Sweet Sunday

It's been a while since I baked. After suffering some small baking disasters (weird thyme muffins, exploding scones, raw brownies) I was somewhat reluctant to get back into it. Leave the baking to Ellen, I thought, and I meanwhile will cook every variant of lentil and barley stew known to man.

But, I have a new kitchen to christen, new co-workers to meet, and honestly: I just couldn't go past these peanut butter cookies.

Gosh, they're good. At the risk of being kicked out of Australia, I'm going to confess that I don't really like ANZAC biscuits. They're so often dry and hard and disappointing. Which I suppose makes sense - war-time food is not famous for flavour.

These biscuits would make an ANZAC weep. They're rich and buttery and lovely. They're crunchy on the edges and soft in the middle, and just the right amount of chewy.

And they go quite well with my (tiny) new kitchen:

As does this bottle opener. Probably my favourite (and certainly most used) kitchen item.

I'd be lying if I said the ducks on the curtains didn't help me pick this place.

My baby coriander. This attempt at growing herbs is going oh-so-much better than the last time. It turns out neglect is not a substitute for water and sunlight.

Having said that, I have managed to forget what these are. Sorry baby mystery herbs. I'm sure you'll grow up to be delicious no matter what you turn into.

But back to those cookies.

Here's how you do it:

Preheat your oven to 175 degrees C.
Combine 2 cups rolled oats with 2 cups sifted plain flour in a large bowl.
Add 2 tsp baking powder and 1(ish) tsp salt. Set aside.
In another bowl, mix 3/4 cup vegetable oil with 3/4 cup natural peanut butter. I used crunchy. Add 2 cups of brown sugar, 1/2 cup oat milk and 2 tsp vanilla extract.
Mix the wet and dry, and then use a dessert spoon to spoon out the dough onto baking paper lined trays. Space them out, they'll spread in the oven.
Bake for 14 - 18 minutes, or until they start smelling divine and browning at the edges.

Take them into work. Or eat them all by yourself. I won't judge.

Mon Petit Macaron

Strawberry macarons with white chocolate ganache

Do you like incredibly complex cooking? Baking to create a mess? Do you enjoy the feeling of failure? If so, then the following recipe is for you! Macarons are the most frustrating, finicky and difficult of all baked goods. They fail almost as often as they succeed, and sometimes for the most inexplicable reasons. One day the below method can produce beautiful macarons, crisp on the outside and soft and fluffy in the middle. The next day this recipe may well produce a flat, sickly smelling mess, or a fluffy goop that expands in your oven like The Blob. Macarons can fail due to factors like humidity, air temperature, how quickly you open your oven door, or how loudly you had Kanye West blaring when you turned the blender on. Friends and family wonder why I bother with the things at all.

So why bother? Well... essentially macarons are show-stoppers. They elevate you from "that girl in the office who made that nice fruit loaf that one time" to "that miracle worker over by the printer who we should promote." I will remember my first successful macarons as fondly as I remember my first kiss. When they fail, they fail hard, but when you get macarons right I guarantee you will feel like a wizard. They're beautiful to look at, and you can really experiment with flavour too. A chocolate cake is always going to taste like chocolate, but once you get the hang of macarons you can come up with all sorts of exotic and peculiar flavours. White chocolate with green tea ganache, lavendar and rosemary with dark chocolate ganache. Raspberry with lemon creamy filling. Macarons make for creative baking, and if you can face the inevitable failures they really are an awful lot of fun.

Lemon macarons with cream cheese filling

My lovely friend Natalia very obligingly shared the following macaron recipe with me, and even had me around to her place for a day long tutorial (and several glasses of her Dad's home made grappa. Grappa helps with macaronning, as it turns out!) It's definitely the most straightforward, low fuss recipe I've encountered. Plus I've benefited from Natalia's trial and error here, she tweaked this recipe herself. You can definitely expermient when it comes to flavouring macarons, although I am yet to succeed in flavouring my macarons with anything liquid. As such I'd suggest starting with dry flavouring. Dehydrated fruit works a treat, as do nuts, dried herbs,even chilli or pepper. This recipe makes 24 macarons. You may want to halve the recipe for your first few attempts. Less goes in the bin that way!

What you will need:

2/3 cup almond meal

1 1/3 cups powdered icing sugar

3 egg whites

6 tbsp granulated sugar

Gel food dye in whatever colour you choose

Granulated nuts, dehydrated fruit, green tea powder or whatever else you fancy for flavouring

Baking paper stencils for piping. Use a thick black pen to trace circles (roughly 3cm in diameter) onto baking paper. Lay a second blank sheet of baking paper over the top of the inked one before piping. 24 macarons, so that's 48 black circles. Ugh.

