Miss Biscuit Beginner's Comprehensive Cookie Decorating Class

On a rather cold, wet Saturday a couple of weeks ago, I made my way to Seddon to attend a Beginner's Comprehensive Cookie Decorating Class at Miss Biscuit.  Miss Biscuit's new premises have only been open for a month, so they are bright and fresh and new:

Miss Biscuit, Julia Day, sells decorated cookies, decorating supplies and  homewares at the front of her premises.  Here are some examples of the gorgeous decorated cookies that you can buy at Miss Biscuit for ~$5 each:

In the beginner's class, there are places for 12 students.  The class runs from 10am to 3pm, and includes morning tea (tea/coffee/juice/water and cookies) and lunch (wraps, fruit, chocolates).  You learn to decorate 9 different pre-made cookies.  The price of the class (currently AUD$225) includes all materials, a leaflet with three cookie recipes (including a fabulous "no chill" vanilla cookie dough), a royal icing recipe and a piping tip guide covering three different brands of tips.

Here is the class attentively listening to Julia's tips on rolling out the cookie dough evenly: 

Here is Julia demonstrating how to put a wing on her bird cookie design - see how much fun she's having:

On the day, we learned how to decorate 9 different cookie shapes with Julia's designs.  Here is my completed set of cookies:

I think that all of the cookies are cute, but my favourites are the bird:

and the icecream: 

I bought cutters for both of these from the Miss Biscuit shop, which also sells everything used in class.  I am lucky in that I already have a fair collection of equipment from my own adventures in cookie decorating.  I have made flooded cookies before - see these Lovebird Cookies, these crazy hearts, and these butterflies.  However, I learned some new tips and tricks from Julia that I know I will find invaluable.  I especially like how she creates definition in her cookies by sectioning and layering.

I highly recommend Julia's class.  It was well organised, there was no mad rushing to complete the tasks, and everyone had enough equipment at their own bench - there was no Lord of the Flies type behaviour that I have experienced in some classes in vying for scarce equipment.  Julia is also very approachable and friendly, and was not hung up about how you held your piping bag and whether or not you did a perfect job.  In an adult education class, this is just as it should be.  If I ever practise enough to become more skilled, I would definitely go back to Miss Biscuit for the advanced class.

Miss Biscuit

65a Charles St

Seddon VIC  3011

Olive, Cheese and Onion Cake for the Melbourne Cake Club - Sensational Savoury Cakes

Last night, four members of the Melbourne Cake Club met on a cold wintery night at Milton Wine Shop in Malvern to enjoy Sensational Savoury Cakes.

Our venue, the Milton Wine Shop, was a beacon of cosy warmth and comfort. We had a lovely table beside the fireplace in the back room:

I had to arrange the venue for the first time this month, as Dalya, our usual host, is on holidays.  The Milton Wine Shop were hospitable from the start - they were quite happy for us to bring our cakes and eat them at the shop, and provided us with plates and forks and serviettes.  Thanks to The Milton Wine Shop staff!

On to the cakes.  Lindsay, fresh from a holiday in the UK, brought a Goats Cheese, Sultana and Walnut Cake, adapted from this Hugh  Fearnley-Whittingstall recipe:

The sultanas added just the right amount of sweetness and moistness to the cake.

Abi made a Savoury Carrot Cake with Cream Cheese and Feta Icing, adapted from a recipe in the same Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall article: 

The icing was superb and really made the cake.

Sue made a spectacular nine-layer Tortilla Cake from a recipe in her own collection:

Here's a peek inside the layers:

This was so delicious - just the right amount of spicy, and a slice would make a perfect meal.

Here's my slices of cake, ready for me to dig in:

I made an Olive Cheese and Onion Cake from this recipe: 

 It was deliciously cheesy (I just used a pre-grated cheese mix) and surprisingly light.  Here's a peek inside:

We enjoyed our savoury cakes - they surprised me at their variety and deliciousness.  We also took a group shot holding a sign wishing Dalya a happy birthday to post on social media, with the assistance of the lovely Milton Wine Shop Staff.

All in all, it was another terrific evening with the Melbourne Cake Club.  If you are in Melbourne and would like to join The Melbourne Cake Club, you are most welcome to - just look for us on Meetup.com or Facebook.

Milton Wine Shop
1427 Malvern Road
Malvern VIC 3144
Ph: (03) 9824 5337

EwE - Mixed Berry Cobbler - Red, White or Blue: It's Up To You!

The US celebrated the 4th of July this week, so Kayte chose a "Red, White or Blue - It's Up to You" theme for Eating with Ellie.  

I decided to go red, white and blue by making Ellie's Mixed Berry Cobbler from So Easy.  There were red cherries, blue blueberries and white (ish) cobbler crust - served with vanilla icecream: 

Look at  all that scrummy oozy fruit - and the crust is made with wholemeal flour and minimal butter:

This was so wonderful served warm on a cold winter's night.

To see what everyone else made for this week's Eating with Ellie, visit the LYL section of the EwE website.

Old Fashioned Apple Pie

Don't you hate it when you buy apples and get them home, to find that they are rather bland and chewy?  That happened to me recently, and I was left with over a kilo of apples that weren't much good for eating as they were.

Rather than waste the apples, I decided to make an apple pie.  I made my apple pie using a combination of recipes so that the end product fitted in with what I wanted.

