{penguins and parentheses}

Reflections

noreply@blogger.com (Sticky Penguin) — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 08:00:00 +0000

You mightn't think that penguins have all that much to do - go fishing, waddle about, slide across the ice, shiver a little - and yet, it seems to have been inordinately busy around these parts over the past few weeks. Here are a few snippets of the latest goings on...

Taking time to notice that things can be beautiful without being perfect
Studying colourfully, hopefully for the very last time - studying colourfully doesn't come close enough to embodying Kate Spade's maxim of living colourfully
Far, far too much caffeine (and far, far too little sleep)

A long walk in the sunshine, with a detour for gelato. This one was caramelised white chocolate and ‘the whole package’ (peanut butter, banana and salted caramel) from Gelato Messina. Much as I love to try something new, my heart (or its arteries, at least) belongs to the salted caramel and white chocolate. And my curiosity hankers after the strawbachio (strawberry and pistachio – another long walk will be needed very soon...)
A spell of subsisting on the offerings of the vending machine at work (thank goodness that's over!)
The cafe downstairs has wonderful chicken and avocado sandwiches on Brasserie Bread sourdough - a good way to recover from a deadline. Getting away from the vending machine's good, but getting further than the foyer will be even better

Making calissons for the first time – these ones are cherry flavoured, with lemon icing (a bit of pink icing never goes astray)
A very late night combining glamour (unusually for me, and apparently second nature for many of the others) and sobriety (second nature for me, and apparently entirely anathema for many of the others)
Taking time to prepare things that aren’t perfect to be a little more beautiful can be rewarding (I’m starting to realise that instagram is handy for test shots, too)

Fresh, warm potato and rosemary sourdough from the new Bourke Street Bakery in Potts Point
Some light and sugary reading for the week.
Because I can’t just bounce between Daring Bakers and batches of brownies forever, when there are so many wonderful cakes to be made
A little something sparkly picked up on the walk home – a flippy metallic skirt from Minty Meets Munt

Wherever you are, I hope you're having a lovely (and sparkly) week...

Nutty But Thankful - Pecan, Maple and Pumpkin Sans Rival Cake

noreply@blogger.com (Sticky Penguin) — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 08:00:00 +0000

In the midst of chaos, being told (or even gently encouraged) to be thankful can be akin to having the Trifle-Eating Cat's Dad shout "Dropped it!" on hearing a crash from an adjacent room. That is, it's completely true, patently obvious even if you don't want to hear it, and therefore entirely infuriating*. And yet, there can be a lot to be thankful for, even if you have to poke under a few rocks to think of it. Good friends. Sleeping in. The prospect of Christmas. The absence of bagpipes. More occasions than usual to justify wearing sparkly shoes. The limitless patience of the Other Penguin.

Pecan, caramel and pumpkin Sans Rival cake - an innocent buttercream exterior hides nutty meringue inside...

Thanksgiving, a holiday that (unsurprisingly, given its origins) passes in Australia with barely so much as a peep, has just been and gone for another year (passing with a much louder peep indeed on the food blogs, where pumpkins and pecans abound in every possible incarnation). This was on my mind when I tackled this month's Daring Bakers challenge.

Catherine of Munchie Musings was our November Daring Bakers’ host and she challenged us to make a traditional Filipino dessert – the delicious sans rival cake! And for those of us who wanted to try an additional Filipino dessert, Catherine also gave us a bonus recipe for bibingka which comes from her friend Jun of Jun-blog. In a rare application of common sense, I decided that, much as I did want to try an additional dessert (when do I not...?), it was wiser to tackle one thing with conviction than bite off more than I could chew and end up grumpy (and with a pair of baking fails).

Alternating layers of pecan meringue and caramel buttercream, with pumpkin cookie dough for good measure and to add to the festive flavours

A sans rival cake is a form of dacquoise which involves alternating layers of (traditionally) cashew meringue and buttercream. When I first read about the resulting crunchy, silky, rich confection, it sounded like eating a generously buttered cloud. Half the fun of Daring Bakers is trying to find a creative way to interpret the given recipe (the other half, I often have to remind myself while muttering intently at something untried and initially seemingly impossible, is the challenge bit of it). So, I decided to combine my Filipino dessert with a US celebration, and bring Thanksgiving to the Sans Rival...

My sans rival incorporated layers of pecan meringue and caramel buttercream with, for good measure, gooey pumpkin cookie dough with more pecans added.

The finished recipe was a mix of invention and evolution. It began with the discovery that pumpkin was thin on the ground in my local supermarket, unless I felt inclined to roast and puree it myself (which I didn't). This led to some improvising with pumpkin soup and brown sugar, which produced a satisfyingly rich and pumpkin-y syrup. I also discovered that this was another recipe that didn't lend itself to a rustic baker - the assembly process had more in common with bricklaying than with Donna Hay.

The rustic effort in icing the cake didn't detract from its indulgent taste (phew!)

However, after the finished cake had been put in the fridge to cool down and set, it turned out surprisingly well. It wasn't particularly cloud-like, as the nuttiness of the meringue gave it more substance and texture than the melting crunch of the regular variety. The deep caramel flavour kept the taste of the buttercream from being dominated by, well, butter. Combined with the pumpkin cookie dough, the finished cake had a complexity that was belied by its rather cobbled-together look. Still, it was very indulgent, and a little cake went a long way.

Don't be taken in by its small size - even a half-size Sans Rival packs a serious sugar hit

If you'd like to make your own Thanksgiving Sans Rival, here's what to do...

What you need
For the pecan meringue
(note: this was half the quantity in the original recipe, as I decided to make a smaller cake)
120 g chopped pecans
5 large egg whites, at room temperature
½ cream of tartar
113 g sugar
For the caramel sauce
(note: this makes more than needed for the recipe - I simply can't imagine what leftover caramel sauce could be useful for, though!)
115 g butter
200 g sugar
120 ml cream
For the maple buttercream
(note: this is the full quantity from the original recipe, as adapted for my flavourings. Why twice as much buttercream as meringue? Well, it matched the number of egg yolks remaining, as well as giving a bit of room for trial and error. But there was still way too much - enough to ice a batch of small cupcakes as well, for instance...
5 egg yolks, at room temperature
225 g sugar
60 ml water
275 g butter
2½ tbsp maple syrup
180 ml caramel sauce
For the pumpkin cookie dough
560 ml pumpkin soup (I used Darikay)
150 g dark brown sugar
75 g butter
125 g dark brown sugar, additional
200 g flour
1½ tbsp molasses
130 g roughly chopped pecans

What to do
For the pecan meringue
1. Preheat oven to 160°C. Line the base of two 10 cm springform cake tins (or four if you have them - I needed to do two batches of two) with baking paper, and grease the sides with butter, taking care not to miss any spots as the meringue will stick very easily.
2. Whiz the pecans in a food processor until they are roughly ground. (The recipe recommends not processing them so much that they become an even powder, as the textural contrast of the nuts is an important part of the cake).
3. Whisk the egg whites until frothy (around 2 minutes in a stand mixer), then add the cream of tartar. Continue whisking on high speed, adding the sugar a couple of tablespoons at a time, until firm glossy peaks form.
4. Gently fold the ground pecans into the egg whites.
5. Carefully dollop the meringue batter into the prepared cake tins. Plonk the tins down on the kitchen bench to ensure there aren't any gaps (just the once or it'll knock out all the air), and level the top with a knife or an offset spatula
6. Bake for 30 minutes. Remove the cooked meringues from the tins 2-3 minutes after removing from the oven, and place on a wire rack to cool. Then, wash, re-line and grease the cake tins, fill with the second batch of meringue batter and bake.
Important notes on baking time: I scaled back the original meringue recipe by half, and cooked it in smaller tins. Even after this, I ended up filling the cake tin each time. In hindsight, thinner, flatter meringues would have cooked more quickly and evenly, and then been easier to work with when assembling the finished sans rival.
Interestingly, the results varied quite significantly between batches - while the same quantity was put in the tins, the first batch came out thinner and crispier, and the second batch was thicker and chewier. I left both batches in the warm oven overnight and then, before preparing to assemble them, cooked them (on the wire rack, not in their tins) for a further 60 minutes at 120°C. This helped dry them out and crisp them up appreciably more. And taught me (yet again) that tinkering with recipes I've never attempted before can have mixed results and need a bit of tweaking.
For the caramel sauce
7. Put the butter and sugar in a large saucepan and heat, stirring only minimally, until it turns golden brown. When it's ready, it will be starting to turn a darker brown, and may still look almost frothy. If you leave it till it's going too much darker, it'll get beyond salvation as it keeps cooking after removed from the heat.
8. Remove the pan from the stove and add the cream, ¼ cup at a time, stirring in between. The mixture will froth and bubble up as the cream is added, so be careful not to get scalded. Also, be careful not to sound like a little old woman when writing recipes full of boiling sugar...
9. Allow the caramel sauce to cool to room temperature before using it in the buttercream.
For the maple buttercream
10. Put the egg yolks in a mixing bowl and beat on high speed until they are thick and pale yellow, and almost double in size (this took quite a bit longer than I expected).
11. Put the sugar and water in a large saucepan, and heat until it reaches 112°C. As it heats, brush the sides of the pan occasionally with water to avoid sugar crystals forming.
12. Make sure the splash guard is on your mixer, and very carefully, slowly pour the scarily hot sugar syrup into the egg yolks. Mix at high speed until the egg and sugar mixture has cooled to room temperature, which takes around 15 minutes.
13. Add the room temperature butter about a tablespoon at a time, and continue beating on high. It helps to make sure that each addition of butter is incorporated before adding more. Then, add the maple syrup and beat in until well combined.
Important note on adding the sugar syrup: The recipe requires this to be done with the mixer on high speed, but my wariness around boiling sugar meant it was on about middling speed, and the syrup went in far quicker than it should've. I was very, very nervous indeed that it was going to turn into scrambled eggs. While it wasn't perfect, it ended up not being too bad for my first ever attempt at French buttercream. It improved significantly as the rest of the steps were completed.
14. Refrigerate the buttercream for at least an hour (mine was in the fridge for over 12 hours, to enable baking to fit round important things like sleeping and going for brunch with the Penguin Wrangler). This is the finished buttercream as adapted from the original recipe - it reminded me that I find buttercream, well, entirely too buttery and without enough other flavour, so I decided now that it needed something else to give it some depth. That something was caramel...
15. When ready to assemble the sans rival, remove the buttercream from the fridge and beat on high speed. Add 180 ml of caramel sauce, a little at a time, and beat until thoroughly incorporated.
For the pumpkin cookie dough
16. Put the pumpkin soup and 150 g of dark brown sugar in a saucepan and heat until thick and syrupy - about 15 minutes. Set aside and allow to cool to room temperature.
17. Beat the butter until pale, add 125 g of dark brown sugar and cream together with the butter until light and pale.
18. Alternately add the syrupy soup and the flour, a little at a time of each, to the creamed butter and sugar, beating well at a slow speed after each addition.
19. Add the molasses and mix thoroughly, then add the chopped pecans and mix again to distribute evenly through the cookie dough. Refrigerate for at least 30 minutes before using.
To assemble the sans rival
20. Trim the edges of the meringue so that the layers are an even roundness. I also sliced each of the two meringues from my second batch into two thinner layers, so they were consistent with the thickness of the layers from the first batch.
21. Starting with a layer of meringue, alternate layers of meringue and buttercream, spreading the buttercream to the edges, Every third layer, add a layer of pumpkin cookie dough.
22. Spread the sans rival with buttercream and decorate with additional crushed pecans. I also added some chopped pecans in caramel sauce to the top of the cake.
23. Refrigerate the finished cake until ready to serve, and before cutting it.
Assembly is resoundingly not my strong suit, not by a long shot. My initial reaction to the sans rival was that it would have plenty of rivals, and would succeed on appearances only by pulling a proverbial Steven Bradbury... I ended up with a badly engineered tower with an uneven smeary coat of buttercream. Paddington Bear would have been very proud.

* It may not surprise you after hearing this to hear that the Trifle-Eating Cat's Dad has prior form in consulting, which involves saying much the same things, only about technical matters and getting paid for it...

Yes Sir! Three Bags Full (Of Breakfast)

noreply@blogger.com (Sticky Penguin) — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 08:00:00 +0000

Sometimes, the prospect of a holiday can be a more powerful motivation than the holiday itself. It's all about anticipation (which might be a point that's reinforced by my family's tendency to open their Christmas presents in, at best, late afternoon - and not just because we're too busy grazing). One of my favourite things to look forward to about a holiday is the very important matter of where to eat. It's where my holiday planning efforts begin and (perhaps to the occasional frustration of the Other Penguin) often where they end, too.

Sticky gingerbread with mascarpone, cumquats and pistachios

Time Out's list of the best breakfasts in Melbourne was one of my starting points on the trail for promising restaurants and cafes before a recent long weekend visit. The combination of tea cup light shades and "grungy warehouse chic" at Three Bags Full sounded intriguing, so I popped over to its website. And it had me at Sticky Black Gingerbread. Hook, line and sinker.

The menu at Three Bags Full

It was a good thing I was committed and, perhaps, an even better thing that there aren't too many other brekky options in the vicinity of Three Bags Full on a wide but surprisingly peaceful road in Abbotsford. Because the rest of Melbourne's discovered it too. And when we got there, at a pleasantly civilised hour of mid-morning, they all seemed to be ahead of us in the queue. We fidgeted and chatted, eyeing the rather hardy souls game to sit in the still-rather-nippy fresh air at outside table under the hungry gaze of the waiting hordes, and held out for a table indoors.

The cafe felt comfortably modern and quirky, and rather reminded me of the artfully curated style at Anthropologie. The tea cup lights above the counter added a spark of whimsical colour, while road signs turned into stools and vintage finds brought an industrial edge and hinted at the building's past. I had plenty of time to take it all in as, being so busy, service was a little stretched (but also friendly).

