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Mon, 28 May 2007
James was apparently inspired enough by his first cake-making attempt that he wanted to try it again. He's decided to stick to making this particular recipe for now, what hardship! And so, on Wednesday I came home from work to an almost-finished lamb roast and a new chocolate and orange gateau.
And a kitchen that was noticeably tidier than it'd been when I left in the morning.
Admittedly, it sounded like James had been in the kitchen from noon to six to achieve this feat, but I am impressed all the same.
The lamb roast was very nice, and quite filling, so we didn't actually get to try the gateau on Wednesday. James also said he wasn't sure he could face the actual cake after all that testing and bowl-licking. I think I know what he means.
So the cake tasting happened last night. This one looked much more like the picture, although if I want chocolate leaves, I have to make them myself. I think it tasted better too, certainly more like the picture - the first version had ended up a bit smudged together, and now the layers and flavours were more distinct.
There is a rumour that James may have a third go at this cake late next week, in time to push it on anyone silly enough to visit us on Sunday afternoon. Our waistlines are not going to survive having to dispose of three of these cakes in a month. Even if I sweat over another batch of chocolate leaves.
Given how much we'd enjoyed eating at Lily's on Wednesday, and how we'd been too full to get onto the dessert menu, we decided to head back Friday night for an entree/dessert approach.
We booked for 6pm, and with our window seat, got a fabulous display of swallows, swooping and gathering over the lake as the sun set. We're guessing they roost under the restaurant, over the lake.
We got the bread again as "entree" - ginger/garlic and coriander leaf this time. James had salmon, actually one of their mains, but light enough for our purpose, and I had the entree of red quail. We also had some salad - more rocket, bean sprouts, and other green vegies, and bits of silken tofu. I still don't really get tofu, but enjoyed the salad all the same.
The serious part of the exercise was dessert. We ordered three.
James ordered a chocolate pudding with icecream on homemade biscuit/waffle, which was brought out on a big square platter, with the restaurant logo sprinkled in chocolate powder in the upper corner. Very pretty. I had the ginger-lychee mousse, decorated with sugar-syrup cooked orange slices and orange peel. I thought the mousse would have been a bit bland without the orange trimmings, but was fabulous with the orange.
We ate half our desserts each and swapped plates. I'm glad we did, both were so rich I'm not sure I could have finished either, but they were sufficiently different that I could eat half of each, and feel completely satisfied.
The third "dessert" was Vietnamese coffee. It was on the dessert menu and counted as food, rather than drink (we got 50% off food, but not drinks, with the hotel deal we had). It featured a bowl full of coffee, a scoop of icecream to add, a shot of Galliano to add, and a little pile of palm sugar to add to taste, and a cinnamon stick for stirring the whole thing.
I left the restaurant very happy, satisfactorily full, and wondering about playing around with oranges and sugar syrup at home. James can play with the Vietnamese coffee idea.
I made Rum-balls-but-with-brandy -style truffles yesterday. Actually, an important part of the prep work was done in December, when I discovered some old, darkening dried apricots and some old sultanas which were starting to get those little sugar spots on the outside. Since December is the month for doing things with dried fruit, I chopped the apricots into sultana-sized pieces, and stuck it all in a bowl, and James helped me pour brandy over it.
In December, some of the brandied fruit got used to make fake mince pies (I have no clue how to make real mince pies: I cut circles of pre-made pastry, press them into mini-muffin pans, put a bit of sugared alcohol-soaked fruit in each, and bake until they look baked.) and some of it was used for our Panforte-inspired Christmas cake (brandied fruit, chopped cashews, citrus peel, green and red cherries, chocolate chips, ginger syrup, spices, a nominal amount of flour and some beaten eggs to hold everything together, baked until done).
We still had some brandied fruit left, so yesterday I minced some with the big knife until it was more a paste than individual bits of fruit in syrupy goo. Then I added crushed Marie biscuits until I had a reasonably firm playdoh-like substance that tasted rich and decadent, rather than totally overwhelming, like the brandy fruit paste did. I rolled cherry-sized balls, and then I melted some (dark) chocolate and coated each ball in chocolate, and left them to set in the fridge.
I like it when you can just mush things that taste nice together, and the finished result tastes really good too.
The fish is just to note that I'm not scared of cooking fish anymore, and I've found a way to incorporate fish into my OneStirFry recipe. It probably should count as my SecondStirFry recipe, since it is a bit different.
