FoodieChat

Last year, I bought the Hummingbird Bakery cookbook, based purely on the beautiful traditional home baked goodies that filled its pages.  A year later, I was lucky enough to get to visit London, and purely by coincidence, managed to pass the actual store whilst exploring trendy Soho!  You can’t miss it, as the book is so true to the store – the pink bird sitting on top of the painted font (a hummingbird dare I say? ) and the striking red shelves with its wares on display.

Inside the store, it’s even cuter, with pink cupboards, pink and brown checkered floor and rows and rows of perfect cupcakes behind glass display cabinets. (I didn’t notice this lovey dovey couple on the left until I got home, the guy blended so well with the decor ).  The restaurant has a row of benches where you can eat it (it costs more though) and enjoy a coffee.

All the treats from the book are on display here.  The most popular is the red velvet, and of course the traditional vanilla cupcake, each is adorned with a lick of pastel cream.  New flavour of the day was the earl grey tea flavour.

These mounds of calories and goodness were in fact rocky roads, rather than rocky road topped cupcakes as I had imagined.

Apart from the cupcakes, Hummingbird Bakery also has large cakes. Sadly, I didn’t realise you could buy these by the slice, until too late

Despite the fact that I was still full from lunch, I decided I did not want to carry around a cupcake whilst shopping. So I had to eat one there. Eating in costs just slightly more – but at least it allowed me to dissect what’s so good about these cupcakes After much agonising deliberation, I decided on a chocolate cupcake for something different, swathed in a gorgeous lemon coloured vanilla frosting. (more…)

The day after the Masterchef contestants presented burnt and raw cakes, runny jam and rock hard scones, many were discussing – what went wrong?  Many attributed it to the outdoor setting and the unfamiliar oven.  So I set about trying to prove that in normal circumstances, the challenge can be done!  I wanted to try the marble cake as I hadn’t seen one before that had only two colours (pink and white) and had jam in the middle.   Oh noooooooooo!!!!!!!!!!!!  It burnt!!!  As you can see, i had to shave the sides down!!!  Not even the pretty pink icing could hide my shame (especially since the judge said that no icing can run down the side!).   

THe cut through the middle test:  Fair distribution of colour, but still a bit too much pink.  Not burnt on the inside.

Crumb was okay and the icing was fairly even (on this slice at least hahaha), but still dry for my liking   Big fail!   I concluded:  It’s not me, it’s not the contestants, it’s the word “moderate” to describe the oven temperature.  Everyone’s oven is different. Whilst moderate generally means 180 degrees, my oven is fan forced so I should have turned it down 10 degrees.  Who knows what the CWA oven is like?  So “moderate’ could have meant a bit range of potential fails    Oh well… better luck next time.

Link to the recipes:

http://www.cwaofnsw.org.au/newsEvents/generalNews.do?newsId=3368

Masterchef Australia should come with a warning.  Warning: Do not watch unless you have a well stocked pantry of food to satisfy guaranteed longings.  Well I luckily do have tonnes of stuff in my pantry and fridge, and today’s craving was for a warm tarte tatin.  That’s a French upside down apple tart.  The apples are caramelised then covered with a puff pastry blanket to cook (traditionally in a frypan), inverted and served with vanilla bean ice cream.  I wanted to make individual serves, so here’s the recipe for 2 people.  Step 1: Peel and slice one granny smith apple.  Step 2: Melt a tablespoon of butter in a saucepan, and a tablespoon of brown sugar. Step 3: Put apples in and cook until soft and some of the juices have come into the saucepan to form a sauce. Step 4: Meanwhile, cut two discs of puff pastry and preheat the oven to 220 degrees. 

Step 5: I lined two tart tins with baking paper but for the traditional way, just simmer off some of the liquid until the caramel is thicker, then lay a whole sheet of puff pastry on top and put it in the oven.  For my way, lay the apples nicely in a spiral, then simmer the sauce until it’s thicker, and then pour over the apples.  Lay the pastry on top.  Step 6: Bake in the oven until puffed and the edges are very brown and the sauce is caramelised.

Final step: carefully invert onto a plate and serve with a scoop of vanilla ice cream. Eat immediately whilst still warm and whilst the pastry is crispy.  Cooked and eaten in 40 minutes

Last year for my birthday I was given (upon request ) the Ripailles French cookbook. It’s more of an anthology, filled with beautiful recipes divided into chapters such as meat, eggs, sugar, and with every classic French dish that we Aussies would know, and more.  So I tested one of my favourites. I’m not sure if it’s French, but it was yum! The lemon meringue pie.  It said it would take 30 minutes prep, and 30 minutes cooking, and I took around 30 minutes more than that.  3 processes.  The first – the pie crust. It’s richer due to the addition of almond meal. I just ground my own in the food processor.  However, I found that it needed extra water and an extra egg yolk as my mix was too dry and crumbly to mix.  Key trick is to chill the pie crust in the freezer first, and prick it with a fork too.

At the time it was chilling, I made the lemon curd. It didn’t make any difference to substitute half the butter for margarine. but you do need the full 3 lemons. It seems like alot but it’s not.  I had to add over 4 times the amount of cornflour though, to thicken it to spreading consistency.

As I chilled the curd in the fridge and let the tart case cool, I whipped the egg whites. I used a round tip nozzle to pipe it onto the pie.

So here’s the final product out of the oven.

So it’s a bit uneven coloured because of my grill. I’m sure if I had a blowtorch though it would have been fine.

Next time I might add more butter into the pastry as it was a bit hard, but overall, quite okay for a first attempt.  but there’s hundreds more recipes to try as well from that book! It’s an essential for your technical cooking collection as well as just to turn through with a cup of chocolat chaud!