The cosy interior - love the teacup lights

Looking at the menu was a bit of a cursory effort for me - I already knew exactly what I was going to order. Although twice-baked French toast sounded pretty appealing, too. And so did the braised leek and potato omelette with gruyere.

The Other Penguin opted for the big breakfast, which was very true to its name - even after the appetite-whetting queue, it was a bit too big to finish. It included eggs, bacon, tomato, spinach, mushrooms, a rich and slightly obscene looking cheese kransky, relish and toast.

The (very) big brekky at Three Bags Full

The keenly-anticipated gingerbread initially concerned me with its crunchy-edged appearance. Where was the stickiness I was hoping for? As it turned out, though, toasting the gingerbread was a great move - it gave it a textural contrast to the rich smoothness of the vanilla bean mascarpone and the syrupy tang of the candied cumquats that accompanied it. And the sprinkle of pistachios brought it together. The menu grouped it into the 'Sweet Tooth' section, and it was definitely indulgent - but not tooth-achingly so. Looking forward to a particular dish for a fortnight could have created an almost-insurmountable expectation, but this was the perfect beginning to set up a hungry penguin for a day of pootling across town.

The menu of reliable favourites plus some more unusual options and the friendly laid-back atmosphere make Three Bags Full worth the wait. Which is lucky, because it could be quite a while before I make it back to Melbourne to have more gingerbread for breakfast... but it all just adds to the anticipation.

Take An Umbrella In Case There Are Cupcakes

noreply@blogger.com (Sticky Penguin) — Sun, 20 Nov 2011 08:00:00 +0000

When it's raining and sunny at the same time, there are rainbows. But if it's raining while you eat a cupcake... does that mean you end up with sprinkles?

Cupcake Weather by Mitra Farmand via Dear Musketeer

Or do you just end up with soggy icing, feeling like you've ended up in MacArthur Park?

With cupcakes like these, you might not even notice it was raining...

Cupcakes with cupcakes on top - eep! These ones are from Baked Perfection

I love this colour combination, too (they're actually truffles, but they're so pretty I'll let them off)...

Cupcake truffles from The Family Kitchen

Or, for something (slightly) more understated, there are these sandwich cookies...

Banilla sandwich cookies by Bakers Royale

If I was going to eat cupcakes in the rain, this might be the perfect skirt to wear while I'm out there...

Twinkle Lights pencil skirt from Anthropologie

I think I'd wear it with a simple black top and black patent wellies. It's important to look glamorous when you're out in the rain eating a cupcake, after all.

It's hard not to feel cheerful surrounded by sprinkles (or sparkles). You might even feel like dancing...

Photo by diastema via weheartit

Dancing in the rain with a cupcake? Just perfect...

Sweet Dreams

noreply@blogger.com (Sticky Penguin) — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 08:00:00 +0000

In the list of trade-offs to try and do seven impossible things before breakfast, sleep is almost always the first thing to go (and that's before reconciling myself to the notion that sometimes, doing two and a bit things by afternoon tea is as good as it's going to get). Sticky Penguin, brought to you by an Awful Lot Of Caffeine - so much that it requires capital letters to convey just how much.

But, even after going to bed, sleep can be elusive. There are things to think about, to worry about, to plan. Terribly pressing matters of global significance, like what sort of filling should go in the next batch of brownies, when on earth I'll get my Daring Bakers done, and whether wearing black to work three days out of five is unimaginative. And the dreams that follow can sometimes be much the same...

Would those dreams be that much sweeter if you went to sleep snuggled in crisp, clean layers of... chocolate?

Chocolate sheets from Bed Toppings

(not to be confused with bed hopping, which is something else entirely - or so I hear)

The pillows are the same sort of too-cute-for-words as Japanese food erasers (and if you've noticed the new profile picture lately, you might spot a certain weakness there!)...

Chocolate pillow case from Bed Toppings

Sadly, they're only available for kids - the size of kids that sleep in single beds, that is. Those of us bigger kids who dream of dozing off in more of a family-sized block of chocolate will just have to... keep dreaming.

Bed Toppings was discovered while pottering on hardtofind.com.au - source of all sorts of distractions and covetable (or, in this case, duvetable? Nope, that really doesn't work...), and which hasn't had anything to do with this post - the only sort of sponsoring of penguins happens here.

Not Over The Rainbow Yet

noreply@blogger.com (Sticky Penguin) — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 08:00:00 +0000

A sure-fire way to crave a particular food more than ever is when you Just. Can’t. Have. It. Recent hankerings after viennoise au chocolat, crack pie, fondant fancies and (absurdly after all that sugar overload) diet Cherry Coke support this highly scientific allegation based on a gluttonous sample of one.

The difficulty in obtaining some (although by no means all) of the various things to eat that skitter distractedly across the bit of my brain that is permanently devoted to thoughts of food is their belonging to a particular place or a specific point in time. The power of food to transport you somewhere else is simply amazing.

When I came across this photo, it immediately made me think of food...

Photo via Satellite True

Probably not the reaction you’d expect from a picture like that! But it took me straight back to being a small girl in New Zealand, waiting with my dad for a Friday-night order of fish and chips to be ready. The takeaway shop had walls panelled with wood-printed laminate, and a tank of tropical fish that I never thought to connect with the coming meal. The fish – often shark – was thickly coated with batter that never seemed soggy in the middle and was extra-specially crunchy towards the head and the tail. And the chips were crispy and golden with fluffy middles and a generous sprinkling of salt, in the days before people worried about high blood pressure.

Sometimes, after the fish and chips, there might be the promise of a rainbow bar. Like a bigger, better version of a licorice allsort, rainbow bars were long and thin and came in packs of six, each a different colour. I was convinced the candy exteriors had distinguishable flavours, and whether they really did was maybe less important than your imagining it was true. I almost wonder whether I imagined the rainbow bars themselves, because when I went in search of them, they were nowhere to be found...

That’s a lot of memories to come from a brightly coloured piano. What’s the most unexpected thing you’ve come across that’s made you think of a particular food? I’d love to hear about it...

Comfort Food From Outside The Comfort Zone - South East Asian Food

noreply@blogger.com (Sticky Penguin) — Sun, 06 Nov 2011 08:00:00 +0000

What does 1970s food make you think of? Retro dinner party classics like prawn cocktail and beef wellington, perhaps. The sweet nostalgia of blancmange, peach melba, knickerbocker glory and trifle (always trifle). Pot luck dinners and so-uncool-it-never-goes-out-of-style fondue. Leaving for work or school only after a Proper Cooked Breakfast. More pre-packaging – TV dinners and fish fingers anybody? (didn’t think so...).

Lots of those things have a rather stodgy waft of comfortable familiarity. Some are rib-sticking and hearty and even dishes that once seemed the height of sophistication (devils on horseback and duck a l’orange?) are something to be tucked into and enjoyed, rather than a delicate morsel artfully arranged on a plate. They can evoke feelings of childhood and a sense of innocent – even naive? – pleasure in food, even in people who didn’t grow up in the 70s. But not all the recipes from back conjure up images of Kath & Kim crossed with Enid Blyton.

South East Asian Food by Rosemary Brissenden

The idea of what was exotic was very different to now. Unless they were part of your native culture, things as simple as espresso, pumpernickel, souvlaki and felafel were curiosities that didn’t lurk on every corner (although 20 odd years later, I used to get funny looks eating pate sandwiches for lunch at school…). Chinese food was likely to begin with spring rolls and end with sweet and sour pork. But some people had a broader frame of reference…

Rosemary Brissenden first visited South East Asia in 1957 when she was a student at Melbourne University. South East Asian cuisine was largely unknown beyond those who’d experienced it first-hand and Australian food at that time was yet to stake out its territory as a global pick-n-mix held together with something of its own. Brissenden set to and wrote South East Asian Food, which was first published in 1969 and was the definitive guide to food from that region.

Over forty years later, a substantial new edition of the book has been released. In the cluttered and growing cookbook market full of next big things and toqued experts, South East Asian Food has become an enduring classic while staying relevant and up to date. It can be described as a seminal work without a trace of hyperbole – an assertion supported by Elizabeth David providing a ringing endorsement on the book’s warm chartreuse cover.

"A book that every serious cook should possess" - Elizabeth David"

I first approached South East Asian Food with a degree of caution; its initial impression is of a Book That Means Business. Its heft reminded me of Stephanie Alexander’s The Cook’s Companion which, I learned to my surprise, was only published in 1996.

South East Asian Food isn’t like the majority of modern recipe books. It isn’t a glossy coffee table book designed for show (or showing off) as much as for cooking. Nor is it a magazine-style format to flick lazily through on a weekend afternoon before, with a rumbling tummy, pottering into the kitchen to try out whatever caught your eye. It has more in common with a textbook – investing some time reading carefully and planning your approach will reward you by unlocking flavours that – for me, at least – I’d not imagined being able to recreate at home.

Lamb and spinach curry - its not-so-exotic name belies its depth of flavour

The book’s authoritativeness and detail could make it initially a bit intimidating for readers who are new to recipes from the region, or who favour cookbooks full of glossy pictures showing the finished product. However, Brissenden is a patient teacher. Her style is instructive and no-nonsense, a little like being taught by a slightly stern but very wise and generous aunty. The instructions are direct and clear, and explain why things are done a certain way (satisfying both my curiosity and my ignorance). A touch of lightness is provided by Daniella Germain’s illustrations (now taking centre stage of their own accord in My Abuela’s Table).

A couple of Daniella Germain's illustrations in South East Asian Food

South East Asian Food traverses a culinary journey from Indonesia to Vietnam, passing through Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Laos and Cambodia along the way. The recipes are arranged by country and then into categories – grills and barbecues, braises, fried dishes, curries of almost every sort and persuasion. Brissenden gives an insight into each country’s culinary history and traditions, important ingredients and how meals are served. This follows a meaty introduction to ingredients and techniques, which instructs on everything from ‘making prawns crunchy’ to the uses of fresh coconut and making your own Javanese soya sauce.

If the 1970s are, at first glance, all about comfort food, South East Asian Food took me far outside of my comfort zone. I can safely confess to being a complete novice in relation to cooking Asian food of any variety and most of my experiments tend firmly towards sweet rather than spicy. The first recipe I tried was a lamb and spinach curry from Malaysia, and involved making my own curry powder. The finished dish had a depth of flavour that grew on the Other Penguin and me with each mouthful. It was quite mild, but had a subtle intensity – the freshly made curry powder made a noticeable and refreshing difference. As it turns out, this recipe was comfort food - just perhaps not the kind I'd first think of...

Lamb and spinach curry

Being in such new territory, I tried to minimise my tinkering with the recipe. There were a few items where I used some pre-ground spices because they were what I had to hand, but I was keen to stay true to the instructions to get a good sense of the intended flavours.

The recipe, with my extra notes and comments, is as follows:

Meat Curry Powder

(The quantities below are for a quarter of the recipe shown in the book – the original recipe makes a substantial amount, and I thought it was worth seeing how it tasted before making a giant batch (especially as the Other Penguin has quite a low chilli threshold))

What you need

25 g coriander seeds

8 g cumin seeds (I used ground cumin)

8 g fennel seeds (I used ground fennel seeds)

3 tsp turmeric

1 tsp black peppercorns

9 dried chillies (or more to taste – even twice as many if you like it hot…)

What to do

1. Roast the coriander seeds, cumin seeds, fennel seeds and turmeric lightly in a dry pan for around a minute and a half.

2. Remove the spices from the heat and place in a mortar or the bowl of a small food processor (I used the attachment for a stick blender), add the peppercorns and dried chillies and whizz (or grind with a pestle) to a powder.

Making lamb and spinach curry

Lamb and Spinach Curry

What you need
1 tbsp grapeseed oil (the recipe uses ghee or other vegetable oil)
1 large brown onion, cut in half across and then sliced finely
1 cardamom pod, broken open
1 cinnamon stick
2 cloves of garlic, peeled, smashed and chopped finely
1 tbsp meat curry powder, from the recipe above
500 g very lean lamb, cut into 2 cm cubes (I used two lamb backstraps, which felt a little extravagant, but gave a tender and juicy result)
2 tomatoes, skinned and chopped or 2 tbsp yogurt (I used half a tin of peeled plum tomatoes, roughly chopped, and opted to not include yogurt)
Salt to taste
1 packet (which is a mysteriously unspecified quantity) of frozen spinach, or 500 g fresh spinach (I used 150 g of fresh baby spinach – a bit more would’ve been good, but my local shop was running out in a big way… terrible excuse, I know!)
A little chopped mint (optional, and I can’t stand it, so I left this out)
Pinch of ground cumin
1 tsp garam masala, or to taste (I also left this out as, having been positive there was some in the cupboard, I discovered I was mistaken – gah!)

What to do

1. Heat the oil (or ghee) in a pan. Add the onion, cardamom and cinnamon, and fry until the onion is deep golden (and enticing smells have suffused the kitchen).

2. Mix the garlic and curry powder with a little water (to add enough moisture for it not to burn) and add with the lamb to the pan. Stir well to combine.

3. Cook, stirring occasionally, until the meat is browned all over and the spices smell “cooked and fragrant”. (The scent develops a bit more complexity as this happens).

4. Add the tomatoes or yogurt and stir well. Check for seasoning, and add salt if needed. Then, add the spinach, a splash of water if the consistency is getting a little dry. Add the mint now, too, if using it.

5. Simmer until the meat is cooked through and the sauce and flavours are smooth. Add the cumin and garam masala before serving.

Served with jasmine rice, the recipe serves two for dinner, with enough leftovers for two (or one very hungry Other Penguin) for lunch.

There are lots of other recipes I’m keen to try out in South East Asian Food after such a successful first experience. Some of these are…

- Ayam Semur Jawa (chicken in soya sauce)

- Dadar Jawa (Javanese omelette)

- Abon Daging (tasty meat floss… I’ve seen pork floss rolls in Chinese bakeries and am intrigued by the idea of trying to make meat floss – this one is an Indonesian recipe)

- Hainanese Chicken Rice

- Roti Canai (because I’ve read so much about it on other food blogs!)

