Little Tart

Phew! At long last I have a post about something I actually baked myself. These beautiful little tartlets came from my current favorite cookbook - The Golden Book of Chocolate. I am a very aesthetic person and I knew I would love this book as soon as I saw the cover. I had flicked through it a few times in different book shops and then one day I just said "feck it" and splurged out on it. I have had this book beside my bed for weeks now and I love nothing more than flicking through it's pages and imagining what all the different desserts would taste like.

Last weekend was my very favorite 2 year olds birthday party and I really wanted to make a little something for the party so I thought these cakes would be perfect ( don't mind about the Cointreau in the ingredients, there were only adults at the party, bar the birthday girl herself). So with all the good intentions I went out and bought all the ingredients the day before. I planned on getting up early and making the cakes before heading to the party at 10:00. Ah yes, the best laid plans .... It really wasn't my fault that I drank so many glasses (bottles) of red wine the night before. J has been practicing with a band for the last year and that night was their first public appearance. It's a groupies duty to be all rock and roll and drink copious amounts of alcohol. For the record I would just like to say that I did my groupie duty very well indeed. Too well some might say. There was not a hope in hell I was going to be making any cakes for any birthday party. We were pretty impressed with ourselves for even turning up for the party. We stayed for a couple of hours and then went home and went straight back to bed for the rest of the day.

Chocolate Orange Meringue Tartlets

Chocolate Pastry
200g flour
75g cocoa powder
200g butter, cut into pieces
100g caster sugar
1 large egg, lightly beaten

Filling
350g white chocolate
2 tlbsp glucose
150ml heavy (double) cream
3 tlbsp Cointreau
Finely grated zest of one orange
2 tlbsp butter

Meringue
2 large egg whites
150g caster sugar



Place the flour and cocoa in a small bowl. In an electric mixer fitted with the hook attachment, place the flour mixture, butter and sugar and mix on slow until the pastry resembles fine crumbs. Add the egg and continue mixing until the dough comes together. Turn the pastry out onto a floured work surface and gently knead, bringing all the pastry together. Roll the pastry into a ball, wrap in plastic wrap and chill in the fridge for 20 mins.

Preheat the oven to 180 Degrees. Grease two 12-cup mini muffin pans. Roll the pastry out to about 2mm thick on a floured work surface. Using a 5 cm round cutter, cut out 24 disks. Gently lift each disk and lay it over a muffin cup. Push the pastry into the cups, smoothing the base and pressing into the sides. Trim off and excess pastry. Line each cup with parchment paper. Fill with baking beans. Bake for 5-10 mins. Remove the baking beans and the parchments. Place the cases back in the over for 2-3 mins, to cook the base out. When the base is firm to touch, remove from the oven and cool completely.

Place the chocolate, glucose and cream in a double boiler over barely simmering water. Stir until the mixture is smooth and shiny. Remove from the heat and stir in the liqueur, orange zest and butter. Pour the mixture into a bowl and cover with plastic wrap. Chill in the fridge until cool enough to pour into the cases, 30 mins. Fill the chocolate cases to two-thirds, leaving room for the meringue.

Preheat over to 200 Degrees. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper. Beat the egg whites with an electric mixer until they hold soft peaks. Then gradually add in the sugar. Spoon the meringue into a piping bag fitted with the plain nozzle and pipe onto the chocolate orange filling, bring the bag up as you pipe to form "witches hats". Place the tartlets on the prepared baking sheets and bake until lightly browned, about 5 mins.

Food that makes me exceedingly happy

I have been making an effort to eat more healthy food recently. I have been successful with this healthy eating during the week but at the weekend so many sinful temptations seem to cross my path. In the past couple of weeks I have been enjoying some of my favourite foods and I wanted to share with you what I consider to be utterly wonderful. Lets start with the cakes pictured above. These are a small selection from one of the best patisseries I have ever been in. They are from a little place in Balmain called Adriano Zumbo. All the different cakes in this tiny little shop are to dye for with interesting little names like ‘Piste as she goes’ and ‘Charlotte O’Hara’.

