Dessert Day - the "what the eff, Jamie Oliver?" edition

Over the past couple of years, it's become a little bit of a tradition that Deidre and I get together, possibly bake something, meet up with Inspector Climate, go to a 6pm-ish movie, and are all back at our respective homes by like 9.30pm. Which is FABULOUS, because it means you're busy on New Year's Eve, but don't have to spend a million years at a party socialising with people you're not particularly interested in socialising with. You can go to bed at 10pm if you want, or you can ring in the new year sitting on the sofa in your PJs and watching Jurassic Park for the five hundredth time. In short, it's the best New Year's Eve of ever.

Anyway.

We decided to do Dessert Day pretty much at the last minute and so had almost zero ideas of what we wanted to make. Eventually, I remembered the salted caramel brownies that I'd had in London and decided that sounded like just the thing. So I trawled the internet for recipes and came up with this one from Jamie Oliver.

And let me tell you, there were a few things that made almost zero sense to us.
1. Crinkling up the baking paper and wetting it. Pretty sure it made no difference whatsoever...
2. The whole not stirring thing. Golden syrup is really thick and it's pretty hard to swirl it.
3. The size of the baking tins involved. They both seemed much larger than was entirely necessary.

Pre-baking

Post-baking. Definitely didn't look like the picture...

On the plus side, they were delicious

 In between baking, we watched Pitch Perfect and ate far too much roast pumpkin dip and fancy cheese (using the cheese cleaver, obviously. It's not Dessert Day without the cheese cleaver).

And while the brownies were delicious, there were a few things that we decided we'd do differently in the future:
1. Make more salted caramel. This quantity seemed insufficient.
2. Use a smaller pan so that it's easier to hide the chunks of caramel in the brownie.
3. Freeze half the caramel, cut it into chunks, and bury the chunks in the brownie. Much easier than dealing with sticky spoonfuls.
4. Pour some of the caramel over the top AFTER they've been baked so that it doesn't all get absorbed into the surface of the brownie.

Still, they were delicious whether warm or cold, and the combination of salted caramel and suuuuper dark chocolate was fairly phenomenal. So on the whole, I'd call them a win. Just not as much of a win as they could have been with a few alterations.

And then we went to see The Hobbit: Battle of the Five Armies. I'd recommend the brownies way before I recommended the movie. It was...not great. But, you know, there was a battle pig, so that's something!

Have you made salted caramel brownies? Which recipe did you use? And did it involve scrunching up and wetting the baking paper?? Because that still seems weird...

K xx

Flourless chocolate cake

So I made a birthday cake for my mum over the weekend, and decided to try a recipe I'd not used before. It turned out pretty damned well if I do say so myself!

I don't have any proper photos of it because I was busy making the recipe into a vlog for VEDA at the time, but I DO have a photo of the finished product, which is probably about all you really need. It's a really simple recipe and it turned out surprisingly well, so I figured (in light of the fact that it's been incredibly quiet around these parts recently) that I'd share it with you guys.

Ingredients
4 oz (115g) dark chocolate
125g unsalted butter
3/4 cup caster sugar
1 tsp vanilla extract
3 eggs
1/2 cup cocoa

Chop chocolate and butter into small chunks. Melt together in a double boiler. Remove from heat, stir in caster sugar and vanilla. Allow to cool slightly, then whisk in eggs one at a time. Add cocoa and mix until just combined. Pour into a greased and lined 8" cake tin and bake at 190 degrees C (375 degrees F) for 20-25 minutes or until a thin crust forms on the top. Cool in the tin for 10-15 minutes, then turn out onto a wire rack. Dust with icing sugar to serve.

I'll be perfectly honest, the hardest part about this cake? Was getting it out of the tin. In the future, I think I'll be doing what several people said they do in the comments and making 1.5 times the recipe in a 9" springform tin!!

Does this sound like something you'd make?

K xx

Throw another Iced Vovo on the barbie. Or something.

As you guys know, Nikki came to stay a little while back. And one of the things we did while she was here? Was to make a vlog together. We originally planned this like forever ago, and the idea was that it would be a weekly series. I'd talk about the history of a product and its significance in Australian culture, then the following week, Nikki would sample it and tell the internet what she thought.

Given that she leaves Australia next Tuesday, we had to cram the process into a much shorter space of time. This video is hella long, but considering I had 59 minutes and 30 seconds worth of footage to work with, I think I did pretty well to get it down to a hair under 15 minutes.

