WWDH - French Onion Soup

For Wednesday with Donna Hay this week, Sarah chose French Onion Soup from p28 of Modern Classics I.  I did have a sense of deja vu with this one, and sure enough, found that we had made it in February 2013, before Sarah joined us.  Oh well, it never hurts to make the classics again, and we are finding that we are all going back to the same recipes subconsciously because they were good.

I liked this well enough, but only made a quarter recipe because I didn't want to swim in soup all week.

To see what Sarah, Margaret and Chaya thought of this soup, visit their websites.

Millstone, Malvern

In the last twelve months or so, a few new local cafes have opened their doors.  One which has proven extremely popular, judging from the ever present crowds, is Millstone.  The café is named after Arthur Ebbott, who ran the first mill and grain stores in the area.  The pastry chef at Millstone, Alice Wright, trained at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris.  After reading that, how could I pass up trying some of her delicious pastries?

My opportunity to visit Millstone came one morning when I was working from home.  Being a weekday, and still quite early, it was easy enough for me to get a table.  I was greeted on arrival by a very friendly counter assistant, who told me to take a seat anywhere in the light-filled café. 

I started with my usual weekday pick-me-up, a skinny flat white coffee: 

 
You cannot believe how welcome my morning coffee is on weekdays, and it sets me up for the day ahead.  Millstone's coffee was just right, and served in a cheery blue cup and saucer.

I didn't want a fancy breakfast, so I ordered what I often make at home for myself - poached eggs on toast:

 
This was not just any old toast, but a lovely sour dough.  And thankfully, the eggs were perfectly gooey inside:

 
I enjoyed this simple breakfast, which was brought out very quickly and efficiently by the friendly wait staff.  The only thing that would have made it better is a smear of chutney on the toast, like I have at home.

Of course, I had to buy some pastries for take out.  I bought this apple brioche ($4.50): 

 
The buttery layers of bread were topped by a slice of baked apple and sprinkled with cinnamon.

And best of all, they started bringing out the patisserie items just before I left.  I chose a salted caramel, hazelnut and rhubarb dome ($9):

 
Here's a peek inside:

The brioche was nice, but this was devine!!!

I will definitely return to Millstone, but I think I will wait until my next working from home day so that I don't have to battle the crowds in this deservedly good café.

Millstone

10a Claremont Ave

Malvern VIC 3144

Ph: 03 9509 0789

Dark Chocolate and Marmalade Cake for Collette

Recently, it was my colleague Collette's birthday.  To celebrate, I made her the Dark Chocolate Marmalade Cake from The Clandestine Cake Club Cookbook.  You can also find the recipe online here.

I love a chocolate/orange combination, so this cake was a perfect flavour choice.  I also loved the chunks of chocolate throughout the cake:

Instead of making the chocolate buttercream that accompanied the recipe, I used the chocolate fudge icing from The Crabapple Bakery Cupcake Cookbook, which is also online here.  It tastes very chocolatey but doesn't use chocolate, just cocoa, so it is infinitely quicker and cheaper to make.

For decorations, I used Queen chocolate letters (another birthday pressie from Mum) and sugar butterflies.  I thought it looked really pretty.

I thought the cake itself was a little on the dry side, but there were no complaints - at least none that were passed on to me.  The frosting helped to combat any dryness, so it was a win from my standpoint.

Golf Cake for Mitch

 

We lost another Pilates instructor on Monday (careless of us, isn't it), this time a physio called Mitch.  Mitch stands out as being the only physio I have met who trained at Bond University (the first full fee paying Uni in Australia) - before then, I didn't even know you could study physiotherapy at Bond.  I caught wind of Mitch's departure by accident, and decided to thank him for his time with us by baking him a cake. 

 

I don't know a lot about Mitch, but I do know that he is crazy about golf.  That made the theme of the cake a no brainer.  Next step was to turn to Google to find a golf themed cake that looked good but wasn't too hard to achieve.  After scrolling through numerous images, I found several people who had made a round cake iced green, with "grass" icing on top, a small hole in the top of the chocolate cake to imitate a hole, and a golf ball (real or chocolate) on top.  For one example, look here.  

 

I bought a grass piping tip and a golf ball chocolate mould, and voila - I was set to make my own version of the golf cake:

 

 

Pretty impressive, yeah?  And even better, simple to make.  For the base cake, I used a half recipe of Jennifer Graham's Dinosaur Rock cupcake recipe.  The exact quantity for a half recipe is posted here (hmm, seems this is my leaving cake of choice).

