The Edmonds Challenge

Eat it with your mouth, not your eyes

2012-02-29T21:55:00.000+13:00

Spinach soup (p90). Doesn't sound very appealing, does it? Well, you'd be surprised.

I picked up a $1 bunch of spinach at the markets the other day, well aware that I had this recipe to do. I had a bit of trouble motivating myself to make it though. As always, I was willing to give it a go, but frankly didn't have very high expectations. Finally, this evening, I dragged myself off the couch (and away from the suddenly very effective fast food ads on TV) and into the kitchen.

The trouble I always have with spinach is that, however much I wash it, it still seems to be gritty. Determined to avoid a gritty soup, I placed all my spinach leaves in the sink, and rinsed them repeatedly.

The next step is to sauté onions and garlic in butter. Normally I'd substitute canola oil as a healthier option, but, this time I stuck with the butter, feeling like I needed to keep in as much flavour as possible. The delicious smell was an added bonus: suddenly, the soup didn't seem so unappealing anymore.

When my onion was cooked through, I added the spinach, along with chicken stock, salt and pepper. I hadn't used a particularly large saucepan, and had to stuff all the spinach in. Luckily, spinach wilts down quite quickly, or I might have been in trouble.

I got the soup boiling and left it simmering for ten minutes. At the end of this time, I added a little sugar, then transferred the soup to my food processor.

What I had taken off the stove was a saucepan full of anaemically green liquid with soggy leaves floating in it. Surprisingly, pureeing this mixture only made it look less appealing - a bit like a watery spirulina drink. I was not particularly keen to try it, but I soldiered on, adding nutmeg and stirring a very generous dollop of yoghurt through the portion I ladelled for myself.

Since the soup was so watery, the yoghurt just sank straight to the bottom. I had a go at stirring it through, before sitting down and trying a spoonful.

Would you believe it was actually quite pleasant? I'd put in enough yoghurt to add a noticeable tang to the flavour, but I could also taste the nutmeg and those buttery onions. Oddly enough, the spinach itself seemed to be mostly a background flavour. I ate the entire bowlful quite happily, and will probably take some for lunch tomorrow.

So there you go: even when you're convinced a dish is going to be awful, it can turn around and surprise you. Guess you shouldn't judge a soup by its colour...

Munching on munchkins

2012-02-25T21:25:00.000+13:00

I'd eaten up all my peanut brownies, so it was time to stock up the baking again. After a little browsing, I selected munchkin bars (p64), which appeared to be a sort of homemade muesli bar.

A brief glance at the recipe will tell you that this is nowhere near as healthy as you might expect from a muesli bar though, (sadly, this is also the case with most bought ones) as the oats and seeds that make up the bulk of the bar are held together by a thick sugary concoction.

That aside (or perhaps because of it) I thought the muchkin bars sounded pretty tasty. Another plus was they were very quick to make. While butter, brown sugar, apricot jam and golden syrup were melting together in a saucepan, I combined rolled oats, pumpkin seeds, sesame seeds, coconut and sultanas in a bowl, then emptied the bowl into the melted mixture in the saucepan.

I pressed the contents of my saucepan into a sponge roll tin and put it in the oven. The cooking time given was 25 minutes or until golden. After 20 minutes I decided it was looking nice and golden - in fact, a bit overdone at the edges - so I took it out.

It wasn't very firm, though. I hoped it would firm up as it cooled, but when I cut it into bars and tried to take one out for a taste, it fell apart so badly I had to eat it with a spoon. Interestingly, the edge bits I originally felt were overdone were the only parts that held together, and were moreishly chewy and far more appealing than the rest of the slice. Looks like I was jumping the gun when I cut back the cooking time.

I turned on the oven again, and plonked the tin back in for another five minutes or so. This time, once the slice had cooled, the pieces actually held together, which was an improvement.

My munchkin bars pretty much lived up to my 'like a muesli bar' expectations. They were sweet and chewy, full of flavour and texture. If you like the sound of these, give this recipe a go - but don't be tempted to take it out of the oven early!

Pancake sandwich

2012-02-19T10:44:00.000+13:00

I hadn't taken any baking into work for quite a while. So, with one eye on the number of sponges I still have to do, I promised a sponge cake last week. Of course, it was 8pm on Thursday night before I actually remembered to make it.

I decided to make a sponge sandwich (p69), which is a variation on the sponge roll recipe. You use the same recipe, but bake it in sponge sandwich tins instead of a single sponge roll tray.

As with most sponges, the main ingredient is eggs: you begin by beating eggs with salt, then beating in sugar and vanilla (The sugar here was supposed to be caster sugar, but found I'd run out, so I had to substitute plain white sugar, which may or may not have had a bearing on the final result).

The next step is to sift flour and baking soda together and fold them into the egg mixture. I seem to have trouble with this bit; the flour just clumps together and sinks to the bottom. I did my best to combine the mixtures without stirring all the air out of the eggs, before folding through the final ingredient - melted butter - and pouting the mixture into sponge sandwich tins.

Normally, I grease and line sponge sandwich tins, but I noticed the recipe said 'grease and flour', so I had a go at that. Probably I ought to have greased it with butter, old-school style, but spraying them with oil is just so much quicker. Anyway, when I sprinkled flour over the oil, it looked like it was turning to a kind of paste. Whoops - never mind, pour the mix on top of it and pretend it didn't happen!

When I got the sponges out of the oven, they looked surprisingly good - cooked through, spongy and without any obvious floury lumps. The only negative was that they had only risen to about half the height of a decent sponge cake. When sandwiched together, I was going to have a cake 20cm round and about 2.5cm high: not good enough.

It really hadn't taken long to make the sponge sandwich, so I decided to make another one, thus doubling the height of my cake. I went through all the above steps again, this time deciding to line the sandwich tins instead of flouring them. A slight hiccup occurred when I was pouring the sponge mixture into the tins and realised I hadn't added the butter. I poured all the mix back into the bowl, folded through the butter and returned the mixture to the tins. I lost a bit of air out of the mixture by doing this, but didn't think I could get away with leaving out the butter.

The second batch of sponges came out even more dismally flat than the first. Oh well. I let them cool down and packed my stack of flat sponges in a container overnight.

In the morning, I whipped up some cream and got out my homemade apricot jam, believing that if I added enough cream and jam, it would take attention away from the crappy sponges. It was at least a good excuse to dig out my cake pedestal, a frivolous post-Christmas purchase I hadn't yet had the opportunity to use.

I stacked up my sponges, spreading a generous amount of jam and cream between each layer, and sprinkling the top with icing sugar. At a glance, it looked quite good - to anyone who didn't know it was a disaster in disguise!

It didn't taste too bad either: As I'd hoped, the apricot jam saved the day and made a dodgy cake quite palatable. That's not to say that the cake itself actually tasted bad. It's more that it didn't exactly meet the standards of a sponge cake, i.e. it didn't rate very highly on the "light and airy" scale. In fact, the entire concoction looked and tasted more like a stack of pancakes than anything else. Good thing everyone loves pancakes, then, isn't it?

Curry convert?

2012-02-14T20:11:00.001+13:00

I wouldn't really call myself a curry person. I enjoy curries when I eat them, but I very seldom think "man, I really feel like a curry tonight". I automatically skip over the curry section of a menu, and only ever eat at Indian restaurants at someone else's suggestion.

It's pretty much unheard of for me to cook curry at home. So it's quite odd that as I sat at my desk today, staring out at the dull drizzle that has recently usurped our Summer, it occurred to me that tonight would be a good night to make lamb curry (p150).

The suggested accompaniment for lamb curry is cucumber salad, or 'raita' (p150). Along with that, I decided to make some lemon rice (p106), which would round it all off into a decent meal.

I'd intended to make the full recipe of curry, thus providing myself with 'lunch leftovers' for a couple of days, but when I got to the supermarket and saw the price of lamb, I decided to stay with my usual half-recipe. The recipe isn't very specific about what cuts of lamb to use, but it doesn't seem to indicate anything bone-in, so I got a pack of leg steaks and cut them into cubes.

I began by chopping up and cooking some onions and garlic. While these were cooking, I tossed the meat in seasoned flour, ready for cooking. When the onions were cooked, I scooped them out and set them aside while I browned the lamb in two batches.

This done, I returned all the meat and onions to the pan, along with tomato paste, ginger, cumin, chilli ground coriander, ground cardamom, and chicken stock. I have to confess to a certain amount of 'cheating' - I used ginger and garlic out of a jar instead of fresh, and since I wasn't about to buy a whole packet of fresh chillis just to use one, I just added a generous sprinkle of chilli flakes instead.

There didn't seem to be much liquid, so I sloshed in a little more stock. Then I placed a lid over the pan and left it gently simmering while I went about preparing my accompaniments.

Cucumber salad (raita) is pretty similar to Greek tzatziki - it's mostly cucumber and yoghurt, but this one also includes toasted cumin seeds and spring onions. Firstly, you have to salt the seeded, chopped cucumbers, and leave them for 15 minutes (I presume this is to remove the excess liquid from the cucumber). Meanwhile, I was toasting the cumin seeds in a dry pan and keeping an eye on the curry.

After 15 minutes, I rinsed and drained the cucumber pieces, and combined them with the cumin seeds, chopped spring onion, and some yoghurt. I used Greek yoghurt, mostly because I really like the creaminess of it. The recipe is for plain unsweetened yoghurt though, so whichever you prefer.

Finally, I put on the rice, placing equal quantities of long grain rice and water in a pan with lemon zest and juice. It's pretty easy - you just bring it to the boil, then turn the heat off, and let the rice absorb the water as it sits on the warm element. I did find that when I went to use the rice, it was slightly scorched in the bottom of the pan - but I'm not sure at what stage of the rice-cooking this occurred.

The recipe states to cook the curry for an hour, or until the meat is tender. I thought that was a bit weird, since lamb is quite tender to start with - it doesn't usually require long, slow cooking. My half recipe had cooked almost all the liquid out of it by the time I turned it off at the 40-minute mark. Half an hour would probably have been better.

I was astonished at how tasty I found the curry. It actually approximates the earthy flavour of an authentic Indian curry, but without the huge list of spices you generally see on a curry recipe. Granted, there are a few spices in there, but any you don't already have in the cupboard will be cheap and easy to find (and don't forget I took a few shortcuts with mine).

There's a reason why the raita is recommended with the curry. The fresh, tangy creaminess cuts through that earthy curry taste, and tones down the spiciness. I did put quite a few of those chilli flakes in, after all - but the great thing about making curry at home is that you can choose your own spice level.

As for the lemon rice, it was a bit overshadowed by the curry, but it's not meant to be the star of the show, after all. Simply adding a little lemon juice and rind into your rice pot makes for a subtle difference in flavour, something to try if you're sick of bland, plain rice.

I think I enjoyed this meal more than anything else I've eaten in weeks. It's made me think differently about cooking curry at home. I can't afford to buy lamb all the time, but it might be worthwhile experimenting with beef, or with cheaper lamb cuts like chops. Meanwhile, I thoroughly recommend the recipe as it stands. It's simple and very tasty. What's not to like?

Half a packet of peanuts

2012-02-09T18:50:00.000+13:00

I was flicking through my Edmonds book the other day, trying to decide what I could make for my morning teas this week. I rejected several recipes due to not having the appropriate ingredients, but then I noticed peanut brownies (p42). I still had some roasted, unsalted peanuts in the cupboard from the carrot salad I made a few weeks back - and here was the ideal way to use them up!

I should perhaps point out that a peanut brownie is a biscuit; it's not a brownie in the cake-like American style. Not that there's anything wrong with that kind of brownie, of course: I love American brownies, it's just that this isn't one.

It only took a few minutes to cream butter and sugar, then add eggs and dry ingredients before stirring through the peanuts. This produced a mixture that was soft and easy to roll into balls, but not wet enough to make your hands sticky.

When I had all my balls of biscuit dough laid out on a tray, I squished them with a fork and put them in the oven for 15 minutes. The resulting biscuits were crisp and sweet, with just enough peanuts to make them more interesting than a plain bikkie.

It's easy to be put off this recipe because the ingredient list seems to suggest you roast your own peanuts - not a difficult task in itself, but one that lengthens the time and effort required to make a very simple biscuit.

If you want to roast your own peanuts, go ahead. Otherwise, just buy yourself some pre-roasted ones like I did. Either way, once you have the nuts sorted, you're about 20 minutes away from a fresh batch of peanut brownies.Yum.

Oxford muffins

2012-02-06T21:37:00.002+13:00

Mum and Dad were passing through Oxford on Saturday, and I'd arranged to meet them for a takeaway lunch. I found I had a spare 45 minutes before I had to leave, and decided to make some spice muffins (p30) to take with me.

Like most muffins, these were pretty quick to make. You have creamed butter, sugar and egg in one bowl, sift the dry ingredients (which include cinnamon and mixed spice, thus turning the plain muffin recipe into spiced muffins) into another, then dissolve baking soda in milk in a third bowl (or jug).

The next step is to add the dry ingredients to the creamed mixture alternately with the milk, and combine the three mixtures, very carefully to avoid overmixing. After that, just spoon into muffin tins and bake.

I packed up the muffins, along with some homemade apricot jam, and headed out to Oxford. As it turned out, there was no need to bring any food; the local bakery supplied us with lunch in the form of smoked venison pies, and Mum had enough to supplement this without the addition of a batch of muffins. But we ate them anyway, of course.

These are some pretty old-school muffins. They're small and plain - the sort of thing that's designed to be buttered (or jammed). They really bear no comparison to the sort of massive deluxe muffins you get these days, so you have to evaluate them to a different standard. And by the standards of plain, simple baking, these are actually very tasty. They're soft and moist, but not soggy, and are especially tasty if you happen to have a bit of apricot jam.

A beer with dinner

2012-02-04T10:33:00.000+13:00

I have a hazy recollection of attempting beer batter (p112) some years ago, when I was living in a student flat with four hungry boys. This was done to the boys' specifications as opposed to the Edmonds recipe, and I don't recall that it turned out all that well.

Putting this failed attempt behind me, I had another go last night, dropping by the supermarket for a fillet of gurnard and a single stubby of Speights.

It's an extremely basic recipe - just flour, salt and beer. I found that the quantity of beer given in the recipe was not nearly enough, and added more...and then more...and more again. By the time my batter had reached the nice smooth consistency described in the recipe, I'd put in about double the amount shown in the recipe.

The batter was a bit lumpy, so I gave it a good whisk to smooth it out, before dipping my fish in the batter and and attempting to get it evenly coated. I had some oil heating in a frying pan, which sizzled satisfyingly as I placed the fish in.

In the few minutes it took for the fish to cook, I threw together a salad, (including salad from my garden, and the first ripe tomato off my plant! You'll have to forgive my excitement; I've never had a garden before) And before long, I had a meal on the table, with most of a bottle of beer to go with it.

The beer batter was actually a bit surprising - I'd expected it to bubble up a bit, but actually it seemed to coat the fish in a smooth, golden layer, which was not just crispy, but actually crunchy in places: a pleasant contrast to the soft flesh of the fish.

It's possible that this is not the desired result, but merely what happens when you add so much beer you thin it down considerably. I'm not sure, but I since I enjoyed the result I got, what does it matter?

Leftovers for lunch

2012-01-31T17:45:00.001+13:00

I haven't been doing much cooking lately - mostly I throw together a salad when dinner time rolls around, which is fine, but doesn't make for much in the way of leftovers, and I've always been in the habit of taking leftovers to work for lunch. Result: I've been buying lunch far too often.

It even got to the point where I'd actually written "make something for dinner which will have leftovers" on Sunday's 'to do' list. Of course, since I didn't actually refer to the list during the day, merely checking it that night to see how much I could cross off, nothing ever got made.

Finally, I got out my Edmonds book at work yesterday, selected a fairly easy-looking recipe - ginger beef stir-fry (p149), and headed to Pak N Save on my way home to pick up the ingredients.

This stir fry uses skirt steak, a cut I haven't bought before, but actually seems ideal for stir-frying. It's a cheaper cut, and you'll find that the pack recommends slow cooking, but since you're slicing it thinly across the grain, it really does not have the chewiness that you'd expect from a cheap cut of meat.

Those thin strips of skirt steak go in a bowl to marinate in a little oil, soy sauce and grated ginger. This takes about half an hour, during which I chopped up my peppers and spring onions, and stirred together a mixture of soy sauce, vinegar, cornflour, sugar and beef stock to make a sauce.

I admit I skimped on the marinating time a bit - I was hungry, so I only gave it about 20 minutes before pulling the meat out of the fridge, and stir-frying it in two batches. Setting the meat aside, I added my veges to the pan, and briefly stir-fried those before pouring in my sauce mixture. After a minute or two, the sauce began to thicken, so I added the meat back in, stirred it through, and the stir-fry was done.

The recipe doesn't include rice or noodles, but I cooked up some egg noodles and added those as well. So with very little time or effort, I now had a decent meal on my hands, and - importantly - more than enough to provide me with leftovers for lunch.

Stir-fries are a basic component of most people's cooking repertoires these days - with good reason. They're quick and easy, and you can stretch a small amount of meat quite a long way by slicing it thinly. I admit I have never been good at just throwing them together, though, and this recipe would be useful for those like me who prefer to use something as a guide.

It's a pretty good stir-fry: the meat is beautifully tender, and the sauce has just the right quantity and consistency to coat the veges (and my added noodles) without actually drowning everything. I'll be making this one again.

And no burnt bottom!

2012-01-29T18:00:00.002+13:00

It must be a pretty good year for apricots. Last Summer, apricot prices never got very low, and those that were available were of quite a low standard. This year, there's a lot of nice-looking apricots around, and, while supermarket prices haven't dropped much at this stage, I've seen them priced below $2/kilo in several fruit and vege shops.

As you may have guessed, the reason I was keeping such a close eye on apricot prices is that I had apricot jam (p225) to make. The full recipe requires 2.75kg of apricots, and while I only ever intended to make a half-mix, it was still going to be a bit costly unless the prices came down.

Anyway, I stopped at one of the aforementioned fruit and vege shops last weekend and got a couple of kilo of apricots. They were quite under-ripe at the time, so I decided to leave my jam-making for a few days. As it turned out, I had quite a crazy week, and didn't get around to making jam until yesterday.

The apricots had matured nicely during the week; some had even grown up so much they were sprouting beards. I didn't need all 2kg though, and once I'd biffed out all the nasty ones, I had exactly the right amount for my half-recipe.

Having halved and stoned the apricots, I grabbed my hammer and broke open half a dozen of the stones. This bit was quite fun, but some of the stones stubbornly resisted my hammer and others sent shards flying all over the kitchen. In the end, though, I had the apricot kernels I needed.

I transferred the apricots to a large pot with some water and the apricot kernels, then placed it over a low heat until the apricots got pulpy. At this stage I added a huge amount of sugar, (the full recipe has twelve cups of sugar. Twelve!!) stirred it through the apricot pulp, and gradually brought the jam to the boil.

For the next half an hour, I allowed the jam to boil (checking frequently that it wasn't burning on the bottom, previous jam-making experience having made me somewhat paranoid) while I cleaned and sterilised some jars.

After 30 minutes, I tested the jam for setting point, and it looked like it'd be ok. I hadn't had a chance to let the jars cool down before filling them, though, and the jam sizzled and fizzed as I ladelled it into the hot jars, only just remembering to remove the apricot kernels before they got bottled with the jam.

I had some of my jam on toast this afternoon, and I'm quite pleased with it. It's a bit runny, perhaps - I've never quite got the hang of judging setting point - but it has such a beautifully rich apricot flavour: better than the average bought jam, that's for sure!

One Summer Saturday

2012-01-22T14:22:00.000+13:00

For several years now, Lauren and I have been planning to go berry picking one weekend. The problem is that berry picking is only an available activity for a few short weeks during the Summer, and generally these pass us by before we've even thought of going.

This weekend we'd finally made plans to go. The weather was looking dodgily changeable, but we decided that if we put it off, we'd never end up going. As luck would have it, the weather made its mind up and came out sunny, at least long enough for us to do our raspberry picking and follow it up with a cuppa and cake.

I'd already decided to use some of my berries for another activity I'd mentally set aside for a nice Summer's day: making ice cream. The Edmonds recipe is for a plain ice cream, but there is a list of suggestions for flavouring, among which is the addition of pureed berries.

Ice cream is actually pretty simple - all you need is a good electric beater. I started mine off in my large mixer, but since I had to beat several things in separate bowls, I ended up using my hand-held beater. Another time I'd just use the beater for everything.

