Meringues - or how to use up egg whites!

As part of my pre-christmas cooking, I made some Vanilla icecream - this required 6 egg yolks, which left me with egg whites to use up! So I went the easy route, and made some meringues, and some mini pavlovas!

There is a "basic meringue recipe" here at taste.com.au .  I just adjusted the quantities.


To make the meringues, I just piped swirls onto the trays.....




For the pavlovas, I piped nests!(kind of wobbly nests, but nests all the same!). 




I filled the cooled nests with raspberry cream, and topped with a raspberry. (to make raspberry cream, I used the cream that I had leftover from making my icecream! - I simply whipped it to soft peaks, added a little bit of icing sugar and some "crumbs" from the bottom of the frozen raspberry packet! )

Brewbakers, Albion!

A few weeks ago, I attended a bread and Pizza making calss at Brewbakers, Albion.  Owner, RIchard talked us through the many processes and calculations involved in creating the best bread ever!







These little balls of dough were so soft! We shaped them into pizza bases



topped them with a delicious selection of ingredients, and watched them go into the oven!





The pizzas came out crisp on the outside, yet soft and fluffy in the middle! Best pizza ever!!





We also had a go at shaping some bagels!!

I ate my bagel for lunch the next day - yum!




We also had a go at weighing out the correct amount of dough , and shaping into ciabatta loaf. Not as easy as it sounds!





We each took a just out of the oven loaf home! Miraculously, the loaf survived the drive home intact, and was enjoyed another day!

Now on my list of things to do is a visit to Brewbakers when the actual shop is open so I can try some more baked delights!!

Dinner at home - halloween!

We had friends over for dinner the night before Halloween, so I decided to make the food a little halloween themed. but only a little!




I wasn't paying $20 for a "carving pumpkin" at Woolworths, so I carved an apple instead! A tea light fitted nicely inside.




For dinner, I made this beef and bacon pie.  I uses Maggie Beers Sour Cream Pastry.  It was easy to make - it just goes together in the food processor. The filling for the pie, I made up.  I sauted a leek, then added garlic, and chopped up meat.  I think I used blade steak. Not really a meat expert here - it had a bone in it, which  I cut out and used to make some meaty stock, which I added to the browned meat with some tomato paste.  I simmered the meat on a low heat for a few hours, until it was really tender and falling apart, and the gravy was thick.  Then I left it overnight to cool in the fridge. The next day I shredded the meat up a bit with a fork.

I rolled out the pastry and lined my pie dish with it, then put it back in the fridge to harden up, I then filled it with the cold meat filling and put a pastry top on.  I then put it back in the fridge to cool again. I btushed the top with egg wash and baked in the oven for 20 ish minutes, until nicely golden brown.

I served the pie with some assorted roasted vegies, which is what I ate for my dinner.





dessert was a slight drama.  I made a kind of chocolate mousse-y thing using condensed milk, cream and cocoa powder which I beat together, and put into cups with a suprise of caramel in the middle. Then we went and bought a new fridge, and in the excitement of getting the new fridge delivered, I left the dessert in our old fridge, which was taken away by the delivery man. Oops. So a quick new dessert was needed.  I had already made these chocolate spiders to put on top of the mousse, so I zipped down to the IGA and bought some ready made tart cases which I filled with the left over tin of caramel. And there we have a super easy, and rather tasty dessert.

I am still cranky at myself for leaving my Ikea cups filled with dessert in that fridge. Have to go to Ikea to get some more cups!!!

Malteaser Birthday Cake

Here is a birthday cake I made some time in the not tooooo distant past... its a basic chocolate sponge, with chocolate icing and Malteasers! Quite tasty it was too.

Happy Birthday Mum - Zebra Cake!

For my Mum's birthday (which was way back in May) , I decided to make a zebra cake - recipe from here. The only change I made was the addition of icing, because, well, it was for a birthday, and a birthday cake needs icing!! Despite appearances, this was a very easy cake to make, with the only fiddly part being the alternate spooning of mixture into the cake tin.  The resulting pattern inside the cake was certainly worth it. THe cake tasted good too!!

Lunch at Home - Wholemeal Bread!!

Janet felt like some fresh bread for lunch, so I had a go of making some without the aid of Bread Mix this time.  It was just wholemeal flour, yeast, salt and water mixed into a dough and left to prove, before placing into a tin and letting it rise again, and then into the oven.  I was happy with the way it turned out, considering I didn't use a recipe and didn't measure anything.