- Khao Tom Kai (chicken rice porridge)

- Bubur Ketan Hitam (black rice pudding – because desserts are thin on the ground in this book, so I’d love to try at least one of those that are included)

A few more desserts - though I'd love to learn more about making Asian sweet treats

Brissenden explains that desserts “are few because main meals in South East Asia traditionally do not include them. Sweets are usually enjoyed as snacks and between-meal indulgences and warrant a book of their own”. Now there’s something to wish for…

Not Drowning, Swirling - Four Varieties of Povitica

noreply@blogger.com (Sticky Penguin) — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 08:00:00 +0000

Change can be good. Especially when you unexpectedly find it down the back of the couch. But if a change is as good as a holiday, too much change can feel about as comfortable as a three month trek across the Arctic wilderness in Jimmy Choos a size too small. Is the ice going to crack underneath me? Is that polar bear eyeing me off for its next meal? Have I got my heel caught in a crevasse?

So, having moved to a new role at work, and in a new grade in dancing, with an exam lurking menacingly round the corner (a bit like a hungry polar bear), I approached the prospect of Daring Bakers with trepidation. Can’t I just come up with another flavour of brownie and not go looking for unfamiliar and difficult things and poking them with a stick to see what happens? Nope…

Traditional walnut povitica

Some Daring Bakers challenges involving making something beautiful (as well as delicious). Lots of them involve making something that’s time-consuming (some of them, mind-bogglingly so). Almost all of them involve making something unfamiliar (because that’s the point). Not many of them involve something a little rustic round the edges, baked in a loaf tin. So, odds are that the rustic loaf is going to involve all sorts of trickiness and will take half the night. And it did. But it was so tasty I quite forgave it, through my sleep-deprived haze. And I was so pleased I gave it a try (even if it turned out a bit more resoundingly rustic than just around the edges).

The Daring Baker’s October 2011 challenge was Povitica, hosted by Jenni of The Gingered Whisk. Povitica is a traditional Eastern European Dessert Bread that is as lovely to look at as it is to eat! It’s a sweet loaf made by rolling up thin dough spread with a filling so that each slice has a beautiful swirled pattern and every bite contains a mix of flavours. The traditional recipe combines ground walnuts with cinnamon, sugar and cocoa, but the recipe lends itself very well to experimenting with other sweet or savoury fillings. The recipe makes a monster four loaves, so there was lots of opportunity to try out some new varieties. As well as the traditional recipe, I also made:

Caramelised white chocolate with chocolate chips (if you decide to do this version, you’ll need to have made the caramelised white chocolate in advance – or to be a vampire and so not need any sleep. Luckily, I had a jar I’d prepared earlier for the purpose... though since discovering this recipe, I’ll be needing to make some more)
Peanut butter and strawberry jam
Moreno cherry and ricotta

The povitica has a detailed swirl pattern in each slice

The most challenging part of the recipe involves rolling and stretching the dough to the requisite thin-ness and shaping it into loaves; otherwise, the recipe is relatively straightforward. It does involve quite a lot of “process” though – getting started late on a Sunday afternoon with the added distractions of a (thankfully rare) crash of the Daring Bakers site and an (even more thankfully rare) lengthy phone call by the Other Penguin to wrangle a travel arrangements, during which the noisy machinations of the KitchenAid would not have been well received.

The finished loaves, however, were definitely well received. They came out a deep golden brown and their unexpected heft belied their light-but-filling texture. When cut open, the filling formed a clear swirl pattern – I’d been a little worried it might just become a jumbled, albeit tasty, mixture. The different fillings impacted the consistency of the loaves, as well as their cooking time – the walnut and peanut butter versions came out dense and tightly coiled, while the cherry and ricotta one took quite a bit longer to cook through as the filling was wetter. As helpfully foreshadowed in the comments for the challenge, allowing the bread to cool completely and to sit overnight in the fridge made it easier to cut evenly. Even so, it was a little crumbly round the edges, probably from how it was rolled up and coiled into the tin.

The crunchy golden crust on the peanut butter and strawberry jam povitica

I tried a little of the peanut butter and the walnut versions, and was pleasantly surprised. The bread itself was sweet-tasting, and reminded me of a heavier version of Chinese milk bread. Combined with the well-dispersed filling, it had an unexpectedly subtle flavour and was neither too plain nor too stodgy. The traditional walnut version was It’s well suited to a simple morning or afternoon tea, but could also be good at breakfast time (I’d be interested to see how it came out if you toasted it) or for one of those late-afternoon high teas which graze across baking, charcuterie, cheese and fruit (one of my favourite things about Christmas with my family). The bread is quite filling, so more than one of those options might leave you a little sleepily full, much as I’d love to advocate baked goods for every meal!

I would definitely like to try making the dough again, although next time I’ll scale it back to half the quantity and just make two loaves. A marzipan version, a little like a swirly stollen, is an appealing possibility. More likely, though, is that I’ll try using the dough for loaves or small rolls without the swirled filling, or with some fruit or chocolate scattered through. A dark chocolate chip version might even tame my longing for a pain viennois chocolat, which I’ve been carrying since that wonderful discovery in Paris last year.

If you’d like to try making povitica ("povateetsa") for yourself, here’s how it was made:

What you need

To activate the yeast

2 tsp / 9 g sugar

1 tsp 3 g plain flour

2 tbsp / 14 g dry yeast

½ cup / 120 ml warm water

Dough

2 cups / 480ml full cream milk (as we don’t tend to have this around, I referred to Joy of Baking and substituted skim milk with 50 g extra butter added)

¾ cup / 170 g sugar

3 tsp / 18 g salt

4 large eggs (at room temperature, lightly beaten)

½ cup / 115 g butter (melted and cooled)

8 cups / 1.12 kg plain flour

Walnut filling (these quantities were for one loaf – if you make the above dough recipe and want to do all of them with this filling, it’ll need to be scaled up by 4)

1 ¾ cups / 280 g walnuts (ground – I used whole ones and whizzed them in a food processor)

½ cup / 113 g sugar

2 tbsp cocoa powder (this is way more than the recipe called for in the original recipe, but I wanted to go extra chocolatey, and also to have a greater colour contrast in the swirls)

¼ tsp cinnamon

¼ cup / 60 ml milk (I used skim)

¼ cup / 56 g butter

1 egg, lightly beaten (note: the recipe for the full quantity, which makes 4 times this amount, uses 2 eggs – as others had needed to add more milk to make the filling wetter, it seemed sensible to use a whole egg and no extra milk, than to use half an egg and get rid of the other half – this worked well – the mixture didn’t need any extra milk to be spreadable)

¼ tsp vanilla extract

Peanut butter and jam filling

240 g peanut butter (I used smooth, but crunchy would work well for the textural contrast)

55 ml milk (just under ¼ cup)

400 g jam (I used strawberry)

Ricotta and cherry filling

375 g light smooth ricotta

200 g (approximately) Moreno cherries (squashed), plus 3 tbsp (45 ml) juice from the jar (a small splosh, for those of a less precise persuasion)

Caramelised white chocolate filling

1 batch of caramelised white chocolate (made from 400 g white chocolate, using this recipe)

White chocolate chips – enough to cover the dough as liberally as you wish (I used around 150 g))

Glaze (for traditional version)

¼ cup / 120 ml strong coffee (cooled)

2 tbsp / 28 g sugar (which I added to the hot coffee so that it dissolved)

Melted butter

Glaze (for the other versions)

1 egg, lightly beaten

2 tbsp / 28 g sugar (which I added to the hot coffee so that it dissolved)

Melted butter

The dough needs to be rolled our very thinly before being spread with the filling

What to do

To activate the yeast

1. Put 2 teaspoons of sugar, 1 teaspoon of flour and 2 tablespoons of yeast into a jug or small bowl. Stir and then add 120 ml warm water and stir again to combine.

2. Cover with plastic wrap, put in a warm place in the kitchen and allow to stand for 5 minutes.

Note: if you activate the yeast before starting making the dough, as I did, it ends up sitting for a lot longer than 5 minutes, although this didn’t seem to cause a problem. Next time, though, I would activate the yeast part-way through making the dough, after removing the scalded milk from the heat (step 3 below).

To make the dough

3. Heat the milk (or, if using skim milk, the milk and 50 g extra butter) in a saucepan until just below boiling point (about 180°F/82°C), stirring regularly so that a skin doesn’t form on top. It should be scalding hot, but not boiling (this can be done using a sugar thermometer, or just by eye and experience). Allow the milk to cool slightly (until it is about 110°F/43°C, or very warm but safely bearable to the touch – this took about 10 minutes, for the avoidance of burnt fingers, for anybody else who lacks asbestos hands!).

4. In the bowl of a stand mixer (or a large bowl if you’re going to mix the dough by hand), combine the cooled scalded milk, 170 g sugar, and 3 teaspoons salt.

5. Add the lightly beaten eggs, yeast mixture, cooled melted butter, and 280 g of the sieved flour (about a quarter of the total amount).

6. Mix thoroughly and slowly add the remaining flour (840 g if you use it all), mixing well until the dough starts to clean the bowl. Note: At this point, much as I’d seen from the challenge that the dough was meant to be quite sticky and that others didn’t need all 1.12 kg of flour, I decided it was entirely too sticky and added around another 75 g (½ cup) of flour. It was still very sticky, but at that point I decided to live with it and see what happened, which ended up turning out quite well).

7. Change the mixer attachment from the beater to the dough hook and knead until smooth (if making the dough by hand, turn – or, perhaps more likely, scrape – the dough out onto a floured surface and knead, gradually adding flour a little at a time, until smooth and a bit less sticky). As I was making the dough in the ever-reliable KitchenAid, I didn’t add any more flour at this stage (although I did worry whether I should – this was even stickier than brioche dough).

8. Divide the dough into 4 equal pieces (they should each weigh about 550 g).

9. Place the dough into 4 large lightly oiled bowls (large saucepans work if you’re starting to run out of bowls – if you’re starting to run out of kitchen bench space by now, you’re in the same spot I was in...) cover loosely with a layer of plastic wrap and then a tea towel. Allow the dough to rest and rise for 1 ½ hours in a warm place, after which it should be roughly doubled in size.

Traditional walnut filling

10. Place the ground walnuts, sugar, powder and cinnamon and cocoa powder in a bowl and stir to combine.

11. Heat the milk and butter to boiling and pour over the nut and sugar mixture.

12. Add the egg and vanilla and mix thoroughly.

13. Allow to stand at room temperature until ready to be spread on the dough. (If the mixture thickens, add a small amount of warm milk – I didn’t need to do this having scaled the recipe to use more egg).

To roll and fill the dough and make the loaves

14. Preheat oven to moderate 180°C / 350°F, and line your loaf tins with baking paper (I only had two loaf tins, so I baked in two batches).

15. Cover the kitchen bench with non-stick baking paper, ensuring it overlaps so there aren’t any gaps.

Note: The original recipe advocates rolling the dough, and forming the loaves, on a clean sheet or cloth – I’ve found previously, with dough – including phyllo – that baking paper seems to work just as effectively for this purpose, and creates less washing (which is important, given this recipe seems to use almost every utensil in the kitchen, as well as most of the tea towels).

16. Sprinkle the paper with a couple of tablespoons to a handful of sieved flour (use flour sparingly, but ensure there is a light sprinkle over the whole surface as, without it, the dough may well stick when you go to roll it up).

17. Place one of the four blobs of dough on the baking paper and roll it out with a lightly floured rolling pin, starting in the middle and working your way out, until it is roughly 40 cm square (15 inches).

18. Using a combination of the rolling pin and your hands, roll, stretch or gently pull the dough out from the centre until it is thin and a consistently almost-translucent. You should be able to see the outline of a pattern through the dough (if you slide a picture or some writing under the baking paper). Try to keep the shape roughly square. Gently sliding your lightly floured hand, palm down, beneath the dough as you go will help make sure it doesn’t stick to the paper.

19. Dollop filling evenly over the rolled out dough and, using a spoon or your fingers, spread over the dough until evenly covered.

20. Gently and tightly roll up the dough. There are several ways to do this:

- The easiest way is to just roll the dough along its horizontal edge (either from front to back or from back to front depending on which is easier – I found this was much of a muchness) until you have one long, thin sausage of dough. Then, coil the dough around itself into the base of the loaf tin (a little like in the picture shown, courtesy of the Daring Bakers website):

- Alternatively, roll the edge of the dough nearest you into the centre, and roll the edge furthest away into the centre, so there are two long sausages of dough joined up beside each other. Then, carefully fold the long ends of the sausage on top of each other (so that you have a roughly loaf-shaped lump which is two sausages wide, and three sausages high), as shown in the diagram below from the povitica genius at Wolf's Den.

21. Repeat the filling and rolling process with the remaining three blobs of dough to create another three loaves, coiling each sausage of dough in its own loaf tin. The different fillings I used are prepared as follows:

Peanut butter and jam

Place the peanut butter and milk in a microwave-safe bowl or a small saucepan, and heat until the peanut butter is soft. Stir thoroughly until well combined. Spread the peanut butter evenly over the rolled out dough. Then, dollop with strawberry jam and spread this evenly over the peanut butter layer. Roll up as explained above.

Ricotta and Moreno cherry

Mix the ricotta, cherries, and extra cherry juice in a small bowl until thoroughly combined. Spread evenly over the rolled out dough. Roll up as explained above.

Caramelised white chocolate

Warm the caramelised white chocolate in a microwave or small saucepan until it reaches a slow pouring consistency. Spread evenly over the rolled out dough, and sprinkle evenly (and liberally) with white chocolate chips. Roll up as explained above.

22. Brush the top of the traditional loaf with the coffee glaze (a mixture of 60 ml of strong coffee and 2 tablespoons of sugar, cooled). For other fillings, I used a glaze of a beaten egg and 2 tablespoons of sugar).