The first step is to beat the egg whites until stiff, then gradually add in castor sugar, one tablespoon at a time. Next, beat the egg yolks - also with castor sugar - until thick and pale, then fold into the egg whites. The mixture already looks (and tastes) really nice at this stage, but there's one more thing to add: cream, beaten until thick and folded through the egg mixture.

This is the basic ice cream recipe, but I wanted to make use of some of my berries. I measured out a generous cupful, then squished them up with a potato masher and folded the puree through my ice cream.

My mouth was already watering and I hadn't even frozen it down yet! I poured my not-yet-ice cream into a shallow dish and placed it in the freezer. The freezing-down time is two hours, but when I checked it at this point, only the surface had frozen. After about three or four, it was firmer, but still quite gooey in the centre.

I didn't want to wait any longer, so I scooped out a serving, added a generous handful of fresh berries, and had a taste. It was delicious: sweet, creamy and subtly fruity. There was a hint of iciness around any larger chunks of berry, but overall, it was very, very tasty.

Overnight, the ice cream froze down completely, and I'm sorry to say it's become very icy, much like bought ice cream that has been partially defrosted, then refrozen. It's not the end of the world, of course: I'll just have to partially defrost each serving to that gooey, creamy stage before I eat it.

Perhaps that's the reason why the freezing-down time was only two hours in the recipe - maybe it's not supposed to get to that firm texture of bought ice cream. Don't let this put you off making this recipe, because it really is delicious. I'd just recommend putting it in the freezer about three or four hours before you intend to serve it - and don't be surprised if the leftovers end up going a bit icy.

Not the 1998 way

2012-01-20T19:42:00.001+13:00

In the midst of yesterday's howling Nor'Wester, I barricaded myself inside and headed into the kitchen to whip up a refreshing summer dessert: orange and lemon pudding (p204).

I began by mixing the gelatine with a little water, and leaving it to swell while I separated some eggs and beat the yolks with lemon and orange juice, and a little sugar. By the time I'd done this, the gelatine had swelled, and I dissolved the rest of the gelatine in boiling water, and added this to the yolk and juice mixture.

Next, I beat egg whites until stiff, and attempted to fold the whites into the yolk mixture. I ran across two problems here: firstly, with my usual lack of forethought, I'd used my smallest bowl for the yolks, not realising that the entire mixture would end up in there as well - it was full enough to make folding difficult.

My second problem had to do with the consistency of the mixtures. With the addition of a full cup of water (albeit gelatine-enriched) to a mixture that was already predominantly juice, the yolk mixture was extremely runny - like water in fact. How you're supposed to fold a water-thin liquid through egg whites is a bit of a mystery.

I had a go anyway, succeeding in turning the egg-whites a sort of yellowy colour, but not in actually combining the two mixtures. Glancing over the recipe again, I noted that the 'fold-in' instruction was followed by a seemingly contradictory direction to 'mix well'. Hmm. Well, folding hadn't done any good. I got out a wooden spoon and beat as hard as I could, but to no avail. Finally, I got my electric beater out again, and applied it to the stubbornly split mixture.

With this, I was able to briefly combine the two mixtures, but as soon as I poured it into a bowl, the liquid sank to the bottom again, leaving a furry-looking layer of egg-white on the top. Sighing, I placed the bowl in the fridge to set, figuring maybe it was supposed to be in two layers like that.

A couple of hours later, I spooned some out and had a taste (you're actually supposed to set it in a mould, but I don't have one, and anyway the soft fluffy stuff would get squished when I turned it out). The bottom layer was like very thick, very strongly citrus-flavoured jelly. The fluffy bit tasted like nothing at all. It wasn't exactly unpleasant, but then again, it wasn't terribly pleasant either.

I'm sure that something went wrong with this pudding, but I've read the recipe several times, and I know I followed it correctly. Perhaps there's an instruction missing somewhere - often this sort of pudding requires that you partially set the gelatine mixture before beating it up and folding it into the egg whites, but this one did not have this step.

I've just checked an older version of this recipe (1976 edition, purchased at Riccarton Market last Sunday) which doesn't have the above step either, but seems to have considerably less liquid. So if you want to try making an orange and lemon pudding, maybe try it the 1976 way!

Getting around to it

2012-01-15T17:27:00.001+13:00

You'll have noticed that I haven't been very conscientious in pursuing my Edmonds Challenge over the past few weeks. Ever since I shifted into my new house, there haven't been enough hours in the day to get everything done. I expect this will settle down somewhat once I've finally got everything unpacked and organised to my satisfaction, so just bear with me in the meantime.

It was actually several days ago that I found spare half hour to make some sultana biscuits (p35), but I've been so busy since, that this is the first chance I've had to write it up. Well, perhaps I might have found the time, but my current computer setup is a low deck chair in front of an old coffee table. It's quite uncomfortable, so the idea of sitting here long enough to write a blog entry is not terribly appealing. 'Computer desk' is quite high on my list of required furniture.

Sultana biscuits are a variation of the basic biscuit recipe. It's very easy - the biscuits are made with the same old 'cream butter and sugar; beat in eggs then add dry ingredients' method. All you do is add sultanas into the creamed mixture.

For some variations of the basic biscuits, I've recommended rolling the dough and using a cookie cutter, but this isn't really going to work for sultana biscuits. For these, I went with what it actually says in the recipe, i.e. roll into balls and press with a floured fork.

The recipe has a cooking time of 12 minutes. I checked mine after 10, and they were already golden-brown - in fact, a little overdone. I put the next tray in for 9 minutes, and turned the heat down slightly. These came out only slightly golden, which is what I was looking for.

This recipe tastes pretty much as you would expect: it's a pleasant sweet biscuit with sultanas in it. It's not fancy, but it's easy to make, doesn't take very long, and is comprised of ingredients you'd likely already have in the pantry. In my book, that adds up to a pretty good recipe.

Salad in a hurry

2012-01-08T21:02:00.000+13:00

I've had a busy time this weekend; Mum and Dad have been visiting to get a bit more work done on the house. I knew I had a barbecue to go to today, but somehow it crept up on me anyway. I found myself rushing to the supermarket this morning, to get what I needed for a carrot salad (p176), which I had just enough time to throw together before heading down to Rakaia for Richard's birthday barbecue.

There aren't many recipes left to do in the salad chapter. I'd been putting off making carrot salad, because for some reason it never seemed that appealing. Still, since Bex had specified "not potato or green salad", this seemed just the thing.

It only took a few minutes to put the salad together. It would be slower if you didn't have a food processor, which sped up the grating of carrot and cheese considerably. The salad is just a mixture of grated carrot, cheese, sultanas, roasted peanuts, and plain unsweetened yoghurt. You just mix that all up and chill it for a while.

Of course, mine didn't get much chilling down time, as I very soon departed for Rakaia, leaving my hard-working parents busily sanding and painting in my absence.

Though I didn't originally like the idea of this salad, I found it very tasty when I actually tried it. The peanuts are great for both flavour and texture, and the yoghurt and sultanas prevent the cheese/carrot mixture from being too similar to a basic coleslaw. I suppose a lot of people wouldn't like the sultanas, but I found the odd burst of sweetness quite pleasant. If you don't like them, just leave them out.

Owing to the usual oversupply of food at Richard's birthday lunch, I wound up taking home about half my salad. That was ok, though, because Mum, Dad and I ate the rest with our dinner this evening.

From not liking the concept of this salad at all, I've gone to thinking of it as something tasty and different I might make from time to time. So I guess the moral of this story is 'don't knock it till you've tried it'.

'Chinese' New Year

2012-01-02T11:30:00.000+13:00

I had a barbecue to go to on New Year's Eve, so I had to think of something Edmonds to bring. There really aren't any recipes left in the meat or poultry sections that would be suitable for a barbecue, so I decided it would be a good chance to tick off one of the marinades.

So I went to the supermarket in search of meat to marinade, and ended up bringing home a large pack of chicken nibbles: the marinade I'd selected was Chinese marinade (p190), a honey/soy type of thing that I thought would go quite well with the chicken.

An hour or two before heading away to the barbecue, I combined sherry, honey, soy sauce, garlic and ginger in a ziplock bag (it says to use a bowl in the recipe, but I find a bag is easier and less messy) added the chicken nibbles and closed the bag up, moving the contents around until all the chicken nibbles were coated with marinade.

The best thing about bringing meat to someone else's barbecue is that you seldom have to cook it yourself. Nick took charge of the barbie, and, on top of cooking all the rest of the meat beautifully, did an excellent job of getting my nibbles to the point of golden, sticky deliciousness.

Naturally, the barbecue cooking had a lot to do with making the nibbles so tasty - you can't duplicate that flavour in an oven - but the marinade seemed to have done the job quite well too. The soy and ginger flavour was there, but not overpowering. I think this is a good one to use on chicken, especially if you're going to barbecue it.

Almost another disaster

2011-12-31T12:03:00.000+13:00

While down in Timaru for Christmas, I took the opportunity to pillage Mum and Dad's blackcurrant bushes, so I could make some blackcurrant jam (p225). Christmas is really a few weeks too early for blackcurrants, so there weren't a lot ripe yet. Even so, we managed to glean about 350g that were ripe or near enough. The recipe is actually for 1kg of currants, but a one-third recipe would make plenty enough for me.

On returning to Christchurch, I spent every spare moment of the following days in the garden or attempting to reduce the mountain of unpacked boxes cluttering up my garage. It was a few days before I realised I had a container of blackcurrants - now starting to look a bit wrinkly - sitting in my kitchen.

So when I got home from work yesterday afternoon, I went straight into the kitchen and made a start on the jam, picking through the blackcurrants, removing any stalks and the odd one that had started to go mouldy. These went into a large pot with some water, and boiled it gently for a few minutes. Once the fruit was soft, I stirred in sugar and brought the jam to the boil.

Blackcurrants are high in pectin and acid, so I knew I wouldn't have any trouble getting this jam to set; I just had to boil it for 15 minutes. Setting a timer, I busied myself by drifting around the kitchen with a screwdriver, replacing the old mismatched handles on my kitchen cupboards with new ones - and keeping one eye on the jam pot, which was boiling away merrily without any interference from me.

Towards the end of the boiling time, I took out the jars that had been sterilising in the oven (after I'd dug them out of one of the ubiquitous garage boxes) and had a look at the jam.

As I stirred the jam with a wooden spoon, I realised with a sinking feeling that there was a layer of blackcurrants burnt onto the bottom of the pot. Not again! I stopped stirring, took the pot off the heat and immediately poured the jam into jars.

There was only enough jam for two jars; in fact, neither of these ended up being full, either. A layer of froth at the top of each jar subsided as the jam cooled, leaving a large gap at the top of both jars. Meanwhile, at least half of those carefully-picked blackcurrants were scorched onto the bottom of my pot.

I left the jam overnight, crossing my fingers that I'd got to it early enough that the burnt taste had not permeated the entire pot of jam - like the horrid tamarillo jam I made a few months back.

Well, I've just had a couple of English muffins with blackcurrant jam, and I'm happy to say that it's perfectly edible. As predicted, it's set very firmly, and I can't taste any burnt flavour in it. Phew! Now I just have to get that pot clean...

Blackcurrant jam has never been a favourite of mine; it's quite tart (despite all the sugar) and the texture tends to be a bit lumpy. However, it's less sickly-sweet than some, and it's very easy to make - just pay attention and don't let it burn!

Scones just aren't festive enough

2011-12-25T10:50:00.000+13:00

I'm sure everyone's heard by now about the latest events in Christchurch - not what anyone needed just before Christmas - or ever again really. My new home, being on the less-affected western side of town, was completely unscathed, and I have spent my time since Friday's quakes feeling oddly guilty at being entirely unaffected by an event which has meant disaster for so many in the same city.

As you know, it's somehow become my tradition to make a batch of scones just after a quake. I did consider throwing together a batch so as not to disappoint your expectations, but really, I had a pavlova (p204) to make, which was going to tie up my oven all evening.

Pavlova is one of those recipes people tend to be a bit afraid of. I've never had a problem producing an edible pav, but I've always used the same recipe - which isn't the Edmonds one. So I was keen to see how I would do with a different recipe.

A pavlova is just a giant meringue, really, so it's much the same process. You begin by beating egg whites until stiff, then (this is the first time I've come across this bit) add 3 tablespoons of water, and beat again, before slowly adding caster sugar to make a nice glossy meringue mixture.

Finally, you stir through vinegar, (oddly, the recipe doesn't state what kind, but I used malt because that's what my usual recipe has) vanilla and cornflour. Then all that's left to do is spoon it all out onto a tray lined with baking paper, marked with a circle about the size you want your pav.

And that's pretty much it. Bung it in the oven at 150 for 45 minutes, then when the timer goes off, turn off the oven and leave the pav in there until the oven has cooled down, like overnight if possible. And don't get curious and open the door - just leave it.

Mine held a pretty good shape while it was still baking, but collapsed a bit as the oven cooled down. I'm sure that some people would say that a successful pav is supposed to stay up and not collapse. But I say, rubbish - - it tastes the same whether it's collapsed or not.

There was considerable further collapsing as I eased the pavlova off the baking paper and onto a cake plate, then Gladwrapped it for the trip to Timaru.

My pav was in fact a fairly sorry sight by the time I got it to Timmers, but the great thing about pav is that you pile stuff on top of it, covering up all the broken bits. Kiwifruit is the traditional topping for pav, but in recent years I've subscribed to the 'pile it up with lots of berries' method. Berries may be astonishingly expensive in Christmas week, but they look and taste fantastic.

Since Mum already had the desserts for Christmas Day under control, we had my pavlova on Christmas Eve. And it was exactly what I expect from a pav: crunchy on the outside, with a soft, sweet marshmellowy centre. Top that with cream and berries and you've got a winner.

I've just had the last of the pav as a decadent Christmas Day breakfast. And Mum's sorted the rest of our meals for the day, so that's me for Edmonds stuff this Christmas. Hope you are all having a happy, safe and earthquake-free day. Merry Christmas!

Tiny is tastier

2011-12-22T19:22:00.000+13:00

I had one last item to make on my Christmas baking list, before piling up trays with Christmas goodies to take to work. I'd acquired some appropriate adhesive and glued the clips of my oven seal in place, and though it had had only a few short hours to dry, I was hoping it'd hold long enough to make some neenish tarts (p84).

Before starting on the tarts, I used the half-can of condensed milk not needed for the tarts to whip up some lolly cake, one recipe that is strangely absent from the Edmonds book. I've wondered why such a simple and popular Kiwi recipe would be omitted, and have decided it must be because it uses products (Eskimos and malt biscuits) that are not affiliated with the Edmonds brand.

Anyway, it only took a few minutes to throw together a lolly cake, giving me something to fall back on and pad out the goodie trays if the tarts didn't work. This done, I started on the tarts, creaming butter and sugar, beating in egg and mixing in dry ingredients to make the pastry. After 15 minutes' chilling time, I rolled out the pastry and cut out rounds to line mini muffin tins, pricking the bottoms to stop them from rising too much.

Neenish tarts are generally made in patty tins, but I chose to make mine smaller. I've mentioned before that I prefer to make things bite-sized - especially at Christmas - and neenish tarts are the perfect example of something that tastes good at the first bite, but becomes overpoweringly sickly before you manage to finish it all. By turning it into a one-bite item, you only experience the pleasant part. After all, you can always have a second one if you want more!

I hadn't rolled the pastry quite as thin as I intended, and some of the pastry cases I turned out were overly puffed up. In later trays I amended this somewhat, but I mostly ended up with tart cases that didn't have all that much space for the filling.

When all the tart cases were baked and cooling on racks, I mixed up the filling. It's a mixture of softened butter, condensed milk, icing sugar and lemon juice. My butter wasn't really soft enough, and I had to beat it quite thoroughly to get all the lumps out, but eventually I had a nice smooth filling.

The tart cases did not take long to cool, and I began spooning filling into them as soon as it was ready. A few short minutes later, and I had a tray of filled tarts chilling in the fridge.

I left them chilling while I arranged almond biscuits, lolly cake, apricot balls, chocolate truffles, slices of cathedral loaf and florentines (cut into shards to make them easier to fit on the trays) on my goodie trays, leaving space for some neenish tarts on each. I'd tried to avoid going overboard with my baking this year, but as always, I had more than enough.

The neenish tarts were not quite set as I took them out to ice them, but I was short on time, so I went ahead with the icing anyway. Neenish tarts are easily recognised by the half-white, half-chocolate icing. I've always thought it looks like a nuisance to do the icing like that, but actually I found it wasn't that difficult.

I mixed up a bowl of white icing (p77), and went right through my tray of tarts, icing one half only. It wasn't difficult, but quite time-consuming: it took quite a while to get right through the tray - and then I had to start on the chocolate!

I'd decided to use melted chocolate instead of chocolate icing, partly because I had heaps of cooking chocolate left over from the florentines, but also because I thought it would be less sickly than actual icing. I melted the chocolate and went through the tray of tarts again, icing the other side of each. It was getting late and I was getting impatient, so the icing was a bit messily done in places, but at a glance, they looked pretty good.

I added my completed tarts to the trays, which I dispersed around the various sites at work the following day. I think the most popular item was the lolly cake - the one non-Edmonds item on the trays - but the rest was well received too.

I've never liked neenish tarts much; I've always found them sickly and unappealing. Not everyone shares this opinion: I was surprised at how many people were pleased to see them on the trays. It was also a surprise how tasty my mini versions were - a burst of sweet creamy filling in a shortbready case. You might prefer the traditional size, but for me, the little ones were just the right size.

Flimsy frilly things

2011-12-21T19:36:00.000+13:00

I was relaxing comfortably on the couch on Sunday afternoon, trying to motivate myself to get up and do something productive. "One more recipe," I told myself, "how much effort can that be?". Well, considering the recipe I chose was florentines (p39), quite a lot of effort, actually!

Maybe you don't recognise the name 'florentine'. You know those things you see in bakeries sometimes, that have a very thin kind of toffeeish biscuit with fruit and nuts in it on one side, and chocolate on the other? That's a florentine: that's what I talked myself into making on the Sunday afternoon of the weekend before Christmas, when I was already worn out from being in the kitchen all weekend.

What a great idea.

The recipe didn't look too daunting at a glance - just cream butter and sugar, beat in syrup, then add flour, almonds, glace cherries, walnuts and mixed peel. That bit took mere minutes. It's the cooking that took forever - you can only make four at a time (though by the end of it, I was squeezing five or even six to a tray, just to get it done), each biscuit being a tablespoonful of the mixture, squashed flat, and cooked for 10 minutes.

Well, I cooked my first tray for 12 minutes, and they came out scorched far beyond edibility. On the second tray I reduced the cooking time, but they were only marginally better. On the third tray, I realised that I was supposed to be lining my trays with baking paper, a process which helped reduce scorching and also limited the spreading of the biscuits.

I finally settled on a cooking time of five minutes. My new but totally ineffective oven seal had now broken on both sides, and for such a short time, I wasn't bothering with trying to poke it into place, so plenty of heat was probably leaking out during the cooking process. The trays I made towards the end of the baking seemed a bit underdone, which may be the result of the oven losing heat due to aforementioned seal issues and the frequent opening of doors.

If you're mad enough to decide to make florentines after reading this, you'll have to experiment with the first few trays and find the ideal cooking time for your own oven. Take my advice and don't start with the recommended ten minutes.

Eventually, I settled into a system of rotating trays; one in the oven at all times, one cooling after just coming out of the oven, and one in preparation for going in. Once I'd seen how much the first few spread, I made sure I squashed down the spoonfuls of mixture and spread out the fruit and nuts - it didn't matter if the bits weren't joined up when they first went into the oven, they soon would be once the biscuity mixture started spreading.

Plenty of the florentines shattered or were either over or undercooked; I lost count of the casualties, piled higgledy-piggeldy on a nearby tray. It was well into the evening when I took the final tray out of the oven and took stock of the successful florentines.

I had sticky stuff all over the kitchen and surrounding areas; the kitchen was covered with dishes and trays of cooked florentines; and I still wasn't done yet. I was tempted to call it a night, but I decided it was best to get the job done. I took a deep breath and started melting some chocolate.

I'd been dreading the bit where I had to try and ice these flimsy shards of brittle biscuit. I was sure hardly any would survive the process. To my surprise, however, it wasn't actually that difficult. I'd hold a florentine in one hand while I scooped chocolate onto the flat surface and spread it around. Just as the chocolate started to ooze through and burn my hand, I'd spin around and deposit the now-iced florentine, chocolate-down, on a sheet of baking paper.

