Melted Moments

Success story: Thanks to Sarah, I found a recipe for chocolate chip bikkies (we do not eat "cookies" in this house) which worked. I used 200g instead of 400g of chocolate and about 170g rather than 200+g of chopped nuts and the biscuits were still delicious. "Baking soda" is what we call bicarb. The quantities were generous so there are still two rolls of uncooked dough in the freezer.

Not-a-success story: Tweaking the bikkie recipe worked. Not following the steps for Melting Moments didn't. If you dump everything in a bowl in a frenzy because the Bella and twinnies are coming over for afternoon tea and you are only halfway through your planned cooking, you don't get a buttery lump of fragile dough as you do if you cream the butter and sugar first. You get custard-powder coloured breadcrumbs that sort of clump together but can't be worked.

Do not be tempted to add extra butter. You will produce sad flat little buttons totally incapable of being stuck together to make yoyos. (Nonetheless they all disappeared, and anyway the twinnies prefer chocolate, ideally all over their faces.) The bread in the background is no-knead, which is so 2009 but still delicious.

Postscript: A pair of ten-year-old boys absorbed in boy stuff at the kitchen bench will not investigate, respond to or fetch an adult regarding strange loud explosive blopping sounds from the stove. So much for the gingered pumpkin soup.

Autumn & spongecake

Yesterday we dropped by a local church's market-day and although tempted by butterfly wreaths we bought only a sponge cake.



Today Princess Pea decorated it for afternoon tea, with intermittent help from Cheekus Weekus. The five of us have eaten the whole thing. It was a real CWA-style light-as-a-feather beauty.



Later Princess cooked on the stove for almost the first time, roo steaks. Yum (but no photos - she got a bit cranky over the for-the-blog cake photos so I'd stopped).

Chestnuts mean Autumn

When I was a child my Mum, my sister and I would go to Emerald Lake around Easter to look for chestnuts.

The trees next to the lake were always picked bare so we would head over the little hill at the back, past the stream (where once we found tadpoles) into the groves. We always managed to come home with a few. Your fingers stung from wriggling the glossy brown nuts out of their prickly cases. Often there was nothing there, or a tiddler rejected by prior fossickers, needled fingers for no return. Sometimes you would find a big fat nut...after the possums had. But we always got a few worth eating.

We'd take our booty home and put them on the coals and wait. When they exploded we would pick them out with the tongs and peel off the casing and eat them with salt, the nuts hot and slightly charred.

Now, sometimes up in the hills I've convinced the CFO to pull over so I can buy cooked or raw chestnuts by the roadside, but it's not the same. I have also bought them roasted in the CBD from footpath braziers, but again it is not the same. A proper chestnut is too hot to handle, burst, floury and delicious. I tried roasting some in the oven but this was an utter waste of effort. The children (and the CFO) have been less than captivated.

Today at the Prahran Market several stalls had big, fat, tight shiny nuts and I couldn't resist. While Princess Pea finished her school project on Debussy far too late tonight I roasted some. They were fabulous and she and I and the CFO ate the whole bowl. Chestnuts mean autumn! And I told her the story behind Smetana's Trio in G, as autumn also means reflection.

She was right

Stephanie Alexander in her excellent first edition of The Cook's Companion warns against mandoline slicers. She says they are far too dangerous for the home kitchen and recommends buying a "simple and ingenious" alternative. I have never been able to locate one of these, as Stephanie does not give its name and describes it simply as a "Japanese shredder and slicer".

I covet(ed) the ability to do paper-thin potato slices for pizza and crisps, make neat juliennes of carrot and daikon. About a week ago I bought myself a small inexpensive mandoline.

Last night I decided to make pithiviers for dessert. It was awkward slicing the apples with the hand-held finger guard until about halfway through, so I decided to take the first few slices off each piece by holding it directly in my hand. You all know where this is going, don't you?

I've lost the top 3mm off my right-hand middle finger but didn't hit or chop the bone, so emergency just patched me up and sent me home. Right now I can't drive or type properly, or swim until it heals "in its own time" as the emergency doctor told me, and I will forever have a flat-topped finger.

