I know, I know, oh, millions of adoring fans. It’s been quite a while since I posted, but I’ve been busy! And I’m still busy. Too busy to write in fact, but I can at least provide you with a selection of photographs from the buffet that our class did for a private function.

I will provide captions later. For the moment, it’s all visual.

This is my FIRST EVER character cake. I’d always wondered how these were done, and now I have a bit more of an insight. I’d never heard of Peppa the Pig—which just goes to show you how out of touch I am with the pop culture of the under fives—but here she is. The pattern came from a book full of characters that are shown on Nick Jnr Too. Peppa is actually a multiple winner of the British Academy Children’s Awards.

Anyway, in an effort to get the hang of Thursdays I’ve decided that the fourth (or fifth) day of the week is dedicated to special projects.

Peppa has, at her core, a dense sponge cake. She needs to be dense to support the weight of the fondant on top. The fondant itself is a basic White Fondant, with extra icing sugar added until it is almost the consistency of Royal Icing. The colouring is various concentration of Cochineal Powder that provides the intensity of the red. It is a rather tricky medium to work with and I have learned a lot today.

But gosh it was fun! It was like Xy discovering plasticine and Play Doh all over again, only you can eat this stuff, although I wouldn’t be inclined to eat too much of this too often.

For the die-hard perfectionist fans of Peppa, yes, I know her tail is normally pink, but she’s wearing a tail stocking because the weather is still slightly chilly up here in the mountains and Peppa is obviously a British Rose of a Girl—a person of refinement who thinks that a tail with goosebumps isn’t very ladylike.

NOTE TO SELF: In future, use gloves when handling intense food colours. I have now been caught, literally, red-handed.

OTHER NOTE TO SELF: A warm shower solves the cochineal staining problem, but I can’t vouch for the efficacy against any other colour.

CAKE VITAL STATISTICS:

LENGTH—45cm, BREATH—30cm, HEIGHT—9cm. WEIGHT—3kg.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:

Ma Cheffe: For inspiring the gig.

Mon Chef: For key instruction and demonstration.

Slick Wilhelm: For numerous attempts to discern a technique to get the white chocolate eyes right.

 

 

 

In case you didn’t know, the world of chefs, waiters and others who work in restaurants and hotels is riddled with drugs.

It’s the mega-sized elephant in the room that nobody wants to talk about. Because people calling each other out on their Scheisse is never fun although “shit” always sounds better in German. As a person who has spent a lifetime abstaining from drugs except in rare cases for medicinal purposes, I’m probably the least-qualified person in the world to talk about this, but since the vast majority of people in the world never let a little thing like ignorance or inexperience get in the way of having an opinion, I don’t see why I should be an exception to that or why I shouldn’t put in my five cents worth (yes, I know, it used to be two cents, but, you know, inflation …)

But first, need to set the record straight on a few things.

One: It was Father’s Day yesterday and my pal form school Mish-Mash innocently asked me, “Did you call your Daddy?” The following conversation ensued.

X: Well, actually, my father’s been dead since I was 19.

Mish: Oh! I’m sorry.

X: Oh don’t be! I’m not. He was a terrible person.

Mish: (wide-eyed but suppressing laughter) Well then, I guess you have a different take on Father’s Day then?

X: Oh yeah. I wake up on Father’s day like one of those people in mattress commercials all springy and bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and smiling thinking, “YES! Yet another year I haven’t had to live with, much less buy anything for that BASTARD!”

What I didn’t tell Mish is that one of the many reasons that I have a low opinion of the man who donated, arguably, the better half of his genome to me is that he was a chain-smoking alcoholic. My father wasn’t a cinematic drunk, tripping over furniture and being comical or witty. He was a real-life drunk—narcissistic, controlling and boorish. So being forced to endure polluted air and polluted behaviour throughout my delicate, formative years was pretty much a long, drawn-out torture—not the best or most nurturing environments for an “Orchid Person”. Being the observant type (when I want to be) I rapidly concluded, “Gee. If that’s what drugs do to you I want no part of it. You look bad. You smell bad. There’s NOTHING attractive about this at all.” Notice that my objections weren’t moral, they were aesthetic—typical orchid thinking. I’m telling you this so that you have a better insight as to why I have the opinion that I have about drugs.

Of course, there’s always that question hanging in the air. “Do drugs corrupt people OR do corruptible people seek out drugs?” I’m inclined to believe that it’s more of the latter, but it depends on your interpretation of “corruption.” I have argued elsewhere (in my book Women in Crime—be the first to write a review!) that people often do drugs out of desperate, clumsy, self-medicated pain relief and I still think that that point of view has merit and I’m disinclined to judge that sort of desperation too harshly, after all, I’m not a woman from a disadvantaged socio-economic background with a history of being a victim of physical and sexual abuse who takes a shot of heroin to make all that pain go away—at least not in this lifetime. I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about reasonably well-educated people who come from so-called “good” homes who think that drugs are cool or funny or “edgy” and who think that because they’re young and hip that they can put whatever they like into their bodies as a form of chemical entertainment and that by some magic there will be no consequences.