In my OneStirFry recipe, you chop meat of some kind into smallish chunks or slices, put it in a bowl, and pour/shake over it a random assortment of stuff you find in the cupboard and fridge that might go well together, from items such as soy sauce, teriyaki marinade, Thai fish sauce, oyster sauce, lime or lemon juice, vinegar of some description, dry sherry, red wine, yoghurt, ginger, garlic, chilli, green herbs, and the Spicerack of Impressing Most Visitors.
You let the meat and flavourings entertain each other, while you pick out a selection of vegetables and chop them into whatever shapes you're in the mood for today. Frequently Encountered Vegetables are onions, broccoli, pumpkin, mushroom and capsicum, but it depends on what's on sale.
The chopped vegetables go into old yoghurt containers (1 litre Bornhoffen buckets which we mysteriously have quite a number of) according to their estimated cooking time, factored based on the vegetable and the size and shape of the chopping. Beans, carrots, and broccoli go in early, pumpkin is an intermediate vegetable if you slice it thin enough, mushroom is intermediate or late depending on how firm they are and if I'm in the mood to show off that firmness. Onions usually go in early, and often almost become part of the sauce, but can go in late for crunch, and spring onions and capsicum tend to be late.
Cornflour and a small jug of water are put on standby, and the wok is fired up. The meat is separated from its new friends as far as possible, and stir-fried until browned on most sides, then the vegetable buckets are progressively added every few minutes. The leftover stuff in the meat marinating bowl has some cornflour and water stirred in, and once the vegetables are all close to cooked, the liquid is poured over, stirred through and allowed to thicken a bit, before the heat is turned off. We pretty much always eat this with rice.
In the SecondStirFry recipe, cornflour and chosen representatives of the Spicerack of Impressing Most Visitors are mixed in a bowl, fish is sliced and tossed in the flour-spice mix, extra oil is added to the wok as it heats, the fish is stir/deep fried quickly, and removed to a new bowl.
Vegetable chopping (actually done before the fish was taken from the fridge) and stir-frying happens as in the first recipe, a bit of liquid is added to the cornflour dregs, and that again is poured on and allowed to thicken at the end of vegetable cooking. The vegetables are served with the fish as a sort of garnish on top.
Last night's credits: red snapper; paprika, star anise, salt, pepper, cumin, cassia; onion, white cabbage, green beans, pumpkin, capsicum, mushrooms; lime juice, teriyaki sauce. Because there was quite a lot of cabbage and pumpkin, we decided to skip the rice.
James would have liked more generous amounts of the spices; I really liked the flavour of the lime juice with just a squidge of teriyaki, and thought it was very appropriate with fish. Also, I think the SecondStirFry recipe may be appropriate for making salt and pepper squid, just the fish cooking part. I've never really learnt to cook seafood.
Zanth's is the main, and family-oriented, food service in the resort. It's buffet style, featuring a lot of seafood, and a variety of other dishes that rotate during the week.
The food was okay - some of it not very good, other bits just fine. The prawns were okay, but neither James nor I seem to be into oysters or mussels. Their "mediterranean" food was also rather mixed - the hummus was nice, the turkish bread and wine leaves yummy, but they have no clue how to make Baba ganoush.
James scored their "build yourself" chicken kebabs quite highly, and I enjoyed their couscous dishes and the beef stew.
The dessert buffet selection however was quite up to scratch. About five different ice-cream flavours, chocolate mousse, fresh fruit, apple strudel, and an ever-changing parade of cakes, of which I had a piece of chocolate-hazelnut cake and a piece of a raspberry-white chocolate pudding thingy.
The dessert buffet also had jugs of sauce to pour over everything - James and I ignored the chocolate and caramel sauces and focussed on the mango and raspberry sauces, which tasted like somebody had pushed fruit though a blender and poured it in a jug. This is fine by me, frankly.
I was a bit horrified this morning to discover that Zanth's is apparently short for Zanthorrhoea. Even without web access, I'm sure the latin for grass tree is spelt with an X, although I couldn't spell the rest without help. It simply hadn't occurred to me that Zanth's could be short for "Xanthorrhoea".
Back with net access, I note the "Z" spelling gets 9 google hits (and a "did you mean to search for Xanthorrhoea"?); the "X" spelling gets 10,900 hits. Based on Language Log's use of googling as a linguistics research tool, I say Zanth's (the restaurant) is more or less alone on this one, at p=0.001.
When someone asks you if you'd like to buy a tray of slightly overripe mangoes, of a variety you've never heard of before, namely Honey gold, for $5, you say 'yes!'.