23. Cover tins lightly with a tea towel and allow to rest for around 15 minutes.

24. Place the tins (without tea towels) into the preheated oven and bake for approximately 15 minutes.

25. Turn down the oven temperature to slow 150°C / 300°F/ and bake for an additional 45 minutes, or until the top of the loaves are golden and crisp, the texture is firm rather than squishy when gently prodded and a thin skewer inserted into the centre comes out clean. Check on the loaves after a total of about 30 minutes, to ensure they’re not getting too brown – if that looks to be happening, cover them with a sheet of aluminium foil.

Note: I did the first two loaves with the oven initially hotter, then turned down after 15 minutes, and found that the walnut and cherry versions took quite a different time to cook through (the cherry one took almost 15 minutes longer). Consequently, I decided to turn the oven up to the higher temperature for the second batch, and left it there throughout. These second loaves took around an hour to cook, and didn’t end up too dry from the hotter temperature – and it’s less faffing about with a still-rather-temperamental oven!).

26. Remove bread from oven and brush with melted butter. Allow the loaves to cool on a wire rack for 20-30 minutes, preferably still in the bread pan. (If it’s stupid o’clock and you’ve still got two loaves to cook and need to use the loaf pans, turning them out earlier won’t kill them, but might mean they sink a little as the baked loaves are quite heavy and cooling them in the tin helps them to hold their shape. I think the varied shapes of mine had more to do with slight differences in the rolling technique than with the cooling process).

27. The loaves can be cut into slices with a serrated knife and it is apparently (and which I overlooked, rather to my regret) easier to do so after turning the bread upside down. I’d be interested to hear from other folks who’ve tried this recipe whether that’s the case and why. I did find they sliced more easily after being refrigerated overnight.

Warning: resting povitica dough may take over your kitchen!

But the results are worth it...

Apricots And Chaos

noreply@blogger.com (Sticky Penguin) — Sat, 27 Aug 2011 10:07:00 +0000

Sometimes, cakes emerge cleanly from their tins, without leaving crumbs lingering in corners. Sometimes, sauces thicken at just the right time, and don’t bubble away to a burnt and smoking nothing the moment you turn your back. Sometimes, the steak is perfectly cooked when you slice into it. And sometimes, the words flow like gravy over roast chicken.

Sometimes, though, they don’t. And what happens then? Practising. Pondering. Howling at the moon. Furtive baking in the tight crevices in between “real life”. Hoping that you haven’t talked so much that you’ve used up your lifetime’s quota of words already.

Only the foolish might take on bubbling sugar in such a frame of mind. The foolish… or the daring. Daring Bakers dragged me from a reluctant but accidental baking hiatus, and tipped me into sweetness and stickiness. It didn’t turn out quite the way I imagined, but, in the midst of chaos, it turned out at all and, sometimes, that’s more than enough to be grateful for.

The August 2011 Daring Bakers’ Challenge was hosted by Lisa of Parsley, Sage, Desserts and Line Drive and Mandy of What the Fruitcake?!. These two sugar mavens challenged us to make sinfully delicious candies! This was a special challenge for the Daring Bakers because the good folks at http://www.chocoley.com offered an amazing prize for the winner of the most creative and delicious candy!

I wanted to make sweets that tasted real, with a concentrated but subtle flavour from ingredients which don’t have unpronounceable names, and with delicate colouring rarely encountered in the confectionery aisle. Bright, clear, sunny tastes called out to distract me from the tail end of winter. There was a vague idea of making variations on a theme based around one core element. And then a package of apricot nectar, in those little pale blue glass bottles, sealed the deal and the experimenting began.

Eventually, a trio of apricot confections (apriconfections?) emerged from the kitchen. There were pale clouds of apricot marshmallow, glassy vivid squares of apricot Turkish delight and stickily dangerous (or should that be dangerously sticky?) chocolate ganache truffles filled with apricot marzipan and chocolate pistachio paste.

If it wasn’t quite the perfect apricot assiette I’d imagined, it was still a more than satisfying sugar high. The Turkish delight, in particular, turned out especially well, with a soft chewy-but-melting texture, a jewel-like glow and an unmistakeable apricot flavour. The marshmallows weren’t quite as fluffy as they’ve been on previous occasions and were so subtle that the apricot could’ve been easily mistaken or overlooked. A little added colour would have perked them up and added the power of suggestion to enhance the taste (although I’d been keen to try to keep the sweets “natural”, without artificial colours, flavours, or added glucose or corn syrup – not from any particular principle other than a desire to see how it turned out). The truffles were appropriately rich and sticky, with the apricot marzipan matching well with the dark chocolate coating, and some crunch added by the chocolate hail on the outside and the crushed pistachios lurking within.

So, if you’d like to try making some apricot confections of your own, this is how they were made…

Apricot Turkish Delight

Adapted from a recipe for passionfruit Turkish delight by Jane and Jeremy Strode published in Good Living on 21 June 2011

What you need

2 cups* / 440 g castor sugar

3 cups / 750 ml water

¼ tsp cream of tartar

1 tbsp lemon juice

¾ cup / 90 g cornflour

250 g icing sugar

18 g / 2 tbsp powdered gelatine

120 ml apricot nectar, refrigerated

What to do

1. Line a square or oblong baking tin or container with baking paper (I used a 20 cm (8 inch) square cake tin).

2. Put the caster sugar and ½ cup of the water in a saucepan and cook, stirring occasionally, on a medium heat until the sugar dissolves. Increase the heat to medium-high and bring the sugar syrup to the boil. Allow the syrup to boil until it reaches 115 °C (240 °F). Stir in the cream of tartar and lemon juice (being careful in case the mixture spits a little when you add them).

3. In another saucepan, combined the cornflour and icing sugar with another ½ cup of water and whisk until smooth. Put the kettle on to boil the remaining 2 cups of water, then whisk this into the cornflour mixture. (Note: this saucepan has not yet been put on the heat).

4. Add the sugar syrup mixture to the saucepan containing the cornflour mixture. Whisk over medium heat for around 30 minutes, after which the mixture will be thicker and more translucent. (Note: it’s already quite thick and translucent when you start, but will become more so as it’s cooked – it will end up smooth, but quite gloopy. Keep whisking it very regularly – it doesn’t have to be so continuous it gives you a cramp in your arm, but it should be watched carefully and whisked a lot. It will glump and bubble like a brightly coloured version of the Rotorua mud pools, so be careful not to get splashed).

5. While the mixture bubbles away (and in between whisking), combine the gelatine and cold apricot nectar and stir until smooth. Allow to sit for 10 minutes. When the bubbling mixture reaches the desired thickness, whisk in the apricot nectar and gelatine.

6. Pour the mixture into the prepared tray. Give it a jiggle so that the mixture levels out, and plonk it down firmly onto the bench top a couple of times to dislodge any air bubbles. Allow to set (either at room temperature or in the fridge). (If putting it in the fridge, be careful not to seal a lid over it, as condensation will form on the surface of the Turkish delight.

7. When the Turkish delight is firm, slide it (still attached to the paper) from the tray, carefully peel away the paper, and cut with a large sharp knife dipped in hot water or (even better) a pizza cutter. (Note: from an 8 inch tin, cutting 36 (6 x 6) or 49 (7 x 7) squares gives good-sized pieces. The original recipe suggests 24 pieces, but looks like it uses a much deeper container; still, that would be a big sugar hit in one go!).

Apricot Turkish delight will keep in the fridge for at least a week.

Apricot Marshmallows

Based on a recipe by Sugar Plum

What you need

18 g / 2 tbsp powdered gelatine

½ cup / 125 ml apricot nectar, refrigerated

2 cups / 385 g white sugar

½ cup / 125 ml water

1 tsp golden syrup

Olive oil spray

Icing sugar for dusting

What to do

1. Spray a cake tin or deep baking tray with olive oil spray, and dust thoroughly with a sieved icing sugar It only needs to be a light coating, but get right into the corners, or the marshmallow will stick – it tries to stick to everything!

2. Place the gelatine and cold apricot nectar into the bowl of a stand mixer and mix on low speed for a minute or two, using the whisk attachment. (Note: If you have a splash guard for your stand mixer, it’s a good idea to fit it now, as boiling sugar syrup is something to definitely keep a safe distance from).

3. Put the sugar, water and golden syrup in a large saucepan, and stir over medium heat until the sugar dissolves. Increase the heat to medium-high and bring to the boil. Allow the syrup to boil until it reaches 115 °C (240 °F) (this will take around 15 minutes).

4. With the mixer on low speed, pour the sugar syrup very carefully into the bowl of the mixer. Once all the syrup has been added, gradually increase the speed to medium. Beat the apricot and syrup mixture until it becomes thick, white and glossy and stops increasing in volume (around 10 – 15 minutes).

5. Spread the marshmallow mixture into the prepared tray, and smooth the top with a spatula dipped in hot water. Dust with sieved icing sugar, and allow to set for at least 4 hours (or overnight).

6. Carefully prise the set marshmallow from the tin and cut into squares using a sharp knife or pizza cutter. Dust the cut sides of the squares in icing sugar so they don’t stick together.

Marshmallows will keep in an airtight container for at least a week (but will gradually start to dry out as they get older).

Chocolate, Apricot and Pistachio Truffles

A sticky invention of the Sticky Penguin, with ganache recipe based on the Daring Bakers

What you need

100 g almond meal

50 g icing sugar

25 ml apricot nectar (approximately)

50 g pistachios, blanched and with shells and skins removed

200 g dark chocolate

200 ml cream

Dark chocolate hail

What to do

1. To make the apricot marzipan, place the almond meal and icing sugar in the bowl of a food processor and pulse to combine. Add the apricot nectar, a little at a time, until the mixture comes together into a ball that moves freely (but stickily) around the bowl. Wrap in cling film and refrigerate until required.

2. Finely chop the dark chocolate and place in a heat-proof bowl. Heat 130 ml of cream in a small saucepan until it bubbles round the edges but doesn’t reach a full boil. Pour the hot cream over the chopped chocolate and stir well until the chocolate is completely melted and the ganache is smooth.

3. Finely chop the pistachios, and combine with 60 g of the ganache. Place in the freezer until the mixture becomes firm.

4. Heat the remaining 70 ml of cream, and add to the remaining ganache, stirring in well.

5. To assemble the truffles, roll the apricot marzipan into balls (I got 12 balls from the quantity I made). Flatten each ball and use a ½ teaspoon measure to scoop a sphere of chocolate and pistachio ganache, and place this in the centre of the marzipan, pinching the marzipan over it to close it together. Reform the ganache-filled marzipan gently into evenly shaped balls. Coat the marzipan balls evenly with the thinner, plain ganache and then roll them in chocolate hail. Refrigerate or freeze until firm (although the truffles will still be a bit sticky).

* All references to cups in the recipes in this post are Australian / metric cups (1 cup = 250 ml)

From Couch Potato To Decadent Dessert - Peanut Sticky Rice Dumplings with Chocolate Shortbread and Salted Caramel Sauce

noreply@blogger.com (Sticky Penguin) — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 09:00:00 +0000

Does reality television kill off brain cells like a game of Space Invaders so that you stare slack-jawed at the accomplishment of others while sitting glued to the couch, shovelling down fast food? Or does it inspire you to leap forth, conquering new frontiers you would never have imagined? The truth is probably somewhere in between, but that would never make the news...

Last week, Marty Wilson wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald about what else people could accomplish in the time they spend watching reality shows and the artificial emotions experienced from vicariously living through the contestants. As a population, we watch more TV than ever before, we get bigger by creeping increments, we move less. But the (increasing) weight of statistics conceals the quiet minority, gobbling it up like a packet of salt and vinegar chips without pausing to brush the crumbs from its Snuggie.

From reality TV inspiration to the sticky reality of dessert...

Because some people are out there, writing their novels or working as lifeguards on the weekend or renovating the house. And some of them (especially, perhaps, the ones doing all those things) collapse in a heap at the end of the day and watch some TV to relax and switch off from whirling thoughts of chapter structures, training drills, how they’re going to fit the microwave into the redesigned kitchen or whatever else has been occupying their attention.

Others see people on TV doing something that looks like fun and think “Wow, I’d like to try that!”. In the place where that brain cell was killed off, a seed gets planted instead. That’s partly why I’m writing a food blog. Watching the enthusiastic amateurs on MasterChef make a huge range of dishes (and, sometimes, a hell of a mess as well), push their limits in the kitchen and visibly improve their skills was so much more approachable and motivating than watching a well-prepared and tightly edited chef make the same recipes. And into the kitchen I went. Tentatively at first, and then with increasing confidence (punctuated with regular baking fails, but also lots of things devoured happily by friends, workmates and the Other Penguin (who has infinite patience with a cinnamon-sprinkled and chocolate-daubed blur dashing between bowls and saucepans in the wee small hours, and even with the ensuing mountain of washing up).

This season, still watching MasterChef (go Team Billy!), I turn over ideas of what I’d make if faced with that particular range of ingredients. I look at the techniques and think of other places I could apply them. And, on a good day (and there are more and more of those), looking at a recipe gives me an idea for an adaptation of my own, or even a completely different dish. And, just this week, this led to sticky peanut dumplings with chocolate shortbread and salted caramel sauce…

Crunchy peanut filling

Alvin Quah was one of my favourite contestants on the second series of MasterChef – owing to a wonderfully sly sense of humour and a range of recipes that looked evocative and delicious in equal measure. He returned to the current series as a guest on last Friday’s masterclass, where he made black sesame dumplings in ginger syrup with wonton wafers. It looked like a perfect winter dessert – warming but not too stodgy. I’ve often enjoyed sweet, sticky dumplings with a peanut paste filling at yum cha, and this provided a starting idea. But, rather than pairing them with other Asian flavours, I took inspiration from the likes of Dan Hong and David Chang, and decided on the combination of peanuts, chocolate and caramel for a different twist.

I started out with such a vivid impression of the dessert I was aiming to create that I was a little apprehensive that it might’ve all been a little premature. Perhaps I’d bitten off more than I could chew – as those glutinous dumplings can be very chewy indeed. As the components gradually came together, I started to relax a bit more and felt quite proud when it was completed, as it was more elaborate than a lot of my usual baking inventions...