Well, sorry, there are. I grew up with a lot of people who “experimented” with drugs and kept it “educational” to the point where they experimented and educated their way into, in no particular order, permanent short-term memory loss, stupidity, paranoia, cancer and the morgue. I have NEVER met anyone who has taken “recreational” drugs, especially if they started at a young age, and who wasn’t worse off for it especially if the “use” continues for years. The effects of recreational chemistry are so well documented that I won’t bore you or myself by repeating any more of them here.

Having said that, I assure you that while I might be judgmental about it. I’m not at all smug about my sobriety. For whatever reason, evolutionary genetics, the spiritual evolution that only comes from lifetimes of trying EVERYTHING or sheer dumb luck in a Godless, mechanistic universe, I’m not a personality prone to compulsive or addictive behaviour at least not as far as chemistry is concerned. I have never smoked anything, except unwillingly and passively. I drink ethanol rarely, and when I do, it’s just a sensation, like any other food experience and a small amount suffices. I don’t feel like “Wow! Where have you been all my life, Baaaaaaby!” If there’s an “alcoholic gene complex” I didn’t inherit it from either parent and I’ve avoided the epigenetic influences too. The fact is, my early exposure to a lot of my father’s drinking wasn’t “sophisticated” cocktail bars full of “elegant”, well-dressed people sipping alcoholic alchemy, or of fine dining, but of the bar that was, literally, next door to the hotel where I did a lot of my growing up. The bar smelled of stale beer and ashtrays and full of men on stools who I’m sure could have been doing ANYTHING more life-enhancing at that time of the day and I still don’t get what the appeal is with either drug.

One of the many disadvantages in my case of being interested in food and fine dining is that people also assume that there will also be a concomitant interest in booze. This is because of the historical link between aristocratic food and wine and, to a lesser extent, beer, spirits and liqueurs. I have nothing against these various forms of ethanol per se aside from the fact that ethanol is actually a potentially addictive poison that needs a healthy liver to detoxify it. However, the culinary world has many common foods that contain poisons which, fortunately, can be tolerated in small amounts or destroyed by heat or other treatment, hence my lack of concern when cooking with alcohol. But aside from culinary uses my interest in wine, beer, spirits and liqueurs—or what I think of as “disguised ethanol”—is entirely intellectual. I appreciate the aesthetics of “matching” food and drink, but as far as ethanol is concerned, it’s like my attitude to salt, a little goes a very long way. However, at an “industrial” level the “foody industry” as a whole tends to fetishize ethanol. I guess that this can’t be helped since, if you think of food as just a bunch of chemicals, the whole food industry is built upon the fetishization of chemistry anyway. I fetishize proteins, fats and carbohydrates if they’re in a particular form while other people fetishize alcohol and other non-nutritive chemicals if they’re in a particular form. Stated like that, the various forms of fetishization sound more like religious prejudices than anything else. “My chemical idols are better than your chemical idols.”

So why is the hospitality industry riddled with drug abuse? Well it’s no different to anything else really. Human life as a whole has been riddled with drug abuse for millennia and has caused huge and immeasurable suffering. This suffering even includes the abuse of food. “Gluttony” wasn’t a deadly sin for no reason after all. The “drug scene” and the current fashion of the social acceptability of drugs is all part of a bigger issue about society as a whole. Unfortunately, in an age where we’re all supposed to be more “tolerant” of each other, it’s hard to point a finger at the Emperor of Chemical Addictions, and say that he’s naked, without being accused of being a stick-in-the-mud, a drag, a wet blanket or some sort of religious fanatic who thinks that the opposite of hedonism is aestheticism. This is because a lot of people find drug use pleasurable (pleasure is a good thing, yes?) and to argue against drugs is confused as an argument against pleasure.

In fact, an argument against drugs is actually an argument for pleasure.

I have nothing against pleasure, some of my best experiences have been pleasurable, but speaking as someone who is addicted to sobriety it doesn’t look all that great from my perspective. If you’re sober and looking at drunks—whether it’s drunk on booze, or high on something else—it’s no fun. And no, I’m not looking at drunks and thinking “Wow! They look as if they’re having fun. I wish I could join in!” I’m thinking. “Yuck. That looks really ugly (orchids—aesthetics again) and dumb and undignified (ditto, ditto) and they’re so going to regret this in the morning.” And I’m also thinking, “What is it about their lives that means that they have to numb or otherwise modify their natural, in-built reactions to their experiences?”

In other words, why don’t people trust their own, natural in-built capacity for pleasure? Our bodies have tremendous natural, inbuilt potentials for pleasure and I’m not just talking about sex. I’m talking about sensuality. And I think that that’s ultimately my objection to drugs. Yes, they’re addictive and expensive and they ruin lives. But they do this because they might “feel good” in the short term, but ultimately they rob you of your capacity for pleasure because that’s just the reality of living in a human body. The nervous system adapts and usually in a bad way. It’s all gluttony. If you’re constantly eating rich food you go numb. If you constantly listen to loud music you go deaf. If you’re constantly upping the ante on your nervous system with alien chemistry without all the in-built checks and balances of your natural “pleasure system” then you rob yourself of the capacity to ever really feel good again. And experienced drug takers who are honest with themselves KNOW THIS. You never, ever experience the first high again, no matter how much you pump into yourself, no matter how many jobs you’ll lose or relationships that you’ll destroy. It’s never as good as the first time.

