WWDH - Thai pork with noodles

For Wednesday with Donna Hay this week, I chose Thai pork with Noodles from Modern Classics Book I.  Although I am no expert on Thai food, I would call this a larb dish.

I really liked the crisp Thai flavours in this dish of pork mince, onion, chilli, lemon grass, lime juice, brown sugar and fish sauce with vermicelli noodles.  (I skipped the mint.) I would have liked some Asian greens  to serve with it, but unfortunately I did not have any.

To see what Kayte, Margaret and Chaya thought, visit their websites. 

BWJ - Baked Yoghurt Tart

This week's Baking with Julia assignment is Baked Yoghurt Tart, being a continental European-style tart based on non-fat yoghurt and topped with berries or fruit (I chose blueberries). 

This tart was easy enough to make - a flaky pastry dough, baked into a tartshell, and filled with the yoghurt-based filling and topped with fruit.  It tasted like a light cheesecake.

I liked this tart, but I didn't love it.  I think I'd prefer a cheesecake for something of a similar type, but this does have the advantage of being lower fat.

To see what the BWJ bakers thought, visit the LYL section of the website. 

Fabulous chocolate celebration cake for Peter

One of our colleagues, Peter, finished up on Friday.  He has been an admirer of my baked goods, so I couldn't let the occasion go by without a cake in his honour.

Knowing that chocolate is generally a favourite, I decided to make a chocolate cake, and I couldn't go past the Fabulous Chocolate Celebration Cake recipe by Barbara Broccoli at p231 of Share: The Cookbook That Celebrates Our Common Humanity.  Barbara is the producer of several James Bond films.

This cake is not half-hearted in its chocolatiness, as it contains around 400g of chocolate (including the ganache).  However, if chocolate punch is what you want, that is what you will get with this cake.  Behold the undressed cake:

Inside, this is what you get from this double-decker creation:

To make it, you will need:

Cake

200g dark chocolate
6 tablespoons milk
175g softened butter
175g sugar
4 large beaten eggs
150g self raising flour
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
100g ground almonds

Ganache

275ml thickened cream
200g chopped dark chocolate

Preheat your oven to 180 degrees Celsius.  Grease and line 2 cake tins, each 20cm in diameter.

Break the chocolate for the cake into pieces, place into a heatproof bowl with the milk and melt over simmering hot water, stirring from time to time.

In the bowl of a stand mixer, beat together the butter and sugar until creamy and light.  Add the eggs, flour, baking powder and almond meal and combine either on low speed in the mixer or using a rubber spatula.  Add the melted chocolate and combine well.  Divide the batter evenly between the two cake tins, smooth off the tops, and bake in the preheated oven for ~30 minutes or until cooked through.  Unmould the cakes onto a wire rack to cool completely. 

For the ganache, heat the cream in a small saucepan on the stovetop until it is just boiling, then remove from the heat.  Stir in the chopped chocolate until smooth.  Place the ganache into the fridge to firm up for an hour or so until it thickens up and is spreadable.

To assemble the cake, place the bottom cake onto a cake board or serving plate.  Spread one third of the ganache over the top of the cake.  Place the second cake on top of the first, and spread the entire top and sides of the cakes with ganache. Decorate as desired.

Friday food, Diksteins, a mobile phone and Dr Martin Clegg

Dr Martin Clegg (Source: Ten's Offspring website)

 

 

Who would have thought that the eccentric Dr Martin Clegg from Offspring would save my mobile phone?  Well, in a curious way, he did.  Let me explain ...

 

Friday was a great day food-wise.  I had lunch at the Cajun Kitchen in Elizabeth Street, where I had wanted to go for ages:

 

I tried the pulled pork po' boy ($10.50):

This was huge - bread roll, filled to the brim with spicy pulled pork, with lettuce, pickle, tomato, onion, coleslaw and mayo.  The bread roll was not as good as it might be (the ones at Roll'd are better), but I could not fault the filling.  The only thing is that as a personal preference, I would have liked less mayo, as it left a greasy taste and texture in my mouth all afternoon.  The staff were friendly, and service was reasonably fast - but it seemed to be faster if you had take-out rather than eating in.

After work, I caught up with Tim for drinks at our fave, Zuffas, in Little Collins Street - only to find out it was last drinks at Zuffas forever.  Their lease is expiring, so we will have to find ourselves a new watering hole.  We liked Zuffas because it was reasonably quiet and we could always get in. 

We then went on to Diksteins in Little Collins Street for their excellent $10 pizzas.  We had the pork and pear:

and pumpkin, spinach and gorgonzola:

 

Both pizzas were delish, but the pumpkin one with its sweet roasted pumpkin, crunchy almonds and sharp gorgonzola was my favourite.

In taking these photos, my problems began - although I didn't know it at the time.  You see, when putting my phone camera away (or so I thought), I must have missed my handbag and the phone fell to the floor under the table.  Blissfully unaware of that fact, Tim and I trundled off to Lindt in Collins Street for a coffee and a macaron.  I was regaling Tim with details of this week's episode of Offspring, and couldn't resist reciting a pearl of wisdom from Dr Martin Clegg, on Dr Patrick expressing surprise that he also had a law degree:

"Everybody's got a law degree these days; they're like iPods."