Please enjoy us eating all the foods and generally being ridiculous. You're welcome, internet. And yes, those facial expressions in the thumbnail are totally indicative of our feelings towards several of the foods we tried.


If you are Australian and actually like Chico Babies, please let me know immediately. Because I need to know.

K xx

Roadtrip = hiatus

Um, HI. I kind of took an unintentional hiatus for the better part of a week courtesy of a wee trip up to Canberra. 

So what did I do while I was in our nation's capital? 

- Went to precisely zero cultural institutions or attractions. I didn't even see Parliament House. It was kind of amazing.

- Hung out with two of my best friends an awful lot. 

- Spent a lot of time wiping snotty noses and grubby hands.

- Had mint hot chocolate at two different places. The Max Brenner one was spectacularly good, despite the totally weird-ass mug. 

WTF IS THIS. 

- Caught up with my friends LB (who's expecting a baby any day!) and Femaelstrom, who I hadn't seen in three years. So that was awesome.

- Ate a lot. 

- Cracked up repeatedly over things that Clapton and Bowie said. I'd show you pictures, but I feel a liiiiiiittle weird posting pictures of kids I'm not related to. 

- No, but seriously. I ate SO MUCH. Including my beloved and obligatory trip-to-Canberra Turkish food. Mmmmm, zucchini puffs...

- Marvelled at the awesome ridiculousness of the (sadly temporary) makeover that the Holbrook submarine has had:

LOOK AT THIS INCREDIBLENESS OMG.

- Had a two month old baby fall in love with me. Seriously, he would just stare at me for like 20 minutes at a time. It was a little weird. 

- Caught up with some of C's friends (who are also friends of mine) for the first time in a couple of years and marvelled at how terrifyingly grown up their lives are compared to mine.

- Read less than I have in approximately forever.

- Introduced a sixteen year old girl to the wonderfulness that is Clueless.

- Bought two new pairs of jeans that are actually long enough for a total of $60. MIRACLE. 

- Spent very limited time on the internet because the free wifi at our hotel was slow and crappy. I was torn as to whether it was a relief or really weird to be away from the internet that much. 

So. What's news with you guys?

K xx

Choc orange cake

It's been a while since I've done any baking, so when I got an incredible chocolate/doughnut dessert instead of cake for my birthday and then received this book from Ness, it seemed like a perfect opportunity to make a cake!

Here's what you'll need:

Pretty simple, huh?!

Here's the full list of ingredients:
200g butter, softened
200g + 75g golden/raw caster sugar
4 eggs
Juice and zest of 3 oranges
200g self raising flour
100mL double cream
150g dark chocolate
Edible gold leaf, if you have money and stuff

Start by chopping up your butter. It should be softer than mine was...

Add in the 200g of raw caster sugar (which looks a little like sand) and cream it together:

Beat the eggs and zest two of the oranges:

Add the eggs and the zest into the butter and sugar mixture and mix to combine. It will look lumpy and gross and kind of reminiscent of vomit. DON'T PANIC, EVERYTHING WILL BE FINE:

Add in the flour - mine was gluten free - and fold it in. It will continue to look lumpy and gross. Then add the juice of one orange and fold that through too:

Pour it all into a greased ring pan (the recipe specified a 24cm savarin tin, but all I had was a 20cm ring pan. It worked perfectly) and shove it in the oven at 180 degrees C for 30 minutes (mine, because it was gluten free, was more like 35 minutes):

While the cake is in the oven, make your orange syrup. Put the remaining 75g of raw caster sugar into a small saucepan:

Add the juice of 2 oranges (zest the third one before you juice it!), and stir over low heat until all the sugar has dissolved. Set aside to cool.

When the cake is done (i.e. when a toothpick/kebab skewer comes out clean), take it out of the oven and spoon the orange syrup over the top.

Leave it to stand for five minutes (mine was more like ten, because gluten free tends to be a little slower to absorb things), then turn it onto a cooling rack.

Once it's cool, make the ganache topping. Chop the chocolate into small, even pieces. Heat the double cream over a double boiler, then add the chocolate and stir until smooth:

Leave it to cool until the mixture coats the back of a spoon, then cover the cake. Top with the remaining orange worth of zest or some edible gold leaf if your budget stretches to that:

Leave it to set, then try not to shove your entire face into the cake because it's so pretty.