No, they did not all survive this process. But a surprising number did. At the end of a very long evening, I had a bench covered in completed florentines. They were all shapes and sizes, and did not actually look that impressive. They were finished, though, and that's all I cared about. I packed them carefully between layers of baking paper, turned my back on the dishes, and went to bed.

Florentines taste quite nice, I suppose. When you have a combination of chocolate, fruit, nuts, and a biscuit that's more like a thin layer of toffee than anything else, it's not surprising that it's nice to eat. The thing is, it's really not worth the effort. If you want a florentine, go to a bakery and buy one.

Build your own cathedral

2011-12-20T18:21:00.000+13:00

On Sunday morning, I dragged myself into the kitchen and turned to my next Christmas recipe: cathedral loaf (p57). It's one of those cakes that are so chocka with fruit and nuts that there's only a bare minimum of cake holding it all together.

I'd had to substitute some of the ingredients - dried apple bites for glacé pears, for example, and plain dried fruit instead of the glacé listed for pineapple and apricots. These I chopped into smaller pieces and set aside in a bowl along with glacé cherries, crystallised ginger, almonds and brazil nuts.

In a separate bowl, I beat eggs, sugar, vanilla essence and brandy, then added sifted flour, baking powder, nutmeg and salt. Though I'd double-sifted the dry ingredients, my attempt to fold them into the egg mixture had a very lumpy result until I gave up trying to fold and just mixed it normally instead.

I poured my now reasonably smooth mixture into the bowl of fruit and nuts, and stirred it through. In a normal cake, the fruit and nuts would become part of the overall mixture; in this one, the cake mix merely coated the main ingredients.

I lined a loaf tin with two layers of brown paper and one of baking paper, and spooned the cathedral loaf mixture in. It filled the loaf tin up to the top, but I didn't expect it to rise much. I plonked the loaf in the oven at 150, set the timer for two hours, gently poked the loose side of the oven seal back into place, and left the loaf to its own devices until the timer went off.

The cathedral loaf was looking pretty good as it came out of the oven. A little brown on top, but not too bad. It had to cool completely in the tin, so I left it on the bench for some hours before deciding it was cool, taking it out and wrapping it in tinfoil.

The instructions are to leave the loaf for two days before cutting - two days that are now up. I cut into the loaf a short while ago, using a sharp knife and attempting to cut nice thin slices as directed in the recipe. My thin slices didn't go too well, they went a bit crumbly (not inappropriately, for a cathedral loaf made in Chch in 2011) so I tried doing them a bit thicker, which worked better.

I'm quite impressed with the results of the cathedral loaf. With all that nutty, fruity goodness, it's delicious, and it looks lovely too, with the stained-glass window effect which is the obvious 'cathedral' reference. This is well worth making, as long as you bear in mind that the long list of ingredients adds up on your grocery bill too.

Bring a plate

2011-12-19T21:47:00.000+13:00

I had a casual Christmas gathering at a friend's place to go to on Saturday night. This was a "bring some food to share" situation: ideal for ticking off Edmonds recipes. So, having spent the whole of Saturday morning madly baking, I cleaned up the kitchen and raced across to Pak N Save to get ingredients for pasta salad (p178).

While I was at the supermarket, I noticed a bulk pack of chicken drums on special. I knew I still had one or two recipes suitable for drums, and figured I had enough time to cook the chicken and cool it down to be served cold at the dinner.

When I got home, I got some pasta on the boil for the salad, and sat down to find a chicken recipe. I had to rethink the one I had planned to use, because I didn't have all the ingredients. I did, however, have the ingredients for cheesy sesame-coated chicken (p135) - or so I thought.

I started to combine the ingredients for the chicken coating in a bag: flour, grated parmesan, chicken stock, sesame seeds, mixed herbs, and dry breadcrumbs... except I didn't have any dry breadcrumbs. Hmmm. I considered several options as substitutes, and was toying with using rolled oats or polenta when my eye strayed to the bowl of leftover biscuit crumbs from the morning's apricot balls. Biscuit crumbs for breadcrumbs? Not an ideal substitute, but surely closer than my other ideas? Oh well, I didn't have any other use for the biscuit crumbs anyway. In they went.

I removed the skin from the chicken drums and coated them piece by piece in the parmesan mixture. The recipe is for eight drums, but I still had plenty of the coating left when I'd done eight, so I coated all twelve drums from the pack of chicken I'd bought, cramming them into an oven dish and putting them on to bake for 20 minutes.

While the chicken was in the oven, I fisnished the salad. The cooked pasta had been cooling while I worked with the chicken, and was now ready to use. I added chopped spring onions, celery, green pepper and tomatoes, along with one of the optional extras - cooked, chopped bacon. I'd intended to make my own mayonnaise for this salad, but I was running short on time, so just used bought mayo and stirred it through.

The salad was done and chilling in the fridge by the time the chicken came out of the oven. It didn't look very exciting - kind of anemic and soggy. It seemed cooked, but since I didn't want to be responsible for an outbreak of food poisoning, I put it back in for an additional five minutes' cooking time.

Five minutes later the chicken was looking a bit more presentable, if still a bit pale and boring. I tried one drum and found it cooked through and reasonably tasty. So far, so good: I placed all the drums in a clean oven dish and put them in the fridge to cool.

Cooking and cooling the chicken took longer than I thought, and the chicken wasn't entirely cold as I gathered together my offerings to take to Leah's. We put them straight in her fridge when I arrived, though, so I figured no harm done.

When it was time to eat, I was quite embarrassed to see my chicken sitting on the table. It had become shrivelled and even more unappealing during the hours in Leah's fridge. Amongst the far more appetising food on offer, it actually looked quite repulsive. Only myself and one other person took a piece; I don't know if she ate hers, but I only got through half of mine before deciding it was underdone and therefore unsafe. And frankly, not very tasty.

The pasta salad, on the other hand, looked colourful and fresh and was an ideal dish for a summer barbecue. I should have done the salad and left it at that! In the end, I took home almost all of the chicken and turned it into chicken casserole.

I can recommend the pasta salad - it's fresh and summery, but filling at the same time. Cheesy sesame-coated chicken, on the other hand, is nice enough hot, but the recommendation "serve hot or cold" shouldn't be trusted. Of course, if I'd used actual breadcrumbs instead of biscuit crumbs, the coating would almost certainly have been more successful. Looks like I should be adding this one to my ever-increasing list of possible 'do-overs'!

Christmas catchup

2011-12-18T14:56:00.000+13:00

After spending the past few weeks absorbed in the 'delights' of moving house, I found that Christmas has suddenly appeared on my doorstep - and I'm nowhere near ready for it! So this week I hurriedly finished off my gift shopping, and attempted to acquire a new seal for the oven door so I could get into my Christmas baking.

This turned out to be more of a mission than I thought, but after several days of trying, I found myself in possession of the desired seal. I brought it home, fitted it on the oven... and two hours later, it had broken in exactly the same way as the old one. Grr. I've got a plan in mind for fixing the thing, but meantime, all my baking is being done with one side of the oven seal hanging loose. Ah well.

By this time last year, I'd done huge amounts of baking - far more than I actually needed, as it turned out. This year, I intend to be a little less extravagant, but I'm still doing double-recipes for almost everything. I just hope I can get through all the recipes I'd earmarked for Christmas - time's running out fast!

Since I'd done the most obvious Christmas recipes last year, I had to think outside the box for some of this year's recipes. The first thing I made, for example, was almond biscuits (p34) - not obviously a Christmas recipe, but I do associate almond flavour with Christmas, So I figured it was Christmassy enough.

It's a straightforward biscuit recipe, really: cream butter and sugar, beat in eggs and almond essence, then add dry ingredients. Roll into balls, squish with a floured fork, and place a blanched almond atop each one. Actually, it's supposed to be half an almond, but whole ones is what I had, and I wasn't going to bother trying to halve them!

While the biscuits were in the oven, I made a couple of recipes that wouldn't need baking - apricot balls (p218) and chocolate truffles (p219). I had a lot of dried apricots to chop up, but the food processor made short work of those, and they were soon in a saucepan with some orange juice and citric acid. I brought this mixture to the boil, and let it simmer for 10 minutes. It's mostly just apricots, though, and at one point, I felt the mixture was in danger of scorching, so I added a bit more juice to keep it moist.

The apricots had to cool after this, so I put the saucepan aside while I made the chocolate truffles, melting cooking chocolate and butter over a low heat. The chocolate seemed to be taking a long time to melt, until I realised that when I took out the last tray of almond biscuits, I'd turned off the element I was using instead of the oven! Obviously, I'm not used to my new stove yet.

With the element back on, the chocolate melted very quickly. I added enough icing sugar to make the mixture thick enough to handle, before adding liqueur and cocoa. When I say "liqueur", it was supposed to be rum, but I never got around to getting any, so the truffles ended up with Cointreau in them instead.

The final addition was more icing sugar: enough to get the chocolate to a workable consistency. In retrospect, I don't think I put enough in - the mixture was very soft and didn't completely hold its shape once I'd rolled it into balls and coated them in coconut. Something to remember for next time.

I began with the tablespoon-sized truffles suggested in the recipe, but these seemed too large for such a rich truffle. I prefer to make things bite-sized for Christmas, since there's just so much to choose from, and rich-tasting nibbles can be hard to get through if they're too large. The other benefit of reducing the size is that you get more out of your mixture. My double recipe should have yielded about 30 at the recommended size; I wound up with 40.

Meanwhile, the apricot mixture had cooled enough to work with, so I spooned it back into the food processor and pureed it. To the apricot puree I added biscuit crumbs, coconut and icing sugar, making a mixture thick enough to shape into balls and roll in coconut or dip in chocolate. Chocolate would be really nice on these, but I chose coconut as quicker, easier and cheaper.

The bowl of apricot mixture was considerably more daunting than that of the chocolate truffles. I'd doubled both recipes, as neither seemed particularly large. As it happens, the apricot ball recipe seems to make quite a bit more than estimated. It took me a while to get through the whole bowl (I tried to keep them to approximately the same small size as the truffles, but impatience creeps in and the size increased a little as time went on) but I eventually had a tray of over 70 apricot balls.

So after spending the whole of Saturday morning in the kitchen, I'd completed the almond biscuits, chocolate truffles and apricot balls. The almond biscuits weren't particularly exciting - they're a fairly plain biscuit with a slight almond flavour - but I don't suppose anyone will complain.

The truffles are rich and chocolaty, though perhaps slightly too sweet from all that icing sugar. Rolling them in cocoa powder instead of coconut might add enough bitterness to cut through the sweetness a little. As for the apricot balls, they're quite interesting. I've always found that truffle-type recipes based on biscuit crumbs are a bit dry, but these are surprisingly moist and fruity. They taste pretty good with the coconut coating, but I think if you're willing to make the effort, chocolate-dipped would be nicer.

So that's three recipes ticked off my Christmas baking list - it's a good start, but there's plenty more to do yet!

One more batch for Vera

2011-11-30T21:31:00.000+13:00

I'm moving house this weekend, having finally managed to purchase a place of my own. I'll miss the cosy little flat I've lived in for the past seven years, though I'm looking forward to having a larger kitchen!

Another thing I'll miss is my lovely neighbour Vera. I've often made scones for her as a thank-you for looking after Moby when I've been away. So I decided it'd be nice to make one more batch for her before I leave. Vera claims that she's no good at making scones herself, though I've always made Edmonds scones (p32) and found they work every time.

Scones seem to be my default setting - I reverted to scones after each of the major earthquakes we've had since last September, and it seems quite appropriate to be marking a major change in my life with a batch of scones - my last Edmonds dish before becoming a homeowner!

Probably the reason I fall back on scones so often is that they are so quick and easy to make. You just sift flour, baking powder and salt into a bowl, rub in butter and mix with milk. When you've got a nice firm dough, knead it very briefly, then shape and cut into scones. Lastly, just brush them with milk and bung them in the oven for ten minutes.

You can have hot, fresh scones on the table about 15-20 minutes after first opening your Edmonds book: it's that quick. This particular batch came out very well - soft and fluffy, with no trace of the dense centre that you sometimes get if the scones are slightly underdone. I took them over to Vera, who was delighted to be presented with a batch of scones totally out of the blue.

So over the next week or so I'll be shifting. The next entry you see will be a dish made in my new red kitchen, in my very own house! I only hope my new neighbours are as nice as Vera!

Insipid curry

2011-11-21T21:08:00.000+13:00

Today's pouring rain and chilly Southerly was wintery enough to make me choose something warm and filling for dinner - like a chicken curry (p137).

This recipe probably dates from a time before homemade or pre-packaged curry pastes were widespread in New Zealand: no carefully balanced spices here, just good old-fashioned curry powder. For this reason, I wasn't expecting anything spectacular, just a basic homely meal - and there's nothing wrong with that.

I started by cooking onion, garlic, and crushed ginger in a little oil. Since I wanted to add more veges if possible, I also chopped up some celery and added this to the onion. I let this mixture soften over a low heat until the onion was cooked, then I stirred through curry powder, then added chicken stock and chopped chicken breast.

I needed to bring the curry to the boil, but there didn't seem to be much liquid for the amount of chicken. I sloshed a bit more stock in and turned the heat up. Once I had it boiling, I turned it down again and let the curry simmer for half an hour while I sorted out some rice and veges.

At the end of this cooking time, the curry wasn't looking too appealing. The sauce was thin, watery (more so than could be explained by that small amount of extra stock) and sort of split and curdled-looking. I figured I'd missed something in the recipe, since I'd been participating in a pointless telephone survey while I was adding the final ingredients - perhaps I was supposed to stir flour through with the curry powder to thicken the sauce? But no, there's nothing in this curry for thickening. For once, I hadn't missed anything in the recipe.

I gamely spooned some of my curry over rice and had a taste. Unfortunately, this wasn't one of those times when something looks bad but tastes good. It looked bad and didn't taste very good either. The chicken was dry and overcooked, and the only flavour in the sauce was very obviously of curry powder and not much else. Actually, I couldn't even finish it.

It's probably possible to make a decent meal with this recipe as a base. Not an authentic curry, but a basic old-school version. You'd want to add something to thicken the sauce, and either cook it less or use a cut of chicken less prone to drying out. Careful seasoning might improve the flavour, and additional veges would make it both healthier and more appealing. So really, if you're going to use this recipe, I'm actually recommending you practically rewrite it. Will I be bothering to try this one again? In a word: nope.

Family dinner

2011-11-16T19:26:00.001+13:00

I've just returned from a family trip to Queenstown. With five of us there, I decided it would be a good chance to make one of the dishes that are less suitable for a single person: apricot-stuffed forequarter (p123). So I stayed behind last night as the others went off for a swim, working in the kitchen to have dinner ready when they got back.

I didn't actually use forequarter; since I didn't know of a butcher in Queenstown, I had to rely on what was available in the local New World. There were no boned lamb forequarters, so I ended up with a couple of boned shoulder roasts instead.

The unit we were staying in in Frankton is well-supplied with basic kitchen utensils, but I guess they don't anticipate that you'll be cooking big roast dinners while you're on holiday, so I didn't have all the equipment I'd have had at home.

This didn't present any major difficulties, though. I prepared some veges, placed them in an assortment of dishes, and got them into the oven to begin roasting. This done, I turned to the apricot stuffing.

It's a very simple stuffing - just breadcrumbs, chopped dried apricots and a little grated ginger. It would have taken only a few moments if I'd had my food processor, but even using a grater for the breadcrumbs and chopping the apricots with kitchen scissors, it didn't take too long to mix up.

Since there's no egg or anything to bind the stuffing mixture, I wondered how well it would hold together. It seemed ok though, as I opened up the shoulder roasts and spread the apricot mixture over, before rolling the roasts up like a sponge roll and tying them in place with string.

I've never been very good at any kind of cooking that requires you to be tie things up in neat little parcels. I'm not really sure of the proper way to do it, so I just kept adding more string until my roasts looked reasonably tidy and likely to hold together.

I placed each roast in an oven bag, (to avoid dirtying an oven I had no intention of cleaning) and placed them on a tray in the oven, rearranging the various veges to make everything fit, and turning the temperature down to 160 degrees.

The recipe indicates a one-hour cooking time for a 1kg forequarter roast. I had two shoulder roasts, one around 700g, one about 850g. I figured cooking them for an hour would probably be long enough.

By the time my hour was up, everyone was back from the pool and very hungry. I placed the roast vege on the table and began slicing the larger of the two roasts. The end pieces were just slightly pink, and as I cut further into the roast, (completely mutilating it with a crappy knife) the lamb became pinker and pinker. I like a little pink on my lamb, but the centre was still raw. I put this piece aside to go back in the oven.

The second roast was edible right through - though a bit pink for Dad's liking - so only the very centre of the larger roast went back in the oven. The rest I sawed into rough pieces as best I could and piled it onto a plate for everyone to help themselves.

My dinner was a mixed success really. Everyone was happy enough with their meal, but the vegetables were not particularly successful, having been cooked at a much lower heat than usual, and the potatoes in particular were very dry. As for the meat: pieces of it were very good, but not all of it. The cut I got seemed to be a bit gristly, so some of what was on my plate wasn't that pleasant. Any pieces without the gristle were moist and delicious, and the apricot stuffing was very tasty.

If you're going to have a go at this one, get the right cut of meat (you might have to go to the butcher for it). The rarer pieces of meat were nicest, in my opinion, but that's a matter of taste, so adjust the cooking time to suit what you like. Mine was well-done on the outside and underdone in the middle - I suppose at least that way you can accommodate everyone's preferences!

Nutty golden tastiness

2011-11-09T19:15:00.000+13:00

Time to fill the biscuit tins again - this time it's nutty golden cookies (p42).

You start by melting butter and golden syrup in a saucepan (or bowl in the microwave, if you prefer), then adding sugar and vanilla. When this mixture has cooled down a bit, stir in beaten egg.

The next step is to sift flour, baking powder and custard powder into a separate bowl, and add it to the melted butter mixture alternately with the nuts. You could chop up your own nuts for this, but I just used a couple of 70g packets of pre-chopped nuts. They're cheap as chips and are definitely easier to use. Of course, if you want larger chunks of peanuts in your biscuits, you might have to chop your own.

When the dry ingredients and all the nuts are mixed in, the resulting soft, sticky dough is so tasty that I couldn't stop myself from sampling the odd bit as I was rolling the mixture into balls and pressing them down with a fork. For a change, this recipe actually made exactly as many biscuits as the recipe stated - I must have made them exactly the right size.

The biscuits came out golden and extremely appetising. They're surprisingly soft in texture, with crunchy pieces of nut scattered throughout. Very tasty hot from the oven, and just as nice once they've cooled down. Simple, tasty and fast to make: have a go at this one next time your biscuit tin is empty.

From two eggs

2011-11-06T12:24:00.001+13:00

I had a barbecue to go to on Saturday evening, and decided that instead of bringing a salad - which was my first idea - it might be a good idea to take a dessert. Choosing citrus bavarian cream (p202) meant that I'd have a couple of egg whites left over. My knee-jerk response in this situation is to make meringues, but after a quick flick through the pastry chapter, I found another option: coconut macaroons, (p82) a recipe which conveniently requires two egg whites.

I decided to get the macaroons out of the way first. Taking out a sheet of flaky puff pastry, I cut out 6cm rounds and placed them in greased patty tins. Onto each pastry round I spooned a small amount of raspberry jam (the last of my home-made Edmonds raspberry! It's been so useful, I'll have to make some more!) before preparing the meringue topping.

I separated my eggs, setting the yolks aside for the bavarian cream. The whites I beat to soft peaks before folding in coconut, sugar and almond essence. I spooned the egg white mixture into the patty tins, and got them into the oven.

While the macaroons were cooking, I made a start on the bavarian cream, beating the yolks with sugar, and stirring in milk. This mixture I placed over a pot of water in 'double boiler' style, and stood stirring until the mixture thickened.

That was the plan, anyway. I'd hoped to have the custard mixture cooling in the fridge by the time the macaroons came out of the oven. As it happened, the macaroons took only about 20 minutes to cook, as opposed to the 35 indicated in the recipe, so I found myself simultaneously attempting to pry stuck-on macaroons out of patty tins with a spoon while at the same time keeping an eye on the custard.

