Chestnuts that refuse to peel are completely infuriating. Chestnut season in Australia starts around late March through to May – in some ways I’m glad that it’s short, because they are a total pain in the arse! They taste good and all, but man they can be annoying little buggers.
My last fruit and vege delivery came with a container of fresh chestnuts, and I wasn’t entirely sure what to do with them. It was the beginning of the Easter holiday, and we weren’t going to be home much for meals, so I decided to turn it into cake: specifically, this chocolate and chestnut cake. (more…)
Cookbook Challenge 2011: Fortnight 9,
Theme: Crunchy
Recipe: Oat and cherry biscuits aka Big Fat Thin Anzac Biscuits
Adapted from: Bourke Street Bakery
The Easter holiday this year has been fantastic! For any non-Australians, the Easter weekend coincided with Anzac Day, which meant a five day weekend for most people (or a 10 day weekend for me, because I took this week off!).
Maria and Daz invited us to a picnic for the Anzac Day public holiday, and I took the opportunity to make my Cookbook Challenge post for “crunchy”, taking along a variation of the Anzac biscuit. We ate food, drank wine and beer, had desserts, and then we played a cut-throat game of Kubb. There was a lot of screaming and insult hurling involved. So if you were in the vicinity of Queen’s Park on the Anzac Day holiday, no doubt you would have heard us. Major apologies!
Cookbook Challenge 2011: Fortnight 7
Theme: Celebration
Recipe: Hot cross buns
From: Australian Women’s Weekly Bake
We’re backtracking a fortnight to the celebration theme for the Cookbook Challenge, which you may remember I skipped over because I dropped a cake into the sink. Well, I’m back on theme and since it’s Easter, I rather predictably made hot cross buns. (Side note: I just had a sudden brain dead moment and couldn’t remember the word “predictably”! Gak!) (more…)
On to Fortnight 8 of the Cookbook Challenge, and the theme is “eggs”. I doubt anyone is keeping track, but I’ve skipped the 7th theme, which is “celebration”. I baked a cake for celebration, but I’m not going to post it because it turned out to be a big ugly thing. And to make matters worse, I dropped it into the (thankfully clean) sink when trying to remove it from the tin. Ugh! After all that, I couldn’t bear to photograph it – I didn’t feel like celebrating the failcake.
(Though I did save failcake from the sink with no ill effects. It turned out to be a really delicious cake. Ugly, but delicious.)
So I’ll come back to celebration another time – let’s just move on to eggs! (more…)
It’s Meal to Share time! My monthly collaboration with Penny and Celeste where we each cook a course based on a set theme. This month’s theme is “South African” and I was allocated the main course. I made bobotie, which is a baked curried mince dish, with a milk and egg topping. (more…)
Cookbook Challenge 2011: Fortnight 6
Theme: American
Recipe: Chocolate Brownies
Cookbook: The Kitchen Diaries
The next theme for the Cookbook Challenge is “American” and so I asked my brother, the American food expert in this house, for ideas. He gave me TONS of great ideas, which I then disregarded so I could make brownies. Sorry Bro!
Oh no! I’m late for last fortnight’s Cookbook Challenge theme, which was “outdoors”. I cooked my dish, which we took to the Avalon Airshow, but ran out of time to write the post and edit photos. Still, here I am – better late than never.
Because I had planned to take my dish to the Airshow, I needed something that I could make ahead of time, that would be okay eaten cold. I decided to make mini lamb pies, from Arabesque, to add to a little picnic that I packed for the day. (more…)
The theme for the latest International Incident Party (hosted as always, by the lovely Penny) is nostalgia, and I love it! It’s such a great theme and sent me down memory lane trying to think of a dish to make. (more…)
It’s the end of the month, which means Celeste, Penny and I are back with another Meal to Share.
As always, Meal to Share is our monthly collaboration where we each cook a course for a themed meal – so don’t forget to check out their posts for the rest of the meal. This month’s theme is “Russian” and I was allocated entree. (more…)
Melbourne has been humid, humid, humid lately. This has been a weird summer – LOTS of rain and very little of the dry heat that stretches for days, that is more usual of our summers. Thank you La Nina, you can stop now.
Well, at least ice cream is good for any type of heat – dry or humid. So it’s fortunate that the theme for this month’s incident party is “sundae”, to which I’m bringing sesame ice cream, topped with red bean sauce.
I grew up eating black sesame and white sesame in desserts – namely black sesame soup or sesame seed balls. I really wanted to showcase both types, so I made ice cream from both! With the white sesame, I toasted the seeds in a dry frying pan, and then ground them to a paste using a mortar and pestle. If you’re ever grinding sesame seeds in a mortar and pestle, I recommend doing it a small amount at a time. Once I was making sauce for shabu shabu and poured a large amount of sesame into the mortar and pestle – it took me half an hour before I had sesame paste! Extremely painful experience, and it would’ve been much quicker if I had done a small amount at a time.
With the black sesame, I used black sesame powder that I purchased at an Asian grocery store. For both ice creams, I used an ice cream recipe that I’ve made before, that has an Italian egg mousse base that’s folded into whipped cream.
The ice creams turned out well – before freezing, I preferred the white sesame version. It was sweeter and nuttier. However, after freezing I found that I liked the black sesame one more! It was more assertively nutty and fragrant, and the white sesame one turned out creamier and less flavoursome. The black sesame was a touch grainy (since I did add rather a lot of sesame powder!) but after freezing it wasn’t a big issue. But I do think I can improve on it – next time!
And finally, when I was thinking about this sundae, I wondered how I could make it even MORE ASIAN. 😀 Red bean sauce immediately came to mind! So when I was ready to put it together, I spooned over red bean sauce that I had made from purchased red bean paste thinned out with boiling water (with a touch of red food colouring to keep the red colour). It was the perfect topping for my sundae!
Thanks, as always, to Penny for hosting this IIP and see the other delicious creations at the IIP forum.
1/4 cup white sesame seeds
3/4 cup black sesame powder (to taste)
4 egg yolks
100g sugar
250ml water
600ml thickened cream, softly whipped
Toast the white sesame seeds in a dry frying pan until fragrant. Grind to a paste in a mortar and pestle – do this a small amount at a time otherwise it will take forever! Set aside.
Place the egg yolks in a bowl/mixer and whisk over high speed until they are pale and fluffy.
In a saucepan, combine the water and sugar and stir over a medium heat until the sugar is completely dissolved. Remove the spoon and increase the heat until it boils. Let the syrup boil until it reaches the “thread” stage – 106-113°C – it will be quite thick, and when a metal spoon is dipped into it, the drops of syrup will form firm threads.
While whisking the egg yolks, pour the hot syrup on to them.
Spoon out half of the egg yolk mixture and set aside.
To one half of the egg yolk mixture add the white sesame paste and fold together. To the other half, add the black sesame powder. Fold in half of the softly whipped cream to each mixture and pour into separate stainless steel or plastic bowls, cover and freeze.
When serving, remove from the freezer at least 10 minutes before serving.
Serve with red bean sauce, made with red bean paste and thinned with a bit of boiling water.