So I think that people who work in the entertainment industry—and this includes cuisine, which is a performance art—who take drugs are idiots. Worse, they are hypocrites, betraying the spirit of the entertainment industry, which is, for the most part, to give pleasure, because “hypocrite” is the only word that accurately describes people who purport to give pleasure, while diminishing their own capacity to experience it. In that sense, the hospitality industry is full of deaf musicians. Want to talk about corruption? There you have it—corrupted sensuality.

And while I’m on my soap box I should extend my definition of corruption to insensitivity and absence of empathy. It’s been my experience that drug abusers are also incredibly insensitive and lacking in empathy. It’s all about them and their “pleasure” and the oblivion they seek makes them oblivious to the effects that they have on others. It’s hard to trust a drug addict. The numbness of their nervous systems seems to extend to insensitive treatment of not only themselves, but others too.

Look. I get it. Life is not always nice. Bad things happen to good people blah, blah, blah. You can’t always hide from the hideousness of what can happen in the universe, and the temptation to run away into some sort of opium dream, drug haze or even sugar coma must be overwhelming. Society can be awkward. We’re not all fun or witty or good looking or smart or have excellent taste or extraordinary presence or talent or wisdom, insight or have effervescent personalities and win personality contests without even trying. Some people even take drugs to “enlighten” themselves. I get it that many people take  drugs as a “social lubricant” or for “spirituality”, but—!!!NEWS FLASH!!!—drugs don’t make you more fun or witty or attractive or closer to God, blah, blah, blah, they just numb or corrupt your senses to the point that you think that you’re a better version of yourself than you actually are and that the people around you are better, more “adequate” versions of themselves that they actually are. That’s not enlightenment, that’s denial.

And the sober, when they’re sober, see right through all that stupidity.

So sobriety is hard. Sobriety has a dark side. It forces you to bear witness to the painful displays of people who don’t think that their real selves are enough or that real life is enough. And you know, maybe they’re right. Maybe a lot of the time our real selves aren’t enough and that a lot of the time our lives suck. But the only way to cure that is to work at it. You have to expend some time, energy on building that better version of you. You’re better off investing your time, energy and money on becoming a more adequate version on your current self and of your current life than blowing it on some liquid or crystal that will only ever give you a brief illusion, a feeling of “better” without some sort of reality to back that up while everything else crumbles into crap around you.

And yes, a drug-free reality of sobriety is hard, but I’m not brilliant enough to have found a better alternative yet. Even spirituality and a “connectedness with the divine” is better with a clear head, if you can do the hard work, much as that might suck and not always feel good. If I ever find a better way, I’ll share it. And if any of you, among  my millions of fans have found a better alternative, I’d love to hear from you.

 

 

 

There’s a sort of ‘flu-type bug going around at the moment that has turned all of last week into one long Festival of Phlegm and has really cut into my productivity, so I have to apologise to my millions of fans for not posting last week’s class until today. I didn’t even have my phone with me, so this week’s photos are thanks to Brilliant Barb, so named because of her excellent execution of Beef Cheek and Mushroom Pie.

In case you were wondering about the title of this blogpost, the dishes here are a requirement of The Certificate III in Commercial Cookery qualification. For those of you who are undergoing the course or thinking of undergoing it, here is an indication of what you should be aiming for so here is a showcase of various culinary efforts from my classmates. They’ll have to let me know who’s responsible for what if they want any credit since I didn’t keep track of what everybody was doing:

Rock Lobster Bisque

 

Macadamia-Encrusted Barramundi with Sweet Leek and Roast Tomato Risoni

 

Mushroom and Gruyere Tortellini with Burst Cherry Tomato and Caramelized Onion Sauce

 

Duck Confit, Parsnip Mash with Fava Beans and Duck Jus

 

Barb’s Braised Beef Cheek and Mushroom Pie with Some Chutney Thing I’ve Forgotten

 

Nervous Nate’s Chocolate Mocha Tart with Double Cream (for those times when single cream isn’t enough) with Chocolate Sand

 

Mille-feuille of Strawberries and Strawberry Mousse

This is the proper, puff-pastry variation on the miss-named mille-feuille of last week. This is a co-production from Mon Chef, Chuckles Charlie and Yours Truly.

 

 

 

A short blogpost today because I’m feeling a little poorly.

I’m writing “How to Boil Water” in response to a recent article on MSN that left out a couple of important points so I’m going to repeat them here plus add my own extra tips. I don’t know whether the person who wrote that blog was an overworked, under-timed journalist with no real interest in food who was ordered by an editor to create digital landfill or whether it was laziness but if you’re going to write about how to boil water you’d might as well do it properly.

