So, let me get you updated. The first bit of news I must tell you is that I've booked yet another Ashburton Cookery School course. They were having a 10% off sale and I decided to do the next course up, the 5 day 'Advanced Cookery' course. I've always thought I was going to do it, so I took advantage of the discount and now I'm looking forward to the 28th of February to start it. Only six weeks tomorrow!
Since I last posted, I've made quite a few delicious delights. It will be a long read, so make yourself comfortable, maybe get some Christmas chocolates, if you have any left or something tasty to snack on and enjoy. It's how I like to write my blog. Of course. In fact, I find that teaming most daily activities with eating chocolate makes everything much better. Except for my waistline!
The first delicious delight was a special birthday cake. This didn't turn out too well aesthetically, but it was tasty! It was my friend Briony's 23rd birthday and she had a Harry Potter party. I went as the mad Professor Trelawney and we all attempted to make The Hogwarts Castle in cake form. It turned out to be more difficult than I thought! I'd never made sugarpaste before, made from egg white, a lot of icing sugar and liquid glucose, and it was difficult to shape. Rather difficult in fact, as it was quite warm in the kitchen! Especially the dragon. I wanted to make it a scary dragon, with blue-purple open wings and a menacing face, but it ended up looking rather happy to be on the cake. Practice makes perfect though! But eventually, we managed a castle with a chocolate matchstick and chocolate finger roof, complete with Hagrid's hut, Hedwig and fire-breathing dragon, plus some peppermint sugarpaste trees, including the whomping willow.
In November, my Dad had a dinner party for some of his friends and asked me to help out by making the bread to go with the starter and the pudding. I made a wholemeal loaf and white dinner rolls, some with seeds, some without. For pudding, I made a chocolate orange mousse shot surprise, sticky toffee pudding and individual pavlova with raspberry, pear, pineapple and passionfruit, with a raspberry coulis. I made each plate personal by piping everyone's names onto it. I also added some, I'm ashamed to say, store-bought vanilla ice cream. I didn't have time to make the ice cream as everything else took me the whole day. But it was a good quality one!
Now we jump straight to Christmas. Throughout December, I begged my Dad to let me cook Christmas dinner. I'm always keen on improving and expanding my skills/cooking repertoire and I've never done a full Christmas dinner before. Unfortunately, Dad was adamant that he wanted to do it. Boo! Maybe next year...I did manage to help with some of it though- I made the braised red cabbage, stuffing and pigs in blankets.
In hindsight, it's a good thing that Dad did Christmas dinner as I had plenty of other things to do, which I'll get to a bit later. I also had been ill from the weekend before Christmas, so I was still recovering from that and gave myself a lot of kitchen work, which didn't help. I don't know what I had. I think it was some kind of virus, but I ended up fainting at one point and smacking my head on the hard, wooden floor whilst I was on a short break at Center Parcs and I spent most of it inside the villa. Rubbish!
So, even though Dad was doing the main event, he let me cook Christmas Eve's dinner which, as you can see, was Gary the Goose. I'd never cooked goose before and it turned out pretty well. I found a recipe on bbcgoodfood.com (I'm plugging a lot of websites today, aren't I?!) which served the goose with a cider gravy. We had it with the classic low calorie and healthy goose fat potatoes and butternut squash. It was so delicious, especially the gravy. Yum yum yum! I don't particularly like Christmas pudding, so I made an alternative of clementine and chocolate yule log. It was quite rich but lovely. I especially liked the addition of the clementine, it took the edge off the heaviness of the chocolate and cream.
Clementine and Chocolate Yule Log.
The reason I'm glad Dad did Christmas dinner was because he also gave me the task of cooking lunch on Boxing Day when my relatives came over to my house for what we call our second Christmas. Considering that all together, there were 16 of us, it was no easy task! I chose to do Nigella Lawson's cola ham which is cooked in full fat coca-cola for a few hours, then glazed in the oven for ten minutes with a mixture of cloves, mustard powder and black treacle (it is Christmas, after all). I also decided to make my Christmas presents for my extended family, just to add to the mayhem I was causing in the kitchen!
I made each couple, of which there were four, a Christmas hamper each with handmade foodie goodies. As well as making the edible treats, I designed the labels. I guess you could call it a prototype of what I hopefully will do in the future, I'd love to combine my two main passions, cookery and design.
I made seven different delights: festive shaped lemon and chocolate shortbread, white chocolate and Baileys fudge (pictured on the left) caramelised red onion marmalade, spiced pear and cranberry relish, assorted handmade chocolate truffles (pictured on the right) spiced beetroot and orange chutney and sea-salted caramels. I found some lovely little jars to put my chutney/preserve-y things in from the jamjarshop.com and topped them off with some light blue polka dot lids which looked fabulous. I put the biscuits into a kilner jar and chose to package the rest of the gifts in some little cellophane bags with strips of ribbon tied into the labels.
I designed the labels in a bold style and used different shades of grey for each word to express which shade they would be if they were only one colour. For example, (here's my nerdy inner graphic designer coming out!) I thought that the word 'chocolate' would be a medium to dark grey because I mainly used milk chocolate which is quite dark in colour in reality, compared with the word 'lemon' which I felt needed to be a light to medium grey to express the refreshing tangy flavour of a lemon, but not too light a grey as it's a flavour that can pack a punch. Back to the real world and away from shades of grey, (sorry!) I designed two labels- the top label told of the product and the bottom of descriptive suggestions of perfect accompaniments/how to eat them/anecdotes in a friendly, informal tone of voice.