This tickled my fancy because I am a lawyer - or perhaps  I just have an odd sense of humour.  So what has this got to do with my phone?  After reciting this quote from Clegg, I wanted to find a Youtube clip of his voice for Tim, because actor Lachy Hulme (Clegg's alter ego) gives Martin Clegg the most peculiar accent for comedic effect.  That was when I realised - my mobile phone was not in my handbag!!!! 

Luckily, I knew exactly where I had the phone last, so I sculled my coffee (it wasn't hot so that was easy), and Tim and I flew back to Diksteins, with me not being very hopeful that my phone would still be there.  However, it was my lucky day, and my phone was on the floor against a wall under the table where we had sat, and the same ladies who took our table when we left were still there.  You could not wipe the smile off my dial when I found that  my phone was still there. Phew!

Sooo ... I only realised I had lost my phone so quickly because of Dr Martin Clegg.  I will therefore be eternally grateful to the fictitious Dr Clegg.

Have a great weekend.

 

 

Cajun Kitchen

136 Elizabeth St
Melbourne VIC  3000

 

Diksteins Corner Bar

Cnr Bank Place and Little Collins St
Melbourne VIC 3000

 

FFWD - Socca from Vieux Nice

This week's French Friday with Dorie challenge was educational - the dish is Socca from Vieux Nice.  I have never heard of Socca before, but for those like me who have never heard of it before, it is a chickpea flour pancake.  The other educational aspects of making this dish is (a) finding out where to buy chickpea flour; and  (b) finding out that in Australia, chickpea flour is sold as besan flour.  Whew!  All that learning in one simple dish.

I really didn't know what I'd think about this dish.  It is very simple - flour, water, oil, rosemary.  However, I was pleasantly surprised - it was really tasty eaten on its own while still warm.  I only made a half recipe, which turned out the perfect thickness in my pan, but unfortunately made it a little delicate, but made it hard to get out of the pan in one piece, hence the mangled appearance.

I'd make this again - which is lucky, as I have a whole bag of very pricey chickpea flour.

To see what the other Dorie cooks thought, visit the LYL section of the website.

The Daring Bakers - Crack Pie for The Life of Pi Challenge

Have you ever got caught up in the hype of something and been desperate to try it because everyone else in the whole world except you seems to have tried it and deemed it good?  At the moment, the "in" thing is cronuts - every other day there is an article in the newspaper or a TV story about cronuts.  Apparently, there is even a black market for cronuts.  If I decide that I really have to try a cronut, I will skip the black market and make my own.

A couple of years back, Momofuku Milk Bar's crack pie was the cronut of today - everybody had to have it.  Bon Appetit says about Crack Pie, "Anyone who has taken a bite of this Milk Bar best seller immediately knows the reason for the sassy name. Once you start eating this rich, salty-sweet pie with its oat cookie crust, you won't be able to stop."  I have read about crack pie on plenty of blogs, but as New York is a long way away, and a single pie costs $44, I won't be having the real thing anytime soon. However, never fear ...

Rachael from pizzarossa was our lovely June 2013 Daring Bakers’ host and she had us whipping up delicious pies in our kitchens! Cream pies, fruit pies, chocolate pies, even crack pies! There’s nothing like pie!

One of the recipe options that Rachael gave to us is the Bon Appetit recipe for crack pie.  This gave me the opportunity after all this time to finally find out about crack pie for myself.  Looks good, doesn't it:

It's hard to explain what crack pie is like, but unchilled, it really is like pecan pie without the pecans (as someone else suggested), and chilled, it is like caramel fudge pie.  The pie has an oat cookie crust that melds into a brown sugar toffee-like substance when the pie is filled and baked, and the filling really does taste like caramel fudge.

I almost didn't make this because milk powder here costs a squillion and the smallest bag you can buy is 1kg (what ever happened to small cans of Sunshine Milk Powder?) when all I needed was a tablespoon to make the pie, but I relented on the basis that as the cost of a crack pie is $44 from Momofuku, I am still ahead.

And the verdict?  I liked this pie - in fact I liked it better warm than chilled (which  is how it is meant to be served).  However, I haven't developed an addiction to it - I prefer good old fashioned caramel tart.

To see what the other Daring Bakers made this month, you can take a look at the slide show on the Daring Bakers website on the 27th, US East Coast time. 

WWDH - Apple and Dark Chocolate Wontons

For this week's Wednesday with Donna Hay, Chaya has chosen Apple and Dark Chocolate Wontons from Donna's website.

These little packages are pretty straight forward - sandwich a pice of apple and a piece of chocolate between two wonton wrappers, brush with melted butter and bake for 10 minutes at 350 degrees Celsius:

Dust the finished product with icing sugar to serve.

These wontons tasted nice - crispy on the outside, soft and gooey chocolate contrasting with the tartness of the apple on the inside.  It was my first time working with wonton wrappers.  I have heaps of them left over, so I hope to make some pot stickers with the remainder.

To see what Chaya, Kayte and Margaret thought of these wontons, visit their websites,