Can you have too much caramel sauce...?

This is how it was made:

Sticky Penguin’s Peanut Sticky Rice Dumplings with Chocolate Shortbread and Salted Caramel Sauce

What you need

For the shortbread

125 g (1 US cup) plain flour

63 g (¼ US cup) white sugar

32 g (¼ US cup) icing sugar

3 tbsp Dutch cocoa powder

¼ tsp salt

1 tsp vanilla extract

113 g (½ US cup) butter

Cold water as required (I used about 3 tsp)

For the dumpling filling

75 g peanuts (unshelled and unsalted)

37 g butter

37 g sugar

For the dumplings

250 g glutinous rice flour

240 ml water (approximate)

For the salted caramel sauce

115 g butter

200 g white sugar

300 ml heavy cream

Salt to taste

What to do

For the chocolate shortbread

(adapted from a previously adapted recipe)

1. Combine the flour, white sugar, icing sugar, cocoa powder and salt in the bowl of a food processor, and pulse until evenly combined.

2. Add the vanilla extract and butter, and pulse to combine until the mixture resembles coarse breadcrumbs.

3. Add the water, a teaspoon at a time, until the mixture comes together into a dough that rumbles round the bowl leaving just a few sticky traces behind.

4. Turn out the dough onto a piece of kitchen wrap or baking paper and roll into an even sausage (I made mine about 30 cm long and as wide as the circle formed when you join your thumb to your middle finger). Refrigerate for 30 minutes.

Note: if you’re trying to be efficient (and in a sticky penguin’s case, trying is usually the operative word), the dumplings can be made and filled while the shortbread dough chills and firms up.

5. Preheat the oven to 190°C / 375°F and line two baking sheets with non-stick paper.

6. Using a serrated knife, cut the chilled dough in slices around 3-4 mm thick and place on the baking sheets. As the dough warms up a little, the cookies can be reshaped slightly if needed (if you're being fussy and want to make them completely round).

7. Bake the shortbread for around 12 minutes. The cookies will be firm around the edges but still a little soft in the middle when they are ready - they firm up as they cool. Cooking them longer will make them more of a brittle consistency.

8. Allow the shortbread to cool on a wire rack so they're barely warm before using them in the dessert. Leftover cookies (as the recipe makes more than you'll need for 16 dumplings) are great with a cup of tea (or, with the rich chocolate flavour, an espresso).

For the dumpling filling

1. Grind the peanuts until they are reduced to very small pieces (just a little finer than the consistency coarse breadcrumbs or sea salt flakes). I used a food processor to do this (a stick blender attachment would be more efficient with this small quantity, but, alas, mine has recently died).

2. Melt the butter and sugar in a small saucepan, and then stir in the crushed peanuts. Stir to combine thoroughly, and continue cooking for a minute or two. Set the resulting crunchy peanut paste aside to cool.

For the dumplings

(made using the recipe from Alvin Quah, with my notes on what I discovered in the process of making dumplings for the first time)

1. Place the glutinous rice flour in a medium sized mixing bowl (the texture was loose enough that I opted not to sieve my flour, and didn’t end up with lumpy dumplings) and make a well in the centre.

2. Gradually add the water into the centre, mixing with one hand (or with a small metal spoon). Keep adding the water until the mixture comes together into a firm paste, which doesn't stick to your fingers (at least, not more than a tiny bit - I'm incapable of working dough without ending up in a bit of a sticky mess!).

Note: I made my dumplings in advance and left them for around half an hour while I pottered onto other kitchen experiments... when I came back to fill them, the dough had dried out and cracked when I tried to work it. I made a second batch of dumplings and used a tiny bit more water to make the dough more malleable, and rolled and filled the dumplings straight away, which was much more successful. I also followed rolled and filled the dumplings, as per the following three steps, one at a time, so that the dough didn't dry out quicker from sitting there in smaller pieces.

3. Divide the dough into 15-16 even pieces (they will weigh around 30 g each, if you're being fussy and want them all the same size), and roll each piece into a ball.

4. Gently flatten each dumpling a little, and press an indentation into it to contain the filling. Scoop a small amount of peanut filling into the centre of each dumpling (I found a measuring teaspoon was the ideal shape and size for this).

5. Fold the edges of the dumpling over the filling and press them together to seal the join. Roll the dumpling lightly between the palms of your hands to achieve a uniform shape and remove the sign of the join.

Note: When folding and sealing the dumplings, it is preferable for the filling to remain centred inside them, rather than off to one side. Next time I make these, I will roll the dumplings a little thinner and squeeze in more filling for a better squish-to-crunch ratio.

6. The dumplings can now be set aside until you're ready to start assembling the dessert.

7. To cook the dumplings, bring a large saucepan of water to the boil. Carefully add the dumplings (I lowered each one into the water using a quarter cup measure) and use a metal spoon to separate any that cluster together (I cooked the dumplings in two batches to avoid overcrowding). The dumplings are cooked when they float to the surface of the water (this took about 5 minutes).

8. Remove the dumplings from the boiling water (I used the cup measure again) and drain on a plate. I was very wary of using a sieve or kitchen paper to drain the dumplings, in case they stuck.

For the salted caramel sauce

(adapted, just a little, from Ready for Dessert, by David Lebovitz)

1. Place the butter and sugar in a large, heavy-bottomed saucepan (it's important to use a big saucepan, as the sauce will bubble up when the cream is added) and cook over a medium heat until the butter melts and the sugar has dissolved. Stir occasionally.

2. Continue cooking until the melted butter and sugar caramelise to a deep, rich golden colour. For quite a lot of the cooking process, the melted butter didn't emulsify with the sugar and floated as a separate layer on top. This will be resolved as it continues to cook and thicken, and a bit of a stir with a silicone spatula also helps.

3. Once you've boiled the caramel until it is as dark as you'd like, making sure you don't let it burn, remove it from the heat and, standing well back as it bubbles, add the cream and whisk like mad. Keep whisking until the mixture is smooth.

4. Add salt to taste (I used just under a teaspoonful).

5. Sieve the sauce into a container - it will keep for over a week in the fridge, and the recipe makes more than you will need for the dessert (though it is utterly delectable, so having some on hand for top ups might also be an option!).

To assemble the dessert

1. Place several spoonfuls of the salted caramel sauce in a flat bowl and swirl to evenly coat the bottom.

2. Put a shortbread biscuit in the centre of the caramel sauce.
3. Balance a dumpling on the shortbread, and sprinkle lightly with some of the leftover peanut filling.

The finished dessert was much more glamorous anything that's eventuated on a Sunday night at home before. It turned out very close to my imagining, and the mix of flavours and textures made the overall dish better than the sum of the parts. The silky caramel sauce unites the sleekly chewy dumpling with the crunchy crumble of the shortbread. The saltiness of the nuts and caramel, the slight bitterness of the dark chocolate just balance out the overall sweetness of the dish. I also liked that the dumpling, rather than making the dish heavy, was a simple contrast with the other flavours.

The Other Penguin, not typically a dumpling fan, polished it off, pronouncing the caramel sauce his favourite part. This is definitely a recipe I will return to – it would be ideal for dinner parties, as the components can be made in advance, and the dumplings cooked in a few minutes before serving.

After my first attempt at making sticky rice dumplings, I've decided that I’d far rather be one of the people who does stuff and then watches crap TV shows to unwind, rather than somebody with impeccable taste and nothing to show for it. Now, I’m off to knock up a batch of scones in the ad break...

Pulled Pork? Pull The Other One!

noreply@blogger.com (Sticky Penguin) — Tue, 05 Jul 2011 09:00:00 +0000

Sandwiches tend to be practical. Utilitarian. A concise report rather than a dulcet whisper. A pit-stop for fuel rather than a longed-for indulgence. The Other Penguin flat out refuses to buy them, on the basis that paying for something so mundane and so readily made at home is a highly objectionable concept. While I don't go quite that far, the number of sandwiches that are etched in my memory are few and far between.

Don't be deceived by its innocent appearance - this roll packs a porcine punch!

The Sticky Penguin Sandwich Hall of Fame comprises the following members (some of which, I'm almost certain, are all the more alluring for being hard to come by):

Coronation chicken from Albion Caff in Shoreditch. London's a long way for a sandwich, though (even one that good, and large enough to qualify as dinner).
Special chicken salad* with celery and mayonnaise on fluffy white bread, that used to be served in the murky peace and quiet of the cafe underneath David Jones, before it was very ill-advisedly removed to stuff in more cosmetics. Preferably accompanied with thin and crispily golden chips (that'd be the sandwich, not the make-up. Not so keen on fries with that when hunting down mascara or browsing the latest OPI shades).
Ham and cheese baguette in the cafe at the Louvre. A combination of the appetite built up wandering corridors gazing at art, the happy surprise of finding exactly-what-I-felt-like-eating at a major tourist spot (let alone finding it well-executed) and the timeless simplicity of the food itself.
Just about anything from EARL Canteen (with preference for the slow-cooked lamb or - so far, alas, only vicariously - the duck confit).
Sausage and tomato sauce sandwiches, made using cold left-over sausages. Long ago, a favourite lunch-box discovery (second only to leftover home-made lasagna**) and now a summertime pleasure after over-catering for barbecues, and Christmas treat when down the coast (the Trifle-Eating Cat's Parents have a ready supply of sausages, and aren't the slightest bit sparing in their use. Squee!)
And an honorary mention also goes to just about anything from the now-departed and much missed Moose General Store.

Having settled on that list (with one notable omission, which is of such significance as to warrant proper consideration separately), I will doubtless go pootling through the week beset by random thoughts of the Sandwiches I Loved And Forgot. Which tends to be the way when trying to come up with any sort of definitive list, from groceries to wedding guests.

This weekend, though, a new contender for the Best Ever Sandwich emerged. Like the cool new kid at school, it swaggered in and grabbed my attention, distracting me from faithful and familiar friends...

Could you go past the pulled pork?

The prospect of a trip to the Pyrmont Growers Market was sufficiently enticing to prompt a rare early start on a Saturday morning. It was ages since I'd paid a visit, and I was keen to suss out what interesting discoveries might be made. The market was bigger, busier and much muddier than I remembered . Old favourites like the Australian Honey Sellers and Whisk & Pin had been joined by wontons, micro herbs and an array of condiments that bordered on boggling.

I'd run out the door without breakfast in the hope that something tasty would present itself, and I wasn't disappointed. There were lengthy queues for coffee and at any stall with the wafting fragrance of bacon. There was also a stall offering a minimalist menu of pulled pork rolls and porridge. It smelt fabulous. It looked delicious. I got in during a rare lull in the crowd. Much as the porridge, on offer with rhubarb and almonds, sounded entirely satisfying, there was no going past the pork. And there it was... a sandwich revelation...

The pulled pork (made with Berkshire free range pork) was matched with vividly pink beetroot coleslaw, squirted with a tangy barbecue sauce that bore as much resemblance to the usual sugary gloop as a duck does to a flamingo. The roll was soft and tender, filling but still light, and the perfect size and shape to pick up. The proportions of pork, slaw, sauce and bun were the edible equivalent of the golden ratio. Heaven, without need of a stick. I perched on a sandstone wall and blissfully munched until all that remained was a warm, comfortable not-too-fullness and a fuchsia smear on the plate. The astonishing sandwich came from The Table Sessions, which also does guerrilla dining events in Sydney, something which I'm now going to need to investigate very thoroughly.

Once more, for those who missed it! Complete with dodgy camera phone photos...

Have you had a sandwich that elevates the lunch--on-the-run staple to something special? I'd love to hear about it, and where you found it. I suspect the next stop on the trail to find culinary nirvana might need to involve a Reuben...

* For those to whom "special chicken" denotes a source of protein originating from almost any bird, beast, fish or creature other than an actual chicken, I believe the description of "special" is properly applied in this instance to the chicken as turned into a salad, or perhaps to the sandwich in its entirety.

** The range of foods which a Sticky Penguin will cheerfully tuck into with relish (not literally - I've never been one for pickles and suchlike) at cold-to-room-temperature is an occasional source of mystification to others. Perhaps it's because microwaves are relatively rare in the Antarctic. But then again, so's home-made lasagna...

Talking About Food Doesn't Have To Be Funny

noreply@blogger.com (Sticky Penguin) — Sat, 02 Jul 2011 04:12:00 +0000

When I first came to Australia, I wanted to fit in with all the desperation my ten-year-old heart could muster. I longed to fly under the radar after the “new girl” awkwardness had faded. But there were two things that stood in my way. The twin crimes of an English accent and an apparently precocious vocabulary marked me as that most un-Australian of things, “up myself”. I was frustrated and confused by it – I’d recently arrived from a small-ish town in New Zealand, where I’d never been singled out for being different, much less had it held against me.

What time had (mostly) dismissed as the ability of children of a certain age to go straight for the jugular came back to me earlier today. Sue Bennett’s article in the weekend Sydney Morning Herald transported me from sprawling on the couch with the weekend papers on my lap to standing in a playground in the height of summer with my words stuck in my throat.

Bennett takes a well-worn Blundstone to people who say foreign words with the accompanying accent when it isn’t native to themselves. Saying parmegiano instead of parmesan, for instance. Such pronunciation apparently amounts to pretentiousness of, if not the worst kind, at least a kind that can be safely lampooned from behind the pie stand.

The particularly blood-boiling example Bennett gives is when people apply an accent when all they’ve done is to live there. How dare they have the temerity to live in Italy for ten years and then come back here and talk about gelato instead of ice cream? Or have spent a decent length of time in France and be so bold as to not stumble when pronouncing hors d’oeuvres. And a friend who’s travelled widely in China and can hold their own ordering dim sum is a rare gift, and no cause for mockery.

