Gettin’ Paid

A few weeks ago, Mum told me that a lady she knows from her work asked her if I would be interested in making cakes for her sons’ birthday party this Saturday. Apparently Mum talks about my baking escapades enough to garner interest from people who don’t know me. Cool! Even though I’m really busy with uni and Panto right now, I accepted readily. I’ve only ever made cakes as gifts for friends or family, or for myself, but I’ve been thinking about selling cakes for a little over a year, and it was one of my New Years Resolutions to do so, so this was the big opportunity!

The ~customer~ wanted two cakes. Both chocolate. One decorated with Lightning McQueen from the Pixar film Cars, and the other a guitar. I made the cakes last Sunday and froze them, carved them and did the crumb coats of icing yesterday, then finished decorating today. It took me about 15 hours all up. But I work pretty slow 😛 The Lightning McQueen one was my first attempt at creating a 3D cake which required building rather than just cutting out a shape, and I was really really happy with it.

I think they ended up fancier than the woman will be expecting. Mum’s dropping them off at the party tomorrow so I hope she’s impressed.

The First In A Potential Series Of Culinary Representations Of Linguistic Trickery

The other day, Bradley, one of my favourite friends, brought up the linguistic phenomenon where grammatically correct sentences are sometimes formed by the repetition of just one word, provided the word can be both a noun and a verb. My favourite example is ‘Fish fish fish fish fish.’ (Noun noun verb verb noun), meaning ‘Those fish that are fished by other fish, also fish even other fish.’ It can be easier to understand if the plural of the noun is not the same as the singular, for example ‘Dogs dogs dog dog dogs’. There’s an even more complex one that has its own Wikipedia page, and which I brought to Bradley’s attention: “Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo”. Get it? Doesn’t really matter if you don’t.

Now at the time that we were talking about this, I was looking for ideas for Bradley’s birthday cake. When I realised that ‘cake’ is both a noun and a verb (as in ‘caked in mud’), the lightbulb went off, and I set about devising a real life representation of the sentence ‘Cakes cakes cake cake cakes.’ This would of course entail a cake being caked by a second cake, and itself caking yet another cake. Simple!

I made a white cake following this recipe, and a batch of red velvet cupcakes following this one. I cut a cavity a cupcake wide and a half-cupcake tall out of the bottom layer of the white cake, and a cavity the size and shape of the cupcake top out of the top layer, inserted the cupcake inside the cavity of the bottom layer, and inverted the top layer to cover the cupcake. Thereby my cake was caking a cupcake.

I made some buttercream following the recipe on the aforelinked-to white cake recipe, and decorated the cake with a picture of a cake: The cake picture caking the cake.

The finished product:

When piping the picture of the cake, I started decorating it with that ‘vines and flowerbuds’ pattern that I’ve seen on cakes, to give it some sort of character. Then I liked doing that so much that I did the same thing to the whole cake. Unfortunately that sort of made the cake look like it was meant for a five year old girl. Bradley is not a five year old girl. He is a 24 year old male. Oh well. Pastels are for all ages, right?

Hello cupcake! How red you are! I sort of wish you were pink so you’d go with the pastel theme.

Ash The Photographer (who gets thanks for all the photos in this post) made us look a bit foolish by bending over a bit too much to be in this photo, but yaaaay happy cake baker and recipient.

Bradley was very intrigued by the concept of a cupcake being inside of a cake, and after asking me how I did it, started excitedly rattling off a list of ways it could conceivably be done. I eventually got him to shut up so I could explain how I did it. Here’s me poking between the layers to demonstrate their existence.

All in all it was a grand cake success, even though the theme of it went well over most people’s heads. The buttercream was way too lemony for my liking, but it did work well with the almondiness of the cake, which I found a bit too almondy 😛 The cake was super soft and lovely texturally, and weirdly enjoyable to slice through. This was my first time making red velvet, too, and I probably shouldn’t have done it because I only have liquid food colouring so I had to do all sorts of strange things to get it to do what I thought it had to. The cupcakes tasted a bit funny for it, but people still seemed to like them.

The end.

Naaaaaaaan. Naan naan naan naan naaaaan. *

*To the tune of Elton John’s ‘Crocodile Rock’, obviously.

Today I made naan.

I don’t like making curry unless I can also make naan. But it takes time because it is a bread that requires a very long rising time, so it’s two bursts of time commitment you need to have.

But today I did it. For the second time ~EVER~. I bought a Masterchef cookbook today and one of the only recipes I could feasibly make for dinner was a lentil curry (by ~Callum) and I decided this at about 4pm, and I happened to have natural yogurt in the fridge (from making tzatziki), so NAAN AND CURRY WOULD BE HAD.

I’m not going to post the curry recipe because it’s probably online and also I didn’t take any photos and also I made no amendments from the original recipe, but it was the first time I’d ever cooked with lentils and it was yummy and too hot for Kiara and a bit overcooked.

ANYWAY, NAAN:

Recipe mostly stolen from here: http://www.manjulaskitchen.com/2007/05/22/naan-bread/, but I cooked it differently because I don’t have a pizza stone.