1. Choose your pot. Choosing your pot is based around what you’re actually cooking. If you’re doing pasta, you’ll want a large pot to give the pasta plenty of room to swirl around in so that it doesn’t stick to itself. If you’re boiling whole potatoes you’ll also want plenty of water so that there is enough retained heat in the water to cook the potatoes right through. If you’re only going to blanch greens you might not need a huge amount of water but you might want to choose a wide pan that increases the surface area exposed to the hob heat so that the water boils faster.
2. Choose your temperature. “Boil” doesn’t always mean “boil”. “Boil” means “rolling boil” with bubbles of steam churning the water. If you’re doing something more delicate, like poaching an egg or salmon, you DO NOT WANT A ROLLING BOIL. Instead, at most, you want a gentle simmer. A simmer is defined as the gentle movement of small bubbles moving at the meniscus (look it up).
3. Choose your hotplate. Big pan, big hotplate; small pan, small hotplate as Mon Chef seemingly never tires of telling me. A big pan on a small hotplate simply won’t heat enough and a small pan or pot on a large hotplate won’t be stable enough if you’re cooking with gas.
4. To salt or not to salt. Yes, it’s true that salt lowers the boiling temperature of water. BUT for starters a noticeable difference doesn’t kick in until the salt reaches concentrations high enough to be really noticeable, like SEAWATER noticeable, so the effect of salting water in normal quantities for cooking, in terms of temperature, is negligible. Secondly, some people are on low salt diets or are hypersensitive to salt, and some foods don’t need it, so salting depends on circumstance. Furthermore, even if salting made a noticeable difference you might not want to lower the boiling temperature of the water before it boils. The recipe might require you to actually reach 100ºC (212ºF) so lowering the boiling temperature with an additive like salt will only give you the effect of boiling, not what you might need, which is to reach a certain critical temperature.
5. Further to the preceding point. Water boils when the pressure created by the steam bubbles within the water exceeds the counteracting pressure of the water surrounding the bubble and this water pressure is in turn critically and proportionally affected by (or as we like to say in science “is a function of”) atmospheric pressure. The less atmospheric pressure, the less counteracting water pressure on the steam bubbles. Water only boils at 100ºC (212ºF) at sea level.  Atmospheric pressure lessens the higher the elevation and there are other factors like ambient temperature and humidity at play too. Now this might not mean much to you if, like a lot of the world’s population, you live on the coast or at about sea level. But what if like me, and millions of others, you don’t? In fact the difference can be quite startling. Here is a graph I borrowed from Wiki – The Goddess of Popular Facts: 
6. My cooking school in The Blue Mountains is located at an elevation of 867 meters above sea level. Being the sensitive being that I am I feel my ears pop every time I go down to the coastal plain of Sydney. For those of you who know how to read graphs you will note that at that elevation water boils at around 92ºC (198ºF) which might or might not be significant depending on what you’re doing.
7. Further to that point most people boil water to make coffee or tea. In fact, my friend, Crazy Clara has a real thing about germs and insists on a rolling boil before she’ll make tea. That’s fine but it’s too hot for both drinks and killing bugs. In fact, most bugs are dead at about 70ºC (160ºF). By all means do the boil overkill if you want to kill the bugs and the bugs’ bugs and if you plan to sterilise your knifes prior to performing your do-it-yourself kitchen appendectomy, but let the water cool down before you make tea or coffee. The idea temperature for coffee is around 96ºC (205ºF) and the ideal temperature for tea depends on what tea you’re brewing and will be the subject of another blog when I get around to it. In either case it is almost NEVER 100ºC (212ºF). I’m fortunate enough to live at an elevation where water boils at around the right temperature so that I never burn my tea or coffee so I don’t have to think about it. For the sea level dwellers, you’re going to have to let your boiling water cool for about a couple of minutes before adding it to your tea or coffee. You will note that if you could live at an altitude of 10 000 meters—which is at about the top of Mt Everest, where the air so cold you need to look like a Yeti to survive and the air is so thin you need oxygen equipment, so you end up looking like a scuba-diving Yeti—water would boil at about 27ºC (80ºF), which would be pretty useless for tea or coffee but when you’re that cold and look that stupid, who cares?
8. Boil water over high heat. Absolutely, but, especially if you’re cooking with gas, not so high that the flames rise up the sides of the pot or pan. All that accomplishes is wasting energy and creating the potential for burning yourself. There is an upper limit to how fast you can make water boil safely in a domestic kitchen without altering the fundamental laws of physics. In a commercial kitchen, if I’m in a hurry, my standard hack is to find an urn that puts out near boiling water and use that in my pots before they go on the flame.
9. Lastly, and going back to Point Number 2, some foods, like whole potatoes for later baking or frying, need to be put in water as it boils and brought to boiling. Others, like batonnet (thick julienne) potatoes for parboiling for later frying, need to be put in after the water is already boiling.

Well, I hope that clears THAT up.

When I have time I’ll punch in some nice photos of pots on hobs to illustrate the bleedingly obvious.

PS. On a completely irrelevant and different note, I plan to supplement my income with the launch of The Trump Colouring Book. It’s cheap, because it only includes one crayon, coloured orange, because that’s all you really need.

Feel free to order a copy.

There. That’s my cheap political shot for the day.

PS – One of my other self-appointed trolls had this to say:

Deleece Cook You forgot points 10 & 11 Xy – (10) Stay in the room while you are boiling the water (so that it doensn’t all evaporate and ruin the pot, which I admit has been known to happen – X) and (11) Don’t forget to turn off the gas before you sweep past the stove in your full length Lama poncho 😀 (It’s an Alpaca Poncho, OK?!!! – X)

 

I wrote this blogpost in response to a request from one of my millions of fans, who wanted a further elucidation of my theory of what your plant preferences say about your personality.