It took a while to get the macaroons out, but the custard still hadn't thickened by the time I had finished. I stood stirring for a while longer before finally deciding it was probably about as thick as it was going to get. During this time, I'd also had some gelatine swelling in water on the bench. I placed this bowl over some hot water to dissolve the gelatine, then combined it with the custard mixture.

The custard mixture was in the fridge for around an hour before I considered it to have the desired 'egg-white consistency' and moved on to the next step. I beat some cream and added grated orange zest. then I added the custard mixture and folded it through. I was actually supposed to do this the other way around - folding the cream into the custard - but the cream was in a bigger bowl.

I poured the resulting creamy mixture into a serving bowl and put it into the fridge to set, crossing my fingers that it would work ok. Meanwhile, I cut up the oranges I'd used for zest into segments. A few hours later, when the bavarian cream was looking a bit more solid, I used the orange segments to decorate the top.

My desserts went down very well with those assembled for the barbecue. Despite eating largely from the usual surfeit of food that attends these occasions, everyone still had room for a bit of citrus bavarian cream and a macaroon, before we headed down to the beach to watch the fireworks.

The macaroons were an undoubted success. They're very light, but have a surprising sort of chewyness which is very appealing, and the fruity jam keeps the coconut meringue from being too sickly. These are well worth the minimal effort of making them, and I'll definitely be making more next time I have some excess egg whites. Just make sure you grease those patty tins thoroughly, because the only difficulty with making these is getting them out of the tin!

I was less satisfied with my citrus bavarian cream. It tasted nice - sort of creamy and orangey, as you would expect - but the custard and the cream had not combined properly. Mostly, the custard had settled to the bottom of the dish, meaning you get a mouthful of orange-flavoured cream with the odd lump of custard in it. Taste-wise, it was ok, but texturally, not awesome. Perhaps I should have been more patient at the double-boiler stage.

I doubt anyone but myself had any complaints about the bavarian cream though - both desserts seemed to be enjoyed by all - and that's all that matters!

Blood drive rolls around again

2011-11-02T17:27:00.000+13:00

There was another blood drive in Hornby today, and as usual, I took some baking in to make sure my workmates had something to eat before donating. This time I chose to make jaffa cupcakes (p72).

These cupcakes are from the 'baking with Edmonds' section, i.e they're a sort of cheats' version using an Edmonds chocolate cake mix. I decided to take that 'cheat' one step further and use a cake mix that also had an icing sachet, meaning I wouldn't have to make my own icing either.

To make the cupcakes, I put the cake mix in my mixer with some orange zest, butter, water and eggs. After a couple of minutes' beating, I was ready to start filling up my cupcake cases. The previous cupcakes I've made very small, because I like things bite-size. This time I decided to go for a more standard patty-tin size, slightly smaller than a medium-sized muffin. The cake mix made a full 30 cupcakes of this size, instead of the 16 indicated, so clearly you're supposed to use even larger cases.

I put my 30 cupcakes on a rack to cool while I sorted out my icing. It turned out the icing sachet didn't really make all that much, so I padded it out a bit with extra icing sugar and cocoa. Even then, I didn't have much icing to work with, and having used up the last cup or so of icing sugar, I couldn't make any more.

I definitely didn't have enough to pipe icing on to all those cupcakes. Anyway, I'd run out of piping bags, so I ended up topping each cupcake with about a teaspoon-worth of icing, which when spread around, was sufficient. There wasn't quite enough to ice all of them though - about 6 were left over.

I'd decided it would look quite cool if I decorated my cupcakes with broken jaffas, (not my own idea; something I'd seen at a cupcake shop somewhere) so I opened up a packet and smashed them up a handful at a time in the pestle and mortar. Sprinkled on top of the icing, the jaffas really made the cupcakes look great.

My jaffa cupcakes didn't just look delicious, they tasted great too. I've been a bit harsh about cake mix-based recipes in the past, but in this case I can clearly see that it's worthwhile. My previous cupcakes have been merely a vehicle for the icing, in themselves a bit dry and tasteless. Being made from a cake mix, the jaffa muffins are quite different: moist and tasty even without the icing. There's a subtle jaffa flavour from the orange zest, echoed by those crunchy jaffas on the top.

The success of this recipe has me wanting to find a way of making my cupcakes moist and flavoursome without resorting to packet mixes. Perhaps the trick is to adapt a cake recipe? I'll have to do a bit of experimenting.

Cheesy courgettes

2011-10-31T20:43:00.000+13:00

Since I've never been in the habit of making white sauces, It's hard to know how to use them, and have been racking my brain for ideas on how to complete the several variations on this theme without becoming too repetitive.

The obvious use for cheese sauce (p188) is of course cauliflower cheese, or possibly macaroni cheese. The thing is, both of these are included as separate recipes in the Edmonds book. I had to come up with something else, so when I saw some early courgettes at Riccarton Market the other day, I decided that a cheesy courgette bake might be a good way of ticking off this one.

I started by melting some butter in a saucepan and adding flour. When this had gone 'frothy' (or in reality, had clumped into a big yellow blob) I began adding the milk. I actually didn't do this gradually enough and ended up with slightly lumpy sauce. A brisk whisking eliminated most of the lumps, but some remained in the finished product.

When all the milk had been added and the sauce was reasonably thick, I took it off the heat and added cheese. I didn't have the tasty cheese specified in the recipe, so I used edam and added a little parmesan for extra flavour. A little salt and pepper and my cheese sauce was done.

I'd briefly boiled sliced courgettes and arranged them in a casserole dish. I poured the sauce over, and topped it with a little extra parmesan for good measure. After a few minutes baking, I got impatient and stuck it under the grill. All the components were already cooked, after all - I just wanted a little colour.

My courgette bake was fairly successful. The cheese sauce was tasty, though I'd say the flavour depends a lot on careful seasoning. I think most of us would probably add more cheese than it says in the recipe too - 'cause you can never have too much cheese! All in all, I'm pretty happy with my efforts - which is saying a lot since white sauce of any variation is not really my thing.

Greeting Guests

2011-10-29T20:43:00.000+13:00

My brother, sister-in-law and nephew arrived in Christchurch on Friday morning, on a visit from Canada. On Thursday night, it occurred to me that it would be a good idea to have some baking in the cupboard to offer my weary guests with a cup of coffee.

Since I had a couple of brown bananas in the fruit bowl, it would probably have made sense to make a banana loaf. That didn't occur to me at the time, though, and by making fresh lemon loaf (p27) I was able to tick off another uncompleted recipe.

It's pretty much a standard loaf, with the addition of some lemon zest to the creamed butter and sugar. It also has walnuts in it, but I omitted these on the grounds of a) not having any, and b) my brother not being a big fan of fruit and nuts in baking.

I spooned my mixture into a loaf tin and put it in to bake for 45 minutes. Meanwhile, I prepared the glaze, dissolving sugar in lemon juice and bringing it to the boil. When the loaf came out of the oven, I poured the glaze over, trying to coat the whole loaf evenly, and left it in the tin until the loaf had cooled completely.

Mum, Dad and I went to meet Daz, Esther and baby Isaac at the airport, after which all of us came back to my place for the day. My fresh lemon loaf was enthusiastically received by all - even little Issac had a few bites.

Fresh lemon loaf is nothing fancy: it's just a good honest loaf with a soft texture and a subtle lemony flavour. If you're after something nice and filling with a cuppa, this one's worth your while.

My kitchen: a study in purple

2011-10-26T17:09:00.000+13:00

I'd purchased a bag of beetroot at a local vege shop over the weekend, since which time it has sat in my kitchen, mutely reminding me of my intention to make beetroot chutney (p229). By Tuesday night, I figured I'd put it off for long enough.

I began by boiling the beetroot for about half an hour. At the end of this time, the skins should have slipped neatly off in the way they always do for TV chefs. Of course, when I tried it, the skins just came off in bits and pieces, some sticking, some coming away easily. I ended up scraping a lot of it away with a spoon.

This took considerably longer than I'd expected, and by the time I had all the skins off the beetroot I also had purple splatters and bits of beetroot all over my kitchen.

Luckily, the next step did not take long at all, thanks to my trusty food processor: I bunged the beetroot in, along with some onions, and in a few moments I had a food processor full of vibrantly coloured, eye-wateringly oniony, purple mush. That might not sound appealing, but it's exactly what I was aiming for.

Tipping the purple mush into a large saucepan, I added malt vinegar and brought the mixture to the boil, cooking until the onion had softened up a bit. I confess I didn't linger too long on this step; having chopped the onion so finely, I could hardly identify it among the beetroot to decide if it was cooked or not.

The next additions were sugar, salt, pepper, ginger and allspice. Except when I got out the packet of allspice I'd grabbed from the supermarket, I found I'd actually got whole allspice instead of ground. Sighing, I grabbed my pestle and mortar to grind up a small amount.

This mixture bubbled away on the stove as I prepared jars and attempted to clean up the beetroot splatter from my benchtops, walls, floor, cupboards and dishrack. Finally, I mixed up a paste of flour and malt vinegar, and stirred it through the chutney mixture.

I was supposed to boil the chutney for a full five minutes after adding the paste, but when I discovered a small patch in the bottom of the pan where it was beginning to burn, I took it off immediately. With the memory of my burnt tamarillo jam still fresh in my mind, I wasn't going to risk doing that again.

Carefully avoiding any that may have come into contact with the burnt area, I ladled the chutney into my prepared jars. My half-recipe of the chutney filled three jars: more than enough for my purposes. I'll have to leave it for a while before trying it out - at present it mostly tastes of vinegar, but the flavour ought to develop after a few weeks.

So that's another chutney crossed off my list. I'm going to have a cupboard full of the stuff before I'm done!

No more eggplant guilt

2011-10-25T22:05:00.000+13:00

Lately, whenever I see an eggplant at the supermarket or vege shop, I feel a little guilty. The thing is, I've had moussaka (p151) on my 'to do' list for weeks. Months before that, I'd promised to try it soon after having Lauren recommend the recipe to me. Yet every week I'd look at those eggplants and find a reason not to buy one.

Well, this week I actually bought one, along with the rest of the necessary ingredients. And last night, I finally rolled my sleeves up and got that moussaka made.

A word of warning: if you're planning to make this dish, allow yourself plenty of time. Not anticipating how long it would take, I didn't make a start on my moussaka until 6.30pm yesterday. It was around 8.30pm by the time I was able to sit down and eat it.

First things first: the recipe requires cooked lamb mince, so I started by cooking up my mince and setting it aside. Next I chopped up onion and garlic, and got that on while I tended to the eggplant. I haven't used eggplant much, but I gather it needs salting to remove the bitterness. So I sliced up my eggplant, sprinkled salt on either side of each slice, and laid them out on trays to sit for half an hour.

When the onions were cooked, I started adding further ingredients. The mince went back in, along with some tomato puree and chicken stock. One slightly tricky addition was the blanched, skinned and chopped tomatoes. I didn't get these done in advance, and was having trouble getting the skins to come off. After slicing into one finger in my haste, I decided to flag it and bunged the tomatoes in skin and all. Another time, I wouldn't bother with all this: I'd just substitute a can of tomatoes, leaving out both the fresh tomatoes and the puree.

The mince mixture now had to cook down for half an hour. Towards the end of this time, I began assembling the rest of my ingredients, rinsing and frying my eggplant slices, and beating up the egg yolks, flour and yoghurt which would make the topping.

With all elements ready, I layered eggplant with the mince mixture in a casserole dish. There really didn't seem to be enough eggplant - I now have a vague recollection of Lauren telling me to use two eggplants, not one, all those months ago. I might be imagining that, but it's definitely what I'd do next time. On top of the final eggplant layer, I poured the yoghurt mixture, spreading it out to cover the whole dish.

It was only this morning, when describing my efforts to a workmate, that I realised I had missed something at this point. After adding the yoghurt mixture, I should have scattered parmesan cheese over the top. And I completely forgot; I just put the dish in the oven and sat down to wait for 40 minutes until it was cooked.

Even without the parmesan, the moussaka was really tasty. I loved the smooth silky texture of the eggplant, and am quite determined to try using it more in the future. Was it worth the time taken, the large number of dirty dishes, and an irritating cut in the tip of my finger? Probably not. But next time I think I'd simplify it a bit, substituting canned tomatoes as I've suggested above, and possibly leaving out the chicken stock so as not to have so much liquid to reduce down. I'd even like to experiment with different ways of cooking those eggplant slices (perhaps just spray them with oil and then bake them?) as frying them makes the entire moussaka a little oily.

There's plenty of room for experimentation here. I can vouch for the recipe being tasty as it is (or even if you forget the parmesan) but if you don't have a couple of hours up your sleeve, it might be necessary to cut a few corners.

Stunted cake

2011-10-21T18:16:00.000+13:00

As often happens in the leadup to a long weekend, we've had a hectic week at work. Hectic enough that I decided we deserved chocolate cake for our Friday morning tea.

Specifically, one-egg chocolate cake (p51), a recipe that has a reputation for being quick, easy and reliable. I hadn't made it before, but I've eaten it, and it's nice. I just had to see if mine would measure up!

I started by melting some butter and golden syrup in a small saucepan. There's no reason why this can't be done in the microwave - in fact, all you're doing is dirtying a pan which is then immediately emptied into a bowl. But anyway, I followed the instructions and used the saucepan.

To the bowl of melted butter and syrup, I then added an egg and some sugar, beating well. Sifted flour, sugar and baking powder followed, which, when folded in, made a very stiff mixture. The final addition is milk with baking soda dissolved in it, along with a few drops of vanilla. You're supposed to fold the milk in, but folding a liquid through a dough thick enough to make biscuits out of is not the easiest.

I ended up stirring, rather than folding. I didn't allow myself to mix as thoroughly as I wanted to, as an overmixed cake will crack across the top. So the mixture I poured into the sponge sandwich tins still had lumps of the original heavy dough throughout. I had to put it in the oven and hope it would all work out in the baking.

20 minutes into the half-hour cooking time, I checked my cakes. Both were going dark on top and were firm enough to bounce back even in the middle, so I decided no further cooking was necessary. I let them sit in the tin for five minutes before taking them out to cool on a rack.

The two halves of my cake were worryingly thin. I had to wonder to what purpose I'd added both baking powder and baking soda, as the cakes had hardly risen at all. Luckily, I'd prepared a nice thick filling to sandwich between the two, which would disguise the thinness of the cake itself.

I'd played around with the mock cream recipe while the cake was baking. It was successful when I used it in a sponge cake, so I decided to try doing a chocolate version. I whipped up softened butter with icing sugar and cocoa until it was thick and fluffy. At the last minute I realised there was supposed to be milk in there too: when I beat it in, it improved the texture of my 'cream' quite a lot.

There was more than enough 'cream' to sandwich the cakes together, so I used half in the centre and half to ice the top. Just the filling would be enough for me, but people have this thing about icing... and anyway, what would I do with the leftovers otherwise?

Even with two thick layers of chocolate filling, my cake looked oddly stunted, like I'd forgotten to put the third layer on. Never mind: I took it to work anyway. No-one seemed to care about the lack of height on the cake, but several people thought the light-coloured icing made it look like coffee cake. There's just no pleasing some people!

Appearance aside, it actually tasted pretty good. The cake was soft and fluffy - apart from a few thin spots around the edges where it was a little overdone, and the filling made up for the dryness there. It's a pity I didn't think of spreading a little jam on the bottom layer before adding the filling, because that would have been a nice addition.

My one-egg chocolate cake may not have looked quite right, but I came home with an empty plate: evidence enough that it tasted better than it looked!

An old favourite

2011-10-18T22:14:00.000+13:00

When I was struck with a hankering for something sweet after dinner this evening, I mentally ran through the list of desserts and puddings I have yet to make. I wasn't about to attempt anything time-consuming, and it had to be something I could make out of stuff I had in the cupboard.

So what about one of the crumble recipes? There are four variations, and I'd only made two so far. Wholegrain oat crumble (p209) is the version I generally used before beginning my Edmonds challenge, as I prefer crumbles that have oats in them. It's a rare treat to cook an Edmonds recipe that's actually familiar. Mostly, I'm making stuff I'd never even thought about making before.

I peeled and chopped an apple and a pear, and put them on to stew with a bit of cinnamon and ground cloves. I only wanted a single serving, (a generous single serving, of course) so I halved the crumble recipe. It's quick to make - just rub butter into sifted sugar and baking powder, then stir through sugar and oats.

I didn't want the fruit to be cooked too thoroughly: I prefer a slight bite to the apple, instead of it being just mush. Perhaps this wouldn't suit everyone, but since I'm only cooking for myself, I can do what I want! I spooned the apple and pear mixture into a small dish, sprinkled some brown sugar over the fruit, and topped it with a nice thick coating of the crumble mixture. I didn't need all the crumble mixture - I'll have to make something with the leftover crumble tomorrow.

The cooking time given in the recipe is 30 minutes; after 25, my smaller version was looking about right. I'm digging into it as I write, enjoying the sugary crunch of the oat topping and the juicy apple and pear underneath: delicious. Never underestimate a good old-fashioned crumble - it's a favourite with just about everyone!

Speedy slice

2011-10-16T21:58:00.002+13:00

This afternoon I suddenly realised I hadn't made anything Edmonds for quite a few days. Along with this came the realisation that I didn't have anything to pack in my lunch for tomorrow's morning tea. Obviously, it's time to do some baking!

It didn't take me long to select afghan slice (p34), a recipe I've been intending to try for quite a while. It's simply the same recipe as you use for afghan biscuits, pressed into a sponge roll tin instead of being made into biscuits.

So really, it's even easier than making afghans, because you don't have to faff about forming your mixture into balls. You just cream butter and sugar, sift in flour and cocoa, then 'fold' through cornflakes and press it into the tin. That's about five minutes work.

After 20-odd minutes in the oven (25 in the recipe, but my oven often seems to cook things more quickly), the slice is done. All that's left is to let it cool down a bit before adding the icing.

But not too much - I decided the icing might go on more smoothly if the slice was still a bit warm. This was just an excuse, really. I wanted to get it done before the rugby started. (I know: Robyn watching rugby! What's the world coming to?) As it happens, I didn't actually succeed in finishing it in time, which is why I'm writing this at half-time.

I mixed up a quick and not very successful chocolate icing, spread it on the slice with the help of a spoon dipped in hot water, and scattered over a good handful of roughly-chopped walnuts.

When the icing had set, I cut the slice into pieces and had a taste. Interestingly, though the recipe is exactly the same as for afghan biscuits, it doesn't taste quite the same. The slice is thinner and crisper than your average afghan biscuit, and you get more icing for each mouthful with the slice (since my icing was quite sugary and horrid, this was not much of an advantage. But it would be if you did a decent chocolate icing).

I think I probably prefer the biscuits, but the slice is quicker to make - try it yourself and see which one you like best.

'Tis the season

2011-10-11T20:23:00.000+13:00

Lots of people get excited about whitebait season, but I have to admit I'm not one of them. Any whitebait lovers not prepared to traipse out to a river somewhere and catch their own have got to buy it instead - and with whitebait numbers declining, the price increases every year. While I don't dislike whitebait, I have no great liking for it either, so I'm not prepared to pay through the nose for it.

Still, whitebait fritters (p119) are in the Edmonds book, which means they are also on the menu. I got myself a small pottle, enough to make a couple of fritters for myself. Interestingly, the recipe also suggests thin strips of firm white fish as a possible whitebait substitute. So if you're budget-challenged but still love a whitebait fritter, give that a go.

I mixed up the batter while the whitebait was draining: a simple mixture of flour, baking powder, salt, egg and milk. With the addition of the whitebait, the batter was ready to go. I'd heated some oil in a frying pan, and dropped spoonfuls of the whitebait mixture into the pan, where they cooked through in a couple of minutes.

I allowed the fritters to drain on a paper towel for a few minutes before serving them up with a wedge or two of lemon. It had probably taken me about ten minutes to get the whitebait from pottle to plate: fast food at home!

I was surprised at how much I enjoyed the fritters. It's been years since I had one, and I hadn't expected to think much of it at all. The thing is, I think I enjoyed the nice crisp batter more than I enjoyed the whitebait itself. In fact, I'm finding it hard to recall what the whitebait even tasted like.

Perhaps it's a sad waste of whitebait to feed it to someone like me, who doesn't appreciate it properly. I think it's best left to those who really love the stuff. Because really, I'd probably be just as happy with the 'mock' version mentioned above.