They are seriously yummy. They're a bit of a pain to prepare, as the skin is very, very thin (we think they may be bred to be juicing mangoes), but they have almost no fibrous bits, no resiny taste, and just a touch of honey sweetness in the mango flavour.
I got a very strange phone call around lunchtime on Monday at work. James said he couldn't find the cooking chocolate. I said it had gone off - chocolate sort of decays at Brisbane temperatures - it's still edible, but it's no longer chocolate. Based on my experience with the former cooking chocolate, I have learnt that all chocolate products must be in the fridge, but had not had a reason to buy cooking chocolate since.
Exactly what did he want the cooking chocolate for? He told me it was none of my business, and there appeared to be some other things we didn't have, which it was also none of my business to know what were, so he'd have to go shopping anyway.
On the way home, he explained that I wasn't allowed to look at anything in the kitchen while I was cooking dinner (!) because the stuff that was none of my business was still none of my business, and it now required the kitchen. I explained it was going to be extremely difficult, particularly now he'd told me not to think of pink elephants. Eventually he relented and declared that, since he was going to be at rehearsal Tuesday night, my birthday would start Monday evening, and besides, he could use some advice.
James wanted to make me a chocolate and orange gateau. Mind you, he'd never actually baked a cake before. His only previous related baking experience was making muffins with me a few months ago. He tells me stories of quiches he's made in the past, but I've not actually met one.
So, launching into cake baking with minimal background, he rejected several recipes as too boring, and went straight for the gateau. Three layers of dense chocolate sponge, with orange and cointreau-flavoured cream cheese filling, iced with melted chocolate, with piped chocolate cream rosettes, chocolate leaves, and julienned orange peel.
I'd like to point out here that in my experience, it takes effort to make chocolate cake boring. None of the rejected recipes were candidates for boring, although they certainly didn't look as spectacular as his choice.
I read through the recipe, and it looked ambitious but far from impossible. Particularly the basic cake and filling looked quite manageable, which is really what counts when it comes to chocolate cake. So he set to. I did provide help and support, but he essentially made the cake himself.
He'd already decided he had to skip the chocolate leaves, because he couldn't find any in the shops. I explained you have to make them yourself, that I knew how to do it, but had never tried. If he was going to do something he'd never done before, so was I. So I had my first go at making chocolate leaves while James made the cake, conveniently preventing me from meddling too much. I nicked some camelia leaves from the front garden that worked excellently - the right size, obviously leaf-shaped, and they peel off the chocolate fairly easily once it's set. The final leaves were too thin in places, but they looked like chocolate leaves at least until they broke.
James had some icing problems - the icing didn't form a thick layer, but mainly poured off and formed a chocolate lake for the cake. In retrospect, it was too warm, and it should have been let cool down and thicken before being applied to the cake. I blame the recipe for not stating this, because I would have done the same thing James did.
At the end, he looked at the cake a bit disappointed and complained it didn't look like the picture. I explained to him that I would have killed him if he'd produced a cake like the picture on his first attempt. He said he was now happy it didn't look like the picture, because he didn't want me to kill him.
James also says he now understands why the kitchen is such a mess when I bake. He said he was trying to keep things tidy, but it ended up messier than I make it.
I am (in case anyone can't tell) incredibly touched by the whole thing. And the cake tastes yummy.
I'd wanted to make cookies a week or so ago, and got the doughs made up and resting in the fridge. Then of course it got hot again and the idea of turning the oven on was torture.
But now we have air conditioning, so I celebrated the first weekend day with air-con by baking the cookies. I know it's highly energy inefficient to bake, with air-con, on a hot day (34C). Naughty, naughty. I intend to make it a one-off.
The two recipes I made up (both for the first time) are called Bombay Delights and Gingernuts. Spice city.
The Bombay Delights turned out as big, filling, buttery-crumbly things, with a flavour gently reminiscent of those Indian curry nibble mixes. In some ways, they remind me of Brune kager, except bigger, and with sultanas and peanuts instead of citrus peel and almonds, and curry spices instead of christmassy ones. They also share the Brune kager problem that I find it really hard to tell when they're baked, because they don't look noticeably browner in the oven, and then when you finally take them out, they're slightly overdone.
They were fun to make, and I'm now far more inclined to try baking with "unusual" spices, but I don't know if I want to make them specifically again.