If everyone in the world was told to divide into two lines of “sweet” and “savoury” I would be head of the savoury line. I love my bread, cheese and pasta. In a restaurant I will usually order an entrée and skip dessert. I can give or take the whole cake thing but then I met these wonderful sweet creations. They are light creamy and full of different flavours. These are my kind of cake. I shared them with a couple of friends and we all had a little of each to taste. Wow! I wish I could make cakes that looked as good as these creations.


So as I lined up with all the other Savoury people in the world I would be very busy telling them all about my new found favourite cheese. I wish I had a photo of this Fromager Des Clarins cheese in all it’s creamy splendour but every time we eat it I am too consumed in pure delight to even consider picking up a camera to take a photo. And anyway if I was to waste time taking photos then others would have an opportunity to eat more of this amazing cheese. I was first introduced to it at a birthday meal last year at Guillaume at Bennelong and now I am completely hooked. Before my first taste of Fromager Des Clarins I would have been happy to have a selection of different cheeses on my cheese plate. Now I am more than happy to put together a cheese plate made up of Fromager Des Clarins, some muscatels and some light simple crackers. Sheer delight. Pair it with a cheeky little champagne or a rich full bodied red and you are getting pretty close to perfection.


After I tell the people in my line about this wonderful cheese I would probably start talking to the people in the sweet line (cos god knows I like to talk) about one of the most enjoyable chocolate experiences I have ever had. Suckao at Max Bremmer combines the comfort of warm milk with your choice of chocolate (dark, milk or white). Your milk is served over a little tea light to keep it warm while you melt your chocolate in it. You get to play with you food with a long metal spoon that has a hollow handle so you can suck up you warm chocolate milk. Again we’re talking sheer perfection with so many different enjoyable elements to this.

Cakes
Adriano Zumbo
296 Darling Street, Balmain, Sydney, NSW 2041
+61 2 9810 7318


Cheese
Fromager Des Clarins
GPO Sydney
The Cheese Room 1 Martin Place Sydney NSW 2000
+61 2 9229 7700

Suckao Hot Chocolate
Max Bremmer
437 Oxford Street, Paddington NSW 2021
+61 2 9357 5055

Beau'tiful

Ok so I am well aware that this blog has gone disastrously downhill in the number of posts about food I have cooked. I promise you (and me) that this will change in the not too distant future. I have plans for lots of yummy things I want to cook and I will make every effort to photograph them and write about them here. But in the mean time can I just quickly tell you about our little weekend trip to Berry. We wanted to get out of Sydney for the weekend so we hit the road and headed to Berry which is about 2 hours drive south of Sydney. I love everything about Berry and have been lucky enough to have the opportunity to stay there quite a few times in the last couple of years. It’s always a favourite for those girlie weekends away.

This trip was all very last minute. A friend phoned and asked if we would be interested in getting away for the long weekend. This was a marvellous idea, only problem was that it was only a week before the long weekend and it is the middle of school holidays. It was not going to be easy to find accommodation. A few enquires were made about hiring a house but it was not looking like there was much on offer. I came across a website for a B&B that looked pretty nice and when I phoned up they were able to take us as their other guest had cried off due to having the flu (everyone has it at the moment).

So off we headed to Beau Glen for the weekend. I recognised it as soon as we got there mainly by their beautiful gardens. This place had the most magnificent gardens which we got to enjoy over the weekend. There was Gin & Tonics down by the bubbling brook, cheese and wine in the gazebo, whisky on the porch.

I’m noticing a recurring theme here. Our hosts were lovely. They were so friendly and welcoming and they really looked after us well. I know they liked us because they spent most of the weekend with us when we were at the house. They sat down with a cup of tea after serving us breakfast. They joined us for our marathon movie night watching the God Father. They just loved having company. They were a lovely couple but I have actually sworn off B&B’s for this very reason. I just forgot this time but too be honest it wasn’t that bad as they were good company. And I really can’t complain because they served us the most delicious eggs I have ever had. The yolk was the closest to a gold colour I have ever seen. It was almost luminescent. I don’t know much about chickens and that bright yellow could have been a bad thing but what I do know is that they tasted wonderful poached for breakfast and you all know from a recent post what a big fan of eggs I am.

