Festa Italiana - Crostata di Fichi Freschi (Fresh Fig Crostata)

Maryann from Finding La Dolce Vita and Marie of Proud Italian Cook are hosting Festa Italiana, a great new blogging event which celebrates Italian food and beverages. As the name of this event suggests, Maryann and Marie want us to join them at the long table at sunset on a summer's evening, the atmosphere filled with music and good company, by making and posting about our favourite Italian food and drink.

Consistent with my love of dessert, I have chosen to bring along a Fresh Fig Crostata. I have never previously made this dish, but I was curious about it after seeing Jamie Oliver's version in a newspaper article. As I didn't have Jamie's recipe, I used the recipe found here. The only changes that I made to the recipe were to substitute the orange zest for lemon zest, and to replace the Grand Marnier with Marsala. I also skipped the candied peel.

This recipe required careful concentration, as the sugar measurements are not divided between the tart shell, pastry cream and syrup until you get to the method (I had to throw out my first attempt at the pastry because I added all 2 cups of sugar to the pastry - don't try this at home folks!), nor does it clearly spell out that the components of the dish are a tart shell plus a pastry cream decorated with figs that are topped with candied peel and syrup. For this reason, I don't agree with this recipe's 5 star rating.

Despite my initial disaster with the pastry, I was pleased with the end result - this is a very grown up, pretty looking dessert.

Thanks to Maryann and Marie for hosting this event, and I look forward to the roundup.

LiveSTRONG With a Taste of Yellow 2008 - Stracciatella

Barbara from Winos and Foodies is once again hosting LiveSTRONG Day - A Taste of Yellow. This event is to support cancer sufferers, to remember those who were claimed by cancer, and to celebrate those who have won the fight. To participate, all you need to do is to make a dish with a yellow element and post about it by 19 April 2008. (There is also a photo competition, details of which are contained at the link above.)

While I have not yet been personally affected by cancer, I have plenty of friends and acquaintances who have, and their stories are often both heartbreaking and uplifting. Accordingly, I want to support this cause by participating in Barbara's event.

For my A Taste of Yellow entry, I have chosen to make stracciatella, a yellow Italian soup, with parmesan toasts. Soup always reminds me of care and healing, so I thought that it would be perfect for this event. The recipe that I followed is from page 82 of the April 2007 edition of Australian Gourmet Traveller.

To make this dish, which serves 4, you need:

2 eggs
1/4 cup grated parmesan cheese
1 tablespoon chopped flat leaf parsley
1 litre chicken stock
1 teaspoon saffron threads soaked in 1/2 cup warm water

4 slices baguette/ciabatta or similar bread
2 tablespoons olive oil
1/4 cup grated parmesan cheese

For the soup, whisk the eggs, parsley and cheese together in a bowl. Bring the stock to the boil over the stovetop, and add the saffron mixture. Pour the egg mixture into the stock in a slow, constant stream, while stirring the stock constantly, then decrease the heat and simmer the soup for 2 minutes. Finally, add salt and pepper to taste.

To make the toasts, drizzle the oil over the bread, sprinkle with parmesan and pepper to taste, then toast in a 200 degree Celsius oven until the cheese has melted and the bread has turned a golden colour.

Serve each bowl of hot soup with a slice of warm parmesan toast.

To be honest, I didn't like this soup. However, I am still posting about it because: (a) firstly and most importantly, the fact that I didn't like my choice of dish does not detract from my support for LiveSTRONG Day; (b) someone else might make stracciatella and love it; and (c) it would be totally unbelievable if I told you that I liked everything that I made.

Thanks and best wishes to Barbara in respect of her organisation and hosting of A Taste of Yellow, and please check Barbara's site for the amazing roundup (180 entries!!!) here and here. And congratulations to Helene of Tartlette on wininng the photo competition - a very worthy winner.

Cupcakes Spectacular 2008 - Donut cupcakes with marshmallow frosting

Arfi at Homemades is hosting a new blogging event - Cupcakes Spectacular 2008. This event requires you to make any kind of cupcake and decorate it with frosting or icing so that you end up with cupcakes that are edible, pretty and SPECTACULAR!

