One-pot lamb curry & cupcake decorating

Taste.com is an Australian web site which sends out a regular email with affordable, easy recipes, taken from a number of Australian food magazines. One of their recent emails contained this recipe for a one-pot lamb curry. I was particularly attracted to it because it contained mostly ingredients that I had to hand, including risoni pasta. The end result is pictured at the top of this post.

While this was a pleasant enough dish, it wasn't outstanding, and didn't pack the punch that I would have liked. However, if you have some leftover lamb that you would like to use up, this dish is a good way to do so, as it contains pantry cupboard staples like pasta, canned tomatoes, stock and curry powder. It is also simple and fuss-free to prepare, as it simply involves adding ingredients to a baking dish at three separate intervals over a one hour cooking period, then leaving it to do its own thing.

On a totally different subject, this weekend, I attended a cupcake decorating class at the William Angliss Institute of TAFE. Over 2 days, each member in our class of 11 each decorated 24 cupcakes, starting with basic techniques and working up to more difficult designs featuring piped dahlias and roses. Our teacher, Greg Williams, showed the class how to work with fondant, fudge icing, buttercream, ganache and royal icing. The class also made fudge icing from scratch, and learned certain points of cake baking theory. Our base cakes were made for us, and comprised of pre-mix sponge, traditional sponge, orange madeira and chocolate madeira cakes.

Here are the fruits of my day 1 labours:

And here are the results of day 2:

It was really a fun class. Some things worked better for me than others, and not everything that we did was to my personal taste. However, I learned some great techniques to build on the cake decorating classes that I did earlier in the year. Because some of the techniques were repeated in the cupcake class, I had the opportunity to improve on them and "clicked" on a couple of piping techniques that I didn't quite get earlier. I also was able to use my parchment piping bag skills learned in the cake decorating class to my advantage, as quite a few people had as much trouble as I did in initially learning how to make one - and we needed to make many bags for this class.

Hopefully, I will get a chance to practise and build on these techniques for future cake projects.