I iced the cake using The Primrose Bakery's vanilla buttercream icing dyed with green liquid food colouring, piping on the grass with the Wilton no. 533 tip.  I cut a hole out of the iced cake using a small biscuit cutter - maybe I should have done it before piping the icing on, as it smudged the icing a little, but I wanted it to look like someone had just cut the sod.  Finally, I made a golf ball using white candy melts in a golf ball shaped chocolate mould:

The ball was not perfect, but it was OK and looked the part.

Overall, I was happy with the golf cake - it was simple yet effective.  Keep in mind if you are making a cake for a golf-loving person.

Mary Berry's Cherry Cake

Wayne is another keen baker in our office.  He makes an awesome baked cheesecake and a devine sticky date pudding.  When he mentioned that he hadn't had a cherry cake for ages, I was happy to volunteer to make one.

I selected Mary Berry's Cherry Cake recipe from her book 100 Cakes and Bakes.

As you can see, this is a lovely, sturdy, golden cake, full of glace cherries.  The almond meal adds an interesting texture. I didn't quite follow Mary's directions to dump everything in at once when mixing the batter; I used the traditional method of creaming of butter and sugar before adding the other dry ingredients.

This recipe for an old fashioned favourite is a keeper.  After all, if you can't trust Mary from The Great British Bake Off to provide a good cake recipe, who can you trust?

FFWD - Scallops and Double Carrots

We are slowly making our way through the fish dishes in Around My French Table, and this week for FFWD, the recipe was Monkfish with Double Carrots.  It seems that this month, we are having a double vegetable theme as well as a fish theme, with our celery-celery soup last week and our double carrots (carrot juice and carrots) this week.

I couldn't find monkfish so I took up Dorie's suggestion of using scallops instead.  I also struck out on the carrot juice, and not possessing a juicer, opted for store bought vegetable juice which included carrot juice.  Bacon rounds out the flavour combination of this dish.

I thought that this dish was really fabulous - the soft golden scallops were complemented wonderfully by the sweet carrots and salty bacon. I'd make this again.

To see what the other Doristas thought of  this dish, see the LYL section of the FFWD website.

Cake Bake & Sweets Show, Melbourne

On Sunday, I attended the Cake Bake & Sweets Show, Melbourne at the Melbourne Convention Centre.  Basically, this was a bakers paradise, with vendors of cake decorating supplies from around Australia present. 

I bought some cool new cake decorating supplies, before taking a priority seat at Adriano Zumbo's show for the Food Network.  During the show, a Food Network guy decided that Adriano should don a bright pink wig taken from  an audience member:

For her trouble, she received some free Cake Boss accessories.

Adriano's show lasted for just under an hour, during which he made this spooky Halloween eye frozen dessert:

Hidden inside the icecream are some frozen carrot entremets.  One lady from the audience won the right to eat one of these desserts by doing a cartwheel in front of the crowd, but it looked like it was a difficult dessert to eat because it was both large and frozen.

In the afternoon, I attended a four hour cupcake decorating course with Janet O'Sullivan, who came from Adelaide to do the Show.  Here's Janet showing us how to make her Freddy (frog) cupcake topper:

The course featured piping, modelling and moulding.  I was especially interested to learn how to use tylose, which I have never used before.  Here is my box of cupcakes from the course:

My favourite was the snail topper:

 
Isn't he cute?

We also made a quilted topper:

 
A ladybird:

 
A heart on a stick:

 
A cherry:

 
A blossom cake:

 
A daisy topper:

And a moulded lego topper:

I learned some new things in this course; in addition to the use of tylose, Janet corrected my piping technique (although I think I got by just fine doing it "wrong" previously), showed me how to use an embossed fondant rolling pin, and introduced me to the use of foam domes to create perfectly round dome toppers. I also liked her tip of colouring fondant by using a small blob of pre-coloured fondant instead of gel colour for certain applications - that was a neat idea.  I enjoyed modelling the snail and the cherry, and I am a little sad that we didn't have time to make Freddy in class.

Janet's class was lots of fun, and proved that there is always plenty to learn, even if you think you know a fair bit about cupcake decorating.

I enjoyed the Show overall, and lapped up the chance to buy from vendors that I wouldn't normally get to visit from interstate.  However, as is always the case with these sorts of events, I can't stand the pushing and shoving from the crowds, all falling over one another to be the first, to get the sample, to grab the bargain, to see the show.  It turns me off going, so I will have to weigh up whether I could be bothered playing survival of the fittest again next year.  Maybe I will centre my visit around classes and prebooked events at the Show and leave the scrum in the vendor stands to those who enjoy the fray.