When we travel abroad and try different foods in their countries of origin, efforts, however wobbly and unconvincing, to speak the local language almost always receive a kind reception. Why can’t we practice a little before we go without being sneered at? Why not show respect for another whose food you’ve had a lifelong love for by trying not to mangle the names of recipes and ingredients. The “poor ill-educated person out there” at the deli counter, patisserie or café who doesn’t know the word might not mind finding out what it is, as long as you don’t ram it down their throat.

Sure, there are some people with affectations to rival Hyacinth Bucket’s, who grasp at every misplaced opportunity to appear more sophisticated. And I’ll cheerfully laugh at that sort of thing through a mouthful of sausage roll. But the idea that simply using the right word for something, native pronunciation and all, makes you a snob is to sit in a Vegemite-smeared cave of ignorance.

On the multicultural platter that is Sydney’s food scene, should we have to ask for gnocchi, pho, dulce de leche or (gulp) gewürztraminer in broad ‘Strine? And where would Bennett have us draw the line? Should we all be calling a jus a juice or lumping it in alongside lumpy gravy? And there’s the never-ending macaron versus macaroon debate that’s been bubbling away ever since we discovered those delectably impossible confections. How presumptuous of us to lay claim to these foods with names that make us feel more comfortable. If all we want is comfort, why not stay at home with cheese on toast. As long as it isn’t groo-yeah, that is. Better just have a couple of slices of good old Bega tasty.

We want to embrace the ever-increasing variety of delicious food that’s available here, as long as it fits in and we don’t have to use any funny words. If we applied that sort of logic to people, there’d be an uproar. Oh, hang on…

But if you say tomato on toast and I say bruschetta, does it really matter? If we can eat better, travel more, and revel in the opportunity to enjoy everything that other parts of the world have to offer, getting caught up in the semantics seems a petty schoolyard relic. Some of us, though, are left with the memory of a choked up feeling that didn’t have words, as though a piece of prosciutto had gone down the wrong way.

Feats Of Daring - Macadamia & Lemon Myrtle Baklava

noreply@blogger.com (Sticky Penguin) — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 08:24:00 +0000

Foodie. It's a term that can make some people quail* and others bristle with indignation (or indigestion, perhaps). There's a resemblance to greenie or hippie, with connotations of smug righteousness and well-intended but rather impractical passion. A hint of the facile. "I eat, therefore I am". Or worse, "I eat, therefore I'm going to gloat about it to everybody".

Like it or not, I realised I was a foodie on my honeymoon last year. Roaming Paris and perusing Rome with a long list of patisseries and pasticceria and purposeful intent to visit each and every one. Skyping restaurants in New York from the other side of the world to secure dinner reservations weeks before arrival. Squeaking with glee on first encountering the astonishment of the grande epicerie at Bon Marche. Foraging through cookbook shops, snaffling my way across markets and walking for miles on end in pursuit of all manner of comestibles. Gulp! Or should that be gobble...?

Similarly, I was reluctant to claim the "baker" moniker. Of course I'm not a baker. They know what they're doing. I just make occasional batches of brownies (seven batches in a weekend, for instance). I'm far too rustic and messy to be a real baker. I'm only tinkering in the margins, experimenting. And taking morning tea for my group at work at least once a week. With the occasional evening class thrown in, to learn something a bit more unusual. Much as I can dream up gooey, squishy, crunchy and excessive things to put into a brownie for hours on end, I decided it was time for a bit more of a challenge. After seeing the beautiful confections created by so many others online, I bit the bullet and signed up to Daring Bakers.

For anybody not already familiar with Daring Bakers (the dessert-obsessed counterpart to Daring Cooks), it's an online group which takes on a monthly challenge to test their skills, creativity... and patience. There's a base recipe provided, which provides plenty of scope for variations while helping you learn the basic (or not-so-basic) techniques involved. When I discovered the theme for this month, I wondered quite what on earth I'd got myself into. Erica of Erica’s Edibles was our host for the Daring Baker’s June challenge. Erica challenged us to be truly DARING by making homemade phyllo dough and then to use that homemade dough to make Baklava. Baklava. From scratch. Eeeep!

I decided to put my own spin on the baklava by adding some local ingredients to give it a different flavour - macadamias, lemon myrtle, and blue box honey. If you'd like to try making it, here's how it was done...

Note: recipes are my adaptation of the Daring Bakers recipes:
- phyllo dough recipe originally from Kaffeehaus - Exquisite Desserts from the Classic Cafés of Vienna, Budapest and Prague, by Rick Rodgers
- baklava recipe originally from Alton Brown, Food Network

Macadamia and Lemon Myrtle Baklava
I doubled the basic recipe for the phyllo dough to make enough to fill a 23 cm (9 inch) square tin and a mini version in a 10 cm (4 inch) round springform tin. Had I been a little more careful with my trimmings, the recipe would've made enough for at least another second mini version. The syrup quantities below have been increased from the original recipe to allow enough for this additional tin. There was plenty of filling (and a little left over) without any changes to quantities (although I was using quite a different nut mixture).

What you need
For the phyllo dough
370 g plain flour
¼ tsp salt

210 ml water

4 tbsp / 60 ml vegetable oil (I used grapeseed oil), plus a little extra to brush the dough

1 tsp / 5 ml apple cider vinegar
For the filling
180 g macadamias
180 g almonds, blanched
105 g walnuts
1½ tsp ground lemon myrtle
¼ tsp mixed spice
150 g brown sugar
For the syrup
300 ml honey (I used blue box)
100 ml golden syrup
400 ml water
300 g granulated sugar
3 strips of lemon zest
2 tbsp / 30 ml lemon juice

What you do
Phyllo dough
1. Sieve the flour and salt into the bowl of a stand mixer and stir to combine.
2. Combine the water, oil and vinegar in a separate bowl or measuring jug.
3. With the mixer on low speed, gradually add the wet ingredients to the dry ingredients, mixing with the paddle attachment until it becomes a soft dough. If it doesn't come together, it may be necessary to add a little more water to get to this consistency (although mine was just right with the specified quantities, and quite sticky enough).
4. Change from the paddle attachment to the dough hook with the stand mixer, and let the dough knead for 10 minutes. After this time, it should be smooth, squishy and stretchy.
5. Remove the dough from the mixer and knead by hand for another couple of minutes. During this process, pick up the dough and throw it down hard onto the benchtop several times (which makes a very satisfying thwack, as well as developing the gluten in the flour). I kneaded my dough on a sheet of baking paper and found it didn't need any flour added at this stage to avoid any sticking.
6. Shape the dough into a ball, and lightly cover it with a thin film of oil. Wrap up tightly with plastic wrap and leave to rest for 30-90 minutes (the longer the better). As suggested in the recipe, I left mine for 2 hours and found it very easy to work with. Although, as it got easier to work with as I reached the end of the dough later on, it might be even better left for 3 hours (or perhaps it just improves with practice!).

Filling
While the dough rests, make the filling, so that as soon as the dough is ready, you can begin assembling the baklava. This will avoid the messy predicament of ending up with sheets of phyllo all over the kitchen!
Place all the ingredients into the bowl of a food processor and process on high until finely chopped.

Roll out the phyllo dough
After the dough has rested, it needs to be rolled out as thinly as possible. So thin you can see through it. It sounds scary, but it turned out to be much less of an impossible task, especially after a bit of experimenting with the technique.
1. Tear off a piece of dough about the size of a golf ball, making sure you re-wrap the remaining dough so it doesn't dry out.
2. Liberally flour your work area, rolling pin and hands. I used a piece of dowelling, and it made the process much lighter and easier than a regular rolling pin.
3. Roll the dough out a bit to flatten it out. I then found that the most effective way to roll the dough as thin as needed was to roll with one hand, while using the other hand to gently pull the dough away from the direction I was rolling. After repeating a couple of times, I then turned the dough 90 degrees and continued, so that it ended up evenly shaped.
4. The original recipe suggests wrapping the lightly-rolled dough around your dowel or rolling pin, and roll quickly back and forth, after which the dough neatly unrolls from the pin, thinner and larger. When I tried this, I ended up with a sticky muddle which would not unroll from the pin. But the roll-and-stretch approach produced good results.
5. Keep rolling until the dough is as thin as possible. If it has some small tears, this doesn't matter and won't show, as long as you have one neat and tidy sheet for the very top of the finished baklava. Also, as you cut the phyllo to fit the shape of your tin, if it isn't as thin around the very edges this won't matter as this area will be trimmed away.
6. Towards the end, it can be easiest to pick the dough up and stretch it out with your hands (a little like pizza dough).

Assemble the baklava
1. Line the tin with baking paper and brush with melted butter. Preheat the oven to 180°C (355°F) (I didn't use the fan setting).
2. With a sharp knife or pizza cutter, cut the first sheet of phyllo to fit the base of the tin. As I have several 9 inch square pans (they're the perfect size for brownies), I used an empty tin as a template for cutting out the sheets. If you just have one tin, cutting a piece of paper to the right size would also work well.
3. Carefully place the sheet into the tin, making sure it is flat and not curled up in the corners.
4. Brush the phyllo sheet very lightly with melted butter.
5. Repeat this process with another 4 phyllo sheets, brushing lightly with butter in between. After this, you should have five layers of phyllo in the tin, with butter brushed in between and on the top layer.
6. Add an even layer of the filling on top of the phyllo, making sure it goes right to the edges. The recipe advocates adding 1/3 of the filling, but I found I had so much filling it was more like a bit less than a quarter.
7. Repeat the process with another 5 sheets of buttered phyllo and then add more filling.
8. Repeat the process again.
9. Finish with 5 layers of buttered phyllo. Make sure your final sheet is even and rip-free.
10. Gently tuck any stray edges of phyllo down the sides of the tin using a spatula. Pat the baklava down so that it's even and to remove any air bubbles.
11. Using a sharp knife (a small paring knife worked well, as it was easy to maneuver in the tin), cut the baklava into pieces. I cut mine into 25 squares (5 by 5), then cut each square on the diagonal. If it's tricky to get all the way to the bottom, don't worry as this can be finished part-way through baking, although I found it ok to do fully before baking).
12. Brush liberally with melted butter, ensuring the phyllo is completely covered and there are no bare spots.
13. Bake for 30 minutes, then remove from the oven and, if necessary, finish cutting all the way through to the bottom of the tin. Return the tin to the oven for around another 30 minutes, or until the top of the baklava is an even light golden brown. Mine took exactly one hour in total.

Syrup
Start making the syrup when you put the baklava into the oven, so it will have time to cool to room temperature by the time the baklava is ready. When adding the syrup to the baklava, once of the two needs to be hot, and the other at room temperature - doing it this way round seemed to be quicker and easier than waiting for baklava to cool and adding boiling syrup.
1. Combine all the ingredients for the syrup in a saucepan. Stir occasionally over a medium heat until the sugar has fully dissolved.
2. Bring the mixture to a boil and boil for 10 minutes, stirring occasionally.
3. Set aside to cool, then strain into a jug.

Finishing off
1. As soon as you remove the baklava from the oven, pour the cooled syrup over the top, starting by pouring it along all the cut lines, and finishing by ensuring that the whole surface has been coated with the syrup. It looks like an enormous amount of syrup, but it will absorb to produce a beautifully sticky baklava.
2. Leave the baklava overnight to rest and absorb the syrup. The finished baklava can be stored in an airtight container at room temperature (if it lasts that long) or in the fridge if you prefer (which will make it firmer and less gooey).

I was really quite thrilled with how well the baklava turned out, as I'd never made it before (or made my own phyllo pastry). It looked quite convincing, and smelled sweet and fragrant. The Other Penguin was quite impressed with the look of it, too.

The verdict on the tasting will be updated on this post tomorrow, after the finished product has been sampled at work...

* Lightly roasted and wrapped in prosciutto, perhaps? Although not for some of us, who just can't handle cute food...

Unexpected Sweetness – Sticky Date Cake

noreply@blogger.com (Sticky Penguin) — Sun, 19 Jun 2011 12:42:00 +0000

Do shiny new recipe books follow you home like wayward kittens and creep into every room of the house until they reach such epic proportions that they threaten to fall with a terrible splat! into a bowl of cake batter*? Or is that just around this neck of the woods? My name is Sticky Penguin and I’m addicted to cookbooks.

The Other Penguin has taken evasive action in an effort to slow the arrival of further cookbooks (realising that stopping them entirely is likely to be like trying to bail out the QE2 with a tea cup). He arrived home last week with two glossy books of desserts borrowed from the library. A quiet evening of reading and gluttonously plotting baking efforts followed...

The first of the books was The Sweet Life. Not to be confused with The Sweet Life In Paris, David Lebovitz’s love affair with Paris that guided so much delicious pootling around that city last year, this is a book of desserts by Kate Zuckerman, the former pastry chef at Chanterelle in New York. Sadly, after going in search of the restaurant online in anticipation of trying some of their sweet offerings for myself, I found that after 30 years in business and being among the first wave of fine dining destinations in TriBeCa, Chanterelle had fallen foul of the financial meltdown and closed in 2009.

Zuckerman was named in 2005 as one of the ten best US pastry chefs by Pastry Art & Design and Chocolatier magazines (now combined into Dessert Professional). So she knows her onions. Or perhaps that should be her quinces. And tarts. And chocolate... Best of all, she’s keen to share her knowledge along with her creations. The Sweet Life mixes the how-to of essential dessert basics – browning butter, making caramel, even simply creaming butter and sugar – with recipes applying those skills along with a handful of variations to inspire you to venture into new territory for yourself.

Many high-profile chefs can be all about personality, whether bubbling with butter and slapdash enthusiasm or instructing with haughty precision. Zuckerman, while leaving you in no doubt of her passion, has a pleasantly conversational tone. She offers the helpful guidance of an experienced mentor standing beside the kitchen bench, ready to let you try to scale new heights but ready with advice before you bite off more than you can chew.

