spring-clearing the klog

PP. I am having date problems with when Blogger is saying I published. This post was written on the 30th of November.

It's the last day of spring in Australia. For fifteen minutes. Here I go!In no particular order, a backlog of spring things:
Above, barbecued ocean trout and potato salad (adapted from Sally James' recipe from Simply Sensational, an aptly named favourite book of mine), scandalously and deliciously bastardised with iceberg lettuce and salmon.
On the sides - not really spring, but we had them in spring anyway.
What began as that nigh-orgasmic (see how close nigh is to thigh? interesting..) appley dessert I had in France, became known as Sophie's 'the french apple crumble' and to me, now, is Dad's specialty. Nothing crumbly about it, this was in our house about the same time as my sisters made Donna Hay's caramel slice (even better, don't kill me, before they had added the chocolate) and was THE thing that I had thought I was over and not been so keen on in a while but that night at 11pm when I'd got home not having had the roast lamb that had filled up everyone here, well, this was what brought me back around to the idea of caramel. I accepted for what it was this non-crumble. Caramelised apple slice? It's like a solid, crisp biscuit on top.mmmmmmmm.

Back to spring..
asparagus quiche. Actually inspired by a vegan friend of my sister's, but don't let that put you off. It didn't me, that's the important thing. Bench art...














...a delightful by-product of florentines.


Below, roasted cauliflower salad from dear old Maggie and Simon. Not the best photo, but never mind. This was the second time I've made it, and won't be the last. A new favourite lunch, methinks! Neither of the times have I had quite the right herbs.. it's been parmesan instead of gruyere or goaty, parsley for coriander, etc. Burnt cauliflower, possibly both times. Do the antioxidant properties of cauliflower, olive oil and walnuts cancel out the carcinogens of burntness? I'll eat it anyway.yummo.
I don't even SAY yummo.
yummO.
As I hope you have been waiting for, Yoghurt Goes with (Chocolate, Coconut and) Cream Part 2.
It was good.. not as moist as the first one. I probably wasn't paying enough attention because there was another seriously worthwhile distraction in the oven.

My best sourdough yet.
It's been UBERbusy around here lately.
Including some baked and unbaked goods and very goods.
I hope you have enjoyed feasting your eyes on my mouthwatering photography (ha).

you put the salt in the caramel and eat it all up!

This months' darling bakers decided on a caramel cake with caramelised butter icing (defiantly Australian am I, frosting I will not acknowledge) (and yes we caramelise with an S).

I admit I reduced the sugar, but I can't remember how much.. a good amount. And made somewhat less of the icing, with not too much syrup. The icing turned out to be a very repeatable thing (mmmm). I made a half quantity of the suggested syrup and had enough left over for a toffee and banana cake.
Even reduced in syrupiness I doubted my friends and family's will to demolish the golden thing, so I took it to an all-day choir rehearsal where it happily disappeared. Thanks singers!

Anyway, as you can probably tell from my flattish tone, I have never been that excited about caramel, except obviously for sticky date pudding! and banoffee pie which I have yet to try! and homemade caramel slice!
ahem.
This was a nice cake. I could even have eaten some hokey pokey ice cream with it. Hokey pokey ice cream is a bit like English toffee flavour, for any non-Australasian readers.

And now the referencing.
Recipe courtesy of Shuna Fish Lydon from Eggbeater as published on Bay Area Bites, challenge hosted by Dolores of Chronicles in Culinary Curiosity and co-hosts Alex (Brownie of the Blondie and Brownie duo, Jenny of Foray into Food and for gluten-free daring bakers not quite daring enough to eat the gluten, help from Natalie of Gluten-a-Go-Go.
Optional was an extra challenge, Golden Vanilla Bean Caramels from Pure Dessert by Alice Medrich, Artisan Press, Copyright 2007, ISBN: 978-1579652111

salted caramel

Back to fashion.

It's my fashion to be frantic and slightly late everywhere I go. Which is part of the reason I am typing this when I should perhaps be in the shower, knowing I have to leave the house in half an hour.
That rhymes.

When I read Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone in 2000, it was after a couple of years of wanting to resist, purely on the basis that everyone was reading it and it was everywhere. But the thing about a book in vogue is no matter how many people talk about it, you read it alone (just like you die, apparently, but I haven't done that yet, plus it was a bit of a morbid analogy). It's still your own discovery when you read it for the first time. And the next, and the next.

Well, I bet you know it: so it goes for flavours.

Thank you trendies for alerting us!

I am converted.

yoghurt goes with cream - part 1

I
love
yoghurt.

I am fascinated with the stuff.
Cinnamon yoghurt gelati from Tutto Bene, a month or two ago, began the resurgence of my obsession. Began? No, I was already very much besotted, and that was why I tried it, which was a GOOD move.

And the other night after finishing uni and being too excited to sleep and driving around dangerously the next day and wandering palely around Brunswick Street and a disappointing lunch at Babka... where was I? (Needs to learn to use commas.)
I had a blondie from Sugardough.
It was gooey and strange.

My dessert Thursday night: blobs of blondie with cooked pear, blackberry evia yoghurt, vanilla icecream and roasted salted macamadamias. Salted caramel, lick my battery!

Anyway the point of this post was to show you my beautiful yoghurt cake.
Recipe from Chocolate & Zucchini, first food blog I laid eyes on and have ever since adored. I bought the book and it is still sitting on the bench, open on Yoghurt Cake. I decided about a week ago that I wanted to make a coconut one - which is still on the list - but the other day it was raining, raspberry was calling out and I'm glad it did.