What you will need to do:

- Preheat your oven to 180 degrees celcius. You can heat the oven with the fan force on, however i'd suggest turning the fan force off once your macarons go in.

- Using an electric blender, pulse the almond meal and powdered icing sugar together for a few minutes. If you are flavouring your macarons blend in any nuts, dehydrated fruit or powdered flavouring etc. at this stage too. If I flavour my macarons with nuts I add them in place of some of the almond meal. If i'm flavouring with something like a green tea powder, lavender flowers (my favourite) or dehydrated strawberries I add these in place of a few tablespoons of the powdered sugar. Once your mixture is very fine, sieve it twice and set aside.

- In a stainless steel bowl beat the egg whites, slowly incorporating the granulated sugar, until the egg mixture stiffens. If you are using food dye, add a few drops of it at this stage too. Do not use oil or water based dyes as these will lead to macaron ruination. Good gel dyes are available at places like DJ's or specialty cake decorating stores.

- Using a rubber spatula, gently fold half of the almond meal mixture into the beaten egg whites until just combined. Add the remaining almond meal mixture and fold this in too.

- Once the almond meal mix and egg whites are more or less stuck together you need to “macaronnage” your mixture: Spread your macaron mixture along the side of a stainless steel bowl as if you are spreading butter on toast, take up your rubber spatula and run it along the underside of your mix, then fold the mixture over itself and spread it out again. Repeat this step once a minute for ten minutes, or until the mixture turns glossy and drips slowly from your spatula in a ribbon.

- Now its time to pipe your macarons! Transfer the mixture to a piping bag and carefully pipe your shells. Hold the tip of your piping bag as close to the baking paper as you can and allow your macaron mixture to sort of mushroom out as you pipe. Once all your macarons are piped, bang your baking trays firmly on your benchtop once or twice, this helps push out any air bubbles that are likely to ruin your macarons. Now set them aside somewhere and allow them to dry out. Natalia suggested drying my macarons for fifteen minutes on a hot day, half an hour on a cool day. Her recommendation seems to work so I'm stickin' by it!

Piped macaron mix. Your mix should look flat and glossy.

- Finally, bake your macarons for around ten to fifteen minutes, depending on the heat of your oven. They should rise and form "feet" - once my macarons have feet I often open the oven (very slowly) and cover them with foil, just to prevent them from browning or discolouring.

Macaron shells with "feet"

- Allow your shells to cool, then fill them with ganache, jelly, cream cheese or whatever else you care to try and gently sandwich them together. I've taken to spraying mine with an edible shimmer spray too, just for a little extra shine.

Different recipes tell you vastly different things about macarons, but Natalia's recipe works well for me (most of the time...) Practice makes perfect folks, and macaroning takes lots of practice! Oh and fun fact! Most people associate macarons with Marie Antoinette, however their origin is a source of much debate. Read an interesting history of macarons here. Happy Baking! Or not.

The Hampering

Happy New Year, readers! I hope you've celebrated in style. Ladies of taste and distinction that we are, Tara and I ushered in the new year with fascinators, passion pop and a lot of rather terrible dancing. I drank, I ate, I took my shoes off and ran around outdoors, and now that those last few fateful swigs of cheap champagne are leaving my system I'm finally feeling capable of blogging again.

So, Christmas hey? Well that's done and dusted for another year. My Christmas was the usual exhausting, lovely, talk-politely-to-that-distant-relative-you-hate kind of affair. My sister, my man and I combined our vegetarian super powers to make Jamie Oliver's delicious nut roast (otherwise known as "the best stuffing my Pop has ever tasted" *sigh*) and of course we had pudding, salads, daggy christmas hats and wine. So. Much. Wine.

What else happened this Christmas? Well... I totally made hampers you guys! I gave them to people, and they were well received, and people ate and drank and were merry. You have no idea how relieved I am that the hampers were well received. Baking, jamming, truffling, macaroning, turkish delighting... I held my breath when people first tasted what I'd made, and I swear to Dawkins had someone looked unimpressed, I would've staged an almighty Christmas meltdown. I'm not saying homicide, but I have a feeling the fallout would've attracted the attention of the local media... the words "crazed" and "rampage" come to mind.