Some people might find the frequent cross references to tips and techniques on other pages of the book an unwelcome distraction. However, I liked that these were largely for extra information, with the method for each recipe all found in one place so avoided the need to flick back and forth with floury hands or at crucial moments. Notes explaining the science underlying the method (written with the input of Kirsten Hubbard, a food scientist) are also a useful resource for those, like me, whose baking experiments begin with “I wonder what would happen if...”.

The book is grouped into chapters by type of dessert that run the gamut from tarts to ice creams and candies. There are quick options for a last-minute dessert or a rainy afternoon (flourless chocolate bête noir, strawberry-rhubarb crisp), approachable challenges (chocolate caramel tart, prune armagnac creme brûlée) and stand-out-show-off showpieces (cardamom and honey pistachio nougat glacé). Tina Rupp’s photography shows off the detail of a selection of Zuckerman’s recipes – although, for those who use the photo rather than the ingredients to make their selection, be warned that not all of the recipes are illustrated.

In an ever-more-crowded field of dessert cookbooks, The Sweet Life is a valuable guide for those eager to learn new techniques as well as expanding their repertoire.

Trying to decide where to begin in testing out some recipes, the Date Cake with Toffee Sauce looked like the perfect way to use up a bag of fresh Medjool dates lurking neglectedly at the bottom of the fridge. While the recipe wasn’t a difficult one, I was interested in applying the guidance on effectively creaming butter and sugar to achieve a light consistency and the highly liquid cake batter was a way to put my newly repaired oven** to the test.

The recipe, with metric conversions and my extra notes and comments, is as follows:

Date Cake from The Sweet Life: Desserts from Chanterelle

What you need

255 g / 9 oz fresh dates (I used around 15 Medjool dates)

2 tbsp brandy (the recipe also suggests you could use Grand Marnier)

2 tsp instant espresso powder

170 g / 6 oz / 12 tbsp butter, at room temperature

175 g / 1 cup soft brown sugar (references to cups are US cups, not metric)

4 eggs, at room temperature

220 g / 1¾ cups plain flour

1/8 tsp ground cloves

1/8 tsp ground nutmeg

¼ tsp cinnamon

½ tsp salt

1½ tsp bicarbonate of soda (baking soda)

What to do

1. Preheat the oven to 160°C (325°F).

2. Line a 23 cm (9 inch) square cake tin with baking paper.

3. Halve the dates and remove the pits. Place the dates in a mixing bowl and add the brandy and espresso powder. Add 240 ml (1 cup) of boiling water to the bowl and allow the mixture to steep for 10 minutes.

4. Puree the date mixture in a food processor (or you could use a resilient stick blender, or a stand mixer) - it doesn't have to be completely smooth.

5. Cream the butter for 1 minute in a stand mixer, then add the sugar and continue creaming for another 6 to 8 minutes, until the mixture is light, fluffy and pale. Stop periodically to scrape down the sides of the bowl.

6. Add the eggs, one at a time, and mix on low speed for around 20 seconds after each one. If it starts to look curdled, don't worry about it - it will balance out when the dry ingredients are added.

7. In a separate bowl, sieve together the flour, clove, nutmeg, cinnamon and salt. Don't add the bicarb soda yet - just in case you were going to plonk in all the dry ingredients, and then go 'bugger' after going back to the recipe (which didn't happen this time...). With the mixer on slow speed, and half the flour mixture to the butter, sugar and eggs.

8. Add the bicarb soda to the date mixture and stir for around 10 seconds.

9. Keeping the mixer on slow, add the date mixture to the cake batter and incorporate thoroughly. Then, add the remaining half of the flour and spices and mix until combined and no floury streaks remain. Scrape down the bowl, then mix on slow speed for 30 seconds.

10. Pour the batter into the lined tin, and level the top with a spoon or spatula. It's a very runny batter before being baked, just in case you look at it and wonder how it's going to turn into a cake (or is it just me that has those worries, borne of the until-now dodgy oven?). Bake on the centre shelf of the oven, for 45 minutes to 1 hour, until the centre of the cake is set when tested with a thin skewer. My cake was done after 48 minutes. Allow to cool in the cake tin, then turn out onto a wire rack.

Note: The recipe book suggests serving the cake with warm toffee sauce, although I think it would be wonderful with custard. A coffee ganache could also be interesting to try. I was taking the cake to share at work, so kept it plain (a sticky cake is so much trickier in that setting), and just sprinkled it lightly with icing sugar.

The novelty of an evenly baked cake after a newly fixed oven

The finished cake was the beautiful dark golden colour of a jar of treacle held up to the light. The coffee and brandy introduced deeper, subtler flavours than found in the sticky date cakes and toffee puddings on cafe menus from Double Bay to Dungog. It had a light, almost springy texture. While lovely and moist, no hint of its runny incarnation prior to baking remained. Also, to my enormous delight, the cake rose gently and evenly. Perhaps to truly experience the joy of a functional oven, you need to have suffered five years of grappling with a disgruntled Smeg.

If all new baking efforts turned out as well as the Sticky Date Cake, it would be a sweet life indeed...

* And I do mean the recipe books here, not the kittens. Although I’d be so happy to have a kitten that I mightn’t mind too much having to wrangle a squirming, biting one in a bowl of soapy water to clean up the result of the splat!

** For those of you familiar with the trials of the Evil Smeg, it has lately had its thermostat replaced, causing great joy and rejoicing in one half of the penguin household, and a welcome break from (quite so many) dark mutterings from the kitchen in the other half.

Paddington Bear On A Diet – Marmalade Loaf

noreply@blogger.com (Sticky Penguin) — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 09:00:00 +0000

Sometimes, you just feel like baking something quick and easy without ending up with a kitchen full of over-indulgence waiting to happen. A little sweetness, just enough to keep you going. Something you could toast lightly and call breakfast. Or supper. Or afternoon tea.

Something like a marmalade loaf, perhaps. It’s faintly sweeter than bread from a sunny zing of orange marmalade, a bit more unassuming than a cake, with a satisfying tender, almost scone-like consistency. At first bite, it seems so innocent – but it creeps up on you* and whispers like the angel on your shoulder (a warm, plump sort of an angel) to abandon the sinful excesses of those devilishly indulgent brownies and follow the true path to baking enlightenment. But before I lapse into any more extravagant personification, perhaps I should just get on with telling you how it’s made, and let it convince you for yourself...

Marmalade Loaf

Adapted, very slightly, from Serious Eats

(http://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2010/08/bread-baking-orange-quick-bread-recipe.html)

What you need

237ml / 4 fl oz / 1 (US) cup milk (I used non-fat skim milk)

57 g / 2 oz / 4 tablespoons butter

113 g / 4 oz / ½ (US) cup orange marmalade (using good quality marmalade - or home-made - makes a big difference; I used Bonne Maman)

1 tsp lemon juice

383 g / 13½ oz / 3 (US) cups plain flour

1 tbsp baking powder

1 tsp salt

What to do

1. Preheat oven to 175°C (350°F).
2. Line a loaf tin (I use one that measures 23½ x 13 cm (9¼ x 4¼ inches)) with baking paper.

3. Over a low heat, melt the butter with the milk in a saucepan. Remove from the stove and add the marmalade, mixing in well (I found the back of a fork useful to break up the marmalade-y clumps). Allow to cool for around 10 minutes, and stir in the lemon juice.

4. Sieve the flour, baking powder and salt into a bowl and stir to combine. Add them to the contents of the saucepan and mix until combined (given the scone-like texture of the loaf, avoid over-mixing, as it’s likely to make it tough and chewy).

5. Spoon the batter into the lined tin and spread out evenly (if you’re using particularly chunky marmalade, poke in any bits of orange zest sticking up from the top of the batter, as they are likely to turn dark brown during baking – they still taste good, but detract a bit from the appearance, if that sort of thing is important to you).

6. Bake for around 40 minutes, until the top is golden and a skewer inserted into the loaf comes out clean. Cool in the tin for 5 minutes, then slide out onto a wire rack to finish cooling (the loaf is delicious served still warm, but if you leave it sitting in the tin for too long, it can get a little damp underneath).

The marmalade loaf has come in handy when baking for friends who are trying to steer clear of tooth-aching quantities of sugar, and for the Other Penguin to take to work for a home-made snack that’s sustaining but doesn’t result in a sugar crash half an hour later. I also like that it’s so easy to transport compared to lots of baking, too – no sticky icing, a regular shape that can be wrapped in paper and foil (or a tea towel) and not too prone to being squished**.

I’d like to try out some variations next time I make this loaf, starting with the substitution of the quince marmalade I recently made from a David Lebovitz recipe, but also experimenting with other flavours of marmalade and jam. And a little voice in my head in wondering whether the angel and the devil can reach agreement with a nutella loaf...

* Not literally – I’m not sure whether being crept up on by baked goods is the stuff of dreams or of cheese-on-toast-induced nightmares...

** This is the sort of practical consideration that comes from far too many occasions of wrangling bags of dance gear with boxes of muffins, bounding out of taxis with foil-wrapped packages of cake, and walking round Centennial park with carrier bags of brownies.

A Life Half Lived - Breakfast Discoveries

noreply@blogger.com (Sticky Penguin) — Thu, 26 May 2011 09:00:00 +0000

Ok, it might be a little far fetched to suggest that life is only half-lived* before discovering a particular food. But it's cheese**. And it tastes indulgent and satisfying, but is actually good for you. How did I survive *coughspluttercough* years without discovering the deliciousness of ricotta on toast.
It's slightly less healthy, I suspect, when served on toasted slices of golden brioche from Bourke Street Bakery for a weekend lunch. But it looks so much more appetising than the eaten-at-the-desk version that make a regular appearance on weekdays, sprinkled with cinnamon...

Brioche toast with ricotta (which really wasn't burnt round the edges - the lovely flaky golden brioche just doesn't come across in hasty photos)

Sitting beside the Other Penguin, who's eating a sausage roll, also makes your own lunch feel more nutritious...

Pork and fennel sausage roll (perhaps a little on the crispy side underneath, but still very tasty)

He has a better iPhone, too. Although photos are always a little dodgy when they're standing between a penguin and her lunch!

* Well, a type of cheese. Going this long without any cheese whatsoever is a terrifying thought...
** Maybe 10% less lived would be more accurate? Thinking about numbers definitely needs a good breakfast. And not thinking about numbers is greatly improved by one, too!

Chasing Your Tail

noreply@blogger.com (Sticky Penguin) — Wed, 25 May 2011 09:00:00 +0000

There are some days where it feels like you’re running to catch up to yourself all day. Whether you’ve started out behind and are working furiously to climb the to-do list equivalent of K2, or you just can't get into the swing on things from the get-go, there are just not. enough. hours. to. get. it. all. done. Eep!

Sometimes, it feels like if you could only run fast enough, you’d eventually catch your cruisier, lazier self a lap behind (or on the couch with a plate of cookies), give them a shake and get them to run with you so you could get more done*. Or perhaps you’d just flake out beside them on the couch and accompish the ever-admirable goal of eating twice as many cookies!

Moomin blanket by Ekelund from Scandinavian Design Center

Aside from being my favouite shade of periwinkle blue**, this blanket has a Moomin. A Moomin! Or possibly two, depending on how you look at it. It might be entirely too cute and obvious with just one, centrally placed Moomin – but with a wrap-around pattern it becomes so much more striking.

It would be a cosy addition to the couch, too. Perhaps along with these cookies...

Moomin cookies from Lindsey Bakes as featured on Kitka Design

Why did the Moomin cross the road? To escape a gluttonous penguin trying to turn him into a cookie!

* This is also a more drastic way to check your back view compared to the pedestrian utility of a full-length mirror.

** Maybe my equal favourite with seafoam green (although not not necessarily together). But, as a total inability to confine my blog design to an subtle and minimal palette, and a repeated admiration for rainbow-hued baking will attest, this might rapidly turn into a much longer list.

Canned Heat

noreply@blogger.com (Sticky Penguin) — Tue, 24 May 2011 09:00:00 +0000

When left to my own devices with too many distractions (and a dishwasher), I seem to end up accumulating half-finished (or, for the optimists out there, half-started) cups of tea all over the place. They get cold, they get forgotten, they get replaced with newer hotter ones*. They also make an awful lot of clutter.

While my favourite Emma Bridgewater mug offers a bit of encouragement to remember a cuppa, perhaps a way to keep the contents hotter for longer could come in handy. Especially if it was to resemble a penguin in a sombrero!

Penguin mug from ModCloth

At this time of year, even penguins could do with a bit of added warmth!

* Which is a bit of a slippery slope to get started down...

Holding Court

noreply@blogger.com (Sticky Penguin) — Sun, 22 May 2011 09:00:00 +0000

Queen for a day, king for a lifetime? The thing that strikes me about this Disney-regal cake is that it looks positively pedestrian after Princess Beatrice's recent millinery madness...

Cake from Bright Ideas

I do like the thought of scaling this back to a simple white and silver version - tiara cake, anybody?

Sugar High Brownies – Fairy Penguins

noreply@blogger.com (Sticky Penguin) — Sat, 21 May 2011 01:50:00 +0000

What do you do when you drive your partner to distraction and your workmates to hungry frustration by your constant talk of baking? When every time you catch up with a friend, you take a package of a little something (or three) that you thought they might like to try? When your last waking thoughts are of what on earth to do with a jar of lavender and how to tinker with the proportion of flour in cookie dough. And when you sleepily ask your aforementioned and infinitely patient partner, who is tinkering on his phone, potentially in a most-probably-futile effort to stop you going on about varieties of brownies at a ridiculous hour of the night, could he please write down salted caramel marshmallows in case you forget before morning?

Home-made cherry-flavoured sprinkles - get ready to pipe lots (and lots) of lines!

It’s time for a Plan (and if it has Capital Letters, then it has to be Serious Business). To bring just a bit of order to the chaos, and a little momentum to the whimsy. Finding other like-minded souls who share the obsession with wielding spatulas into the wee small hours would also be good*. Joining a baking group sounded like the ideal solution.