Frozen raspberries would be better because they would hold together, but we had a big Fowlers-Vacola jar from picking last year. So in went about a cup, and a little bit of cinnamon.
It is moist, a bit sweet, and a bit sour from both the raspberries and the yoghurt. Just what I wanted!
Though the batter looked and felt a bit like muffin batter so I was ultra-wary of overmixing it, perhaps a bit too over-wary, see those bits of flour. They're kind of good though.

I suspect this would make an excellent apple teacake. And can't wait to try it plain. And the raspberry one, well, I haven't tried it with cream yet but it's tangy and reminds me of raspberry jam, so.. better go and do that now.

By the way, I don't make only cakes. Just have to blog about them because they are just exciting in this special special way.. it's ridiculous how excited I get about cake.

fashion

I'm a little bit more interested in clothes now that I have finished uni for the year and have time to sit down (I'm sitting down right now, in fact, and plan to do a bit more of it today). I would like to think I don't care much about keeping up with trends, but there are some good clothes around in Melbourne.. it's going to be a good looking summer.

Culinary fashion, on the other hand, intrigues me.

What's with caramel? Who started it this time? Is it just like, Jacques Reymond or a world class equivalent made a caramel something that made an impact on someone and they were so excited that they told everyone, and everyone thought, hey yeah, I'd forgotten about caramel! and they all get inspired and it just spreads?
Not that you need an expensive restaurant to start the wave at all, it could start with just a little blog somewhere.
Or does the food media have an evil corporation somewhere with a person at the head of a meeting deciding what this season's fashionable flavours will be (other than obviously, what is actually in season)?
Salted caramel, especially. Everyone's writing about it, eating and making it.

Chorizo has been cool for a fair bit longer.

Uni has rendered me sleepless so that's about as far as my profound observations go for today.

Hello holidays :) out comes the sun as I click 'publish.'

brief thoughts

I am on a quest.
Perfect apple teacake. It is such an art!

The old-fashioned apple cake, I reckon, is not often done really well. When it is, it is impossible to beat.

The best I have had was in a quaint little cafe in the far-out hills.. Kallista Tea Rooms, I think. It was still warm when I saw and pounced (What's that cake there?) and we had had a delicious lunch with fairly poor service.. debating whether or not to bother getting cake/coffee afterwards, and SO glad am I; we'd decided not to when I saw this ugly beauty. The cake was collapsing on itself, sinking in the middle as it sat, and the piece we had fell apart, melting in our mouths. More apple than gooey cake, it was lazily punctuated with sultanas, so sweet, just the right amount, and oh... had disappeared.
When we got the bill, they gave us the cake on the house, wisely recommending we remember them not for the poor service we'd had that day (my aunt, a regular, said it was unusual) but for the cake. Worked on me!

My attempts so far have been well received but I will not rest until I find the One.

I was too lazy to take photos, but I made Lucy's Apple and Olive Oil cake from Nourish Me - that was good, I'll make it again.
And this Jewish one from Smitten Kitchen. Nice, but I want it moister.

On we go. I made banana cake today because the spotty bananas were there. Thankyou, Andrew McConnell, genius man.

Anybody got a worthwhile apple teacake? I'm wondering if it's going to take some walnut meal and/or yoghurt...

The List
Clotilde's Gateau de Mamy from Chocolate and Zucchini
Women's Weekly - will have something

To be cont...!

ricotta, leftovers, and other fun things

Hey reader. It's been a while between posts, I know, on a not-very-frequently updated blog. And I have been exceptionally busy lately, leaving not much time for eating, let alone cooking and going to exciting food places!

But I did get very excited the other day, about ricotta. It is just the best stuff and I can't seem to get enough of it, especially after I had some incredible simple spinach and ricotta agnolotti done just perfectly with the right tomato sauce at Vegie Bar a month or two ago. Spinach and ricotta. Ricotta in cakes. On top of turkish bread with avocado and lemon scented oil at Kanteen on the Yarra (technically that was cottage cheese, but oh so good).
Fetta has made an appearance too; lucky enough to have a day at home the other day, after my family had had roast lamb without me the night before... I got to make this Donna Hay-modelled salad I've been eyeing off over at Kitchen Wench. Roasted sweet potato and tomato, almonds, leaves, marinated fetta, and the dressing features that apple cider vinegar I've been meaning to get around to using. Thanks, Ellie!

Tonight I have finally dragged myself all the way upstairs to get my camera and cord and then all the way back down again to import photos. It was worth it, too.

Anyway. The other day after a long hot bike ride in the sun, a friend and I went to this amazing fruit shop where we got some amazing yoghurt and in their amazing fridge there was some Mamma Lucia ricotta! I got two tubs because I've been wanting to make a cassata out of Good Weekend a few.. months ago, and wasn't sure how much it needed.
There hasn't been enough time to put into the making of the caking and the filling and all, so this I made instead when I saw that the use by date was soon:
Ricotta, honey, rosemary and pine nut tart.
SOOOO much better the next day. delicious baked cheesecake goodness. I think I am becoming a cheesecake person. Hmm, no, more that I have discovered baked cheesecake. (If you have a good recipe for white/dark chocolate cheesecake with a chocolate crust, by the way, let me know. I tasted one - evilly good - in the Blue Mountains and am on the hunt.)

Also recently, lemon yoghurt cake, (no photos yet, alas and alack) thankyou very much Brigitte Hafner, legend I love to read in the paper. Saw the recipe flicking through a Spring recipe book in a bookshop in the Blue Mountains. Semolina, lemon, yoghurt, almonds, syrup, you were meant for me and I was meant for you, so I tracked you down on the internet. Poetry if ever there was!

Rehearsals, shows, assignments, cars, trains, lessons, sandwiches, pianos, books, makeup, bike rides, phone queues, and my diary, used so much that the cover has fallen off. That is my life at the moment. And occasional blog lurking.
Hope your life is fun, even if it too is ridiculously busy at this mental time of year. Send me a comment or a post!