With that in mind, and inspired by the donuts and coffee cupcakes made by Cheryl at Cupcake Bakeshop, I decided to make donut cupcakes with marshmallow frosting. An additional motivation behind my choice is that the wonderful Ash was leaving work, and I wanted to make a leaving "cake" that would match his tastes. I knew that Ash likes (a) chocolate cake; (b) donuts; and (c) marshmallow frosting. Accordingly, I borrowed from several sources to produce these donut cupcakes with marshmallow frosting especially for Ash.

For the base cupcake, I chose chocolate mud cakes used as the base for the Florentine Cupcakes from The Australian Womens Weekly Cupcakes cookbook:

The recipe to make 24 of these cupcakes is as follows:

120g chopped dark chocolate

1 1/3 cup water

180g softened butter

2 cups brown sugar

4 eggs

1 1/3 cup sifted self raising flour

4 tablespoons sifted cocoa powder

2/3 cup almond meal

Preheat your oven to 170 degrees Celsius, and line 2 x 12 hole muffin pans with cupcake cases.

Place the chocolate and water in a saucepan and melt together over low heat until it forms a smooth "sauce". Beat the butter, sugar and eggs together until "fluffy". Fold in the flour, cocoa, almond meal and chocolate mixture, then spoon into the cupcake cases. Bake the cupcakes in the preheated oven for about 25 minutes, then remove from the oven and cool on a wire rack.

To crown the cupcakes, I made mini baked donuts using the recipe from Heidi at 101 Cookbooks, which can be found here. I won't reproduce it, as I think one in every four or so bloggers has already made these. I used the top of a champagne flute to cut out the donuts and the lid of a screw top wine bottle to cut out the donut holes. When you first cut them out, you think that the holes are way too big, but it is surprising how much the holes close up during baking. I ended up with about 24 mini donuts using half of Heidi's original recipe.

I was initially going to toss the donut holes, but then I thought that was too wasteful (given they comprised the majority of the dough!). I am glad that I didn't - the donut holes were delicious, and were just as popular as the cupcakes with my colleagues:

To frost the cupcakes, I made marshmallow frosting from the Crabapple Bakery Cupcake Cookbook and piped it onto the top of the cakes. I don't think I heated it for long enough, as mine ended up a little grainy, but still tasted delicious.

Here is the frosting recipe:

3 egg whites
480g white sugar
3 teaspoons light corn syrup (I used glucose syrup)
cream of tartar
150ml water
3/4 teaspoon vanilla essence
pink food colouring

Place the egg whites. sugar, glucose syrup, cream of tartar and water into a metal bowl and beat continuously with an electric hand mixer over a bowl of simmering water until the mixture forms soft peaks. Remove the frosting from the heat and add the vanilla and enough pink colouring to colour it your preferred shade of pink. Beat the frosting until it forms stiff peaks, then pipe onto the cakes in a swirl pattern.

I topped each frosted cupcake with a mini donut. Here is the end result:

Thanks to Arfi for creating and hosting this event, and do check the SPECTACULAR roundup of cupcakes from all over the world here. (You won't be sorry.)

Snapper in Sea Salt; Sujak

Back in the days when Jamie Oliver was young and cheeky, and everything was "pukka" and "lovely jubbley", he brought out his first cookbook, The Naked Chef. In this book, Jamie provides instructions on how to cook a whole fish in sea salt. I have also seen him cook a chicken in a salt crust.


The process of cooking in a salt crust fascinated me because it seemed to take so little time, so I decided to give it a whirl myself using the snapper that I purchased from Prahran Market.


The process of cooking a fish in sea salt is easy - preheat your oven to its hottest temperature, line a baking tray with alfoil and spread a bed of coarse sea salt on top of the foil approximately 2cm thick which is large enough to rest the fish on. Fill the cavity of your scaled, gutted fish with lemon slices and fresh parsley, basil, dill, coriander or bay, and place it on top of the salt bed. Cover the fish (except the head and tail) with a 2cm coating of salt, scrunch the edges of the foil up around the fish so that the fish is encased in an open topped foil "dish", then bake the fish in the pre-heated oven for roughly 10 minutes per 450g. (I had to cook mine for twice as long because my fish wasn't quite defrosted when I put it in the oven.)