I flicked through Pie It Forward by Gesine Bullock-Prado and came across her recipe for Vermont Apple Pie.  She makes a rough puff pastry for the crust.  However, the rough puff pastry makes an enormous amount of dough, which uses a correspondingly enormous quantity of ingredients (only a quarter of the recipe is required for this pie).  Instead, I opted to make Dorie Greenspan's Good for Almost Everything Pie Dough (a double recipe for a double crust) from Baking - From My Home To Yours. 

Pastry sorted, I only made half of the filling in Gesine's recipe because I only had 5 apples.  I probably should have used a stronger cheese in the filling, because I really couldn't taste the mild cheese that I used.

Regardless, pie is pie, and this one tasted really good.  It was a great way to use up substandard apples and turn them into something delicious.  

Chocolate Double Miso-lution Brownies

For those outside of Australia, we had our Federal election last Saturday.  Unusually, it was a double dissolution election, where the entire upper house of parliament (the Senate) was dissolved and to be voted for, as opposed to just half of it, which is the norm.  This was an attempt by the then current Coalition government to rid itself of a hostile Senate with many disparate independent senators. However, if you follow Australian politics, you will know that this strategy failed dismally, and we are now faced with the prospect of a hung parliament (with neither of the major parties having a clear majority) and an even more hostile Senate.

There is a terrific show on the ABC called Kitchen Cabinet, where political reporter and home baker Annabel Crabb visits the homes of various politicians and attempts to get inside their heads while sharing a meal.  Annabel always brings dessert.  When she visited Malcolm Turnbull, our current Prime Minister, she brought self-styled Chocolate Double Miso-lution Brownies (a word play on double dissolution) for dessert.  Malcolm didn't get the joke and did not react when she mentioned the name of her brownies.  Oh well, you can't win 'em all.

I however was intensely interested in making the Chocolate Double Miso-lution Brownies because, as the name suggests, they contain miso paste, giving the salty-sweet flavour that is all the rage at present.  I was pleasantly surprised - the miso is not overpowering and just adds a hint of something that you probably wouldn't be able to identify if you didn't know what it was.  The white chocolate on top gives a nice sweet, slightly crunchy contrast to the dense salty-sweet brownie beneath.

If you fancy joining us to munch on some Double Miso-lution Brownies while we wait for  an election result, the recipe is as follows:

200g butter
145g sugar 
3 eggs 
200g dark chocolate
3 tablespoons shiro (sweet white miso paste)
50g plain flour 
50g cocoa powder 
100g white chocolate

Preheat your oven to 180 degrees Celsius. Beat the butter and sugar in a stand mixer until pale and fluffy. Beat in the eggs, one at a time. Mix in the miso paste using a metal spoon. 

Melt the dark chocolate in a bain marie or microwave, then cool slightly before folding into the brownie batter.

Sift the flour and cocoa together then fold gently into the batter until just combined.

Spread the batter into a greased and lined 23 x 23 square cake tin (mine was a little smaller). Chop the white chocolate into small pieces and press them lightly just into the surface of the brownie, leaving the pieces mostly above the batter to allow them to caramelise without sinking.

Bake the brownies in the pre-heated oven for 20-30 minutes.  Remove from the oven and allow the brownies to cool on a wire rack before cutting into squares.

Stars and Stripes Cookies for the 4th of July

It is the 4th of July today, American Independence Day.  To mark this occasion, I have made Stars and Stripes Cookies using my improved biscuit decorating skills from my course at Miss Biscuit in Seddon (post to come).

I made Miss Biscuit's no chill vanilla sugar cookie dough - if you are interested in the recipe, you can buy it in downloadable form here.

Here are my baked cookies:

I was going to make star shaped cookies, but my star cutter is tiny - too tiny for the design I wanted to do, which was inspired by a design on Pinterest.

Here is my icing equipment all set up ready to go, as we did in our Miss Biscuit class: 

The base recipe for royal icing was again Miss Biscuit's recipe, which is made using egg white powder rather than raw egg whites.  I made black outlining icing (which used a ton of black gel colouring!), and red, white and blue for the flooding icing.

Here are the outlined cookies ready for flooding: 

Here are the cookies after the first stage of flooding:

And here they are, all finished:

To help the icing dry out in our cold and wet weather, I placed the cookies in the oven on low heat (120 degrees Celsius - that's as low as my oven will go) for 15 minutes.  This is a trick I learned from The Biscuiteers Book of Iced Biscuits, though they put their cookies in the oven at 50-70 degrees Celsius for 30 minutes instead.

These cookies are quite time consuming to make, but I think they turned out great.

Happy 4th of July to all of my US readers!

Cantaloupe Meringue Pie

Last week, I brought you Cantaloupe Bread with Walnut Glaze.  I still had oodles of cantaloupe to use up, so I made another of the unusual cantaloupe recipes that my Web search brought up - Cantaloupe Meringue Pie.

This one sounds almost not possible, but believe me, it is.  Best of all, it uses up a whole cantaloupe (mine was very large to start with so I just used what I had left). 

The top photo was taken while the pie was still warm, so the filling was not quite set.  It tasted delicious, but the filling tended to spill out of the sides of the slice of pie.  It is better to wait until the pie is cooled before cutting it, when you get this:

Isn't the bright orange colour amazing!  It makes a nice twist on lemon meringue pie, and has the advantage of not being as sweet, so it won't blow your mind with sugar.

I used gingernut biscuits in my pie crust instead of Graham crackers (because Graham crackers aren't readily available here).

If you fancy trying something a little different and you like cantaloupe, then I highly recommend making this pie.