The verdict? This cake is AMAZING. Orange cake has a tendency to be a little on the dry side in my experience, even if it's got a crapton of butter in it. But the orange syrup gets rid of that completely. It's moist and light, and the raw caster sugar stops it from being overly sweet. But it's also rich thanks to the ganache. You could probably make it without the ganache if you wanted, but the chocolate factor really adds an extra level of amazing to the equation!

Yum.

Give it a go and let me know what you think!

K xx

New Zealand - the "LOOK AT THE PRETTY" edition, part 2

Previously, Ness and I hung out in some awesome glowworm filled caves, and it was awesome.

After finishing at the caves, we debated what to do with the rest of the afternoon. We headed back to Ruakuri Reserve to do a short walk there that's rated one of the ten best in New Zealand. It wasn't especially interesting during the day, we simply wanted to familiarise ourselves with it for our return later on, which is when it TRULY lives up to that top ten status.

Once we'd done that, there was still an hour or so left before we could check into our accommodation, and we'd exhausted the main possibilities in Waitomo. So we flipped over the map that we'd been given by the tourist information place, and noticed that it included a bunch of waterfalls and beaches and things that were about 30-60 minutes away. We decided on Marokopa Falls.

The drive there got a little bit...ridiculous:

Me: Okay, so the instructions say that after 5 kilometres, there'll be a fork in the road and we go left.
Ness: Cool. [what felt like a million years pass] Well THAT was the longest five kilometres ever. THAT'S WHAT SHE SAID!!!!
[both laugh hysterically]
Me: [a minute later] Wait, that doesn't even make sense. Why is it so funny??

Eventually, we arrived and headed down the path to the falls:

It was very pretty, but it was also blowing mist all over us, so we didn't stay very long. We drove a little further down the road, then declared ourselves bored and headed back to Waitomo to check into our accommodation.

There, our host recommended the restaurant across the road for dinner, so after a wee spot of relaxation (translation: checking all the internet things) we fancied ourselves up and headed over there. Well. We were not disappointed. The food was DELICIOUS - we ended up sharing an entree, then having main course and dessert each. A little more food than we'd been planning on, but totally worth it.

Pumpkin and cheddar risotto balls

Homemade fettuccine with cherry tomatoes and goat feta

Chocolate souffle with raspberry coulis and plum ice cream, OMG.

We left sometime later, happy but laden with food babies. If you're ever in Waitomo, I HIGHLY recommend the Huhu Cafe. And it wasn't especially pricey either!!

Back across the road at our B&B, we borrowed some torches and jumped in the car, heading back to Ruakuri Reserve. Why? Because there are glowworms along the banks of the river at night, and it's kind of like walking through Rivendell or something. It. Was. Amazing. I think we probably wandered around for the better part of an hour in the dark - it's kind of incredible how much your eyes adjust. At first, we were the only people there, and we got excited when we spotted a cluster of half a dozen glowworms. But as it got darker, it was like there were constellations all over the place.

Terrible photographic proof of glowworms

Eventually, a large group of loud tourists arrived, blinding everyone with their torches. Which was dumb, because the more you relied on your torch, the less you'd see the glowworms... So we abandoned ship and headed back to the car. When we got back up to the main road, something darted out into the headlight beams, and Ness practically had kittens. Once I'd identified it as a hedgehog, she had even more kittens on account of never having seen a hedgehog before. She jumped out of the car, and chased it - giggling the whole time - down the road. I wish to God I'd been able to stop laughing long enough to video it, because it was absolutely priceless.

Basically, Ness was the kitten. Source.

We giggled all the way back to the B&B.*

Next up, we hightail it back to Auckland, and I fly to Wellington to meet Kim!

K xx

*It's totally okay for us to giggle. Hedgehogs are an introduced species and a pest in New Zealand, despite their adorableness.

Dessert Day - the "that's not what we planned on making" edition

So a few days before Christmas, Deidre sent me a text message that included a picture of a recipe she thought we should make for Dessert Day - a red velvet cake star in the middle of a white chocolate cheesecake. We established that we should Dessert Day on the 30th of December, and then the festive season took over and we promptly forgot all about our plans until the night of the 29th of December. Obviously, this led to us vaguely wandering around my local supermarket on Monday morning searching for ingredients for the aforementioned fancy cake, and largely unable to find them (for example, vegetarian gelatine).