Remove the fish from the oven at the end of the cooking time and rest it for 15 minutes so that it can continue to cook in the salt crust, then break open the crust and remove the salt before cutting up the fish for serving.


This cooking method produces a juicy, flavourful fish in a very short period of time. I served my fish with spiced couscous containing carrot, kumara, sultanas and shallots from my favourite deli, Cleos.

While I was in Cleos, an odd looking sweet on the counter called sujak caught my eye. I couldn't find anything about sujak on the Internet. However, according to the sign at Cleos, sujak comprises threaded walnuts boiled in a grape juice and honey syrup to produce a sweet which resembles a candle in appearance:

There's even a "wick" in it:

Dont be fooled by the odd appearance of the sujak - it can only be described as "yum"! This was my dessert to go with the fish.

Blog Party #31 - Fried Food Frenzy!

Stephanie of Dispensing Happiness is hosting yet another Blog Party - this time, the theme is Fried Food Frenzy! This is one event where you can find your inner Elvis and bring your favourite mini fried food to the party, together with a beverage.

I have chosen a relatively low cal option - mini vegetable fritters made from a recipe by Michelle Trute, as featured in the first Cooking with Conscience book.

You can see from the photo that the more fritters I made, the darker they became - presumably because the pan became hotter. I would not say that these fritters were exciting, and I think that they would benefit enormously from the addition of both seasoning and cheese. However, they tasted fine, although a little bland, and are a good way to use up some leftover veg at your next party.

To make these fritters, you need:

220g sifted self raising flour
enough skim milk to turn the flour into batter
(Michelle says 1 cup, I say almost 2 cups)
1 egg white
1 diced onion
150g tinned corn kernels
1/2 cup grated carrot
1/2 cup grated zucchini

Combine the milk and flour in a large bowl to form a batter of dropping consistency, then stir in the remaining ingredients until well combined. (I suggest adding salt and pepper to taste at this stage, and maybe some grated cheese - I found the end result a little bland.) Cook the batter in egg rings in a lightly oiled frypan, flipping the fritters to cook the other side when bubbles start appearing on the top. Drain on greaseproof paper.

Now, if I liked Bloody Marys, I think that that would make a perfect accompaniment to these fritters. However, being a classy kind of gal, I prefer a Cosmopolitan served in an elegant martini glass with my fritters:

The Blog Party roundup can be viewed here.

Daring Bakers - French Bread

Foux da fa fa
Foux da fa fa fa fa
Foux da fa fa
Ah ee ah

(From Foux Da Fa Fa by Flight of the Conchords)

This month is only my second Daring Bakers Challenge, but I believe that I have now earned the title "Daring Baker". Our hosts this month are Mary of The Sour Dough and Sara of I Like to Cook.


From the moment that I learned that this month's challenge was bread, I knew that I would be testing my abilities, as I am not generally a bread baker. And when I printed off the 15 pages of instructions and tried to digest them, I knew that I was in for a challenge!


When I read all the fabulous French names for the various shapes of this bread, I was immediately reminded of a novelty song called Foux Da Fa Fa by Flight of the Conchords, a Kiwi musical comedy duo, in which the word "baguette" is bandied around numerous times to comic effect. And, well, my efforts at making this bread were sometimes pretty comical, in between all the flour coating my kitchen, trying to wrap my head around the instructions, and trying to coax my bread to rise after shaping.


At stage 1 of the process, my dough looked pretty good:

This is the dough after being placed in the bowl for the first rising. You can see a mark on the right hand side of the bowl where it was expected to rise to:

At this stage, the dough didn't disappoint me - it rose almost out of the bowl, and the yeast looked as if it had been very active:

After deflation and another rising, it was time to shape the bread. I had to say that this step was good fun, especially making the round "cushion" shapes with the lovely soft dough. To see that smooth, round shape emerge from the irregular shaped pieces of dough was magic! To test my daring, I chose to make a batard, a boule and four petit pains. I found the batard harder than the round loaves, but it seemed to go OK.