The Domestic Goddess’s Sugar High Fridays look like a perfect place to begin. It’s monthly, so there’s enough wriggle room to fit it round non-baking-related real life. The themes are wonderfully broad, so they can push you as far as you let them and be a prompt to realise some of those percolating ideas and experiment more, without sending me in a worry to a culinary dictionary.

When I came across this month’s theme, which is hosted by Little Bitty Bakes, all thoughts of a fast-approaching deadline and better-to-put-it-off-till-next-month drifted away. Because it was sprinkles. Sprinkles! Once more, for the people up the back who’ve stopped paying attention until I stop waffling on and actually cook something... SPRINKLES! Or hundreds and thousands, for the local folks.

The finished cherry sprinkles - I love it when something actually looks better for looking home-made...

On last season’s Australian Masterchef, a jar of sprinkles was included in one of the mystery box challenges, and the judges treated it with the utmost derision. Any thought of actually using the sprinkles (rather than chuckling at them smugly and going on to make something with duck and cinnamon and hollandaise sauce from scratch – or possible all three combined) is met with an arch expression and the risk of imminent doom. It was like a red rag to a stubborn penguin. Then, a couple of months ago, my interest was piqued further by a recipe for making your own sprinkles. I started wondering about how to incorporate them into a brownie, because that is my starting point for all baking. And sometimes also my finishing point.

So, after far too much ado, I’m very pleased to introduce you to Fairy Penguins. They’re small, they’re cute, they’re ever so chocolaty, and they leave fairy bread in a pallid heap in their wake (and that takes some doing, especially when it’s this sort).

Here’s how they’re made...

Sticky Penguin's Fairy Penguin Brownies

What you need

For the sprinkles

(variation on a recipe from BraveTart)

An important note: if you plan to make your own sprinkles, this needs to be done at least the day before (although they do keep, so you can be prepared in advance if you prefer). Alternatively, this could be a good excuse to use up a lurking jar of bought hundreds and thousands, or to treat yourself to some of those cute little colour-themed or fancy-shaped sprinkles that are popping up in corners of stores. This recipe makes (at least) twice as many sprinkles as I used in the brownies.

227 g / 8 oz icing sugar

1 egg white

½ tsp salt

Flavouring and / or colouring of your choice – I used a couple of drops of Roberts Confectionery cherry flavour oil and several drops of red food colouring

For the cookie dough

(based on a recipe by Culinary Concoctions by Peabody)

These quantities make twice the amount of cookie dough needed for a batch of brownies. It keeps well in the fridge (if you let it - be warned, it's highly addictive!)

113 g /½ (US) cup butter

155 g / ¾ (US) cup (densely packed) dark brown sugar

1 tsp vanilla extract

288 g / 2 (US) cups plain flour

400 g / 14 oz sweetened condensed milk (I used Nestle low-fat condensed milk, and 400 g equates to one whole can. Possibly minus a couple of sneaky teaspoons for the cook...)

For the brownies

(as evolved by the Sticky Penguin)

198 g / 7 oz / 1¾ sticks butter

118 g / just over 4 oz dark chocolate

3 large eggs

1 tsp vanilla extract

163 g / 5¾ oz granulated sugar

70 g / 2½ oz dark brown sugar

75 g / 2.65 oz self raising flour (yep, I know these imperial conversions don't look pretty, sorry)

1½ tbsp Dutch-processed cocoa powder

What to do

To make the sprinkles

1. Line baking sheets with non-stick paper (or silicone mats, if you’re ~~being fancy~~ well-equipped). I used four baking trays and still had some mixture left over at the end, but was running out of places to put baking trays.

2. Sieve the icing sugar and stir through the salt. Whisk in the egg white until you have a smooth paste.

3. Add the colouring and flavouring and mix thoroughly to combine.

4. Spoon the icing into a piping bag fitted with a narrow tip (or, if you’re like me and have too many gadgets and an unsteady hand, one of those small concertina piping bottles makes the next step so much easier and stops me getting icing all over everything!).

5. Pipe long thin lines of icing the length or width of the baking pan, repeating until you have filled each pan or run out of icing and making sure the lines aren’t touching each other(I started out very cautiously piping the width of each tray, and as I got further along was able to pipe down the length of each tray with the lines further together – practice definitely seems to help with icing).

6. Allow the icing to dry out and harden over at least 24 hours (really).

7. Use a sharp knife to cut the icing into short pieces, and there you go... sprinkles!

To make the cookie dough

I like to make the cookie dough before starting on the brownies – it takes a bit longer this way (you could also make the dough during the half hour that the brownie batter is refrigerated), but it’s a little less frantic this way round and it makes the cookie dough a bit easier to handle if it has some time to rest before it’s used.

1. Cream the butter and sugar until pale and fluffy (about 3 minutes in a stand mixer), scraping down the sides of the bowl part-way through.

2. Add the vanilla and beat in thoroughly.

3. Keeping the mixer on low speed, add a few tablespoons of sieved flour. Follow this with a few tablespoons (or a glug or two from the can) of condensed milk. Continue alternating between flour and condensed milk until both have been fully incorporated and the mixture is smooth.

4. Using a metal spoon or a spatula, stir in around 4 tablespoons of sprinkles and mix in thoroughly.

5. Leave the cookie dough to rest for around half an hour before using it so that it firms and is easier to handle. To make it even easier, refrigerate it for this period, or make it the day before when you make the sprinkles.

To make the brownies

1. Line a 23 cm / 9 inch square baking tin with greaseproof paper (there’s no need to butter or spray the paper).

2. Melt the butter and chocolate in a large heat-proof bowl rested on top of a saucepan of gently simmering water. Remove it from the heat just before the last pieces of butter are fully melted – the residual heat in the mixture will melt this, and it avoids it being overcooked. Allow to cool slightly (around 10 minutes is enough).

3. In a separate bowl, lightly whisk the eggs and vanilla with a fork or small whisk and add the granulated sugar and the dark brown sugar. Mix well so that the sugars are evenly combined with each other and with the eggs and vanilla.

4. Gradually pour the eggs and sugar into the melted chocolate, whisking as you go (doing it this way round, rather than adding the chocolate to the eggs and sugar, seems to make it easier to scrape out the bowl and makes the washing up less messy!). Mix thoroughly.

5. Sieve the flour and cocoa powder into the brownie batter and mix gently until combined and there are no floury streaks at the bottom of the bowl.

6. Pour about half the brownie batter into the prepared tin and refrigerate for half an hour, so that the mixture firms a little.

7. Preheat the oven to 175°C / 350°F.

8. Using your fingers, or a rolling pin dusted with icing sugar, flatten out the cookie dough to around 3 mm / ¼ inch thick. Arrange the dough evenly over the cooled brownie batter, making sure you go right to the edges of the tin and that all of the batter is covered.

9. Pour the remaining brownie batter over the cookie dough, making sure that it is completely covered. Spread out evenly with a butter knife or spatula (this also helps to get rid of air bubbles).

10. Bake for 30-35 minutes, until the edges of the brownie are pulling away from the tin, the top has formed a thin crust, and the centre has just set if tested with a thin skewer.

11. Allow to cool completely in the tin before removing and cutting into pieces. I let mine cool overnight, and it helps them firm up considerably, so that they keep a lovely squishy consistency without descending into a gooey mess (which is what happens if you go near them when they're warm - which could actually be scrumptious if made in individual pans for a dessert...). I cut them into 20 pieces when using a tin this size.

The finished brownies had a distinct layer of cookie dough sandwiched between the fudgy chocolate brownie. The pink sprinkles were less pronounced after baking than I would've liked, although still discernible. Interestingly, the cookie dough actually tones down the richness of the brownie a little - I'd expected it might have the opposite case and be painfully rich, so was happily surprised to discover that the Other Penguin had the capacity to eat more than one of these in one sitting!

When I make these again, I'd try using more of the sprinkles to make them more apparent in the finished brownie. I suspect that bought sprinkles (with all those additives they have) might well hold their shape more during baking - and would be a hit as an alternative to fairy bread at parties. Overall, though, I was satisfied with how they turned out, and it was fun to finally realise a recipe I'd been imagining for quite a while.

* And, because things always seem to happen at once, is also happening in real life about now, too. Eep! Squee! Bake something before I start to panic...

Macaron Mania

noreply@blogger.com (Sticky Penguin) — Fri, 20 May 2011 09:00:00 +0000

I still have never braved the ferocious challenges of macaron making (although there has been plenty of sampling to make sure I know what the finished product should resemble!). A couple of days ago, the Evil Smeg was finally attended to and received a new thermostat. While warned that it still runs 10-15°C hot, that's an enormous improvement on its previous pick-a-number-and-double-it dysfunction. So, perhaps macarons are gradually creeping a little closer.

Could a fabulous necklace be the way to distract myself from thinking of those tricky little confections a while longer?

Seafoam bauble necklace from Oliphant

Or is it really just a variation on a theme...?

Macaron photo by sfgirlbybay via the Paris Hotel Boutique Journal

And, once again, it all comes back to food...

Simple Things...

noreply@blogger.com (Sticky Penguin) — Thu, 19 May 2011 09:00:00 +0000

Some things can be so simple that you just take a deep breath of astonishment and wonder how on earth you never thought of them. And then you're just glad that they exist, wherever they came from...

Nutella fairy bread from Kidspot

I'm thinking of a slightly more grown-up version, with speculoos spread on slices of brioche and topped with dark chocolate hail. This needs to make the leap from delicious daydream to actual plate very soon!

What The Wild Things Eat

noreply@blogger.com (Sticky Penguin) — Wed, 18 May 2011 09:00:00 +0000

Whether it’s the skill required to create the perfect disguise, or the surprise of discovering something quite different to what was first expected, I have a definite thing about food that looks like... other food. Because when you think of an ice cream cake, I suspect this isn’t the first thing that comes to mind (although it might be a much more practical choice than the real thing, given Sydney’s current chilly snap*)...

Ice cream cake from Hey Cookie

It’s not just food that pretends to be something else, though. Some penguins will cheerfully dance on tables, dye their ~~hair~~ feathers purple and dream of hooning down narrow cobbled streets on anything from a Vespa to an Aston Martin**. Other penguins find alternative ways to express their wild side...

Where The Wild Things Are penguin from My Dear Darling

I’ve only just discovered the shop and blog of My Dear Darling, who make all sorts of distracting things – best of which are their customised penguins. Oh, how I long for a Sticky Penguin mascot wearing polka dots and brandishing a spatula!

And where are the wild things? The only possible natural habitat for a wild penguin could be the vast and gently swaying expanses of asparagus... in the form of one of Sweetapolita’s ever-more-extraordinary layer cakes...

Asparagus layer cake by Sweetapolita. I’ve shared one of these before, but this is the latest marvel, with eight layers (so there's even more wonderfully fluffy filling in every bite).

* Ooh – a chilli snap! It could be like a brandy snap with extra kick... Now, is that an idea worth pursuing...?
** Those penguins don’t just dress like James Bond, you know...

When It All Goes Pear-Shaped

noreply@blogger.com (Sticky Penguin) — Tue, 17 May 2011 09:00:00 +0000

Sometimes, despite your best intentions, baking is a thoroughly sticky business. It sticks to your fingers. It sticks to whisks, spatulas and wooden spoons alike (except when you flick them to try and remove it, and then it sticks to whatever it finds). It sticks, without careful application of baking paper, to cake tins (and occasionally, when the application of baking paper isn’t careful enough, it sticks to that as well). You get the sticky picture...

Not content with sticking to everything in its path, baking can also be very effective in sticking to itself. Carefully placed dollops of biscuit dough creep flatly across the tray, spreading into an amorphous mass. Huddled fluffy scones unite to be become the enormous beast that is The Mega Scone!

Much as it’s ultimately the taste that counts, removing a tray of conjoined cookies from the oven causes a pang of disappointment. It’s likely to be met with a sympathetic hug when offered round at home, hopefully followed by a surprised exclamation when it turns out to taste so much better than it looks. It’s not likely to draw a hungry horde if taken to work. And how on earth am I going to photograph it?

Don’t despair! Help is at hand with these brilliant plates that can make your baking hiccup look like you planned it all along...

Skyscraper plates by Maxime Ansiau, via Hovering Cat (although I bet they’re a nightmare to fit in the cupboard...)

But, if you don’t have the perfect plate to display your latest creation with pride, perhaps there’s another solution... Present it with a Picnic bar alongside, secure in the knowledge that it’ll look wonderful in comparison, and that delicious ugliness can be embraced as a rather unconventional distinction.

At the risk of incurring the wrath of Matt Moran, is it better when these ugly ducklings of the baking world taste as questionable as they look and can be turfed unceremoniously onto the compost heap without mounting guilt at the very real problem of food wastage? Or that they’re a delicious mess to be treated not with disappointment but with tenderness and perseverance? What do you do with a recipe that doesn’t quite go according to plan?

Like Strawberries And Cream

noreply@blogger.com (Sticky Penguin) — Mon, 16 May 2011 09:00:00 +0000

Some things are just made for each other. And, along with the usual suspects - strawberries and cream, chocolate and penguins, fish fingers and custard - there are other pairings that might be less obvious, but that are equally indisputable once you see them.

When I first saw this delicate porcelain bowl adorned with a flurry of flowers, I imagined it upside down, as an alternative to a glass dome on a cake pedestal. It couldn't help but make you wonder about the possible astonishments concealed beneath - or it could be a handy way to dress up a rather more rustic offering!

Flower petal bowl by Emma Clegg from Miratis

And then I found its sugary soulmate...

Domed rose two-tier cake by I Am Baker

I'm not even sure where to begin with that cake. Despite all my previous protestations about the starchy formality of white cakes and the tooth-numbing richness of buckets of buttercream, I simply adore this cake. It's unusual but doesn't shout at you. It's classic but oozes originality. It's elegant but just invites you to indulge. It has a beautiful home-made charm but leaves you in no doubt that its perfect imperfection took some very serious work. If this cake was a person, I'd love to meet her...

It surely can't be sensible to start imagining what sort of person a cake would be. Have you ever wondered about your cake equivalent?