You’d think that people who like citrus would be a mixed bunch. After all, in spite of their commonalities, citrus fruits are quite varied. Eating oranges, mandarins or even grapefruit is quite a different experience from eating limes and lemons. You’d expect there to be more than once kind of citrus person. And if you’re thinking “Well, it’s obvious. Sweet people like oranges and sour people like lemons”, then it’s also obvious that you know nothing about the psychology of fruit. For this I forgive you. Fruit psychology is one of those neglected areas of scientific enquiry, like a serious investigation as to how anyone could find the Kardashians even remotely interesting, which I would suppose would be a subject within the general science of Koalemology—the study of stupidity. Yes, it is a word because I just made it up using well-established principles of word coinage. My classical education was not wasted after all.

But I digress …

Further to my thesis that people project their qualities or even their aspirations onto things that they like, there really is only one sort of citrus person. People who have an affinity for citrus tend to do things well ahead of schedule, only to forget them later. This is in direct reference to the unusually long, by fruit standards, shelf life of citrus. Long after grapes have turned into furry slime and strawberries have turned into, well, furry slime, citrus sits there, almost but not quite impervious to time. Citrus people have no sense of urgency. Citrus people tend to think that they have all the time in the world to get around to doing things, only to discover all too frequently that perhaps they don’t. You’ll find them procrastinating their lives away until one day they discover that the parade has passed them by, and their fresh zesty selves have become a pale shadow of their former glory.  but they can still be put in a drawer to make your underwear smell nice, if that’s the direction my your fantasies might go. Citrus people are in denial but they’re mostly harmless, unlike nutmeg people, who sit there, being fragrant but who’ll kill you with two or three teaspoons of themselves.

I hadn’t planned to post today, but my classmates Gigi Woo Woo and André The Not So Giant wanted access to my photos and the easiest way to get that happening was simply to say, “Go to my blog and feel free to drag and drop”.

Anyway, my stuff first, courtesy of Sponge Xy Spiralpants:

The swirly confection on the left is a Swiss Roll Filled with Strawberry Preserve and Kirsch Filling. It might look humble, but it’s technically difficult, requiring the creation of a sponge, which is easy to get wrong if you don’t do it really carefully, and then the actually rolling, which won’t work if the sponge has come out badly. In any case, in this particular instance Ma Chef did the rolling, while I helped.

And just to show that I’m not the ONLY person in my class who has a way with butter, eggs, sugar and flour, the rest of the plate is the creation of Gigi Woo Woo. In the centre is a Madelaine Cake, which I hope to try in a few minutes with the express purpose of evoking a childhood memory and perhaps kickstarting a major literary opus. If you don’t understand the reference then I feel sorry for you. On the right, Gigi Woo Woo’s excellent scones. Scones are also easy to get wrong if you overwork them.

The pots of cream and jam for the scones were arranged by André The Not So Giant. Notice the artful, off-centre asymmetry … not that I’m an obsessive compulsive neurotic about such things. I do have better things to mentally gnaw over while I lie awake at night than over such trivialities as the centring of a paper doily.

Really, Xy. Get a grip!

And as for the rest of the class there’s this …

 

… and this …

 

I invite the various classmates to take credit where credit is due by writing to me and complaining.

If anyone wants a recipe and technical pointers then email me and I’ll be happy to oblige in a future post.

 

 

Yes, it’s Wednesday and I was given the task of being Chef de Partie—Desserts.

The job of a Chef de Partie is to manage a section of the menu and to have subsidiary cooks working under me. Today, I had the great help of Chuckles Charlie and my old pal Nervous Nate, so I can’t claim that the work was all mine, especially since Mon Chef demonstrated the plating he wanted, so I can’t get too many Brownie Points for Creativity either although I’ll give myself some small pat on the back for management skills.

Nevertheless I did handle the more technically difficult parts of the pieces, especially the Tuiles, which are the Almond Wafers used in this first dessert:

This miss-named piece is called Mille Feuilles, Strawberry Mousse and Almond Biscuit.

What it actually is, is a construction of Almond Tuiles, Strawberries and Cream Mousse with Strawberry Slices, Dusted with Icing Sugar and Served with a Quenelle of Whipped Cream, a Mint Leaf and a Toffee Spiral. The important thing here is that the Mousse should be very firm and cold to get it to sit properly.

Next up …

Frozen Hazelnut Praline Soufflé Served with a Quenelle of Whipped Cream, a Mint Leaf and Spun Toffee.

The praline is made by dry roasting hazelnuts, pouring hot toffee on them, letting the toffee mixture set hard and then blitzing the toffee and hazelnut mix in a food processor. The cold soufflée is made by making a sabayon of either Frangelico or hazelnut syrup and then gently folding in the praline as well as a soft cold meringue and whipped cream. The result is an almost lighter-than-air hazelnut cold souflée mousse.

I contributed little to the next piece, aside from supporting Nervous Nate a little by helping him with his Mise en Place and cleaning up after him because he, like Mon Chef, is a rather messy cook. Also, entirely my fault, I waited a little too long before I photographed this before it started to melt.

Chocolate Mocha Tart with Swirls of Dark Chocolate and Milk Chocolate Ganache.

Next week we’ll be repeating theses dishes with some variations in order to refine the recipes, since, frankly, we discovered that the recipes that we get aren’t always entirely reliable, which really upsets us and Mon Chef, who then has to give us his own recipes from his vast repertoire.