On the second night we cooked up a BBQ and as our hosts were heading out to a party we were left to our own devices. Bob, the man of the house, had left us some relish to enjoy with our steaks. It looked harmless enough. Then I tasted it and wow was this a tasty little relish. I loved it so much that I smothered it all over my steak, my vegetables and I would have put it on some fruit for dessert if the others hadn’t prised it out of my hands. I loved this relish. The next morning when we were checking out I was raving to Bob about how wonderful it was. I was trying my best to get the recipe from him but instead I walked away with my very own jar and a very big smile on my face.

I’m not giving up yet though. I plan to write him a thank-you e-mail and I will be asking for the recipe. If I get it I will write it up here so that everyone else can taste the pleasures of a good relish.

In the mean time check out some of the beautiful flowers that were in bloom.

Do you Fondue?

I love a meal where there is a bit of audience participation. I’m talking about a meal which involves dipping, dunking, cooking and eating. Making your food just the way you like it. We were hosting a brown bag wine tasting at the weekend and I wanted to provide food that would not take away from the wine. Ok ,well to be honest, I did not want the food to take away from my participation in the wine tasting. I didn’t want to have to keep popping off to the kitchen to prepare food. So I decided to let my guests do the work for themselves.

We enjoyed a fabulous Fondue recently when we were in Whistler skiing. Ever since we came back from that holiday I’ve been thinking of dusting off our fondue and having some friends over. This was the perfect time to do that. I don’t like to do things by halves so I decided that the whole meal would be made up of DIY cooking. We would start with cheese fondue. For mains we would have a beef fondue where cubes of beef are placed in very hot oil and left to cook, then dipped in an array of different sauces. For dessert we would have chocolate fondue. Strawberries and jumbo marshmallows dipped in drunken chocolate.

What a meal. Most peoples favourite foods – cheese, meat and chocolate and not a vegetable in sight. Actually, that’s entirely true because I did cook up some shoe string fries just to cover that food group.

The meal was really wonderful. We started the night with some champagne just to celebrate us actually managing to get together to have this wine tasting night we have been talking about for over a year. There were six of us tasting wines (three couples) and each couple brought some of their favourite wines. The idea was for us to cover each wine bottle and number them. Then we had questionnaire sheets where we had to guess details about the wine such as varietal, year, aroma, flavour, cost. We were all very descriptive and enthusiastic about the details early on in the night. People were coming out with descriptions such as “This wine has herbaceous, fruity supple flavour with good legs and a wonderful after taste”. By the last bottle it was more like “This wine is definitely a Red”. The night was great fun - a good excuse for some friends to get together, drink some (ok, plenty of) great wine, get messy while making dinner and laugh a lot.

As the host J and I got to enjoy the whole night too as we had chopped and prepared all the sauces prior to the arrival of our friends. All we had to do was fire up the fondue and let everyone look after them selves. This meal went on until the wee hours of the morning and by the time the last couple left we were way too merry to clean up. The next morning I was never so thankful for a dishwasher. I am a stickler for using the right glass for the right wine so we ended up using champagne, red, white and dessert wine glasses. Add to that a few glasses for water and beer and you’ve got yourself almost every glass we claim to own. It was so much fun it was well worth all the washing up.


Starter
For the cheese fondue I used a basic recipe. I cut up some baguettes of bread the day before so they were slightly stale. I found that the sour dough bread worked best in the fondue. I heated the cheese mixture in a saucepan so that the fondue flame didn’t have to do too much work.


Main
I bought the best beef available and cut it up in to small cubes. I heated up some peanut all with a splash of garlic infused olive oil for extra flavour. For sauces I went for a variety of flavours. I cheated here and used store bought sauces so no recipes for this part. We had béarnaise sauce, a wasabi mayonnaise, satay sauce and finally a chilli soy sauce.