So above is a photo of my completed hamper. Chris, my tolerant and talented partner (fiancee, boyfriend, guy I like to kiss on the mouth) did all of the design work, I did all of the cooking, and together we hot-glued and folded and tied bows until what you see above was finished. Rather naively I had assumed that preparing eight odd Christmas hampers would be relatively straightforward. Hah. Flash forward a month and I was stuck in my kitchen at 2am on a wednesday night, microwaving vegan gelatine alternative and scraping almond meal from the walls. Nonetheless... I'll do it all again next year. I'm just proud as punch at how everything turned out:

Lime Jelly from here. I didn't modify this recipe at all, except to leave the lime pulp in (but not the peel).

Chocolate Truffles from here. I prepared half with the milk chocolate and sea salt, and rolled the other half in a combination of cocoa powder and cayenne pepper. The salted truffles tasted a little like caramel, and the chilli chocolate ones were warm, rich and slightly spicy.

Turkish Delight from here. I substituted gelatine for agar-agar, a nifty vegan seaweed derivative that works just like gelatine but without all of the snouts and trotters and beef skin. I'm pretty sure Turkish Delight is one of those inherently difficult to enjoy sweets. It's sickly, it smells like grandma's potpourri, and the powdered sugar it's rolled in is a choking hazard. But I got it in my head that I needed to make a Turkish Delight with the White Witch quote from Narnia printed on it. So: Turkish Delight for all!

Pfeffernüsse. I made these using this basic recipe, but I doubled the spice quantities. Apparently these babies develop their flavour over time, but given that I was baking them a day or two before Christmas I thought it best to flavour them heavily to start with.

Oh, and I made Macarons. Boy did I make macarons. I made three failed batches of Macarons, two average batches, I made a great batch really early on and then promptly ate the lot, and I made the macarons seen above in the few days before Christmas. I'll blog about the delicate art of macaroning some time soon. I'll need an entire post to dedicate to my macaron saga...

So, hampers! Burns and spills and hot glue everywhere but hampers got done, bitch. Please let me know what you think of our lovely goods! New year, new goals... I'm toying with the idea of attempting a market stall this easter.

Breadwinning

Working full time often brings the full time work blues with it. I find this manifests in several different ways. An unhealthy attachment to the stationary catalogue. Borderline abusive relationships with excel spreadsheets. And occasionally hypothesising a new pokemon based on office supplies.

I've found several ways to combat the crazy. The first is pretending I work on a film set and dressing appropriately. Today I am a secretary in the 50's. Tomorrow, I will be a secretary in the 80's. Next week? I will be an administrative assistant from the future.

The other - making everyone hella jealous of your packed lunch. You know what works every time? Toasting your homemade bread in the staff kitchen. Nothing smells better.

Remember when I told you to go out and make bread? If you didn't you should really try this recipe. A method to save you from the mid-week malaise is at hand. Slightly adapted from this marvelous recipe.

For this recipe you

Do not need to knead anything

Do not need a bread maker

Do need to be able to leave this sucker overnight. It takes about two minutes to mix, 12 - 18 hours to rise, two minutes to mix again, and another hour or so to rise for a second time. Planning is sometimes required!

What you will need

• 3 cups baker's flour.

Baker's flour is not ordinary plain flour, and it is not breadmaker mix. It will be marked as "baker's" or "strong" or for bread and pizza dough. There should be some at your local supermarket or health food store. Don't get anything with yeast already added!

• 1 cup wholemeal flour

• 1/8 tsp instant yeast

Not interchangeable with "active" yeast. Instant yeast you can add to the dry mix, active you have to add to water and let froth. We're going for super easy instant here.

• 2 cups lukewarm water

• 2 tbsp white or caster sugar

• 1 tsp salt

• 1 1/2 tbs vegetable oil, or 3 tbs melted butter, plus a bit extra.

What you will need to do:

Mix all the dry ingredients together in a large bowl. The dough is going to double in size, so make sure it's large enough.

If you're me, you probably think 1/8 of a tsp of yeast isn't enough and add a bit more just to make sure things happen. Control yourselves! 1/8 is plenty, I promise.

Add the oil or melted butter to the lukewarm water, just to make things a bit easier, and then mix the wet ingredients with the dry. There's no art here, just whack them all together, make sure all the dry stuff gets wet.

Drizzle a bit of oil or butter over the top of the mix, spread to cover. This is to make sure the surface doesn't dry out while the dough is rising.

Cover with clingwrap and leave for 12 - 18 hours. Make sure you don't leave it somewhere too cold or too hot. I leave it in the laundry in summer and the kitchen in winter.

12 - 18 hours later it should have risen. Deflate by stirring well with a wooden spoon.

Grease a loaf tin, and turn the dough out into it. Make sure it's relatively evenly distributed, not just sitting in a lump in the middle. This will take some scientific pushing and prodding.