 

Actually, the title of this blogpost should really be: “In Which Xy Waxes Lyrical on His Theory Regarding the Optimal Gluten-Free Flourless Orange Cake and Its Potential Accompaniments” but that was just a tiny bit too long.

I’d might as well come right out and say that the flourless orange cake is my all-time favourite cake. It is true that there are richer cakes – Chocolate Mud springs to mind. It is true that there are more difficult cakes, like the Bombe I made the other day. It is true that there are fussier, more exhausting cakes, like the Baumkutchen. And there are cakes that are rich, difficult, fussy, exhausting, intense and spectacular like one I have in mind to make in the next couple of weeks – I shall keep you waiting for that one.

But, as so often is the case, dear and gentle readers. something that looks great doesn’t necessarily taste great, especially if you’re like me and you don’t really have a sweet tooth, so icing, butter cream and fondant don’t really work for you although you understand that such things have their fans in the same way that pro-wrestling and roller derby have their fans.

Now even the most cursory netsearch (See, I coined an almost-new word there!), or if you’re the more old-fashioned type, library search, will reveal a plethora of recipes for flourless orange cake and they’re all fundamentally variations on a basic theme consisting of four principle ingredients:

• Oranges
• Almond meal
• Eggs
• Sugar

The principle difference between the various cake recipes is in the proportions of the ingredients and how you process them. There’s no doubt that my ideal orange cake will differ from yours, so you’ll probably have to do a little experimenting to get the right flavours, textures and mouthfeel, but what follows is a recipe that I’ve worked out by looking at several dozen recipes and it highlights the most important aspects of making this particular cake. This method works for me and I hope that it works for you too although if you’re one of those people who are so terrified of cooking and your own potential for creativity that you slavishly follow recipes to the letter then you’re not really going to have fun with this one. Of course, if you’re one of those, what the hell are you doing reading this blog in the first place?

Believe me, if a recipe needs to be followed to the letter, I’ll tell you.

So …

The recipe that follows is more an approach to the baking of the cake than an absolute blueprint and it makes quite a lot of cake batter. Making quite a lot of cake is actually not a bad idea, especially if many of your friends want a piece for themselves.

So …

NOTE: 60 grams is approximately 2 1/8 ounces. 100 grams is approximately 1 ¾ ounces. I’m only doing this for your sake, America!

Ingredients

Oranges—4—medium size. Most recipes call for navel oranges, but Valencia will do just nicely too and even Blood Oranges and even the more bitter Seville Oranges. Note that if you use the less sweet oranges you’re going to have to add more sugar, unless, like me, you’re sensitive to sweet and don’t need as much. Also, note that many recipes for this cake, including this one, require that it’s served with a syrup anyway that imparts a lot of sweetness in its own right.

You are also free to depart from the orange theme altogether, since other variations of this cake include using more “out there” citrus like mandarins, tangelos and even grapefruit. The principle point to note here is that different citrus fruits have different proportions of flesh, to rind (also known as the zest) and pith (the white bit under the zest). This means that some fruits will be juicier than others, meaning that you might have to compensate with more of the principle dry ingredient, almond meal and maybe more egg as a binder too.

Eggs—8—This results in an egg to orange ratio of 2 to 1 (2 eggs to 1 orange). Since a large egg weighs about 60 grams and a medium orange weighs about 180 grams then we’re looking at a proportion, by weight, of 2 to 3. I include that fact for the more arithmetically inclined among you.

Sugar—600g. Many recipes say caster or baker’s sugar, and in some cases you really need the caster sugar. But in this particular cake this isn’t critical because it’s all going to dissolve anyway, so if you don’t have it use ordinary table sugar. You can also try brown sugar if you want a richer, more complex and caramel-like flavor. You can actually reduce the amount of sugar by about a quarter and still get a good result if that’s your preference, but if you do so you’ll end up with a drier cake so you might have to add another egg or two, or more almond meal, if you go that far.

Almond Meal / Almond Flour—600g.

So, if you’re paying attention, the important ratios for the basic cake batter are:

 

2 units of egg

3 units of orange

10 units of sugar

10 units of almond meal

 

To this you’ll need to also put in about 2 teaspoons of baking powder. Use less baking powder if you like your cake to be more dense.

 