The Gingernuts might be a keeper, though. Anyone who knows me will not be surprised when I laughed at the spice list (half teaspoon of powdered ginger, pinch each cinnamon, cardamon and cloves), looked at the amount of flour and sugar in the recipe, compared to some of my other recipes, and settled on slightly over a teaspoon of ginger, half a teaspoon of cinnamon, and about a quarter each of the cardamon and cloves.
The finished product is pretty much exactly how I want my gingernuts - the right level of ginger flavour (hah!), crunchy exterior, softer, slightly treacklish interior. The sugar they're rolled in almost pushes them into decadent, but I'm not sure it's wise to omit it.
The dough becomes extremely sticky as soon as it warms up - you're advised to separate it into quarters, work each quarter separately, leaving the rest in the fridge, and even then, you have to work quickly. Each quarter is rolled into a sausage, cut into 10 pieces, and each piece rolled in a ball, which is then rolled in the sugar, and set on the tray, slightly flattened. They're "safe" to handle once rolled in sugar. Because I was doing all this while the Bombay delights were baking, I actually set them on gladwrap and put them back in the fridge, for safety's sake.
But they are a complete delight to bake, and I'd strongly recommend them to anyone who wants to make cookies but is scared by the whole "how do I tell when they're done?" thing. They start out as little flattened balls, they swell and expand into pale hemispheres, then widen further into flat domes. Then, after 10 minutes in my oven, cracks form all over the surface, as the domes collapse slightly and darken. From that point, I let them bake another two minutes, for the cracks to dry and brown. Easy.
And as I pointed out to James, they look just like the picture in the recipe book. I don't think he minded.
Between the two recipes, I almost filled the large cookie tin. It is fabulous just to smell it.
Two batches of icecream: the uncooked cream icecream recipe, with mashed bananas, ginger syrup and chopped cashews. Verdict: tasty, but quite gentle-tasting, the ginger in particular being rather subtle. Obviously more ginger syrup should be used next time.
The other batch is the cooked, cream custard recipe with rum, cocoa and cinnamom. It's now cooling and won't be made into icecream until tomorrow, when rum-soaked sultanas will be added. It will be much richer-tasting, based on licking the saucepan.
Wednesday night, James and I had dinner at Lily's on the Lagoon, at the Novotel Twin Waters resort, although apparently the restaurant predates the rest of the resort. It's definitely the most upmarket, adult place at the resort, and seems a good place to head when the preteens having fun at high decibel levels and the bored teens get too much.
In the earlier menu research, I'd already determined that I'd rather try dessert than entree, so we were straight onto choosing mains. Lily's is not a place for vegetarians, but I was having a hard time picking between the pork, salmon, chicken... I ended up going for the twice-cooked duck on sweet potato with ginger sauce and coconut-pickled vegetables, James chose the lamb on white bean mash with grilled capsicum and eggplant.
We also decided to have a slice each of the homemade bread (very soft and very yummy, with salsa-type herbs, and served with oil with pickled ginger), and a side of Asian vegetables.
The food was very, very yummy, and very, very filling. I don't know if it was the bread that snuck up on us, but I could have made do with one piece of duck rather than the two I got. The duck was incredibly tender - more like duck-flavoured paste than meat in places. The trims were nice and suited the duck well, I wouldn't have minded more of the coconut vegetables which seemed to be more a garnish than a part of the dish.
James reported favourably on the lamb, its tenderness and degree of cookedness (pink in the middle) and also the white bean mash, trying to figure out if it was something we could do at home.
We had a glass of wine each - I can't remember the varietal types, but James' was quite peppery on the front, had a very smooth middle, and some very mellow, rounded oak at the back. Mine was (as requested) much fruitier, and had quite a bit of tannin in the middle, but was quite neutral at the back. All the same, as expected, James got one and half glasses of wine, I didn't need more than half.
The Asian vegetables had some bok-choi type vegetable, snow peas, and much to my surprise, quite a lot of rocket. I haven't tried stir-fried rocket before, and it's such a strong flavour that I'm glad it was just a side - if I was including rocket in one of my stir-fries, I'd add much less - but then again, I'd never thought of adding it before.
James managed to pretty much clean his plate (he did ask if it was unseemly to leave a plate that clean in a restaurant this upscale). I had to beg leave with quite a bit of the sweet potato left, and all the "difficult" meat next to the bones.
Dessert was out of the question, we were close enough to exploding as it was, but it had been very nice all the same. We're talking about another visit on Friday night, probably doing the entree+dessert combo then.