For better presentation

2011-10-09T20:50:00.001+13:00

Often, when I take photos of cold desserts like flummery or pineapple snow, they don't look that appealing. Since people are more drawn to recipes that have a tasty-looking picture, (hence the current trend for overly large, overly expensive cookbooks with more photos than recipes) I get annoyed when I can't portray a dish in such a way as to make people want to try it.

Part of the reason why my dessert pictures have been so boring is that generally, I had to present them in plain glass mixing bowls, since I had nothing else suitable to put them in. So yesterday, when wandering around the annual Vintage Car Club swapmeet, Mum and I honed in on glass and crystal serving dishes. There were plenty available, as not many people are wanting that sort of thing these days. I ended up with two bowls, both of which would be suitable for flashing up my puddings a bit.

Naturally, I had to make use of at least one of them immediately. I had some cream left over from my green peppercorn sauce: exactly enough to make a half-recipe of easy chocolate mousse (p201).

I'd already made the liqueur variation, and I'd noted at the time that more chocolate would be an improvement. So I upped the quantity a bit as I placed the chocolate in a bowl over some boiling water to melt. When the chocolate had melted, I removed it from the heat and stirred in some egg yolks. This seemed to stiffen the consistency of the chocolate, but I hoped it would be ok as I beat it smooth in accordance with the instructions.

The next step was to whip the cream. I transferred the beaters directly from the chocolate to the cream, figuring that since they were going to be combined anyway, it wouldn't matter if a bit of chocolate got in the cream. Before long, the cream was whipped and I added the chocolate. It had stiffened up even more while I whipped the cream, and it didn't fold in very smoothly. The two mixtures combined eventually, but the mixture was still flecked with bits of chocolate that wouldn't combine.

There was nothing much I could do about that. I moved onto the final step, beating some egg whites until stiff, then adding just enough sugar to make it glossy. I folded this into the chocolate mixture, and poured the mousse into one of my new serving dishes. As a final touch, I scattered grated chocolate over the top, and left it in the fridge to set.

Chocolate mousse is one of my favourite desserts, and this recipe doesn't disappoint. It's light and creamy, and chocolaty enough without being too rich. It's not a difficult dessert to make; all you need is an electric beater and a few bowls. And this time, I managed to make it look pretty too!

Very odd kisses

2011-10-05T21:22:00.000+13:00

My baking container has been looking sadly empty since I finished the last of my tennis cake, so tonight I took the opportunity to refill it. It's been a while since I made any biscuits, so I decided to make some kisses (p41), one of several recipes that sandwich two shortbreadish biscuits together to make a whole.

The biscuits are made by creaming butter and sugar, adding eggs, then sifted flour, cornflour and baking powder. The recipe then instructs us to "drop small spoonfuls onto greased oven tray". Looking at my firm, sticky dough, I didn't think that was going to work. Anyway, I wanted my biscuits to be evenly-sized, so I decided to roll them into balls instead.

This turned out to be a bad idea. They didn't spread out at all in the cooking - they just swelled into little round puffballs, each with a slightly overcooked edge ringing each one. I think had I squashed the balls down they would have been fine, but I didn't want to make them too flat. Turns out I definitely had no need to worry on that score!

When the biscuits had cooled, I found that the little edges crumbled away easily and reasonably neatly. So I tidied up the edges of each biscuit and joined them in pairs with some of my homemade raspberry jam. The resulting 'kisses' were about the size (and not to dissimilar in shape) of a large egg.

So they look weird, but what do they taste like? Nice enough, but there's too much biscuit for the amount of jam. In fact, having puffed up so much, the double-barrelled biscuit is quite a lot to eat, and just ends up making your mouth feel dry.

If I made these again, I'd do a couple of things differently. Firstly, I'd make them smaller. Secondly, I'd make them flatter. Two little things, and it'd be a completely different biscuit.

Research before cooking

2011-10-03T20:05:00.000+13:00

Green peppercorns: I'd never heard of them before coming across the Edmonds recipe for green peppercorn sauce (p186). Things like this are a worry to me, since if I haven't heard of them, I don't know where to shop for them. Do you get them dried, or fresh, or what?

On a recent visit to Bin Inn, I checked the peppercorns and found that while there was no separate bin for green peppercorns, there were green ones amongst the 'gourmet' peppercorn mix. I decided these must be the ones I was looking for, and stood there for quite a while, carefully picking out a tablespoon's-worth. Of course, when I took my purchases up to pay, the owner told me she actually has separate bags of green and red peppercorns behind the counter. Oh well.

This evening, having gathered the rest of the ingredients, I tried out the recipe. You start by melting butter, then add the peppercorns, along with cream, lemon juice, egg yolks, sour cream and mustard. I've just noticed that the recipe actually says 'prepared mustard'; I must have misread this, as I actually used mustard powder. Oops.

I let this mixture heat gently as I cooked my steak and sorted some veges and oven fries. The sauce thickened just as it was threatening to start boiling, so I took it off the heat while I finished the rest of my meal.

The sauce was creamy and tangy; on the whole quite tasty. It went well with the steak and was great for dipping chips in. The only thing about the sauce that didn't really work was the main ingredient, i.e. the peppercorns. I'd assumed they would soften up in the sauce, but really they were just fiery, peppery lumps in an otherwise nice sauce. I started to suspect that dried peppercorns, even if they are green in colour, are not what is intended for this recipe.

So I went to Google images and searched 'green peppercorns'. There were some dried green ones amongst the pictures, sure. But most of them looked like this:

That's right, I'm a muppet: seems I should have been looking for peppercorns bottled in brine. I guess I really should have consulted Google before heading to the shops. Lesson learnt? Who am I kidding: probably not!

Odds and ends

2011-09-29T20:18:00.000+13:00

A few weeks back, I used half a packet of Edmonds buttercake mix to make a fruit sponge. The half-empty packet has been sitting in the cupboard ever since, so I turned again to the 'desserts with Edmonds' section to find a way to use it up.

A steamed pudding (p217) would do the trick nicely, made in a half-recipe as I did with the sponge. It would give me a chance to use the end of a bag of raisins I'd bought for my cashmere chutney (you're supposed to use currants, but I figured I could get away with the substitution). To go with the pudding, I decided to make some vanilla custard (p189), which would conveniently get rid of some milk that was just past its best-before date. Plus, I'd bought a much larger carton of eggs than usual (for what reason, I have no idea), and I'd be able to use a couple of those as well.

In short, this particular exercise was less about making myself a pudding and more about tidying up various items in my cupboard and fridge that needed using. Good excuse, though, right?

I began by scattering a handful of raisins in the bottom of a pudding basin. For my half-recipe, I should have used only a tablespoon, but the idea here was to get rid of the raisins. Then all I did was put the cake mix in a bowl with an egg, some butter, and a little water, and beat it for a few minutes with an electric beater. The resulting mixture went into the pudding basin on top of the raisins.

I wrestled for some time with the pleated baking paper, trying to tie it securely over the bowl. Usually I use tinfoil, which is more easily tied on, but I think the baking paper is better because it's almost transparent: useful later on, when you're trying to see if the pudding is cooked or not.

When I first started the Edmonds challenge, I didn't have a clue how to steam a pudding. From the descriptions given in the various pudding recipes, I managed to get a general idea of how it works, and have been steaming my puddings in a bowl that sits neatly in one of my saucepans without touching the bottom, thus removing the need for a trivet.

My way works, but I've now got a better idea of the traditional method, thanks to a recent 'Masterclass' episode of Masterchef. It's similar to what I do, except you place the bowl on a trivet in a large, deep pot e.g. stockpot. I suspect this way (i.e. the proper way) cooks the pudding more efficiently, as my puddings often take longer to cook than stated in the recipe.

One of these days, I'll find something suitable for using as a trivet, and give the 'proper way' a go. Meanwhile, I stuck to my personal saucepan steaming method. When the sponge looked like it was nearly done, I spent a few minutes making the custard, putting custard powder, milk, a beaten egg, some sugar and vanilla essence into a pot on a low medium heat, and stirring until the runny mixture thickened into custard.

I'd forgotten to grease the sides of the pudding basin, so the pudding wouldn't come out when I tipped it upside down. Instead, I scooped a portion straight out of the basin, and topped it with a generous serving of custard.

The buttercake mix made a very light pudding, and it was nice to encounter juicy raisins in the occasional mouthful. I didn't regret adding extra raisins, in fact I wish I'd put more in! The custard, true to its name, was pleasantly vanilla-flavoured and the ideal match for the pudding. I've found that custard (or ice cream) is a necessity with steamed puds, to prevent them from seeming too dry.

Anyway, both pudding and custard were a success, in the sense that they both tasted good, and got rid of some odds and ends that were cluttering up my kitchen. Now, what else have I got that needs using?

On my 'to do' list

2011-09-27T16:48:00.001+13:00

I have this fear of getting near the end of my Edmonds challenge and having to face a long list of chutneys I haven't got around to making. Since I seldom use chutney, I don't find myself in need of it, and have to consciously plan when I'm going to make it.

Still, if I don't want to get stuck with a heap at the end, I've got to make chutneys more often than I have been, beginning with the cashmere chutney (p230) I made last night.

It's a fruit-based chutney, made from apple, dates and sultanas. The first step is to cook the chopped, unpeeled apples in malt vinegar. I was doing a half-recipe, in which about one cup of vinegar ought to have been enough to 'almost cover' the apples. Actually, it took far more than that, and I worried that the extra vinegar would affect the flavour of the finished chutney.

While my apples were cooking, I chopped up the dates and stuck them in a bowl with raisins, crushed garlic, and a heap of grated fresh ginger. These went into the pot with some brown sugar and cayenne pepper, and back on the heat for another half-hour or so.

It didn't take long for the chutney to start thickening up. I was already pressed for time in which to sterilise some jars, and half-expected the chutney to be ready long before the jars were. In the end, it came together ok, though the jars were still hot enough to make the chutney bubble and fizz as I ladled it in.

The quantity I'd made was exactly enough to fill the four assorted jars I'd prepared, so there wasn't much leftover for tasting. The small amount I tried from the edge of the pot had quite a potent flavour: I'd expected it to be tangy and fruity, but was surprised to find it was spicy as well. I guess that small amount of cayenne had a bigger impact than I expected.

At this stage, I found the flavour too sharp for simply using on bread etc, and may need to use it up by adding it to casseroles and things. But who knows what the flavour will be like in a few weeks' time? I'll let it sit for a while before I judge.

Breakfast grill

2011-09-24T10:06:00.000+12:00

Amongst the 576 items in the Edmonds book that are included in my list of recipes to complete, there are a handful that are so basic as to hardly merit the title of 'recipe' at all. One of these is grilled grapefruit (p156).

All you need to do is cut the grapefruit in half, then use a sharp knife to separate the flesh from the skin and membrane, leaving (theoretically) neat little segments of flesh within the shell of the grapefruit. Mine were not terribly neat, but still served the same purpose!

That part takes the longest. When it's done, all you need to do is sprinkle brown sugar on top and place the grapefruit halves under the grill. The instructions indicate that you should do this 'until sugar melts'. Seeing as the sugar had dissolved into brownish mush as soon as it came into contact with the grapefruit juice, I couldn't really use this as a guide. Instead, I just let it grill for a few minutes and then took it out and placed a glacé cherry in the centre of each.

I was quite surprised at how good my grilled grapefruit was. It was deliciously juicy, and I'd added enough sugar to compensate for the natural bitterness of the grapefruit. Ok, yes, it's got a lot of added sugar. I should know, since I was the one who added it! And that's the key: at least you can control how much sugar has been added to your breakfast - not the case with sugary cereals and similar. There's a whole heap of worse things you could be eating for breakfast. With that in mind, I might very well treat myself to a grilled grapefruit every now and then!

Budget winner

2011-09-21T20:25:00.000+12:00

With food prices getting higher and higher, it's always good to have a few budget meals in your repertoire. Canned salmon is among the cheapest proteins you can use, and there are plenty of things you can do with it. One simple option is salmon rissoles (p116), a recipe that bulks out the base protein with potato and a few other basic ingredients.

You start with mashed potato (so keep this one in mind if you have any leftover potato to use), and add the fish and liquid from a can of salmon, along with some chopped onion. To this mixture, sift in some flour and baking powder, then add seasoning and parsley (I used dried).

This results in a slightly sticky dough, firm enough to shape into patties. Then all you need to do is heat some oil in a pan and shallow fry until golden. I cooked mine in two batches, using quite a bit of oil for the first batch and much less for the second. Both batches came out well, so I would opt for minimum oil next time. It may even be possible to cook them on a sandwich press as we did with the corn fritters.

I threw together a salad while the rissoles were draining on paper towels, then sat down to eat. I'd expected the rissoles to be bland and boring, but actually, they were really tasty: crunchy on the outside with a soft, savoury centre. They weren't even particularly fishy, which was a surprise. I had a little mayonnaise with mine, though I think many Kiwis would reach for the tomato sauce instead.

One thing to bear in mind is that the main ingredients in the rissoles - salmon and mashed potatoes - don't need cooking, so the shallow frying really only heats them through and creates the crust on the outside. This works fine, but don't forget you have raw onion in there. So chop it finely, and if you're really anti raw onion, give it a zap in the microwave before adding it to the rissole mix.

So basically, this is a super-cheap, very easy meal that you can make with ingredients usually on hand in the cupboard. And, while it tastes pretty good the way it is, there's no reason why you couldn't add more seasoning or herbs, perhaps even some different vegetables, to adapt it more to your own tastes.

But what's tennis got to do with it?

2011-09-20T18:16:00.001+12:00

It's been a while since I ticked off a fruit cake recipe, so yesterday I decided it was time to have a go at making tennis cake (p59). I'd got all the ingredients with my groceries - or so I thought. It would be quite uncharacteristic of me not to have forgotten any ingredients at all, and sure enough, I didn't bring home a lemon.

This required a quick trip to the supermarket. The Palms shopping mall has now reopened, and it's amazing how much I appreciate being able to just pop up there for a few things when I need to, something I once took for granted. There's nothing special about The Palms - it's just like any other shopping mall - but restoring a major retail area on the Eastern side of town is another big step towards normality.

Anyway, I returned from my brief trip to The Palms bearing the required lemon, and set to work. I began by creaming butter and sugar, then added vanilla and almond essences. Setting that bowl aside, I sifted the dry ingredients in a separate bowl and beat four eggs together in another, then mixed the dry ingredients and eggs alternately into the creamed mixture.

So I had my base mixture ready, but a fruit cake's got to have fruit in it too! The final ingredients added were raisins, glacé cherries, mixed peel (this was supposed to be angelica, but since I couldn't find any I decided to substitute the peel) along with juice and rind from the lemon.

A more organised person would have lined the cake tin before starting work on the cake. But of course, I'm not, so I hadn't. Struggling to find space amongst the mess on my kitchen bench, I managed to line my tin with a layer of brown paper and then one of baking paper, before spooning the mix in and plonking it in the oven for an hour and a half.

I used a 23cm round tin, as I don't have the 22cm one specified in the recipe. When I first began this challenge, I made a point of trying to find the correct size cake tin for each recipe, but since I now have quite a collection, I'm not really interested in buying any more. I generally just use whatever I have that's closest to the specified size. I'm not sure why there are so many different sized/shaped tins for the various Edmonds recipes; it would certainly be more practical if they stuck to one or two standard tin sizes. Are Edmonds getting a commission from cake tin manufacturers?

The cake came out looking pretty good, if not as high as it might have been in the proper 22cm tin. After allowing it to cool slightly, I cut myself a slice. It was pretty good: a light almondy fruit cake with a slight crunch around the edges. If you don't like glacé cherries, well, you won't like this cake. But if that's not an issue for you, it's an easy little cake with none of the heavy texture that's sometimes a problem with fruit cakes.

Something fishy

2011-09-16T20:15:00.000+12:00

I've never been much in the habit of cooking with fish, so it's probably not surprising that I've cooked far more chicken and meat recipes than fish ones. In the interests of covering the recipes as evenly as possible, however, I'm needing to catch up a little.

I'd shyed away from cooking recipes involving live mussels, as it's something I've never really done before. Still, they have to be done sometime, so I decided to take on mussels in tomato sauce (p116) for dinner this evening.

The recipe is for 36 mussels: far more than I can eat by myself, so I bought only one dozen. Or I intended to buy a dozen, but I must have miscounted, as I found I only had 10 when I got them home. It's probably for the best, though - 10 ended up being more than enough.

I'm not sure why I'd put off doing this recipe for so long, because it was very easy. The most difficult part was cleaning and debearding the mussels, and after that it was plain sailing. You start by putting onion in a frypan with some water, and bringing it to the boil. When the water's boiling, add the mussels, cover and cook for 8 minutes.

That's the mussels cooked - just the sauce to do. Removing the mussels from the pan, I arranged them on a plate in the half-shell. Reserving some of the cooking liquid, I cleaned out the pan and started fresh with butter, more onion (though actually I was substituting shallots, as the onions at Pak N Save today were seriously dodgy-looking) and some garlic.

When the garlic and onion were cooked, I added some flour and stirred it through it "until frothy" before gradually pouring in the reserved cooking liquid and the tomato puree. In a very short time, I was spooning sauce over my mussels and garnishing them with parsley.

I'm not a huge fan of mussels in general, but I have to admit that freshly-cooked ones are a lot more tender and pleasanter to eat than the rubbery marinated ones I've had before. The tomato sauce is quite strongly-flavoured, so if you prefer to savour the taste of the mussel itself, you might find it a bit overpowering. For those like myself who are shellfish tolerators rather than shellfish lovers, it's actually ideal.

Just be careful how you eat them. It can be a bit tricky to get them on the fork, and if they slip out of your grasp they'll make a mess of your carpet. Trust me on this!

Good call, Mum!

2011-09-12T17:37:00.001+12:00

On being invited around to Leah's for dinner on Saturday night, my immediate reaction was to offer a dessert. It wasn't difficult to decide what to make, as Mum had recently made yoghurt flummery (p201) and recommended it to me.

Yoghurt flummery is a variation on the main flummery recipe, (if you don't know what flummery is, it's jelly beaten up with evaporated milk - apparently some people call it "fluff") but yoghurt is substituted for the evaporated milk. Mum makes the jelly using fruit juice and gelatine, since she doesn't like the artificial jelly flavours, but I decided I'd best stick to the recipe.

I dissolved a packet of tropical flavoured jelly crystals in water, and put the bowl in the fridge. Some time later, the jelly mixture had cooled and partially set to the consistency described as "raw egg white". I took it out and beat it until the mixture was thick and well-aerated.

At this point I added the yoghurt, and stirred it through. The resulting thick, yellow mixture had a slightly lumpy look to it, but I hoped it would be ok. I transferred it to a smaller bowl and put it back into the fridge to set.

Leah hadn't mentioned how many people would be there for dinner, but to be sure I had enough for everyone, I whipped up a batch of meringues to have with the flummery. When I arrived at Leah's, armed with flummery, meringues and a small jug of passionfruit pulp, I discovered there were only three of us for dinner. It didn't matter though: even after filling up on Leah's lovely lamb chops, we actually managed to finish all the flummery and most of the meringues between us.

I'd never had the yoghurt variation of flummery before, and I really liked it. As with classic flummery, it's light enough to eat even when you've already had a good meal. I didn't mind the flavour of the jelly crystals, but if you're not keen on that artificial flavouring, take a leaf out of my Mum's book and make your own jelly with fruit juice. Either way, it's not difficult, and, while it may not look all that exciting in the picture, it tastes pretty good!

Pity the theme wasn't "things that are soggy"

2011-09-11T19:22:00.000+12:00

This past Friday, as we all know, was the much-anticipated opening of the Rugby World Cup. In celebration of this event, Lauren and Tom had asked a few people around to watch the opening ceremony, followed by the All Blacks vs Tonga opening match.

Since our opponent was Tonga, the evening had an island theme, and we were all supposed to dress and bring food to match the theme. Finding something 'island' from the Edmonds book was a bit of a stretch, until I started thinking outside the box. After all, you really can't fault apricot islands (p215) as not being in keeping with an island theme.

Lauren had also asked me to bring a salad, so I had a look at the remaining salad recipes and chose rice salad (p178). Probably not authentically islandy, but at least it had pineapple in it!

I got home on Friday afternoon and headed immediately into the kitchen, putting rice on for the salad and making a start on the apricot islands. Apricot islands are one of the 'desserts with Edmonds' recipes, and basically consist of canned apricot halves with cake mixture spooned into the cavity, and a few sliced almonds sprinkled on top.