Technique

• Boil or steam the oranges for about an hour. If boiling, put the oranges in a small saucepan and make sure they’re covered in water. The boil should really be no more than a simmer. Keep covered to keep the orange flavours in as much as possible. Whether boiling or steaming turn the oranges over after about half an hour in order to get an even cooking. After an hour, turn off the heat and leave the oranges to cool to room temperature.
• After cooling, drain the oranges and cut up them up into large pieces, removing any seeds and those green bits at the top just in case you forgot to remove them before the boil. KEEP THE WATER FROM THE BOIL—you’ll need it later for the syrup. NOTE: If you’re going to use grapefruit you’ll probably need to remove a lot of the pith since it’s quite bitter. I personally love bitter, but then again I have rather a sophisticated palette.
• Place the orange pieces in a food processor and process until you get a nice, smooth paste although a bit of coarseness is fine too if that’s the way you like it.
• VARIATIONS: It’s at the orange paste making stage that you can add additional flavorings. One “Moroccan” variation used the addition of ground cinnamon and ground cardamom, using about twice as much cinnamon as cardamom. Feel free to experiment and taste as you go. Let the paste rest while you do some other preparatory stuff.
• Prepare 2 x 20cm (8 inch) springform pans. You can either lightly grease them with canola oil spray or, my preferred method, which is spray, baking paper and spray again. Alternatively, you can use silicone moulds. Silicone doesn’t usually need to be greased. NOTE: The way I make this cake it tends to rise a lot so don’t overfill the moulds or pans.
• Preheat your oven to anywhere between 160ºC and 180ºC (320ºF to 350ºF). Really. This is a very forgiving recipe. But don’t use fan forcing as this cake doesn’t really need it.
• Using an electric mixer, bench mixer or even a food processor, whisk the eggs and sugar until you get a texture that’s thick and pale. My personal preference to whisk until the mixture is virtually like that for a sponge. This creates a very light cake. NOTE: It’s best that the eggs be at room temperature for this, so, if you’re taking the eggs out of the refrigerator put them in some warm water to warm up before you crack them.
• Once you have your sponge, then in no particular order, GENTLY fold the orange paste, almond meal and baking powder as quickly as possible into the wet mixture until everything is just evenly combined. Don’t overmix.
• Gently pour mixture into the pans or molds. NOTE: If you’re using round cake tins one trick is to spin them a little so that the center sinks a little and the sides rise. This can compensate for the tendency of some cakes to rise in the middle while baking. You’ll end up with a flatter top.
• Bake for about an hour or until a skewer in the centre comes out clean. Cakes bake from the outside in, so you might notice the centre wobbling a little while the cake is baking, so if that’s the way your cake is baking then don’t even bother with the skewer test until the wobble stops.
• When the cake is done set it aside to cool in the pan. The cake won’t appreciate being taken out of the pan until it’s cool.

 

The Syrup

While the cake is baking, you can make the syrup.

• Take the water from the boil, you should have about 100 ml (3 ½ ounces) left. If not, you can make it up with water or juice.
• Take an orange and remove all the zest. Juice the orange and add the juice to the water into a saucepan.
• Add 100 grams (3 ½ ounces) of sugar to the water / juice mixture. If you’ve been paying attention, you’ll notice that the water and juice should be about 200ml (7 ounces). When you add the 100 grams of sugar, the water to sugar ratio for the syrup is about 2 to 1.

If there’s too much liquid, just spend a little time reducing the water before you add the juice and sugar.

Cook over a medium heat until the mixture thickens slightly. Add the zest and set aside to cool.

NOTE: Add the zest at the end. The retained heat in the syrup will cook the zest just enough.

NOTE: You can, of course, play around with the citrus again. You can use some lemon, if you want to add that note, although I’ve found that lime works really well too.

Serving

When you’re ready to serve the cake, drizzle the syrup evenly over the whole cake.

Alternatively, you can slice the cake and let the eaters decide how much syrup they want.

Variations: Other serving suggestions include.

Mascarpone.

Chantilly cream.

Sour Chantilly cream – that’s thick sour cream sweetened with sugar and vanilla and slightly whipped. Yes, you heard right, sour cream. And use full fat sour cream because it holds its shape better. Light sour cream is impossible to whip.

Ice cream. Since chocolate works so well with orange, chocolate ice cream, in particular dark chocolate ice cream, works really well.

 

This is the cake I’ve made for my birthday. Several weeks late but better late than never.

Happy belated birthday to me.

 

Bon appetite!

 

 

 

Actually, the title of this blogpost should really be: “What Your Plant Preferences Say About How Totally Fascinating You Might Be but that Are More Likely to Prove How Inadequate You Are” but that was a little too long.

I have a theory. Well, truth be told I have a lot of theories about pretty much everything, but the particular theory in question is about what your preferences in plants have to say about you, and yes, this is relevant to food. I’ll get there eventually.

My foodie friend Mellow Mel and I visited the markets in the town of Blackheath, in the Upper Blue Mountains the other day. It seemed like a bad idea at the time, because I’m not really a market person. I think it’s a past life trauma think of growing up in a souk (look it up) before getting sold into slavery but enough of my ancient, past life wounds …

So anyway, Mel and I approach a couple of stands and one of them has a bunch of cacti on it. I let out an involuntary sigh and said, “Oh, succulents” in a tone of voice that only hinted at my sudden despair. Now I have nothing against succulents per se, I think that peyote, aloe vera and prickly pears are marvellous things—real miracles of adaptation and anyone who can make a living in a desert deserves my respect.

However …

I am reminded of a friend of a friend who once remarked that he remembered not very fondly a relationship with a woman who collected cacti. He said that he wasn’t with her anymore because the relationship was ultimately about as interesting as the hobby. I get this. Cactuses might be intellectually compelling from a botanical point of view, and some cactus flowers are truly beautiful but on the whole the cacti themselves are dull. After all, they don’t really do much do they? They just sort of sit there, being prickly.

And I suspect that people who like cactuses like them because they sort of narcissistically see themselves in the cacti. I have a theory that plants are ripe for projection, we imbue them with our own values and we prefer plants that seem to share our value systems.