However, this is where my problems began, because two hours after shaping, the dough had still not risen at all. As it was late in the evening, I used the oven trick mentioned by Sara and Mary to coax the bread to rise. Unfortunately, I knocked the batard shape around a bit by shoving it in the oven in a hurry, so the diameter along its length was no longer as even as it had been. After another half an hour, the petit pains had risen a treat, the boule had risen somewhat and the batard had risen a little. (I imagine that I would not have had this issue with varying rising times if I had made all of the dough into the same size and shape.) This is the point where I said "sod it" because it was getting quite late, and baked the lot. I did not find it necessary to use fleurage to prevent sticking of the shaped dough during the process of transferring it to the oven tray for baking - although I did process some pasta in readiness!

With the aim of producing "handsome" loaves as described in the instructions, I put a pan of ice cubes in the bottom of my oven to create steam, and painted the surface of the bread with water during the early stages of baking. Here is the bread after three minutes of baking, when I removed it from the oven to "paint" the crust with water:

The bread looks pretty handsome to me! The finished product is pictured at the top of the post, and this is what the bread looked like inside after having been left overnight to cool:

The bread looked fine inside and out (although you can see that the batard suffered somewhat from my impatience in not allowing it enough time to rise). Its texture is of the chewy variety (it contains no fat), just like restaurant dinner rolls. Unfortunately, this type of bread has never been a favourite of mine. I am not a big eater of bread, and when I do partake, my preference is for soft Scotch baps and the like. The bread tasted perfectly fine - it was just not my thing.

I ate one of the petit pains for breakfast - cold with jam on one half, and warm with promite on the other half. I much preferred it warm. However, I gave the remainder of the bread to my friend, Veronica. She likes bread, and proceeded to eat a petit pain with nothing on it while I was visiting her. This helped to confirm that my bread was not a dud - it is just that I am not a fan of this type of bread.

That said, I learned a lot from this challenge. In particular, I learned how crucial temperature is to bread rising; how to trick bread to rise when it steadfastly refuses to do so unaided; and how to achieve those gorgeous loaf shapes that you see in better quality bakeries. It also made me face my fear of bread-making head on. This is what the Daring Bakers is all about. Thanks to Mary and Sara for proposing a daring challenge indeed.

If you are simply curious about how to make French bread or would like to have a go yourself, the instructions can be downloaded from Mary's site.

You can check out the exploits of all the other Daring Bakers here.

Meme - 5 Things About Me

This is another Meme post, so I thought that a good way to kick things off would be to give you a vague idea of what I look like. The photograph above is of me at Noosa, Queensland where I was attending a conference late last year.

Gretchen from Canela & Comino has tagged me for another Meme - this time, on "5 Things About Me". The rules of this Meme are as follows:

1. Link to your tagger and post these rules.

2. Share 5 facts about yourself.

3. Tag 5 people at the end of your post and list their names (linking to them).

4. Let them know they've been tagged by leaving a comment at their Blogs.

When I first read this Meme, I initially panicked, because I couldn't think of 5 interesting things about me. However, once I thought a little more, I came up with the following facts:

1. The name of my hometown is derived from the Aboriginal word for "swamp". Does this make me a swamp creature?!?

2. As a child, I refused to eat my veges, and my mother wisely gave up trying to make me. Only when I left home to live at college, where you either ate your veges or starved, did I discover the diverse and wonderful flavours of vegetables.

3. I am the co-author of two legal texts. If you need a cure for insomnia, you may borrow them from me.

4. My favourite movie of all time is Casablanca. The performances, the script, the sets and the costumes (presumably high fashion at the time) are all wonderful. In particular, I love the rapid-fire wit that is exchanged between Rick Blaine and Captain Renault.

5. I do not own a car. In Australia, where cars are worshipped, this is regarded as strange, and I am constantly having to defend myself about this. However, it is common sense in my situation - I live within walking distance of everything I need, there is terrific public transport almost at my doorstep, it is cheap, clean and green, and I get great exercise without having to go out of my way, which allows me to eat more of my own cooking ;)

I am tagging the following fellow bloggers for this Meme (again, apologies if you have already done this one or if memes are just not your thing):

1. Ann at Redacted Recipes

2. Browners & Cowie from Around Britain with a Paunch

3. Gay of A Scientist in the Kitchen

4. Gail from Pacific Outpost

5. Happy Cook from My Kitchen Treasures