The recipe uses madeira cake mix, but that doesn't seem to be available anymore. Using the actual madeira cake recipe as a guide, I figured a plain buttercake mix with a bit of lemon zest would be a suitable substitute. I made up the cake mix from the box, added my lemon zest, and set about spooning it into the apricots.

I have a suspicion that canned apricot halves used to be bigger. The ones I got were tiny, but the recipe stated I should be able to put a tablespoon of mixture into the cavity. I barely got a teaspoon's worth in them, and even then, they were overflowing. I sprinkled on the almonds and got them into the oven.

There was quite a lot of cake mix left over. The recipe anticipates this, stating "use remaining mixture to make cupcakes". I hadn't expected to have so much left, since I'd filled a whole can's worth of apricots, and the recipe is for only eight. Still, I had this mixture, so I went ahead and filled up some cupcake cases.

Meanwhile, I'd checked my rice and found it horribly gluggy: I'd forgotten to rinse the rice before cooking, something I don't bother with for my usual basmati, but is apparently necessary for the ordinary long grain I'd cooked for the salad. Since I had to cool it down anyway, I had a go at rinsing the glugginess off post-cooking. It seemed to work, and I left the rice draining in a sieve while I finished off the apricot islands and got the cupcakes in.

The apricot islands came out looking shrivelled, soggy and completely unappealing. I left them on a rack to cool down and made a start on the salad, adding to the rice pineapple, sultanas and chopped red pepper. A quick vinaigrette and it was done, but it wasn't looking too great. The rice was still softer than it should be and I hadn't drained it enough. It was an unusually wet rice salad.

At least the cupcakes were looking beautiful, so I quickly whipped up some icing for them, choosing to make it subtly lemon-flavoured and colouring it yellow to match. Of course, I didn't check that I had enough icing sugar before undertaking the icing, and I had to use every bit of what I had to get the icing to almost-ok consistency. About this time I found I had dyed my fingers and fingernails bright yellow (which still hasn't come off) and I was getting more than a little frustrated at my inability to produce even one decent dish to take to Lauren and Tom's.

What I did end up taking was my soggy apricot islands, my soggier rice salad, and a tray of eye-wateringly yellow cupcakes that had no connection to the theme. Well, the cupcakes all got eaten, and most people claimed to like the tangy flavour of the apricot islands, if not the unappealing texture. The rice salad was barely touched, and considering the range of more appetising food there was to choose from, I'm not at all surprised. I'm not a huge fan of rice salads at the best of times, but add wet, gluggy rice into the mix and it's quite disastrous.

So that's what tarragon tastes like!

2011-09-07T20:04:00.000+12:00

The trouble with buying cream for a sponge cake is that even if you get the smallest bottle available, you're only going to use half of it. Because of this, I found myself flicking through my Edmonds book, scanning ingredient lists for cream. Eventually, I found an uncompleted recipe that would help me use up my cream: tarragon chicken (p143).

I don't think I had ever consciously eaten tarragon before, so I was quite keen to find out what it tasted like. But first I had to assemble the other main ingredients: chicken breast, onion, white wine and chicken stock.

You begin by cooking onion and garlic in a pan. When the onion is cooked through, you stir through a small amount of flour, then add the wine and stock. When this mixture has been brought to the boil, add tarragon (fresh or dried - I used dried) and the chicken breasts. Then, just stick a lid on it and let it simmer for 15 minutes.

I was surprised to find that the chicken had cooked through in a mere 15 minutes. I'd been expecting to increase the cooking time by another 10 minutes at least. I didn't need to, however - I just set the chicken aside while I finished off the sauce, adding cream and egg yolk (since I was making a half-recipe, I had to try to scoop half a yolk into the pan) along with some seasoning. Chicken on the plate; sauce on the chicken; add veges: dinner's ready!

It turns out that tarragon is not a completely unfamiliar flavour - I've definitely had it before, just not in anything I've cooked. But it tastes good: tarragon chicken is savoury, creamy and really quite a nice meal. I personally would prefer to cook the chicken in smaller, more manageable pieces: a whole breast is quite a lot for one person to get through, and with such a large piece, you're more conscious of the slightly dry texture of the chicken breast.

When you see a recipe with ingredients like cream and wine, you might be tempted to think "nah, that's a bit flash for me". But it's really quite easy to make, and it's a tasty meal. If you've got a little cream and/or wine that needs using, why not give it a try?

I suck at sponges

2011-09-04T17:54:00.000+12:00

It's a bit of a worry that my first reaction, on receiving a text asking me to a friend's housewarming drinks, was to think "what can I make out of the Edmonds book to take to that?" After some reflection, I decided it was about time I tried my hand at another sponge recipe.

I didn't have a particular recipe in mind; I just picked up the vital ingredients - eggs and cream - and went home to pick one at random. Light-as-air sponge (p68) sounded like a plan.

In order to get the sponge "light as air", the eggs are separated, and you beat the whites until thick, then beat in caster sugar - much like a meringue mixture, except that the next step is to beat in the yolks as well. When you have nice thick, airy mixture, you sift in cornflour, flour, and baking powder, then dissolve a little golden syrup in boiling water and add that too.

This is where I ran into trouble. I wanted to fold the added ingredients through the egg mixture without losing too much volume. There's a fine line between undermixed and overmixed, and this time it seems I landed on the 'undermixed' side of it.

I wasn't aware of that though, thinking I'd done a pretty good job as I divided the mixture into two sponge sandwich tins and got them in the oven a mere 15 minutes after walking in the door. I was feeling quite smug as I sat down to watch Masterchef, dishes done and sponge in the oven.

The sponge was to bake for 20 minutes. After about 15, I went to have a look. The sponges were looking worryingly brown on the top, so I whipped out a piece of baking paper and laid it over the top. The downside to this is that I had to open the oven, letting quite a bit of heat out.

A short time later, I took the sponges out and was faced with an extremely unimpressive result. I already knew they'd be overdone on top, but they'd also shrunk away from the sides and hadn't risen much at all - hardly a result that could be considered "light as air"!

When I turned the sponges out of the tins, it got even worse: there were lumps of unmixed cornflour that had just sunk to the bottom. I could pluck the gooey lumps out of the base of the sponges. But even without this, the sponges were totally unusable. My tendency to make bad sponges had caught up with me again..

What to do? I hadn't promised to bring anything to the housewarming, but I was now determined to come bearing a sponge cake. Turning to the three-minute sponge recipe that I have had more success with, I decided to whip up one of those instead.

It's a simpler recipe, in which you merely bung everything in a mixer and beat it for 3 minutes. The result was, while not perfect, much more successful. When it had cooled, I spread it with the last of my lime butter, and a combination of cream and lemon yoghurt. A dusting of icing sugar on top, and my housewarming offering was complete.

The sponge cake went down pretty well at the housewarming, several people indicating surprise when they found it wasn't a bought one. So that's some further praise for the three-minute sponge, but it doesn't tell you much about my original light-as-air sponge recipe. Suffice it to say that my dreadful result should not be blamed on the recipe, but rather my poor mixing and (probably) opening of the oven during cooking. If I have time, I might have another go at this one.

Five jars for the bin

2011-09-03T19:07:00.001+12:00

I needed some fresh ginger for my fried rice the other day, so before I started cooking, I headed down to the shops at Edgeware - or what's left of them. Having been forced out of an earthquake-damaged building some months ago, our intrepid vege man doggedly continues his business from a tent-like structure set up in the carpark. With the competing supermarket across the road now demolished, and customers going out of their way to support such a determined individual, I suspect his business is doing better than ever.

Feeling that I ought to buy more than just a tiny chunk of ginger, I looked around to see if there was any fruit I might want. That's when I saw that he had tamarillos. I'd been looking at tamarillos for a while, knowing that I should make tamarillo jam (p228) while they are in season. They'd mostly been quite expensive though, so Edgeware Fruit and Vege's bags of second-grade tamarillos were exactly what I needed.

The following night, I brought home the cooking apples which were the only remaining ingredient. I set about blanching, skinning and chopping the tamarillos, and putting them in a large pot with the the peeled, chopped apples and some water.

It took quite a while to reduce the fruit to a pulp, during which time I decided I would need to transfer the jam to a larger pot when I added the sugar. So I dug out my stock pot, and when the fruit was nicely pulped, I transferred it cup by cup, as I needed to know how much pulp I had.

The next step was to add an equal amount of sugar to the pulp, along with a little lemon juice, and then bring the whole lot to the boil. It's supposed to take about half an hour to reach setting point, so I set a timer and went about doing other things, returning to the stove for the occasional stir.

I'd had the lid on the pot, hoping that would help keep the jam at a brisk boil as described in the recipe. It certainly did that - at one point, the jam overflowed, oozing down the side of the pot and under the element. I acted quickly, turning off the gooey element and moving my pot to a clean one, then ran to the lounge and took down the smoke alarm before it started making a racket.

From that point, I left the lid off. Towards the end of the 30-minute cooking time, I tested it for setting point, and it seemed to be ok. I took the pot off the heat and transferred the jam to the jars I'd prepared. As I poured out the last of the jam, I saw that there was a large scorched patch in the bottom of the pot. Gingerly, I tasted a little jam from the side of my jam funnel: I could taste a slight burnt flavour, but couldn't decide if the jam itself tasted burnt, or if my tastebuds were just reacting to the smoke still lingering in my nostrils from the earlier jam-under-element incident. I set the jam aside for further tasting.

This evening, I opened one of the jars. The jam is deliciously dark and fruity-looking in appearance, and has set to a nice consistency. It's just a pity that it tastes like charcoal. I couldn't even swallow the mouthful I took - it tasted even worse than the vegetable soup I burnt. So unfortunately, my beautiful-looking jars of tamarillo jam are for the bin. Oh well - maybe this'll teach me to be more careful!

Topping stir-fried with deep-fried

2011-09-01T21:17:00.000+12:00

For months now, I've been thinking to myself, "I really must batter something one of these days". The reason behind this slightly unusual aspiration is that there are three different batter recipes in the fish chapter, and I hadn't yet tried any of them.

So, last night I decided to have a go at crispy Chinese batter (p113). Of course, I had to find something to coat with it: luckily, I happened to have some prawns in the freezer. But what to have with the prawns? How about fried rice (p105)? Battered, deep-fried prawns on fried rice - sounds like a decent dinner to me!

I was uncharacteristically organised and set about cooking the rice and thawing the prawns and bacon while I watched Masterchef. Fried rice is the sort of dish you're supposed to make with leftover rice, but I had to cook mine specially.

So when I'd finished watching TV, my rice was ready and I was able to start cooking straight away. I spread the rice out on a tray to dry, and started preparing the other ingredients. Firstly, I beat egg with a little soy sauce and cooked it omelet-style in my frypan. Stupidly, I didn't think to use my 'wok', and the egg spread very thinly across the wide flat base of my ordinary frypan.

It didn't matter though: I still got the desired result. The omelet took only a minute or two to cook, so I removed it from the pan and started cooking the bacon. While the bacon was cooking, I sliced the omelet into thin strips.

With both bacon and egg cooked and ready, I added chopped spring onion to the pan with crushed garlic and grated ginger. After a brief stir-fry, I added the rice.

Meanwhile, my oil had been heating for the prawns. Crispy Chinese batter consists of only two ingredients: cornflour and egg white. Coating the prawns in cornflour, dipping them in lightly beaten egg white, then deep-frying them didn't sound too difficult, but since I was trying to deal with the fried rice at the same time, (and take photos of everything) I soon found myself wishing I had an extra hand or two.

It was quite astonishing how much the batter bubbled up in the oil. The first ones I did were more successful than the later ones; I suspect I ought to have beaten the egg white up again when I was half-way through. Very quickly the prawns were cooked and draining on paper towels, and I was able to turn my attention back to the fried rice.

The rice had been stir-frying for around five minutes, so it was time to add the final touches - returning the bacon and egg strips to the pan, and allowing them to heat through, before stirring through a little soy sauce to finish it all off.

The crispy Chinese batter was delicious: light, crunchy and slightly eggy-tasting. It's hard to believe something so simple could taste so good. The fried rice was also very yummy, but I think there's potential to make it a bit healthier by reducing the bacon (seriously: it seemed like about half the dish was made up of bacon) and adding a few more veges. Either way, it's pretty much a meal in itself, so while adding prawns to the top may have been tasty, it wasn't really necessary.

Dates or apricots?

2011-08-31T21:06:00.000+12:00

I needed something for my morning teas this week, so I decided to whip up an apricot loaf (p27). It's a variation on the date loaf recipe, i.e exactly the same, only with apricots instead of dates.

To soften the apricots, you chop them up and put them in a bowl with boiling water, baking soda and butter, stir it all together and then leave it for an hour.

When the soaking time is up, you add sugar, egg, walnuts and vanilla essence to the mixture, and beat it through. Finally, sift in the flour and baking powder, and mix it carefully until just combined. I find this incredibly difficult, and always end up overmixing my ingredients because I can't seem to get it all combined.

The combined mixture goes into the oven for 45 minutes. I'd written "40" next to this after trying the date version, so I started checking the apricot loaf after about 35 minutes. I needn't have been so careful: this one took the full 45. I did have to place a piece of baking paper over the top part-way through the cooking time, otherwise the top would have burnt.

The resulting loaf was quite an interesting combination of crunchy crust and soft, fruity loaf. I suspect the crust isn't actually part of the intended result, but actually I liked the texture it added. Soaking the apricots had made them soft and juicy, so there was no chance of the loaf being too dry.

Overall, I liked it. Is it better than the date version? Actually, I think it might be!

More salty than spicy

2011-08-30T19:52:00.000+12:00

Lamb satay (p151) is a recipe I've been meaning to make for some time. If the Edmonds book has one failing, it's a tendency for the recipes to err slightly on the bland side. Of course, generally you can adjust the recipes to suit your own tastes, but I'm obliged to stay pretty close to the recipe. I'm not hugely into spicy food, but it was still a welcome change to see a recipe with a bit of chilli in it.

Though the recipe uses four lamb steaks, I used just one - after all, I'm only feeding myself, and lamb's expensive. Though I was using one-quarter of the meat, I only halved the marinade and sauce ingredients, as the required quantities for a quarter recipe would have been too small to work with easily.

The marinade is made up of chopped coriander, oil, and sambal oelek (chilli paste). You chop the lamb steak into cubes, stir through the marinade, and leave it for half an hour.

At the end of the marinating time, you thread the cubes of lamb onto soaked bamboo skewers, and put them under the grill (or on a grill plate, I guess) and make up the sauce during the 8 minutes' cooking time.

The sauce is a simple combination of soy sauce, chopped spring onions, more sambal oelek and lemon juice. I'd also cooked some rice, so when the lamb skewers came out of the oven, I placed a couple on a bed of rice and poured over some sauce.

I have to admit I was slightly disappointed. Lamb's my favourite meat, so when I fork out for some, I want to taste the lamb itself. Instead, the meat mostly tasted of coriander, and the soy-based sauce was strongly salty with a sharp background flavour of lemon. Not at all what I expected.

For all that, eight minutes under the grill gave me nicely cooked lamb with a little pinkness in the centre, and if taken separately from the salty sauce, the coriander/lamb flavour was quite pleasant: I had the leftover lamb cold for lunch today and enjoyed it. Possibly with a little experimentation, this dish could become very tasty - but as it stands, I'm not a fan.

Aptly-named sponge

2011-08-28T21:33:00.000+12:00

Since I'm yet again falling behind with the cake mix-based recipes, I decided tonight might be a good time to make easy fruit sponge (p216). Since a full recipe would be far too much to eat by myself, I decided to split the contents of my Edmonds butter cake mix in half, using the first half to make the sponge, and setting aside the rest of the packet to use in another recipe later on.

Since I needed some stewed fruit for the sponge, I started by chopping up a couple of apples and putting them on to cook. When they had started to soften, I made a start on the sponge.

The recipe begins with putting the cake mix, eggs, water and butter in a mixer. I couldn't be bothered dragging out my big mixer, so I used my electric beater instead, which worked just as well. You have to use the lowest speed for a start - so you don't get the dry ingredients spraying all over the room - then, once the ingredients are thoroughly combined, you turn it up to a medium speed and beat for a couple of minutes.

After two minutes' beating, the mixture was pale and fluffy. I spooned my apples into an oven dish and spread the sponge mixture on top. The recipe indicates a cooking time of 35-40 minutes, but since mine was a half-recipe, and particularly because I'd decided to use my benchtop oven, I expected it would take considerably less than that.

My benchtop oven is a useful little device, and I manage to bake in it quite successfully - I just have to keep an eye on what I'm cooking, as the food's a lot closer to the element than in a standard oven, and can burn quite quickly. For instance, my sponge went very brown on top before it was cooked in the middle. I had to (very carefully) place a piece of baking paper on top of the sponge to prevent it browning further as it cooked.

After about 25 minutes, my sponge was ready. Apart from that slight over-browning on the top, it was perfect: lovely and light, with a slight gooeyness where it had sucked up the apple juices. There didn't seem to be much apple in proportion to the sponge, but that was almost certainly my error, as I didn't actually measure the apple to make sure I had enough.

So yes, easy fruit sponge makes a pretty good pudding. And, as the name would indicate, it's very easy to make. On the other hand, I have non-cake mix recipe somewhere that has a very similar result, so I don't see myself buying a cake mix specially to make a fruit sponge. But if you prefer the reliability of cake mixes, this might be one for you to try.

Breadmaker for a day

2011-08-25T21:16:00.000+12:00

For some reason, there's a recipe in the Edmonds book for breadmaker loaves (p22). Since I don't have a breadmaker, this posed a slight problem. Fortunately, my boss happened to mention having a breadmaker, so I asked him if he could bring it in to work sometime.

It seemed to me like I was offering a pretty good deal: just bring the breadmaker, and I'll make some nice fresh bread for us all during a random workday. This was not, however, sufficient inducement for Roger, who insisted that if we were going to have fresh bread, we had to have soup to go with it. Skimming through my remaining soup recipes, I selected mushroom soup (p87) as a suitable accompaniment.

Oddly enough, there are no soup-making facilities in our office, so I was forced to prepare the soup ahead of time. It didn't take long though - you just sauté onion and lots of sliced mushrooms in butter until soft, then stir through some flour, before gradually adding the liquids (milk, and more of that home-made chicken stock).

When you've got all the ingredients in the pan, you bring it to the boil and cook it for about five minutes until it thickens. The final step is to season with salt, pepper and lemon juice, but I decided to leave this bit until we were ready to eat it. Instead, I put it in the fridge overnight and turned to packing up the ingredients I'd need to take for the bread.

This morning I arrived at work bearing a crockpot full of cold soup, and a bag full of miscellaneous ingredients. A breadmaker had magically appeared on my desk, complete with instruction booklet and all necessary accessories. It's amazing what you can achieve by promising people food! At around 10am, I carefully measured all the ingredients into the breadmaker, and pressed the start button. Easy.

As the breadmaker thrummed away on the floor of the office, the soup was slowly reheating in my crockpot on the bench. As I headed away for a dental appointment, lunch was happily cooking itself in my absence.

When I returned, the office smelled like fresh bread and the loaf had about half an hour to go. It had risen so high the dough was pushing against the lid of the breadmaker, and I wondered if it would cook through ok. A quick peek under the lid reassured us that it would be ok.

The bread smelled so good that we wasted no time in taking it out and cutting into it. The loaf didn't last long either: everyone was keen to try some. There were fewer takers on the soup, but those who tried it found it very tasty - and extra good with fresh, hot bread.

The bread was an undoubted success, but I actually consider the inclusion of a breadmaker recipe a bit pointless. After all, if you have a breadmaker, you've also got a booklet full of recipes designed for that particular breadmaker. Why would you go looking for a generic recipe in the Edmonds book? That said, a breadmaker is a pretty cool device: every office should have one!

The mushroom soup gets a thumbs-up from me. You get a yummy, filling soup from a few basic ingredients and minimal time and effort. That's the sort of recipe I like!

Stocking up

2011-08-22T21:29:00.000+12:00

I've made a number of the soups in the Edmonds book, for which I generally used bought liquid stock, conveniently overlooking the fact that there are also several stock recipes to complete. This weekend, I decided to make chicken stock (p85) before I run out of recipes to use it in.