Makes six large naan…s

Ingredients

-1 tsp yeast (copying this out, I realised I used a whole packet of yeast. It worked, so just use Some Yeast)
-3/4 Cup lukewarm water
-2 Cups flour
-1tsp salt
-1tsp sugar
-Pinch of baking soda
-2 Tbsp olive oil
-2 1/2 Tbsp natural yogurt

-Olive oil
-A clove of garlic

1. Dissolve yeast in water. Set aside for 10 minutes or until it starts to foam up.

2. Mix flour, sugar, salt and baking soda. In a bowl.

3. Add oil and yogurt. Mix to a crumbly dough.

4. Add yeasty water, mix to soft dough. Knead a bit.

5. Cover with a tea towel and stand in a warm place (the bowl, not you, but you can too if you like) for 3-4 hours. The dough should double in size.

6. Once it’s all big, dust your bench and hands with flour and knead out dough for 3 minutes. Divide into six lumps.

7. With a rolling pin, roll each lump out to 20cm long ovals.

8. Heat some oil to very hot in a heavy pan. Chuck in one of the doughvals (hah). It’ll probably stretch out a bit as you pick it up and place it in but that is fine! As it cooks, air bubbles should puff up. Flip over when underside is getting golden brown. Take it out when it looks like naan. Rub with some garlic. Yeaaahhhhh. Repeat with remaining doughvals.

TA-NAAAAN!
One of the delicious six, the others of which got consumed very quickly.

Armadillo!

A few years ago, my sister Aly and I started experimenting with what were basically mexican quesadillas. At the time we weren’t really sure on what the exact nature or even pronunciation of the authentic quesadilla was, so after a few fumbles around the word we settled on naming our version ‘armadillos’. It made sense at the time.

The armadillo is a simple beast (and, as it turns out, virtually intistinguishable from a real quesadilla). Much like its accidental namesake it has a lovely crispy outer shell, only it is made of fried tortilla and not horn-covered bone scutes. Probably more delicious that way, but to be honest I haven’t tried the latter. The filling generally should involve cheese (as you may know, ‘quesadilla‘ comes from ‘queso‘ which means ‘cheese’) but hey, the armadillo is a culinary maverick, and if you don’t want to put cheese in there, THAT IS YOUR RIGHT.

You can vary this recipe as much as you like. Put all the filling inside before you flip it, or keep some of it as a topping, as I’ve done here (entirely because I was worried about burning the tortilla before my cheese melted, as it started off frozen)  Add sour cream. Make the toppings here into a guacamole instead of a salad sort of concoction. What I am saying here is that there is no reason why you should exactly follow my recipe. Day-to-day cooking is a lot about improvisation, creativity, problem solving and making shit up as you go along. /Duh.

A Basic Recipe, or What I Did:
Ingredients:
-A flour tortilla (did you know that ‘tortilla‘ is actually Spanish for ‘omelette’? I learned that in SPAIN. Anyway, don’t use an omelette here. Use a tortilla.)
-Some cheese. About 1/2 Cup, grated.
-A tomato
-A spring onion
-Half an avocado
-Salsa

1. Dice your tomato and avocado and finely chop the spring onion.
2. Heat some olive oil in a pan.
3. Add the tortilla. Use a spatula to hold the tortilla flat as the bottom crisps, or it might puff up (which could be cool, if you want that. You can cut a slit in the resulting tortilla-balloon and use it as a pocket for the filling! Awesome! Pockets!)
4. When the bottom is golden, flip it over, and sprinkle on the cheese.
5. Watch cheese melt. Keep an eye on the bottom as you do this, because it could get black very quickly.
6. When cheese is almost fully melted, fold tortilla in half with spatula. If the bottom (which is now the top) is getting dangerously brown, lower the heat. Continue flipping your semi-circle armadillo until you’re pretty confident that the filling is cooked. A lot of this is instinct and common sense.
7. Remove armadillo from pan. Add tomatoes and onion to pan and toss for a few seconds. Season if you’re into that.
8. Arrange/dump tomato, onion and avocado onto armadillo. Top with salsa. Eat immediately, before the cheese cools too much.

Fried tortillas are a thing of beauty. After this one, I fried another and put a few balls of baby bocconcini in there. Simple and crispy and flavoursome and awesome. Sliced into triangles, it’s a really great appetiser, too.

And finally,

Resultant Kitchen Mess:

Minimal! Hooray!

If it’s good, make it thrice.

The title of this post is probably the mentality my parents took towards having children, but it applied better to my recent cake ventures, as number three was as good as one and two. Unfair digs at my only mildly inferior younger sister aside, this cake is marvellous, simple and delicious. A rad beginning to a food blog, I think.

Cake #1 (or ‘Alysha’, in this sibling/cake metaphor) was a thank you gift to my co-director after the ROUSING SUCCESS of our Pantomime last week. After ‘destroying’ a wedding cake prop which he had spent hours perfecting for a previous show by transforming it into a chocolate (or in his words ‘shit brown’) cake more appropriate to our play, much to his anguish, I felt compelled to make amends with an edible scale model of his beloved prop cake.

