Cooking 9/10ths of the time

It probably looks like I haven't been cooking for the past month, when I have been. Constantly. Not only have I been cooking constantly, I have been cooking sweet things, which are usually the dominion of this blog. Poor, lonely blog. Every time I have cooked a sweet thing I have thought "I should really take a photo". But something in me just hasn't been able to reach into my pocket, pull out my iphone and seal the deal. I don't think that it's got anything really to do with the fact that the iphone went into the toilet recently. I still love that phone, perhaps now, even more. Because it survived the toilet and my electrolytes. Since I am a lazy MF, I have decided to recount to you my Christmas cooking story. It's fairly heartwarming, with a few close calls and a happy ending, so you'll like it. If you know what's good for you. I don't have any photo's though, so I have scoured the web (done a perfunctory Google search) and come up with

This is a short but fervent blog entry regarding butter icing, or "frosting" as those crazy cats in America put it. I guess it looks like snow, thus frosting. Or perhaps it sits on the top, like ah, frost does. As you can see I have done some fairly careful research. I have a couple of great icing recipes, anyone who reads this blog knows that I tend to favour the good old lemon juice icing. It's a classic: timeless, white and pristinely drippy (fuck off spellcheck, pristinely may not be a word, but if Words with Friends can refuse "wize", then I rest my case. And I don't care that I mixed my metaphors and I also don't care that wize isn't actually a word). Let's get back to frosting, let's leave nasty pedantic grammatical shit behind us and glide into the world of butter and icing sugar, beaten together to form the queen of the toppings. Gabe loves frosting - that is a given, what child doesn't like frosting? He likes cupcakes simply

This is a semi post, a part post, a quasi sectional piecemeal piece of fluff. I find it easy to justify this post with it's non recipe goodness, because I have a photo. Smile girls! Aren't they gorgeous? Gabe and I made them. These cupcakes were the fist time that I used my BIG FAT piping nozzle, I have been dying to use it, but it requires me using disposable bags because it's so big and fat. It makes a satisfyingly large curl on top of the cupcakes. Gabe was in charge of cachous, of course, he eats them and then he pokes them into the cupcakes. Cachous, for the uninitiated, are those little ball things. We did not make the flowers. Are you mad. No way. I buy that crap. Derivative art style cupcakes Here is the Andy Warhol version. I get disproportionate enjoyment from filters. I especially love Gaussian blur. WTF is that? Gaussian? Honestly.

Loaves. They are the dullest member of the cake family. So dull that they usually require butter just to liven them up. They border on being good for you. Some people put nuts in them, I am totally against that - I believe, without fact checking of any kind, that nuts in loaves are against the Geneva Convention.  This divine little creature that I'm about to furnish you with is a sort of loaf, but don't move to the next blog, don't, don't. Stay here, I will account for all this loaf lauding nonsense. It's loaf-y, but does not require butter and I generally ice this sucker as well. Because I'm a rule breaker. People make rules and I snap them over my knee and laugh. And then rub my knee. Artists impression of the finished loaf cake. Ok - a piece of business : Pre heat your oven to 180 and they reckon that you need to double line an 18cm square tin. I single lined a 20 cm one, so there you go -  worked fine. What was their issue? Now, don't get disc

I always wanted to be one of those parents who was going to cook with their child and not care about mess or fuss, you know the type, they laugh when batter hits the ceiling - everything is Ok for that parent. If you know me, then you know that I was never going to be that parent. Never. I cook all the time with Gabe, I let him hold the eggs for a second. I let him mix the ingredients, heavily supervised, and I let him put the paper cupcake patty things in the tray. Then I rearrange them so that the colours are evenly dispersed. Today I decided to be the other parent. The one that laughs at food related mess and doesn't bat an eyelid at rampant disarray. That's right people, I decided to be Fun Mummy. Fun Mummy chose gingerbread - lots of kid related activity in that - and lets face it, what's nicer then tastefully decorated gingerbread. Nothing, that's what. Nothing. Gabe, enjoying some Fun Mummy largesse.  The first thing about Fun Mummy (FM) is that she do

This is one of the saddest posts I've ever had to write. Donna Hay failed me, not just once - but twice. Now I can't entirely blame her for the general lack of tarragon in Melbourne - but I think that I can definitely feel annoyed that she told me to fry feta and it melted (duh) and so it was melty and not friedy. Luckily for her, the dish that feta went on still tasted great! This is tarragon, don't try looking for it anywhere in Melbourne, Australia. There is no point.  My plan was to blog about the cake that I was making for my dinner party. I was having some dear friends over for wassail and merrymaking. Actual Wassail, not just another way of saying merrymaking. Google it, it's a drink and it's very good. So I decided, in what seems like a foolhardy manner now, to make three new things for the dinner. A beetroot starter, Wassail and this Chocolate mousse meringue cake. I started out taking a few photo's but quickly stopped because I was getting depre

This post will talk a lot about poo, brace yourselves. I had one of those child/poo experiences that made me both glad and sorry Gabe isn't still in nappies. We were visited by the Gastro fairy, a total bitch who give you the shits, makes you tired and then leaves you with a five day malaise to sort out. If that sounds like some one you know, then your friends suck. When you've spent a weekend wiping your son's backside repeatedly you start to smell poo everywhere. You catch a whiff and think "it's on me, somewhere". Or it's just that your nose is so accustomed to the smell. You can't tell, you are poo de-sensitised. Gabe was home on Tuesday as the last of the poo ravages left us and so we decided to bake. Because that's fun and we can do it indoors and the weather was pretty damn bad. Thus the treacle cakes, Gabe wanted cupcakes of course with pink icing. I compromised by putting these little loaves into cupcake tins. So they are meant to be

I am going to share the easiest muffin recipe in the world, nay the galaxy, with you. Why do I do this, possibly opening the culinary culture up to appalling mutant muffin creations? Why? I do it in the name of adventure, in the name of experimentation, in the name of all that is good and right. Make your weird muffins, baked foodstuff lovers, make them. Steer clear of dung though. Even dung with ganache. We love imaginative combinations in muffin format, but we are not coprophagous. This really is an excellent recipe, it tolerates all sort of additions, the only thing to be wary of is if you are changing the ratios of wet to dry ingredients significantly. Example: if you want to make banana and passion-fruit muffins, then you are adding two liquidy ingredients. Reduce the amount of milk a little bit, or take it easy when adding the milk and when you get a good consistency cease your milk adding. I'll elaborate more on consistency later.  Zest for life This lemon zest is a day

Yes, lets just say straight up that it's a packet mix, I was curious to see if a packet mix could be any good. Frankly if Donna Hay couldn't pull it off then no-one can. That woman is a goddamn marvel. The Macarons looked good on the cover too, virginal white with some exceedingly naughty looking ganache in between. Oh Stop it! What is the difference between a macaroon and macaron, is it just fancy pretentious spelling? Or is one actually correct and the other some bastardised Anglo version, it's generally the way it goes. The box is sort of gratifyingly heavy too, with an expensive look matched only by it's price. I forget what it cost, but more than White Wings. I have wanted to make macarons before but they look fiddly and like you need a piping bag and I find that the more that eggs are involved the higher the bad mojo for me. So actually this was a blessing in a blue box. There are three packets inside the box, the "egg mix", the almond mix and