I really wanted to bundle them all up into a nice basket, but my quest for the perfect shallow basket throughout December, hindered by the heavy snowfall which cuts my house off from civilisation and basket shopping was unsuccessful. So I used some free tall tins my Mum had won from previous cat shows (yes, there is such a thing) and kindly gave me. Here's what it all looked like.
Christmas was rather good this year, even though I spent most of it in the kitchen! I got some lovely cookery related presents, including the love bakery cookbook, a digital measuring spoon, various shapes of cookie cutter, cake stands, a pasta machine and a WAFFLE IRON!!!! I've wanted one for ages and ages. I just have a thing about waffles. A strange but delicious obsession! So far, I've made plain waffles with cheese and ham on top and blueberry and cinnamon waffles (pictured on the right), topped with ice cream and maple syrup. Wonderful waffles. I would make more, but my waffle iron makes four at a time (you can't make single ones) so I have to wait for more than one waffle request which is from myself. My next waffle plan is to make chocolate brownie ones. Heart attack, here I come...it will be so worth it!
For New Year's Eve, we had some family friends visit us and we had a sophisticated dinner party. Dad made a crab and cheese souffle and I made stuffed breast of lamb for the main course. I also made two puddings, a Heston Blumenthal Waitrose recipe of spiced popping candy chocolate tart and a meringue roulade. The roulade was delicious and the tart was alright, but I didn't have the right sized cake ring for it and it didn't turn out particularly well. It tasted alright, but I don't think I'd make it again. But you have to experiment and try these things, eh!
I also had my traditional annual get together of some of my friends from Junior School. Unfortunately, one of them couldn't make it due to illness, but the rest of us still had a good time. I planned a three course dinner party and greeted Rosie and Briony with a cupcake tree. Using my new love bakery cupcake recipe book, I made 23 cupcakes for my new wire cupcake stand which consisted of red velvet cupcakes and cosmopolitan 'cuptails' (basically a cupcake version of the cocktail). I'd never made either before, but both were delicious. I preferred the cuptails as they had a surprise filling of cranberry jam. I'd never tried red velvet cake before and it was ok, but I'm not a big fan of cream cheese frosting. I much prefer buttercream.
Red velvet cupcakes pre-oven.
For the actual dinner, I made a smoked salmon pate served in mini kilner jars, caramelised red onion marmalade and salad with homemade dill and chive wholemeal bread. For the main course, I made cider braised crispy pork belly with mustard cabbage, apple mash, celeriac puree and broccoli and salmon en croute with the same veg for the veggies.
Pudding trio- lemon posset, sticky toffee pudding and hot lemon souffle pudding with a
painted line of crushed sherbet lemon sweets
Pudding was as described above. Overall, not blowing my own trumpet, I thought it went well and was delicious. I had never had pork belly before and it was wonderful. I loved the contrast between the soft meat and crispy skin on top. Mmm mmm mmm! Pudding was my favourite though, as it always is! I tried a different sticky toffee pudding recipe that Masterchef judge, Greg Wallace gives in this month's Good Food magazine, after his extensive sticky toffee research. It's much lighter than other recipes I've tried and as delicious as it was, I think I prefer the heavier version. I liked the relief of the richness of the toffee sauce that the lemon puddings on the plate provided as well.
And that concludes an essay of a blog post! A great foodie 2010 and I'm looking forward to an even better 2011. No news on the job front yet. I'm looking, but hopefully something will arise. I'll tell you a story now. The author of the love bakery cookbook started off by making a batch of 200 cupcakes for her children's school Halloween fair. Then she was inundated with orders from other mums for cakes for their children's parties, then local shops and delis. Now she's running the successful Love Bakery cake shop in London. She has my life! Well, my (fingers crossed) eventual life...I'd love to have a sweet cake shop/cafe type shop, selling beautiful cakes, afternoon teas, a large bookcase with jams, preserves, chutneys and jellies with bunting hanging from the welcoming Farrow & Ball yellow walls. Maybe some lunches too. If she started small with a school fair, what's stopping me from having a similar experience? I know that my future definitely includes cooking and designing. Let's hope that it's something wonderful. Also, one of my new year's resolutions is to post more blogs. So please keep checking back to see what I've been making!
One last thing. This week on Channel 4, the big four of Channel 4, Heston, Hugh, Jamie and Gordon have been promoting the 'Big Fish Fight'. Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall has been the main instigator of the campaign to shake up the way we buy fish. The campaign is to raise awareness of diminishing fish stocks and to get us to eat some of the lesser known, and more importantly, sustainable fish, such as dab, herring and coley. The 'big three' fish that we all love to eat are cod, salmon and tuna. Because of this, these fish stocks are rapidly declining. Please try and change this by not buying your favourite fish and try something new. Part of Hugh's campaign is to get the 'mackerel bap' onto your chippie's menu. Try it instead of your usual cod and chips. Mackerel is both sustainable and delicious. Also because of stupid EU quota laws, up to half of all fish caught in the North Sea are thrown back dead as 'discard'. Fishermen are simply not allowed to bring back certain fish which is perfectly good and delicious. Ridiculous!!! So please, even if you don't eat fish very often, don't like it at all, but care about the fact that millions of fish are dying pointlessly and want to make a difference, please sign this petition and get everyone you know to do so. Go to http://www.fishfight.net/ and join the other half a million people who care. Thank you. As Jamie says, 'there will be plenty of fish in the sea, so long as you choose the right ones'.