Dessert
I broke up some dark chocolate and added some cream. I heated this up in a pan and then added some Baileys and Frangelico. I served this with some strawberries and some great jumbo marshmallows.

Mussel power

I was at the market recently and picked up a kilo of mussels for $5!! That’s an incredible price, especially as these little gems were large and juicy and absolutely delicious. I love mussels but they are not something I cook at home very often. This was a good excuse to give them a go. I fried up some shallots and lots (I mean lots) of garlic. Then I added a cup of fish stock and a cup of white wine. I just pulled a half full bottle of white wine from the fridge completely oblivious to quality. It was only after J went to pour us a glass of wine to have with the mussels that I was informed of how good the wine I had used was. J made sure we both drank up every drop of the sauce.

I brought the stock and wine to the boil then added the mussels and covered with a lid. I moved them all around a couple of times and after about 5 minutes they were ready to eat. We enjoyed them with a class of average wine (oops) and some gorgeous crusty pumpkin bread which I had also picked up at the market. This delicious, simple, quick meal came at the grand cost of $8.50 plus a gentle reminder about not using the really good wine in my cooking.

Eggsellent

In all my years of cooking I have never been able to make a decent poached egg. I have tried a number of different techniques. I have added vinegar to the water and swirled the water around before adding the egg. I have tried using rapidly boiling water and just about boiling water. All of there methods produced a pretty average poached egg that I was not very impressed with.

I always wanted to be able to poach an egg like they do in café’s and restaurants. I wanted to produce a nice little compact egg with a lovely runny yolk. Well I am here to tell you that I have at last figured it out. Recently I have come across a few articles about poaching the perfect egg and I have put together a couple of techniques to produce what I consider a great poached egg.

In a frying pan (as opposed to a sauce pan which I used to use) bring some water to the boil. Then turn the heat down slightly so that there are small bubbles rather than large rapidly boiling bubbles. Crack your egg into a cup. Then lower the side of the cup into the water and let the egg slip out of the cup very slowly. Leave the egg to poach for 4 minutes. During this time I spooned some of the boiling water over the egg to make sure the yolk cooked properly. Remove the egg using a fish slice (better than a slotted spoon as it prevents the water from pooling on the egg. Allow the water to drain for a couple of seconds and then you are good to go.

I had a whole weekend of poached eggs and they were all excellent. There is nothing better than cutting the yolk open and having it pour all over your toast. A little bit of rock salt to taste and your talking about a near perfect breakfast. I am a happy poacher now.

Sweetie

I decided to give a different gift this year. J is not a big fan of sweet things so an Easter egg tends to be a little wasted on him. He is a big fan of alcohol so when I spotted this recipe for white chocolates made with a dash of rum I knew I could win him over.

These little beauties were so easy to make and you can choose your own coating. I wanted to stick with the white/gold colour scheme but you could really use anything.

The sweet gods were looking after me because no sooner had I decided to make these chocolates then I spotted some vintage chocolate boxes in the antique shop around the corner from where we live. Was it destiny or just good product placement on behalf of the shop owner? Either was I was able to present my chocolates in a quaint little box and they were very well received. Of course I had to help out with tasting to make sure they turned out ok. There were four different coatings – flaked almonds, coconut, gold sugar crystals and icing sugar. The coconut was my favourite.


480g White Chocolate
1 cup pouring cream
2 tsp white rum

Shaved coconut, flaked almonds, icing sugar and sugar crystals for decorating.

Makes 40 sweets

Put the white chocolate, cream and rum in a sauce pan and melt over a moderate heat
Pour the melted mixture into a slightly greased bowl and refrigerate for about 4 hours until starting to set
Place each of the coating in a separate bowl
Use a teaspoon of the mixture to make a little ball. Dip the ball in one of the coating. Repeat for each of the sweets.
Refrigerate for another few hours until fully set.