I took it as an opportunity to attempt Swiss Buttercream for the first time, a task which my brand new birthday-gifted KitchenAid Mixer and I were chomping at the unfrosted bit to try. Add some inedible ribbon and flowers that happened to be hanging around the house, and all was forgiven.

The dearly departed during its moment of stardom:

Delicious replica:

Cake #2 (the Nicola) was demanded by my parents after they sampled the off-cuts from the top tier of #1 (now the sibling metaphor is getting weird). Due simply to running out of vanilla extract from making the first two layers of cake, I had used almond extract for the top tier, and it was received excellently by my discerning taste-testers, so #2 was all almond flavoured. This time I had no butter, so the filling just used cream instead of buttercream, and I dusted the cake with icing sugar. Also I’d used all the raspberries and strawberries from the packet of frozen Mixed Berries so this one used blueberries and blackberries. I am now sick of the word ‘berries’.

And here’s a slice of it hanging out with my new best friend:

(Please excuse the sad deflated blueberry atop)

Whilst the parents were enjoying a slice of #2 for morning tea yesterday (OKAY SERIOUSLY WEIRDED OUT BY THIS METAPHOR NOW) they ordered me to make yet another rendition of it to take to Nonna’s for Easter Sunday celebrations today.

#3 was a simpler, two-layered but single-tiered replica of #1, but with the almond flavour of #2. The buttercream was back, as were the strawberries and raspberries, and it was decorated with raspberries and raspberry coulis.

Needless to say, this cake is wonderful. Recipe adapted from various I’ve seen around:

Almond Butter Cake with Berry Buttercream

Cake-
-1 Cup white sugar
-125g butter
-2 eggs
-1 tsp vanilla extract
-1 tsp almond essence/extract
-1/2 Cup plain flour
-1 3/4 tsp baking powder
-1/2 Cup milk

1. Preheat oven to 180°C. Prepare some cake tin blah blah.

2. Cream butter and sugar. Stare lovingly or longingly at your stand mixer or hand mixer, respectively.

3. Beat in eggs, one at a time.

4. Stir in vanilla and almond extracts.

5. Combine flour and baking powder (sifting’s for pussies). Mix into wet ingredients.

6. Stir in milk, mix until smooth.

7. Bake 30-40 minutes/until it’s done.

Buttercream-
-4 egg whites
-1 Cup sugar
-375g butter
-1 tsp vanilla extract

1. Whisk egg whites and sugar together in a bowl over a pot of simmering water until sugar has dissolved/your heart tells you to stop.

2. Transfer syrup into bowl of stand mixer/large bowl. Make sure no water from the bain marie action gets into the bowl.

3. Whip shit out of, until mixture has turned white and doubled-ish in size.

4. Add butter gradually, whilst whipping shit out of. Add vanilla somewhere hereish too.

5. Continue whippping. It is finished when it resembles buttercream, which is what it is. It will get to a stage that looks like you’ve overdone it and ruined everything. You have not. Keep whipping. Trust me.

Berry Buttercream-
-Some berries. Frozen or fresh if you can get ’em.

1. If using frozen berries, thaw and try to drain them of as much liquid as possible. I let mine hang out on paper towels for a while.

2. Mush ’em a bit. At this point I also transferred them to a seive to get more liquid out. Just use your brain. (for thinking, not for draining berries). You can even not mush ’em if you like chunks in your cream. (hot).

3. Fold carefully (or with reckless abandon, whichever floats thine boat) into about half of the buttercream.

Assembly: Is pretty obvious. Allow cake to cool/freeze it for a bit if you like, slice in half, spread berry buttercream on top of bottom half, replace top, spread with non-berry buttercream. Or with berry buttercream if that’s your bag. Whatever man, I’m not trying to rule your life. Do what you want. What are you even listening to me for.

~~Variations~~
For #1 I made three portions of the cake recipe. Two for the bottom tier and one (in a smaller pan, then trimmed to size) for the top tier. I also made two portions of buttercream. About 3/4 of one portion was made into the berry filling, the rest was used to cover (and it was too much. People collapsed of butter intake. It wasn’t pretty, but they seemed to be enjoying themselves.)

For #2 I used about a cup of whipped cream instead of buttercream, and folded the berries into that for the filling, dusting the whole cake with icing sugar. As you can see. By the photo. And by what I said before.

#3 was pretty standard by that recipe, except I also used coulis to decorate.
Coulis (A vague recipe)
-Some frozen raspberries
-Some icing sugar
Mush the raspberries in a pan over heat. Add icing sugar. Mix for a bit. Allow to get pretty hot until your heart says it’s ready. Sploodge through a sieve to get rid of the pesky seeds. Weep with joy that you managed to get proper red onto a cake instead of pink like you usually do when you try to make red icing and don’t have fancy colouring materials.

Ze End!

The Perks Of Succumbing To Peer Pressure

This is a test entry. Stop reading it.

STOP IT.

IT IS ONLY FOR ME