So we ultimately abandoned that plan and turned instead to something we've been meaning to make for ages and have never quite gotten around to - Tim Tam cake. We used this recipe with a few alterations:

1. Beat the eggs, then gradually add in the sugar.
2. If you are using a Kitchenaid to beat the eggs, transfer them into a different bowl before adding the dry ingredients, otherwise you'll end up with clumps of flour everywhere thanks to the weird bottom of the Kitchenaid bowl.
3. Make two separate lots of cake batter. We had to throw out the second cake and start from scratch because a) it ended up smaller than the first one, b) it had a giant clump of unmixed flour in it, and c) sitting around while the first one baked didn't do the batter any favours, and it was basically a really sad puddle of grossness. So we started over, and the second (third?!) cake was a dramatic improvement on either of its predecessors.

We also left out the Tim Tams because GLUTEN (and gluten free ones are a) kind of gross, and b) not available at my supermarket), and I'm not convinced that we missed out. Oh, and we added raspberry extract to the frosting for the middle, and it was quite possibly the best decision I've ever made. It was so delicious that it was a struggle to get the frosting into the cake!

Oh, and you could probably cut back the ganache recipe by at least a quarter, because there was way too much. Anyway, enough of my wibbling, let's get to the pictures, which is what you really care about, right?

Sad looking bottom layer of cake

Delicious frosting of epic proportions

Sad cake is less sad once frosting is involved

Second cake added and smothered in ganache

Now with added bite so that it really looks like a Tim Tam

Om nom nom nom nom

We also made lemon sorbet from the Commonsense Cookery Book, a stalwart of Australian kitchens. The recipe is as follows:

4 cups water
2 cups caster sugar
1 cup lemon juice
2 tablespoons lemon zest

Bring water and sugar to the boil, stirring to dissolve sugar, and boil for five minutes. Cool syrup, then add lemon juice and rind. Pour into refrigerated trays, freeze until syrup becomes mushy. Beat well and freeze again until solid.

Now we, obviously, did the first two steps and then used the ice cream maker to speed things along. Still, when we came to dish it up and take photos, it was baaaaaaaaaasically in a state not much more solid than a Slurpee, and plopped into the parfait glass in a very splashy way. Still, it was delicious. Although I would recommend not using a Microplane to zest the lemons, as it led to little strings of lemon zest all the way through...

Unlike the cake, the sorbet did not photograph particularly well:

Still, it was delicious, and that's what really matters!

What should we make at our next Dessert Day?

K xx

Dessert Day - the Australian edition

700 posts, whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat??????

Ahem. On Monday, Deidre came over for another installment of Dessert Day. It ended up being a day of creating somewhat stereotypical Australian desserts, in the form of caramel slice and chocolate ripple cake. Sure, the second isn't exactly a difficult task - you take a packet of chocolate ripple biscuits, you smoosh them together with cream, you cover the whole thing in more cream, and then you wait 24 hours and eat it. But considering you can't buy gluten free chocolate ripple biscuits, things got a little more complicated!

We used this recipe from Smitten Kitchen, with the full amount of sugar because chocolate ripple biscuits are quite sweet. We used my cookie scoop to ensure they were evenly sized (and bigger than the recipe called for), but I think in the future I'd probably roll out the dough and use a cookie cutter instead. Keep a close eye on them while baking, because we accidentally let the first batch get a liiiiiiittle too brown. WHOOPS. Let the biscuits cool completely.

Then, whip 300mL of cream with some vanilla and some icing sugar. Smear a little of the cream along the plate you want to serve it on, then cover one side of a cookie in a thin layer of cream and sandwich it to another cookie. Cover that in cream as well, then place them vertically on the plate. Continue smooshing cookies together until it's as long as you want it to be. Then cover the whole lot in cream, ensuring there are no ugly holes, and chuck the whole thing in the fridge overnight. When you're ready to serve, cut it on the diagonal so you can see all the pretty layers, and shove it in your face.

Before

And after!

In case you're wondering, the time in the fridge lets the cream make the cookies go soft and cake-like. It basically tastes like cookies and cream ice cream, but without the melting! And, according to my mum, you can add a slug of some kind of liqueur to the cream if you want to. It's not pretty, but it sure is delicious.

The caramel slice was Kat's mum's recipe, and the original included the fabulous instruction "Melt butt". Obviously, we had to make it.

For the base:
1 cup self raising flour
1 cup desiccated coconut
1 cup brown sugar
125g butter, melted

Mix everything together, then press into a greased and lined slice tin. Bake at 190 degrees for 10 minutes.