The recipe calls for one chicken carcass. I'd bought a pack of two chicken frames, not sure whether or not this was the same thing. Either way, the frames were suitable for stock-making, and since one was quite small, I put both of them in the pot instead of just one. Stocks I've made in the past have come out a bit flavourless, and I figured using extra chicken bones might improve the taste.

To the chicken frames I added a peeled onion, a carrot, a stick of celery, half a dozen white peppercorns and 1.5 litres of water. There was supposed to be a bouquet garni of parsley, thyme and bay leaf - I managed the parsley and bay leaf ok, but had to make do with a sprinkling of dried thyme instead of a fresh sprig.

With all the ingredients in the pot, I merely had to bring it to the boil, and set it on a gentle simmer for a couple of hours. A bit of scum came to the surface early on in the boiling, so I scooped that off, but apart from that, I just left it bubbling away on the stove.

After about an hour, the smell of chicken was wafting deliciously through the house, and I had to keep reminding myself that I wasn't, in fact, looking forward to a nice chicken meal for dinner.

At the two-hour mark, I turned off the heat, strained the stock through a muslin-lined sieve, then allowed it to cool down a bit before setting it in the fridge overnight.

This evening I found a use for some of my chicken stock - and it wasn't even a soup recipe. Nope: I made pilaf (p106) as part of my dinner. It's essentially a rice dish, flavoured with onion and chicken stock.

Heating a flameproof casserole dish on the stovetop, I melted some butter and fried some chopped onion. Then I stirred in the rice and added some of my home-made chicken stock. After a little seasoning, I put the lid on and placed the dish in the oven.

In the twenty minutes it took to cook the pilaf, I busied myself with throwing together the rest of the meal. Before I knew it, the timer had gone off and the pilaf was almost finished - just a little more butter stirred through, and a sprinkling of chives, and it was ready.

I found the pilaf quite tasty. There was plenty of flavour from my freshly-made stock, and, while I try to avoid using much butter in cooking, it lends a nice buttery flavour to the rice. It would be interesting to see how much it would impact the flavour if you took away the butter. Maybe one of these days I'll try it and see!

Old honey isn't a writeoff

2011-08-19T21:14:00.002+12:00

I happened to find some honey sitting in the back of my cupboard; a sad centimetre or two crystallising in the bottom of a jar. What use is grainy, sugary honey? It might not be too good spread on toast, but it's perfect for making honey snaps (p41).

The reason the graininess of the honey doesn't matter is that it gets melted, together with some butter and sugar. In a few short minutes you have a smooth, sweet-smelling golden mixture, with no sign of that sugary texture.

To this mixture you simply sift in some flour, baking powder and ginger, and mix to a lovely soft dough. The dough spreads out a lot in cooking, so it only takes one teaspoon of mixture to make each biscuit - with plenty of room left between to allow for spreading. I suppose my teaspoonfuls must have been slightly more heaped than the recipe intends, since it's supposed to make 20 biscuits, and I barely got 12.

After only ten minutes in the oven, the biscuits had spread out and gone golden around the edges. In fact, some of them were a bit too dark - I'll have to watch out for that next time.

From those few sad spoonfuls of grainy honey, I created a lovely batch of honey snaps: sweet and crisp (except when they're still a little warm, and have a delectable chewiness to the centre) and very tasty. It's an incredibly easy recipe that takes less than half an hour from start to finish. Got some old honey in the cupboard? Go on, give it a go!

Blast from the past

2011-08-14T21:31:00.001+12:00

I used to bake a lot as a kid. Since then, my parents' carefully-instilled lessons to do with checking you have all ingredients before starting, and always cleaning up immediately afterwards, seem to have fallen by the wayside. On the other hand, my fondness for baking endures, and it was with some nostaglia that I whipped up albert squares (p60) this afternoon, since that was once one of my regular recipes.

It's very simple to make: you just cream butter and sugar, add eggs, then beat in vanilla and golden syrup. When that's all mixed in, you fold in a heap of currants, before adding the dry ingredients alternately with milk.

This mixture then goes into a sponge roll tin and into the oven for half an hour. Of course, it's not finished until it's been iced, so let if cool on a rack for an hour or so, then ice with a plain vanilla icing and top with lemon rind and coconut.

Ok, so if you don't like currants, you're not going to be keen on this one. If you do, you'll enjoy this spongy, fruity square - just the thing to go with your mid-morning cuppa.

It's not really about the apple sauce

2011-08-11T19:00:00.001+12:00

It's about the crackling, of course! The thing is, roast pork is not an actual recipe in the Edmonds book - in fact, it's barely mentioned, even amongst the general meat-cooking information. On the other hand, I did have to make apple sauce (p185), which gave me all the excuse I needed when I saw some small pork roasts on special the other day.

So really, I didn't have to do anything Edmonds until my pork and veges had been roasting for about an hour and a half. At this point, I peeled and chopped some apples (they were supposed to be cooking apples, but I just used the ones I had) and set them to simmer with a little water, butter and lemon juice.

I'd also decided I needed some non-roasted veges, so I thought I'd have a go at sweet and sour red cabbage (p166). I chopped up some red cabbage, grated another apple, and put them in a pan. After cooking this for a few minutes, I added vinegar, brown sugar and seasoning, then let it simmer for about 20 minutes.

Meanwhile, my apples had gone soft and pulpy. I mashed them up a bit and then beat the sauce with a spoon to make it smooth. I'd taken my roast out and started serving it up while I put the crackling briefly under the grill to make it extra crispy.

I can tell you this much: it's a very bad idea to make a pork roast just for yourself. Why? Because you don't have to share the crackling with anyone (and yes, there is such a thing as too much crackling)! But I'm supposed to be talking about the apple sauce, which was sweet, fruity and entirely worth the minimal effort involved in making it.

The sweet and sour red cabbage was a bit of an oddity. I didn't dislike it, but I didn't think it was particularly wonderful either. A full 25 minutes' cooking time makes for fairly soft, sloppy cabbage, and I prefer it with a bit of crunch. The sweet and sour flavour wasn't particularly successful either. It was edible, and not disgusting, but that's about the highest praise I can give it.

In short: thumbs-up to the apple sauce; don't bother with the cabbage, and if you're making a pork roast, be sure to share it with someone!

Birthday brunch

2011-08-09T21:32:00.000+12:00

My sister-in-law Beth is something of an expert when it comes to eggs benedict (p95), so it was only good sense to enlist her help in making some for brunch on my brother's birthday.

Deviating slightly from the Edmonds recipe (or most eggs benedict recipes, really), we went with Beth's method of replacing the English muffins with sweetcorn fritters (p166). I've always had trouble with this seemingly simple recipe, as they tend to fall apart in the frying pan. To combat this, I accepted Beth's suggestion that we make them on a sandwich press instead.

We also put in a couple of extra ingredients as a result of Beth's extensive fritter-making experience, adding chopped parsley and shallot to the basic recipe of flour, eggs and creamed corn. With this mixture ready, Beth set about spooning it onto the sandwich press, while I made a start on the hollandaise sauce (p186).

Hollandaise sauce is a favourite with many, but with its high fat content, it's not exactly good for you. I was surprised to hear that Beth makes a successful hollandaise using milk instead of cream. Since we didn't have any cream on hand anyway, we decided to make the substitution and see how it worked with the Edmonds recipe.

You start the hollandaise sauce by melting butter in a double boiler, then add the egg yolks, cream (or in my case, milk) and lemon juice. Then comes the fun bit: you've got to stand there and stir it until it thickens and becomes a nice smooth sauce. No doubt it would have thickened a bit earlier had I used cream, and even when we finally pronounced it ready, it was still a bit thin. Beth tells me her recipe has three egg yolks compared to the two I used, and also less milk. So if you want to make a lower-fat hollandaise, make those adjustments and you'll probably get a better result than mine.

While I'd been pottering with the sauce, my admirable sous-chef had finished cooking the fritters, grilled some bacon (another substitution - it's ham in the recipe) and completed the final element, poached eggs (p96).

I'm not great at poaching eggs, so it's a good thing Beth was there to deal with those. This also allowed me to observe her method of lowering each egg into the saucepan in a teacup, and allowing the simmering water to surround the egg for a few seconds before tipping it out of the cup. I'll have to give that a go myself next time.

From this point it was merely a matter of assembling the eggs benedict: placing a piece of bacon on each fritter and topping it with a poached egg and a generous helping of hollandaise.

For my first attempt at eggs benedict (albeit heavily reliant on an experienced assistant), I was very pleased with the result. I have to recommend the substitution of sweetcorn fritters - it makes a more hearty meal than a muffin, and if you do them on a sandwich press instead of frying them, they're much less greasy.

The sauce, as I've mentioned, was a bit thin, but the flavour was there. By all means use cream if that's how you like it, but for myself, I think it's worthwhile to experiment with the milk version.

However you make it, eggs benedict makes a delicious brunch - as many cafe-goers know. If it's one of your cafe favourites, why not have a go at making it yourself?

Cake like Canada

2011-08-08T18:55:00.000+12:00

Since I was going down to Timaru on Saturday to celebrate my brother's birthday, I decided it might be a good idea to make him a birthday cake. What kind of cake? Well, everyone loves carrot cake (p45), right?

I hadn't had carrot cake since I was in Canada last year, where there seemed to be another delicious carrot cake every time we turned around. I'm not sure if this is a particularly Canadian thing or just a coincidence, but I'll probably always associate carrot cake with Canada now.

I approached this recipe with caution, as some of my carrot cakes in the past have come out a bit heavy. You do of course want it to be moist, but there's a fine line between moist and gluggy. The Edmonds recipe, like many carrot cakes, has crushed pineapple in it, which adds a lot of liquid and can make the mixture too wet. To prevent this, I had the pineapple sitting in a sieve to drain thoroughly while I prepared the rest of the ingredients.

I began by beating up the eggs, stirring in some oil, and sifting in the dry ingredients. This produced quite a stiff dough and I wondered if I would have trouble mixing in the carrots, walnuts and pineapple - especially as they were supposed to be folded in.

It took a bit of effort - and folding went entirely out the window - but I got it all combined in the end. I did actually end up with a mixture that was moist, but not too wet and runny: just what I was aiming for.

One further advantage of this recipe, in terms of it not coming out with a soggy centre, is that it's made in a ring tin: so there's no centre to get soggy. Of course, my version of a ring tin is a normal tin with a drinking glass in the centre, but it has the same result!

I baked the cake for 40 minutes as per the recipe, but ended up putting it in for a little longer when it didn't pass the skewer test. finally it was out and cooling, while I ran around getting ready to head to Timaru.

But I wasn't about to forget the final component: cream cheese icing (p77). It didn't take long to beat together the butter, cream cheese, icing sugar and lemon zest, but the cake still wasn't cool enough to ice. Not about to wait around just for a cake to cool down, I packed up the cake and icing and took it to Timaru with me.

My carrot cake was plenty cool enough by the time I got to Timmers, so I wasted no time in finishing it off with the icing and a sprinkling of chopped walnuts. It looked pretty good, but we had to put it away overnight, since Anthony's birthday wasn't actually till Sunday.

I'd crossed my fingers that there was enough moisture in the cake to prevent it drying out overnight. Apparently there was, because it was still fine when we cut into it on Sunday. I'd succeeded in making a carrot cake that was moist but not gluggy, so I was quite pleased with myself. It might not rate as absolutely the best carrot cake I've ever eaten (looking back on those Canadian ones) but it was better than many I've tried: sweet and moist with a lovely creamy icing. I'll have to remember this recipe next time I get a hankering for carrot cake!

Jelly + custard = disaster

2011-08-04T22:00:00.001+12:00

I found myself wanting something sweet last night after dinner, so I leafed through the cold desserts and selected melrose cream (p203), entirely on the basis that I happened to have all the necessary ingredients in the cupboard.

It seemed quite simple: you make a custard, then make up the contents of a packet of jelly, combine the two, and chill until set.

I was a bit short on time, so instead of mixing up the jelly after making the custard, I did the jelly first, which would give it time to cool down while I was making the custard. Add boiling water to jelly crystals, stir until dissolved, and place in fridge: Done.

The prospect of making custard was not particularly daunting - I've made quite a few successful custard-type desserts by now, which probably made me a bit over-confident. I stood at the stove, stirring my milk, sugar and custard powder mixture for some time, but it didn't seem to thicken.

After a while, there was a bit of resistance as I moved the spoon along the bottom of the pan. I knew some of the custard was sticking to the bottom, but the rest of it still wasn't thickening.

The minutes ticked by, and I started to catch a whiff of scorchy odour as I stirred the pot: I had to get that pot off the heat. The custard had thickened a little, but hadn't yet reached the consistency I was wanting. Still, if I left it on any longer, the custard would be entirely unusable.

By this time I was fed up with my melrose cream and already convinced it was a failure. I wanted to get that custard out of the scorched pan as soon as possible, so I stirred in the jelly mixture straight away. Neither mixture had cooled down much at this point - and I gather they're both supposed to have cooled by the time you combine them - but I mixed them together anyway.

The result was a weird sort of curdled-looking, bright pink mixture, which didn't look appealing at all. It hadn't set by the time I was ready for bed, so I left it in the fridge and didn't look at it until tonight.

My melrose cream did not look any better once it had set. The mixture had partially separated, leaving a layer of jelly on top and a dodgy mush underneath. But when I dug a spoon in, I was surprised to see that it that mushy stuff actually looked quite edible. So I tasted some: very sweet, but otherwise not too bad.

Stunned, I scooped some into a bowl, adding a little banana because an entire bowl of pink mush just didn't seem right, and sat down to eat. Unfortunately, after the first few spoonfuls, I was starting to revise my assessment of the dessert being edible. The texture, which I suspect ought to be light and fluffy, was more that of a curdled substance than anything. And the sickly sweet raspberry flavour was more than I could handle.

My attempt at melrose cream was a bit of a disaster, but I was able to glimpse the kind of dessert it's supposed to be - and I think if it's done right, it could be quite nice. Choose a less sickly flavour of jelly, don't burn your custard, and wait till both mixtures have cooled down before you try to combine them: do this, and you might just have a decent dessert on your hands. If nothing else, you'd be hard-pressed to produce a worse version than mine!

Better than Bryn's?

2011-08-02T21:11:00.000+12:00

Time to try my hand at the Edmonds meatloaf (p126), an interesting undertaking as there's no way I'll be able to resist comparing it to the one I usually make, i.e Bryn's famous meatloaf with barbecue sauce. Of course, in essence, the two meatloaves are pretty similar - it's just that on this one, there's an oat-based topping instead of that delicious gooey barbecue coating.

I discovered long ago that the easiest way to prepare the ingredients for a meatloaf is to use a food processor. Mine usually ends up being a bit over-full, but it's much faster, easier and combines the ingredients effectively and tidily.

I started by grating a carrot, since that was the only thing I needed the grater attachment for. Pushing the grated carrot to one side, I switched to the chopper blade, then added garlic, onion and parsley to the food processor bowl.

Somehow I managed to cut two fingers while chopping the onion into chunks suitable for the food processor. Shortly afterwards I dropped a large knife precariously close to my foot, and started to wonder whether I was risking my health by staying in the kitchen in such a clumsy mood. The meatloaf was half done, however, so I persevered.

The onion, garlic, carrot and parsley were chopped and combined in a matter of seconds, so I put in the remaining ingredients: mince, sausage meat, mixed herbs, mustard, salt and pepper, and an egg. Combining this thick gooey mixture took a bit longer, but it was still done within a couple of minutes.

I spooned the meat mixture into a loaf tin, and mixed together a topping comprised of rolled oats, brown sugar, tomato sauce, and more parsley. I spread this mixture thinly over the top of the meatloaf, and plonked it in the oven.

A few minutes later, I rushed back to the oven, on recollecting that I was supposed to cover the meatloaf with foil for the first half-hour's cooking. No harm done, though - it hadn't been in long and adding the foil took only a few moments.

After half an hour in the oven, I took off the foil and returned the meatloaf to the oven for a further 30 minutes while I prepared some veges. At the end of this time, the meatloaf looked and smelled delicious.

You know what? It tasted delicious too! The meatloaf itself has a fairly standard sausagey flavour, but the star of the show is definitely the sweet, crunchy, almost caramelised topping. I only wish there were more of it. Better than Bryn's meatloaf with barbecue sauce? Hmmm.. not quite, but a close second!

Party of one

2011-08-01T21:58:00.001+12:00

I went to a movie after work tonight, and so didn't get home until about 7.30pm. That said, I was conscious of not having made a blog post for quite a while, so I went looking for something quick an easy, so I could fill my hungry belly and write a short blog entry about it.

What could be quicker or easier than mousetraps (p193)? (By 'mousetraps' I do of course mean the cheese-on-toast sort, not the kind you actually kill mice with.) Somewhat unexpectedly, the recipe for mousetraps is found in the 'party finger foods' section. Since I don't see myself serving up mousetraps at a party in the near future (or ever, as a matter of fact), I figured I was quite safe to use this one tonight.

To begin with, I toasted a couple of slices of bread on one side only, while I assembled the rest of the ingredients. I finely chopped a small amount of onion, before mixing it with grated cheese. To go with this, I got out some salt, pepper, and a jar of relish. This was actually supposed to be chutney, but I didn't have any. Guess it might be a good idea to look at doing another chutney recipe in the near future eh?

When the bread was toasted on one side, I spread the untoasted side with relish, then topped it with the cheese and onion mixture before grinding over pepper and a small amount of salt. And after a short time under the grill, I had some gooey, tangy mousetraps to tuck into.

They were pretty good, as mousetraps go. The flavour of the mousetrap would of course depend on what kind of chutney or relish you use, but that won't matter as long as you use one you like. So as a quick, easy snack, mousetraps are a pretty tasty option. As party finger food: I still can't see it, can you?

Bake with potential

2011-07-28T20:36:00.000+12:00

I went into the kitchen this evening with the intention of making tuna rice bake (p107). It's the sort of recipe that's designed for using up leftover rice: except that since I seldom have leftover rice, I had to begin by cooking some up specially.

That step was accomplished without difficulty; the next proved difficult when I realised I didn't have any onions. I'd checked the recipe when I went to the supermarket to get the tuna, but overlooked the fact that I'd used up all my onions making soup the other day. Sigh.. well, it won't be much good without onion: wrap up; get in car; drive to supermarket for 30c onion purchase; return to kitchen.

With all ingredients now on hand, I could make a start on the sauce, cooking onion, celery and garlic in a pan before stirring in flour and gradually adding milk. When the sauce thickened, I took the pan off the heat and beat in egg and grated cheese. The white sauce turned yellow from the yolk and became almost like an omelet in appearance.

The next step was to season, and then add tuna. The recipe indicates a 425g can, which seems like an awfully large can of tuna to me. I used a standard 190g can for my half-recipe, and that was plenty.

Finally, I stirred in the rice and spooned the mixture into an oven dish. After 20 minutes in the oven, the tuna rice bake had gone golden on top, and was ready to eat. (Well, ok: I was also supposed to garnish the top with parsley, but couldn't be bothered going out to the garden in the cold just for a garnish).

Tuna rice bake might not be the most spectacular meal you'll ever eat - it's pretty ordinary sort of fare. Still, it's has quite a pleasant savoury flavour - and it's not too fishy. If you added some extra vege you'd have a more balanced meal. In fact, I think this recipe could be quite versatile as a 'throw in whatever you've got' kind of meal. Especially if what you've got happens to include leftover rice!

Snow day

2011-07-25T20:17:00.002+12:00

This morning I awoke to find it had been snowing overnight. Since snow seldom stays around long in Christchurch (when it falls at all) I got ready for work as usual, climbed in the car and inched my way through the snowy, slippery streets to work.

The snow didn't melt away as I'd expected. Instead, it continued to fall thick and fast. Few people had made it to work and since we weren't going to be able to do much anyway, I ended up heading home again.

For anyone reading this who isn't familiar with the weather in New Zealand, and particularly Christchurch, the thing you need to understand is that we're not well-equipped to deal with snow. What in many countries would be considered a light dusting of snow can bring the whole city to a standstill.

In weather like this, a bowl of soup seems like an ideal meal. Good thing I'd made some meat stock (p85) over the weekend, then!

Stock takes time to make, but very little effort. I got some beef bones from a local butcher, trimmed off any obvious fat, and put them into a stock pot with two litres of water. When the water started boiling, there was a dirty-looking scum on the surface, so I followed the recipe, which stated that if this was the case, I should drain the water, rinse the bones and start again with fresh water.