So, following this completely unsubstantiated assumption, I conclude the following:

Succulents

Cacti are all about getting the maximum benefit from the minimum input. You have to be like this if you live in a desert and you don’t know when it will rain again, so if you’re a cactus, you have to be very parsimonious. To whit: cacti appeal to anal retentives with miserly tendencies. They also grow in harsh climates so they appeal to people who like to do it hard. Such people are known to be figuratively prickly too. You know the type, “When I grew up our legs would get amputated before we’d have to trudge through five miles of glacier in order to get to our 18 hours of school AND we felt privileged that we were getting an education before spending the next 78 years in a coal mine.” Yep. Those are the sorts of people who collect cacti and their martyrdom is about the most entertaining thing about them, which really isn’t saying very much.

And, extending this theory to ever more ridiculous conclusions …

Herbs

Herbs are decorative, fragrant, varied and they can be applied in many areas.  So, herbs are for versatile sensualists with oral fixations but who have a practically streak as well. So your typical herb lover will like things to feel good, but they feel guilty about feeling good for its own sake, so they alleviate their guilt by telling themselves that it’s OK to be sexy as long as it’s useful.

You can take this even further and have herb personality subtypes. I met someone today who is a “hypostimulant”. This means that her threshold of sensuality is quite high. In other words, it takes a LOT of stimulation before she even notices anything. So she likes strong, robust flavours. I suspect that people who like garlic and chilli are somewhat like this. Such people have a high tolerance for crowds, bright lights, big cities because they need to be slapped across the face before they’ll even notice anything. People who like parsley, on the other hand, are more given to subtlety, or maybe they just like tabbouleh.

Roses

Yes, they’re fragrant and edible and ladylike, so they tend to be favoured by ladylike people of both genders. These are people who want the world to be nice and genteel. But roses also have thorns and if you don’t handle them the right way they’ll prick you and draw blood. This too is consistent with my theory. So rose people tend to be passive aggressive. Your stereotypical rose lover is a middle class woman who has entered a certain, undefined “serene maturity” but who has read every Agatha Christie novel and seen every episode of “Silent Witness” and “Midsomer Murders” AT LEAST twice, each time subconsciously fantasizing that the victims are her neighbours, whom she secretly loathes even though she’s always polite to their faces.

Cucurbits

People who like cucumber, squash, zucchinis and pumpkins are, like the plants themselves, people who don’t believe that anything is real unless it’s big. These are the sorts of people who buy everything in large economy sizes (because it’s all about VALUE) and yet somehow they never manage to use up everything. This is somewhat like the case of the big pumpkin that sits in your kitchen, waiting to be turned into soup, but that ends up decomposing. There are two sub-types of the cucurbit personality. Type 1 grows or buys the pumpkin for themselves and refuses to let anyone else touch it, until one day, in disgust, you have to throw out the deliquescing (look it up) mess and hope that you don’t get attacked for being wasteful. Type 2 buys the pumpkin for you, and expects you to eat it all, without ever consulting you as to whether you even like pumpkin, or, even if you do, expects that will happily and rapidly consume several gallons of pumpkin soup in a few days at most before it all ferments because there’s not enough room in the freezer to freeze the twelve months supply of the damned stuff because the freezer is already full of all their other crap. Like the time that my mother bought 12 boxes of Kellog’s Special K because she was fat and it was “slimming” but she got bored after a few days and then expected me to eat the rest even though I was six years old and had never expressed an interest in Special K, ever. But enough of my present life trauma (for now at least). Cucurbit people ultimately believe that “more is better” but who never follow through on anything because they expect you to pick up their slack.

Orchids

Represented in the culinary world by some edible varieties that some say taste like a cross between cucumber and endive, and, of course, by that most noble of seasonings, vanilla. Orchids are for intellectuals, or at least for people who aspire to be cultured. Orchids are for people who like refined, rare beauty but who have a high tolerance for the bizarre too—after all the word “orchid” actually means “testicles”. Orchids are also surprisingly robust and delicate at the same time—rather like testicles. I have an orchid that has had a single bloom for months. It has managed to grow while only getting watered once every couple of weeks. It doesn’t need much of anything as long as it’s the right thing. People who like orchids can actually survive on very little as long as it’s a little of exactly the right thing. I’m an orchid sort of person. I know, I know; that surprises you, I know. I can put up with a lot of coarseness and vulgarity (hey, I can even generate coarseness and vulgarity) as long as just, every now and then, I can spend a few hours surrounded by weird, haunting, surrealist art, like the work of James Gleeson. And a witty, clever observation is, to me, like a drop of rain in the desert. Admittedly, orchid people can also be extremely annoying. They can drive non-orchid people, even other orchid people, and especially themselves, absolutely insane with their prissy refinements and pretentions. Orchid people really, need a sense of humour. A humourless orchid person is an insufferable control freak. An orchid person with a well-developed sense of humour is utterly charming, preternaturally attractive and makes a great dinner party guest. In the absence of humour, orchid people don’t survive well in a world full of “boors” and “plebeians”. On the other, hand the “boors” and “plebeians”—who really can’t help being what they are, poor things—can find themselves suffocating in the rarified air that surrounds orchid people like the atmosphere at the top of Mount Everest. Yes. I know. It’s cold, but at least it’s clean.

This theory is currently in development.

Feel free to drop me a line and suggest another flower or vegetable that you want me to subject to my cheap, food-related psychoanalysis.

Go on.

You know you want to.