For the caramel:
440mL tin of condensed milk
2 tablespoons golden syrup
30g butter

Mix together in a saucepan over low heat until mixture thickens. Bring to a boil, then remove from the heat. Pour over the base, smooth, and bake for another 10 minutes. Remove from the oven and cool completely in the tin.

For the topping:
125g dark chocolate
30g copha/butter

Melt together in a double boiler, then pour over the slice. Smooth. When cool, cut into squares and serve.

We ran into a small problem in that we didn't quite cook the base enough (stupid gluten free, always requiring more cooking time...), which meant that the caramel mostly soaked in, forming a thin layer of caramel, and then a base that was half base, half caramel. So...that wasn't exactly ideal. That said, it was still completely and utterly delicious and I'd make it again in a heartbeat.

Will you be trying out either of these recipes?

K xx

Dessert Day - the ANZUS edition

That's right, yesterday was Dessert Day. And this time, Deidre and I had an extra special guest - my BFF Kat, who's in Melbourne for a week! And FINE, she's still Australian. But she's been living in New Zealand for like a millionty years now, and I really wanted an excuse to refer to us as the ANZUS trio...

ANYWAY.

The day started with me determined to get to the meeting point before the others. I left home 15 minutes before we were due to meet - said meeting point is about two minutes walk from my house - and arrived to find both Deidre and Kat already there. Obviously, my reaction was "DAMMIT!!!", because I was so determined to not do my usual "leave the house when Deidre texts me to say she's already there" routine. Womp womp.

We were typically vague about what we were actually going to make, and did the usual stand-around-in-the-supermarket-Googling-recipes-on-our-phones routine. We ended up deciding on cinnamon rolls and a chocolate swiss roll. After some Googling, we decided on Pioneer Woman's cinnamon rolls and Smitten Kitchen's naturally gluten free chocolate roll cake.

There was also an awkward moment in which I was totally in the way and a voice behind me said "Excuse me, ladies", and I turned around to see two police officers with a shopping trolley, and my immediate reaction was "OH GOD, WHAT DID I DO???" rather than "Oh, they can't get past me". Awkwardness followed, because OBVIOUSLY.

ANYWAY.

We started by making the roll dough (we only made a half quantity because 50 cinnamon rolls = TOO MANY CINNAMON ROLLS), except we didn't have the necessary enormous saucepan, so we tipped the liquid into the many cups of flour rather than the other way around. This may explain why it didn't rise as much as expected. Or it could be because my yeast is a bit shit and needs replacing... Either that or gluten free stuff just doesn't rise the way it should...

So we left the dough to think about what it had done, and got on with making the swiss roll. It was surprisingly easy, right up until the point where we had to take it out of the tin and roll it up in a wet tea towel to cool. Then there was much "Oh God"-ing and "WHAT IF IT BREAKS??"-ing, but luckily Kat's argument that it would be delicious even in crumb form was a convincing one and we pressed on successfully.

Then it was time to assemble the cinnamon rolls. We cut back quite dramatically on the quantity of butter we used, because REASONS, and mixed the sugar and cinnamon together before sprinkling it on:

Then it was time to roll! It was less stressful than anticipated, possibly because we'd rolled the dough out on baking paper, so we were able to use that to get us started:

Then it was into the pan! I think we were all a little hesitant about whether or not they'd work, because they still weren't doing the whole rising thing very well despite the presence of both yeast AND baking powder. But we ploughed on regardless:

While they were in the oven, we whipped up something that vaguely resembled the glaze that Pioneer Woman's recipe called for. We skimped on the butter again, used milk instead of coffee, and used maple syrup instead of maple flavouring. Once they were out of the oven, we drizzled the glaze over the top:

Then it was time for the most terrifying part of the day - unrolling, filling, and rerolling the swiss roll. It was pretty much as scary as anticipated, especially when a couple of cracks developed. But we managed get it assembled without the entire thing falling apart - WIN! (The tea towel seemed appropriate, given Kat's presence)

And so to the verdicts:
- The cinnamon rolls are pretty damned tasty, but had a slight gluten free aftertaste. They were definitely better warm - the cooler they are, the more they taste like a big greasy gluten free mess.
- The chocolate swiss roll? AMAZING. I might reduce the amount of cream next time because there was more cream than cake involved. But it was fabulous - light and fluffy and completely and utterly delicious. My mum rated it 25 out of 10, which gives you some indication of how tasty it was. Basically, y'all should go make one immediately.

Which one would you go for?

K xx