Cooking 9/10ths of the time

Hello beetroot lovers, I know that you exist because you have been shyly telling me how much you dig the stuff ever since my beetroot carpaccio recipe popped up here. It's exactly like that situation where you mention one day that you were attacked by a squirrel when young and then suddenly everyone's like, "Oh yeah, I was attacked by a squirrel too". Exactly like that. So, I was asked to make a cake with beetroot in it by my co-star Libby, who has been on a de-tox. I think that detoxing is something that young people do, or dilettantes, or if you hit the sauce a bit much and end up rolling down a series of hills (or possibly sand dunes) at night thinking that you are a dachshund and then lay in a gutter and wake the next morning covered in vomit and some sort of red paint. That's just a guess though. Beetroot and chocolate have a high regard for each other. They like to be mixed and they are fond of being baked into a union that only a hungry mouth can free t...

So FUDGEY! Fudgey bickies, aren't they great (that's rhetorical, they are great. Thus no question mark). Or fudgey cookies, they are good too. I've been thinking about them lately. I had decided to make a batch for a friend as she was about to have a nasty piece of news broken to her. By me. So I thought that I'd soften the blow with lots of dark chocolate and a sort of lovely soft gooey centre. It didn't actually end up working like that, as I didn't manage to get my shit together for the cookies to be done in time and I told her the news on skype, thus letting her suffer by herself, at home. I did buy a piece of flourless cake for her when I saw her tho. Also the piece of news was about some data storage at work, not that I had inadvertently killed one of her children or erased her entire weird and ear-crushing music collection. But, the other day, unbidden, the need to make the cookies bubbled up in me much like a laugh. Like a child's laugh. Also...

This post is dedicated to Wayne - who on hearing what I was cooking, supplied the title of the post. Thank you Wayne. For my American friends who read this blog - a "root" is a delightful colloquialism for sexual intercourse in Australia. So you see the post title is a kind of sophisticated reworking of the word beetroot. It should be noted that this post differs vastly from all my previous posts in that I have included obvious lowest common denominator ribaldry and because it is about a vegetable. GAH! Hideous! I have been hankering for beetroot, for reasons known only to my body. So when I saw that snarly pair at the supermarket I bought them.  Then they sat on the bench in the kitchen for a few days whilst I pondered them. The only thing that I really know to do with beetroots is include them in cake or make them into carpaccio. I was definitely wanting savoury, so carpaccio it was.  Beetroots are ugly, they are messy and they are slip...

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...