I had my warm slices of bread spread with cottage cheese and topped with slices of tomato and pieces of gherkin! YUM!!

Picnic Lunch

This is our kind of picnc - the kind that involves stopping at the bakery on the way to the park!!

We called in at the Jason Lee BAkery at Westpoint shopping centre, Browns Plains and grabbed some lunch to eat at the Berrinba Wetlands

I got a Salad Sandwich.  They were extremely generous with the grated cheese. It fell everywhere. I love bakery sandwiches because they are made with deliciously fresh bread!

Janet had a sausage roll - she is a big fan of the sausage rolls from this bakery.

Shadow had some leaves and sticks. And some lettuce that fell from my sandwich.  She had a lovely time watching small children ride by on bikes

she also rather liked playing with this empty Coke bottle.

Easter Baking disasters!

We invited Pam & Sid over for morning tea on Easter Sunday. Janet asked if I could make a chocolate cake and some cookies. As is usual, I started looking through my cookbooks and magazine clippings for some inspiration. I found a recipe for a chocolate sponge roll that I had kept from a baking tin I bought, so decided to give it a go. This was my first disaster. I think I cooked it wrongly, because it was a little crunchy on top, an when I tried to roll it, it just folded and broke into pieces. I tasted a bit of the broken cake, and it didnt even taste any good.  So the cake AND the recipe went in the bin.

So I moved onto the cookies while I waited for some more butter to soften for Cake take 2.  I chose some choc chip cookies from a generic tyoe of cookie and slice book that I have. Never cooked from the book before, may not do so again :-).  The cookies looked ok when they went into the oven, they puffed up and looked fine when they were nearly baked, but when the timer went off and I looked in the oven, they had flattened like pancakes! Oh dear. These ones didn't go in the bin.  We tasted them and decided they were still edlible - we renamed them "pancake cookies"

Onto cake number 2 - I made Nigella's Sponge cake recipe from "Domestic Goddess", substituting some cocoa powder for some of the flour. I like this recipe because everything gets thrown into the food processor!

My 2 sponge cakes came out of the oven looking nice and even! YAY another disaster avoided.

I decied to fill the cake with mock cream & grated chocolate, since I didnt want to go to a shop.  Heres a tip - don't make mock cream in advance because (d'uh) when you put it in the fridge it goes hard.  To fix this small problem, I just beat it up again, and added a couple of tablespoons of "Philadelphia Cream" yes, cream, not cream cheese! They have a new "cooking cream" product - its not for whipping though, so by mixing it with my mock cream, I softened the mock cream, and thickened the Philladelphia cream! Brilliant!!

the cake was goooooood!!

Happy Birthday Janet!

Janet turned 40 on the weekend, and we had a "Young at Heart" party for her.  This has kept me rather busy cooking over the past few weeks!!

We were expecting about 40 people, so I made lots of food - I cooked most of the finger food in advance and froze it.

We started with lots of different nibblies.....

Cheese, dip and crackers

Chippies!!

Cheezles!!

and of course some lollies!

The "healthy plate" - I made a big bowl of hommus. In fact, I am still eating it now :-)

Then we moved onto some hot finger food....

a pile of sausage rolls

I made 3 different kinds of meatballs - mexican beef, sweet chilli turkey & honey, rosemary lamb

I also made a batch of corn fritters, 2 kinds of puff pastry pizza scrolls (bbq meat lovers & roasted vegie), and Nigellas Ritzy Chicken Nuggets

We had a wonderful gang of waiters to help hand the food around - thanks kids!!

and because it was a "young at heart" party, we also had to play a few party games - we "pinned the nose on the koala" and also played "pass the parcel!!!

And then we had dinner!

I made 2 rather large lasagne's - one meaty and one vegie (I forgot to take a photo until after they were outside in the dark)

My Mum made this delicious salad, and there was also a potato salad from Chevonne, that I neglected to photograph! Garlic bread too!!

YUM!!

Then, there has to be some desert......

We did have a fruit platter, but we kind of left it in the fridge. oops

every kids party needs fairy bread!!

the jelly cups were a big hit!

Pam made these fairy cakes

and Janet specially requested chocolate crackles, so Chevonne & her kids made these snazzy looking ones!!

And of course, no birthday is complete without a cake..... Janet selected this one from the Women's Weekly Birthday Cake book, and I made it for her.....

HAPPY 40th BIRTHDAY!!!!