Archive for November, 2009

Personal acceleration equals personal velocity over time

FruitMinceTart

(Fruit mince tart)

As December looms, I’m thinking of spices, family, Christmas shopping, baking, heatwaves, and baking in heatwaves with ice-cream and chilled watermelon.

Something about this past year, has changed.

Now the year is almost at it’s end, it’s my conclusion that this year has been nothing at all like I had expected. For various reasons, this is both a good and a bad thing, and for similar reasons, it has caused me to wonder more about where I want to be heading. People who know me will recognise this as being highly unusual, as I am typically a very directionless and under-planned kind of person. I operate rather laboriously along the lines of hey, let’s pick a path and then see what happens. If it doesn’t work out, I simply backtrack and choose a different adventure instead.

Fortunately, apathy doesn’t seem to wash past a certain age, and there are at least a few more things I wish to accomplish before the lower back pain eventually takes over. Something has me wanting to aim for new things. It’s true I may never realise them, but I’m excited simply for the fact these ideas are blowing away the dust from the attic in my head.

So pull up a chair, grab a cup of tea, and a mince tart or two (I made so many of these! Big ones, small ones.. they’re all going to good homes soon). I promise I’ll be telling you more in good time.

FruitMinceTart3


To new things, and new people :

Joshua Antonius Nov 7th 2009
Miren Lili Nov 17th 2009

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Daring Bakers Challenge : Cannoli

DaringBakers-Cannoli-Vegemite-Avo

(Vegemite ganache cannoli with avocado ice-cream and coffee)

I should first confess that I baked my cannoli. I’ve made plenty of cannoli before, but never at home due to my no-deep-frying-at-home policy (partly because I dread having to do the requisite post-fry clean up).

So, baked cannoli. Despite this, they actually turned out pretty well. The shells may have lacked that wonderful bit of blistering you get from frying, but they were slightly puffy and acceptably crunchy. A step up from the vast difference between oven chips and fried chips, if you will.

The resulting cannoli formed part of a dessert that played on the flavours of avocado, vegemite and toast; three ingredients which are one of my favourite ways to start the morning. How I came about the idea of incorporating them into a dessert, is a bit long winded and would probably require a flowchart to accurately re-tell. So I’m not going to.

Instead, I thought I would distract you with a recollection of my first avocado experience. Growing up, avocados were considered pretty exotic, so it was only when I was at least 10 that I tried my first avocado. It being the 80’s (that was the excuse anyway), mom served it to us sliced, with scoops of store-bought vanilla ice-cream. It was so horrible, I think I tried to hide the slices underneath the pool of melted ice-cream, and it was many years later before I finally realised how delicious avocados were.

Meanwhile, back at the cannoli factory…

I filled the cannoli shells with a vegemite chocolate ganache and paired them with a scoop of avocado ice-cream and some twisty chocolate tuiles for extra crunch. The avocado ice-cream recipe comes from The Perfect Scoop, by David Leibovitz. Following David’s recommendation to pour espresso over the ice-cream, I decided to incorporate coffee into the dessert, in the form of a crumble.

As with most first attempts, this is a tasty dish that would require a few changes if I were to make it again. And you know what, I just might make it again!

DaringBakers-Cannoli-Vegemite-Avo2

The November 2009 Daring Bakers Challenge was chosen and hosted by Lisa Michele of Parsley, Sage, Desserts and Line Drives. She chose the Italian Pastry, Cannolo (Cannoli is plural), using the cookbooks Lidia’s Italian-American Kitchen by Lidia Matticchio Bastianich and The Sopranos Family Cookbook by Allen Rucker; recipes by Michelle Scicolone, as ingredient/direction guides. She added her own modifications/changes, so the recipe is not 100% verbatim from either book.

Thanks Lisa Michele, for picking such a versatile and interesting challenge this month!

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Cocoa Brownies


(Coconut slice, cocoa brownie)

I’ve just finished watching a movie. The kind I only watch when I’m home alone and wish to wallow in the quiet for a little while. The name of the movie is actually pretty irrelevant. It sits firmly on the rom-com shelf and starts with a jaunty soundtrack that prepares you for a whimsical, predictable ride with occasional pithy observations.

I mention it only because it’s seems too true, what “they” say. You only get one life. “You can’t live someone else’s or think it’s more important just because it’s more dramatic. What happens matters. May be only to us, but it matters.”

I think I have lived a fairly unremarkable life. A simple childhood, spent walking cautiously down a road paved by my parents’ good intentions; now stretched and aged into an insignificant adult. For all anyone knows, I could still be in a laboratory somewhere, doing what I originally set out to do. Funnily enough, I still wear a white coat, and work with agar and a set of digital scales, but in a completely different setting. Occasionally I have looked back and am kind of amazed at where I have ended up.

When people ask me what I do for a living, I say that I cook. Don’t you mean that you are a chef, someone once said. Well, no. Forgive the pedantry. It’s as though I’ve stumbled into a hall of mirrors and seen myself at various angles for the first time – in fact, I did that once, at a Yayoi Kusama exhibit. Stepping in, I expected to experience awe and freedom. Instead, I felt small and trapped standing on a thin walkway inside a mind that wanted to be vast. In that hall, I turned and saw

a friend
the daughter
his partner
her laughter
those clenched fists
a flightless bird
endless running

I’m not expecting anyone to understand. I’m not even sure it means anything. But how could it mean anything or matter at all except to yourself. What you do in your life, see in that mirror and perceive yourself to be. Let it matter.

Selfish, I know, but I guess I wrote this for me.

And this is for you :

Cocoa Brownies :
(I make these at least once a week as a treat for the people I work with. I favour it for budgetry concerns and think that it’s remarkable how much flavour you can still get out of brownies made merely with cocoa powder instead of chocolate. The recipe is from Bittersweet, by the fantastic Alice Medrich)

1 1/4 sticks (141g) unsalted butter
1 1/4 cups sugar [it doesn’t hurt the end result if you use a little less, especially if you like your sweets less sweet 🙂 ]
3/4 cup plus 2 tablespoons unsweetened cocoa powder (natural or Dutch-process) [use the best you can get, such as Valrhona]
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
2 cold large eggs
1/2 cup plain flour
2/3 cup walnut or pecan pieces (optional)

Position a rack in the lower third of the oven and preheat the oven to 162’C. Line the bottom and sides of an 8-inch square baking pan with baking paper, leaving an overhang on two opposite sides.

Combine the butter, sugar, cocoa, and salt in a medium heatproof bowl and set the bowl in a wide skillet of barely simmering water. Stir from time to time until the butter is melted and the mixture is smooth and hot enough that you want to remove your finger fairly quickly after dipping it in to test. Remove the bowl from the skillet and set aside briefly until the mixture is only warm, not hot.

Stir in the vanilla with a wooden spoon. Add the eggs one at a time, stirring vigorously after each one. When the batter looks thick, shiny, and well blended, add the flour and stir until you cannot see it any longer, then beat vigorously for 40 strokes with the wooden spoon or a rubber spatula. Stir in the nuts, if using. Spread evenly in the lined pan.

Bake until a toothpick plunged into the center emerges slightly moist with batter, 20 to 25 minutes. Let cool completely on a rack.

Lift up the ends of the baking paper and transfer the brownies to a cutting board. Cut into 16 or 25 squares.

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