When I had the fresh lot of water boiling, I added a carrot and a couple of celery sticks, along with some peppercorns and a bouquet garni made of parsley and a bay leaf. It was supposed to have a sprig of thyme in it too, but I couldn't get any. Instead I sprinkled a little dried thyme in the water and hoped for the best.

That's pretty much the sum total of effort involved in preparing the stock. After this, you just let it simmer for six hours, then strain it through a sieve and leave it cool before refrigerating.

I got my big bowl of stock out today to make some french onion soup (p86). I already had some thinly sliced onions cooking in butter over a low heat, so while that was happening, I skimmed the layer of fat off the top of my stock. With the fat gone, the stock had a weird jellyish consistency, but it melted down into a liquid almost immediately when I added it to the pan with the onions.

The soup had to simmer for 15 minutes, so in the meantime, I sorted out the cheese on toast which apparently goes with french onion soup. It probably would have looked prettier if I'd used dainty little slices of french bread, but I didn't have any (and wasn't going out in the snow to get some!) and anyway, the recipe seemed to indicate normal toast bread. Probably grainy bread isn't exactly traditional, but never mind, it's all I had.

When the 15 minutes was up. I removed the pan from the heat and added a little sherry and some seasoning, then served myself a bowl of soup topped with the cheesy toast.

The french onion soup had a far more mellow flavour than I expected from all those onions, and while I found the soggy, cheesy bread an odd addition, it tasted ok. I think my beef stock was a little lacking in flavour, and I had to add quite a lot of salt to prevent the soup from being bland. Still, it was a warming, pleasant meal - just the thing on a snowy day!

When was the last time you had a banana split?

2011-07-23T19:56:00.001+12:00

What with the chilly weather predicted for this weekend, and a sore throat/runny nose on the verge of becoming a cold, I decided it might be best to spend the weekend hibernating. In furtherance of this goal, I stayed in bed until well into the morning, and this afternoon wrapped myself in a duvet and settled on the couch to watch my way through The Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Halfway through The Two Towers, I found myself wanting chocolate. Well, I didn't have any chocolate in the house and going out to get some doesn't really fit with the hibernation thing, so I had to think outside the box a bit. Chocolate sauce (p189) would do the trick, but I had to come up with something to have it with. My eyes strayed to the fruit bowl and I thought of something I hadn't eaten in years: a banana split.

The sauce took no time at all to make. You just mix cocoa with cornflour and a little milk, add butter, sugar and the rest of the milk, then stir it over a low heat for a few minutes until it thickens. Easy.

While the sauce was cooking, I cut a banana in half and scooped out a couple of balls of ice cream. When the sauce was ready, I poured it straight over the ice cream and sprinkled over some chopped nuts. The hot sauce melted the ice cream almost immediately, but it still tasted great.

The sauce itself was perhaps a little disappointing in terms of chocolate flavour - it mostly tasted of cocoa. But the combination of the sauce with creamy vanilla ice cream, banana and nuts was actually fantastic. I couldn't believe I'd gone so long without eating one of these. Well, it won't be years before I have another one!

Forced compromise

2011-07-19T17:56:00.000+12:00

I can understand why Edmonds would want to have a section in their cookbook promoting recipes which use their cake mixes. What is less easy to understand is why they would subsequently stop making the products required in some of these recipes.

Muffin cake (p75) is one such: the recipe lists Edmonds Apple and Sultana Muffin Mix as an ingredient. Sounds good - except that the only muffin mix Edmonds make these days (as far as I can discover) is a chocolate one. And that wouldn't really work in the recipe. So I'm sorry to say I was forced to purchase the most similar product I could find: Betty Crocker's Mixed Berry muffin mix. Forcing me to use a competitor's product kind of defeats the purpose of plugging your products in recipe-form, doesn't it?

When I got my muffin mix home, I turned to the muffin cake recipe, only to find a second non-existent product listed in the recipe: Fleming's Vita-Crunch. As far as Google was able to tell me, Vita-Crunch was some kind of toasted oaty muesli type stuff. As a substitute, I toasted up some rolled oats, and added a handful of crushed cornflakes and some chopped nuts, crossing my fingers that it would do the trick.

The cake itself was very easy to make. I combined the dry ingredients with come cinnamon, before adding the contents of the berry sachet, along with an egg, some oil and a bit of water. I briefly considered switching the berries with some apple and sultanas, in an attempt to more closely replicate the original recipe, but decided not to bother.

The cake was supposed to be made in a ring tin. I don't have one, so just placed a small drinking glass in the centre of my 20cm round tin. I spooned in the cake batter, scattered my substitute "Vita-Crunch" over the top, chucked it all in the oven and hoped for the best.

I wasn't feeling too optimistic when I got the cake out of the oven. It seemed to have cooked through just fine, but I wasn't sure how it would taste. I brought it to work today to feed to my fellow blood-donors, warning them all that the cake was a bit experimental and that might taste a bit weird.

With such low expectations, it was a pleasant surprise to find that the cake was in fact very tasty. The "Vita-Crunch" topping was entirely unnecessary, since it didn't add much to either the flavour or texture, and also since most of it fell off as we attempted to eat it. Probably the original Vita-Crunch was more successful.
The cake itself, however, was really very nice: it had a nice moist muffiny texture and the berry and cinnamon combination actually worked really well.

Muffin-shaped scones

2011-07-17T21:58:00.000+12:00

I've never had much of a knack with savoury muffins. Sweet ones: no problem, but as soon as I try my hand at savoury, they come out lumpy and hard. Still, I wasn't going to let that get in the way of attempting savoury cheese muffins (p32).

The savoury additions to these muffins are cheese, celery and capsicum. You're only supposed to put in one tablespoon each of the celery and capsicum, but that didn't seem like much to me, (especially as I'd gone for a special walk to the supermarket just to get a single $4.99 capsicum) so I added a bit more.

Into the bowl with the cheese, celery and capsicum, I sifted flour, baking powder, cayenne pepper and salt. In a separate bowl I mixed melted butter with milk and beaten egg, before carefully combining the dry ingredients and liquids.

There didn't seem to be enough liquid: the muffin mixture was more like scone dough than anything else. I could have added more milk, but then it'd be overmixed. I decided I'd better leave it the way it was. Dividing the dough into 12 lumps, I filled up my muffin pans, put them in the oven and hoped for the best.

My savoury muffins didn't look that great when I took them out of the oven - kinda lumpy and odd-looking. Mum, Dad and I gamely had a try of them though, and to my surprise, they tasted quite good. The texture was quite heavy - more like a scone than a muffin, but not at all unpleasant. And though the savoury mixture of celery and capsicum may seem overly simple, it was surprisingly tasty. As an added bonus, they were really good dipped in the leftover tomato soup I had for dinner!

I'd make these again, but probably wouldn't bother pretending they were muffins: I'd just shape them into scones, because that's clearly what the dough is best suited for.

Fresh doesn't have to be best

2011-07-14T20:13:00.001+12:00

I have to confess to a little substitution in my completion of the tomato soup recipe (p90). With tomatoes out of season and ridiculously expensive, there was no way I was going to buy fresh ones, just so I could blanch, skin, chop and cook them into soup. Nope, canned tomatoes are a fraction of the cost, and are pretty much the same as blanched and skinned ones.

With a can of tomatoes at the ready, I began my soup, beginning by frying up some chopped onion and celery, then adding the chopped tomatoes along with tomato paste, chicken stock and seasoning. When this mixture was close to boiling, I took it off the heat and blitzed it in the food processor.

And that's that: soup done. I ladled myself out a bowl, added a dollop of sour cream, and sat down to eat it. I clearly hadn't processed the soup for long enough, because it was still quite lumpy (I've since returned the remaining soup to the processor and given it a more thorough blitzing). Also, the sour cream, instead of melting and adding creaminess, seemed to separate into clumps resembling cottage cheese as I stirred it through the soup.

Despite these minor negatives, the tomato soup tasted alright. A bit salty perhaps - I should have seasoned to taste instead of simply following the quantities in the recipe - but otherwise, a perfectly good, quick and easy winter soup.

The cake that killed a rolling pin

2011-07-11T19:57:00.000+12:00

Having baked my apple pie on Saturday, I washed my rolling pin and set it in the still-warm oven to dry out. Unfortunately, I'd forgotten about it by Sunday night, when I turned the oven on to make a ladysmith cake (p49). Of course, I would have found the rolling pin before long had it not been for one thing:

On perusing the recipe more carefully, I decided it looked like way too much faff for a Sunday night, elected to do it Monday instead, and went back to my room to watch TV. Some hours later, I wandered out into the lounge and wondered, "why does it smell like sawdust in here?" Actually, it doesn't smell like sawdust; it smells like burning rolling pin.

So clearly, it's the complicated recipe that was at fault, and not my own stupid carelessness, right? (Oh, come on - it was worth a shot!)

This evening I had a chance to find out just how tricky the ladysmith cake was. Answer: not very. It just requires a few different bowls and a few different layers. First, you cream butter and sugar in one bowl, and beat eggs in another. In a third bowl, sift flour and baking powder, then add the eggs and dry ingredients alternately to the creamed mixture.

Ok, so you have to dirty a few bowls, but it's really quite simple, as is the next bit - separating out one-third of the mixture and adding cinnamon. Actually, my split ended up more like half/half, because I accidentally got some of the cinnamon in the main bowl and had to scoop out more of the mixture, but it still worked ok.

The next step is to spoon the cinnamon mixture into the bottom of a cake tin. On top of this I spread some raspberry jam (slightly heated, to spread more easily) before adding the plain cake batter and topping it all with a sprinkling of chopped nuts.

After 50 minutes in the oven, the ladysmith cake came out looking and smelling delicious. As soon as I got it out of the tin, I cut a piece and had a taste. It was just as delicious as it smelled: light and fluffy, with a pleasant nutty crunch and a cinnamon and jam flavour almost reminiscent of belgian biscuits.

This recipe is certainly not as involved as it first appears, and the result is definitely worth dirtying a couple of bowls. I really have to concede that the effort required does not in any way justify a delay which in turn results in the sacrifice of a certain kitchen implement. Guess I'll have to take the blame after all.

How to avoid a soggy bottom

2011-07-10T10:04:00.002+12:00

I went down to Rakaia last night for dinner at Bex and Richard's. As usual, I supplied a dessert: apple pie (p206) at Bex's specific request.

When I first looked at the apple pie recipe, I got a bit confused. There were clear instructions relating to the pastry on the top and sides of the pie, but I couldn't see anything about the bottom. I couldn't decide whether lining the pie dish was just taken for granted, or whether it was supposed to be top and sides only.

I discussed this point at length with Mum, and we decided that if there was supposed to be a base to the pie, it would be in the recipe. And if you think about it, it makes sense: apple gets very juicy when it's cooked, and it's difficult to make anything with apple on a pastry base without the pastry going soggy. So what can you do to prevent the bottom going soggy? Don't have one!

Having cleared up this minor mystery, I whipped up yet another batch of sweet short pastry. This one didn't come out as well as previous attempts - I think perhaps I rushed it a little and didn't combine my ingredients well enough.

While the pastry was chilling in the fridge, I made a start on the apple filling. The recipe listed 4-6 Granny Smiths; I peeled, cored and sliced five apples of moderate size, thinking I could always add a sixth if need be. As it happened, four would have been more than enough.. but I'll get to that.

When I had my bowl full of sliced apple pieces, I mixed together some sugar, melted butter, flour and ground cloves, added it to the apples, and stirred them around with my hands until they were all nicely coated in the sugary mixture.

I needed to roll out the pastry enough to cut a 20cm circle for the pie lid, and also have two 2.5cm wide strips long enough to line the sides of the dish. I ended up cutting the circle first, then rolling and cutting the remaining pastry for the strips. With a few patchworking manoeuvres, I got the sides of the dish lined and started adding the filling.

There was way too much filling for the pie dish. At first I thought I'd only get about half in, but then I started thinking, "well, the apples are going to break down a bit when they cook, right? So I can get away with piling it up a bit". And pile it I did! In the end I actually got all the filling on there. I say 'on', rather than 'in', because there was probably more filling in the mound above the edges of the pie dish than in the dish itself.

I placed my slightly dodgy pastry on top and sealed the edges with water. A few steam holes in the centre, and my mountainous, lumpy-looking pie was ready to go in the oven.

I was a bit worried as I watched the progress of the pie. The pastry had an odd texture to it, and instead of becoming a little less mounded and lumpy as the apples cooked down, it simply baked into the exact knobbly shape it started in. So much for that theory.

When the pie came out of the oven, it may have looked a little odd, but it seemed to have cooked through ok, so I wrapped it in a teatowel and headed off to Rakaia.

Following another of Bex's lovely roast dinners, we cracked into the pie. I was a bit put off by the slightly greyish colour of the apple filling, but perhaps it wouldn't have been that colour straight out of the oven. And, despite appearances: despite weird, lumpy pastry and grey filling, it actually tasted really good - and at least it didn't have a soggy bottom!

To go with chicken

2011-07-07T20:24:00.000+12:00

I cooked up a chicken in the crockpot earlier this week, and I've pretty much been eating it ever since. But you can't live on just chicken - tonight when I got home I decided to look for something Edmonds to eat with my leftovers.

Flicking through the vegetable section, I landed on kumara and orange (p161) as a side to my chicken. I was going to go with just that, but on the spur of the moment, I flicked to the sauces and marinades looking for something that would work with chicken.

Onion sauce (p188) is another of the dreaded white sauce variations. It didn't really scream "have me with chicken" but I didn't see any reason why I shouldn't.

I peeled the kumara and got it on to boil - somewhat of a novelty since I only ever roast it - and started melting the butter for the sauce in another saucepan. I choppped up some onions, added them to the butter and let them cook over a low heat until they went clear.

The kumara cooked very quickly, so I drained off the water and added orange juice and grated rind, brown sugar and a little butter, before putting it back on the heat to create a tasty-looking orange glaze.

Meanwhile, the onions had gone past clear and started to go crispy. I saved them just in time, stirring in some flour and then gradually adding milk to make a thick sauce.

I heated up some leftover chicken and hastily cooked up some beans, so as to have at least a little green on the plate! Having added the kumara and poured onion sauce over my chicken, I sat down to eat.

The kumara was very sweet, with a slight hint of bitterness. I quite liked it, but it wasn't perhaps the best side dish for chicken with onion sauce! It didn't occur to me before I started, but orange and onion don't really go together! I was pleasantly surprised by the onion sauce: it had plenty of flavour and went well with the chicken. I like this one far better than any of the other white sauce variations I've tried so far.

This spinster makes good lamingtons

2011-07-04T18:36:00.000+12:00

It's my birthday today: a good excuse to knock off a few recipes in order to feed the hungry workmates, even those undeserving individuals who choose to mock my approaching spinsterhood. Of course, being 31, single and childless does have its good points: for a start, you've got plenty of spare time for things like making lamingtons (p67).

As you know, I'd made my lamington sponge in advance and stuck it in the freezer. Yesterday afternoon, I took it out and allowed it to defrost slightly while I made the second item on my list: coffee cake (p46).

Coffee cake is made from a fairly standard recipe, the main difference being the addition of a little instant coffee (dissolved in boiling water) to the creamed butter and sugar. Other than that, it's pretty much the usual mix, divided into two sponge sandwich tins.

While the coffee cake was in the oven, I mixed up the coating for the lamingtons, which is really just a runny chocolate icing. This done, I cut my sponge into 16 little squares and began dipping them in the icing mixture and rolling them in coconut.

Having the sponge partially frozen made a huge difference - the lamingtons held their shape better and were easier to handle. I found that it's important not to have too thick a coating on the lamington, or you get a sort of lumpy, oozy result. I actually found that carefully scraping off the excess icing before rolling the lamington in coconut achieved the best results.

Soon I had the lamingtons coated and looking pretty tasty. I set them aside while I got the coffee cake out of the oven and turned to the third recipe I wanted to make: toffee (p221). I had no particular reason for making this; I just decided to take advantage of an opportunity to knock off another sweet recipe.

Having learnt my lesson from last year's nut toffee (also made for a birthday morning tea shout) I used caster sugar instead of the plain white sugar indicated in the recipe. This, along with water, a little butter, and a dash of vinegar, I stirred over a low heat until the sugar had dissolved.

Using caster sugar got me over that particular hurdle fairly easily, the sugar dissolving in minutes. The most trying part was waiting for the toffee to boil to the 'hard crack' stage, a process which took about half an hour. I might have been able to do it faster, but I wasn't sure how high I ought to turn up the heat, and so left it reasonably low.

Finally I was satisfied that my toffee had reached 'hard crack' and I poured it into a tin to set. I tried to mark squares in the toffee, but they kept oozing back. I had to wait until the toffee was half-set before I could get the lines to stay properly. Once it had set hard, I attempted to break the toffee along my carefully-inscribed lines but (predictably) it shattered in all directions, spreading spiky little shards of toffee all over myself and my kitchen.

Next, I had to ice the coffee cake. Coffee icing (p77) is a variation on the plain white icing - again, instant coffee dissolved in water is added to create the coffee flavour. For once, I managed to get the icing to a suitable consistency, and it spread quite nicely on the cake. The icing is used both on the top of the cake and to sandwich the two halves together. I prettied it up a little with some chopped walnuts, and the cake was done.

The last thing I did before going to bed last night was to prepare the cream chantilly (p76) for the lamingtons. cream chantilly is a recipe I've had half a dozen opportunities to use and have always forgotten. It's just whipped cream with icing sugar and vanilla essence. Most people add one or the other of these to their cream; this uses both. Also, the sugar and essence are added to the cream after it's whipped - I would have put it in beforehand.

This morning, I dragged myself out of bed a bit earlier than usual, allowing enough time to cream the lamingtons before work. I cut each lamington almost in half, then spread each with a little of my homemade raspberry jam before piping in the cream. Unfortunately, the cream had gone a bit runny overnight - I should have whisked it up again before putting it in the piping bag - and didn't hold its piped shape very well.

But a little underwhipped cream isn't going to put a lamington fan off: they were the most popular item come morning-tea time, and deservingly so, because they were really good! I was quite proud of them, particularly since I'd finally made a decent sponge. I was surprised at how much flavour was in the cream chantilly: somehow it seemed far richer than my usual cream with icing-sugar. I might make a habit of adding vanilla as well.

The coffee cake also had its enthusiasts, though I would personally prefer a cream filling rather than more of that slightly sickly icing. The cake itself tasted quite nice, but wasn't as light and fluffy as I would have liked. On the whole, though, it was tasty enough.

To my surprise, everyone loved the toffee. I'd only made it as an extra (I even find I've forgotten to take a photo of the final result), and expected that there would be far more than necessary, but the bowl was empty by the end of the day. Clearly I did something right there!

So here I am, another year older, not noticeably wiser but considerably more practised in the kitchen - I'm not claiming great expertise of course, but at least I can make a decent lamington!

Successful sponge!

2011-07-02T12:46:00.000+12:00

It's my birthday on Monday, and as such I'll be expected to bring along a morning tea shout. One of the items I've chosen to make is lamingtons, which are always popular, but can be fiddly to make. I'm planning to try out a tip of Mum's to make coating the sponge a little easier: do it with a partially frozen sponge.

Of course, freezing the sponge has other benefits too. It means I can make it in advance, allowing time for a do-over or complete change of plan if I have another sponge disaster.

With this happy thought in mind, I turned to the recipe for sponge cake (p68) and made a start. Unlike the lemon sponge I made earlier in the week, this one doesn't start with creaming butter and sugar. Instead, you beat eggs with salt, then add sugar and beat until thick. After this, you sift in the dry ingredients, and fold in some melted butter. That's it.

The tin specified in the recipe was a 20cm round tin. Well, a round sponge is not much use for lamingtons, is it? Instead I used an 18cm square. I poured the sponge mixture into the greased and lined tin, then put it in the oven for about 25 minutes. Since my oven seems to be a bit hot, I set it lower than indicated, baking at 180 instead of 190.

The sponge looked pretty good when it came out of the oven. I gingerly pressed in the centre, and it bounced back ok, but I was still afraid of having another soggy-centred sponge. However, it didn't collapse like the lemon sponge did, so I'm confident that it's baked through.

The sponge isn't really very high: these are going to be some fairly squat lamingtons. Maybe I'll keep them in proportion and make miniature ones. Other than that, it seems to be a success. Yay - a passable sponge!

I've wrapped the sponge in baking paper and plastic, and bunged it in the freezer for now. I'll drag it out again on Sunday, and we'll see what kind of lamingtons it makes!