And of course, a few minutes beforehand I had been lecturing the kids about never touching the damn thing, because it was so sharp! (At least the pithiviers, which I cooked when I got home from emergency, were fabulous.)

Own Brand isn't the same

We wanted to make mousse. Melted chocolate was called for.

Chocolate is expensive so we used the Safeways home brand cooking chocolate.

It refused to melt. (It also tasted horrible so there was less sampling by Cook's Helpers than usual. Actually there wasn't, but there was less sampling by Cook.)

In the end we used it anyway, and the mousse still tasted good.

I checked the packet expecting to laugh at a ridiculously low cocoa butter percentage. Do you know what? There wasn't any cocoa butter in this stuff, only 7% reduced fat cocoa powder. Dear Safeways, even cheap cooking chocolate should be capable of being used for cooking. Please consider.

Excuses, excuses

On the one hand, the oven has been repaired and I tracked down almond meal at the nuts-and-pulses stall at Prahran Market. (Does anyone know anywhere else it's available?) On the other hand, the forecast is for 38 degrees and it took several attempts to make Toll House Cookies rather than Toll House Cookie Slice Sort of Baked Stuff Totally Filling the Baking Tray.

If we baked, Cheekus Weekus would help rather than playing on the Wii and Running Boy would probably help too, if running electrical appliances was involved. Princess Pea would drift in to reality from being lost-in-a-book, currently New Moon. But then they all like to play Sport Resort together and surely that's good sibling togetherness that should be encouraged while it lasts?

It would give me a chance to show my best friends, who are superb cooks, that I am not a total loss to baking. It would also give me a chance to prove conclusively that I should stick to soup.

I would gain the high moral ground by involving everyone in a Good Family Activity while the CFO is out having the pool pump repaired (the latest appliance to fail), so that I can then lecture him, or at least know that I could lecture him, about putting the kids in front of the TV while I am at work/out doing needful things. They might just all look at me blankly and whine about the Wii turning off.

Nothing ventured, nothing gained...I will try a flourless orange cake!

Oh and by the way - a post or so ago I said the guinea-pigs loved hiding under the pool blanket. They're not aquapiggies: the pool blanket is spread out over the back lawn for cleaning and ariing before we install it.

Christmas-tree cake

Christmas is done for another year. Very little socialising, partly becuase we're tired and partly because we're not terribly good at it. Cheekus Weekus and Running Boy found Santa's stash under our bed but RB had the good sense not to make any comments and CW accepted my explanation that they were toys "for other people". Princess Pea got a Ripstik and can more or less use it. The guinea-pigs got a pot of grass that Running Boy grew for them. They're free-range by day which means that they spend a lot of time under the pool blanket we just bought from friends. (The pigs wriggle little ruffles up into a tunnel network and scutter about.) The tads got extra lettuce. Fred kept on sleeping in his/her coccoon. Our tree looked wonderful, we bought new tinsel and brought out all the special decorations the kids have made.

It took three separate Christmas meals to see all of the various sides of family on Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and Boxing Day and today was just for blobbing.

We are also eating our famous icecream cake, an adaptation of a recipe by John Lethlean. Buy a paper Christmas-tree baking mould - we get ours from The Essential Ingredient. Let a small tub of vanilla icecream go all runny. Chop Toblerone into small pieces. Previously we've used about two-thirds of a large block but this year almost all of it went into the mix. Cheekus Weekus was in charge of chopping and got a bit carried away, although he was canny enough to save one triangle for himself. Add roughly chopped pistachios - about half a cupful - and a cup or so of raspberries. You can also use mixed berries, just don't put too many in. Really large boysenberries don't work too well. Stir everything into gloppy icecream, place the mould on a baking tray to catch leaks and pour it all in. Allow to set overnight. This year we added chopped jelly snakes, which the kids loved but I didn't. We all agreed that very large pieces of Toblerone aren't the good idea one might expect them to be.

Season's Greetings to you all!