Dust the top with a bit of flour. Leave in a warmish place to rise again.

When the dough has risen to about 1/4 inch above the loaf tin (probably a minimum 40 minutes, and definitely a maximum 2 hours before it starts to look like the blob), preheat your oven to 200 degrees celsius.

Put the tin in carefully - we don't want it to deflate this time.

Bake for about 35 - 50 minutes, or until it is browned and crisp on the outside. People say you can tell bread is done if you knock on it and it sounds hollow. This has never, ever worked for me. It should definitely be crisp enough for you to knock on it though, and then feel free to disregard whatever noise it makes.

This is the really hard part: let it cool. Don't cut into this baby for at least 3 or 4 hours.

And then? Then you get to go to town. Or work! And make that hole-punching pokemon jealous. It's especially good toasted with soup or stew. Or pasta sauce, or curry. Or pretty much anything! Enjoy while listening to the following workaday ditties:

Frankly Mr Shankly - The Smiths

Expectations - Belle and Sebastian

Middle of the Road Class War - G.A. Richards and the Dark Satanic Mills Bros.

Swings, Flings and Tasty Things

Hello my little bloglings, it's been a while!

Between a broken - in fact, somewhat on fire - laptop, overseas adventures and long hours at the library, I'm afraid I have been neglecting you terribly. But there are many whistles and milkshakes on their way to make up for it.

In the last few weeks I traded in my small city in for this island paradise

Waiheke Island: perhaps the greatest proportion of vineyards to landmass that I've ever encountered. Also beaches, jungle, mountains, family, food and hedgehogs.

I saw the marvelous Animal Collective in Melbourne Town

They were as good as this pictures suggests they might be.

I saw this incredible, beautiful film, and then had to run through Melbourne with an unfortunate case of cryface to make it in time for my flight.

It was so worth it.

And I've started making plans for christmas. Like most of my plans on any given day, they involve baking. I am contemplating these delicious gingerbreads

Ruminating on these delicious peppermints

And I am very much enamoured with these salted truffles....delicious? Why yes, I think they might be.





And I'm going to finish watching this charming film - right now, if you please.





I do so love a good con. And a Gentlemanly Rogue or two.

Homemade and handmade

.
My week started with a cooking adventure. I made bread for the first time. It didn’t go too well. But the second time around it worked a charm. So here are some things I've learned about baking bread:

• There are different types of yeast. Read about them here.
  
• You’ll probably use instant or active. The main difference is that instant can be mixed in with the flour, while active should be mixed with water.
  
• Instant yeast will last 12 months (after opening) in your freezer.
  
• The bread continues to cook while it’s cooling, so be good and don’t cut it for a couple of hours at least. Some people suggest a day or more. But they’re clearly crazy.
  
• You should probably make this recipe: No kneading required! But pay attention to temperatures.
  
• Fresh bread is the best with ripe avocado, a generous squeeze of lemon, salt and pepper.

Om nom nom.

Apart from making bread, I’ve been blogging about sea creatures over at I Know My Goat. It's not exactly food or music, but there are otters holding hands. I've been recovering from the surreal and wonderful This is Not Art festival, at which I managed to eat a lot of free food, and scored a delicious recipe for rhubarb and strawberry coulis.



And finally, I've been listening to Voss' debut long player, The Inland Sea, which I'm pretty sure you should be listening to also. Especially if you like well crafted songs about myths and maps and legends, sweet and ambling violin, vocal duets, and the sound of rain.

The Inland Sea is concerned with Ludwig Leichardt's quest to cross the continent, which was, in turn, inspiration for Patrick White's novel Voss. This mess of artistic tribute somehow suits the album, which takes fiction as inspiration perhaps more than fact.

It isn't hard to see much Australian fiction as an attempt to rewrite history - to reinterpret convict suffering not as judicial punishment, but as spiritual trial: at the end of which we receive the promised land, having earned it. This artistic endeavor sees us make heroes of criminals and prophets of madmen. It's an uneasy inheritance, but Voss seems to embrace it. Ludwig Leichardt didn't die: he disappeared into myth. No death mask marked his passing, but perhaps we have been making them ever since.

Recurring themes of domesticity and tribulation, great flights and love, find their way into the lyrics. It's a bit rough around the edges, and hesitant in parts – but it's also surprising and a little bit sublime. A little bit like an inland sea.

Buy it online here. It comes with a gorgeous poster by Alice Carroll (last seen here making jam) and the lyric booklet is tied with string.

Listen to:
Charley's Forest Hall
Leichardt Mask

Check out:
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