Pancake Stacker

 Last weekend one of my besties had a housewarming party at her lovely new home.  Because she lives on the opposite side of the city to Hubby and I, we stayed the night, and the next morning I made pancakes for breakfast for everyone.  I used the pancake recipe from Serge Dansereau's 'French Kitchen', but I suspect that this is a recipe that changes very little from one recipe book to another.

I started by sifting 250g of self-raising flour and then adding 2 tablespoons of baking powder and a pinch of salt.

Next, I added 500mL of milk (I used low fat milk and they still tasted great).

The final ingredients are two eggs, which I whisked and then poured into the mixture.

Finally, you whisk the whole lot until it makes a smooth batter.  Next time, when I get to this stage, I'm going to add some sliced up fresh fruit (like blueberries).

My bestie has the MOST amazing kitchen gadget ever.  It's a Sunbeam Reversa-Grill.  The most awesome things about it are that you get a totally maintained heat, fast AND you can make more than one pancake at a time.  I'm in pancake-making heaven.  Each pancake is a quarter of  a cup of batter, and once the top starts bubbling, you flip them over and cook the other side until golden.

Voila!  A perfect stack of light, fluffy, perfectly cooked pancakes!

The final touches for perfection (to me anyway) - a scoop of good quality ice cream and REAL maple syrup (no maple-flavoured syrup for me!).  I promise, it's worth the extra money for real maple syrup.

Macaroon Madness - Part 2

I realise I have been slack with my postings over the last two weeks - but not because I haven't been spending time in the kitchen!


I had intended to make Hubby a plate of macaroon's as a Valentines Day gift... but neither of us was well that week, so the baking got a little delayed.  For the first time in a while I had the kitchen all to myself when I set out on my second macaroon attempt, and I was very hopeful of producing a better result.

I started out, once again, by weighing out and sifting all of my dry ingredients, and then put them aside while I got cracking on the eggs.  

Three egg whites get whisked until they form soft peaks, and then you pop in some caster sugar and whisk away until the sugar is dissolved.  I love how glossy and incredibly white this mixture gets, although I get the feeling that I should have whisked them a little longer, and got the mix really stiff.

Next I folded in the dry ingredients until well combined.  To be honest, this is probably my least favourite step - because I worry that I'm going to 'overwork' the mixture and loose the lightness.

Now for my second piping bag attempt.  I felt a little more comfortable this time around - and got the mixture INTO the piping bag with far less mess than the last time which made me feel better.   I will note though, I'm still having trouble getting the mixture OUT of the piping bag.  I know it's just practice, but I'm still getting 'peaks' when I try to finish piping a macaroon out.  This time round though, because my mixture was a little more runny, the 'peaks' did settle into the macaroon so I did have more smooth, round shapes.

This time I didn't dust the macaroons with cocoa before I put them in the oven, I just left them for 20 minutes (per the recipe) and then popped them in the oven.  Now, the recipe says 20 minutes in the oven.  I think this is wrong.  In my parents-in-law oven last time, 15 minutes was too long.  I'm aware that one side of our oven cooks hotter than the other, so I popped the macaroons in the oven for eight minutes, then opened the oven, rotated all the trays and left them for another eight.  While I was on the right track, this was still a little too long.  I'm starting to think they only need ten minutes all up.

Once everything was out of the oven, I set to work on the ganache.  I didn't have sufficient dark chocolate for the recipe, so I supplemented with some Lindt milk chocolate with hazelnuts in I happened to have in the fridge (why not?).

I popped the cream on the stove on a medium heat until it just started boiling, then took it off the heat and threw in the chocolate and stirred til it all melted.  I have to admit - I'm now a big fan of supplementing the dark chocolate with a portion of milk chocolate.  It just seemed to give the ganache a smoother, less bitter taste.  Then the ganache went into the fridge for about an hour to cool down and get to a good spreading consistency.

The final step was to spread the ganache onto one half of a macaroon and sandwich the other one on, and then resist the temptation to eat the left over ganache out of the saucepan (which I did!  It's so hard to let chocolate go, but I can't just eat it melted out of a saucepan...).

These tasted awesome, and the consistency was SO CLOSE to being right.  I'm not sure what it is I'm doing wrong, but they just don't look like macaroons.  I even bought some to remind myself of how they should look:-

I think my two biggest problems this time were - I didn't whisk the egg whites long enough and I left them in the oven just a minute or two too long.  At least my co-workers enjoyed them when I took them into the office the next day!

Carb-a-licious

In early December, one of my besties and I went to a cooking class held at the Ginger Factory in Yandina on the Sunshine Coast.  The class was absolutely brilliant, and we both went away with some new tricks and also, some reassurance that some of the lines our respective others were selling us on food were actually right.

The chef that ran the class is Erik Van Alphen, and he was funny, insightful and deeply passionate about food, which was highly contagious.  The fact that he subscribes to my 'don't cook without a glass of wine next to you' philosophy only made me like him more.  Especially when he put me in charge of pouring it.

Recently I've been working some big hours at my day job, and Hubby has very much been holding the fort at home.  In an effort to thank him for looking after me, and our day to day chores, I decided to crack out one of Erik's recipe's last night.  The recipe is a Tagliatelle Carbonara, but I decided to make fettuccine instead (I prefer it).

To make the pasta, I started with 250g of 00 flour.  Erik explained in the class that it's very important to use 00 flour if you can get it, because the gluten level is different from plain flour, and lends itself to pasta making, whereas plain flour is better for baking.

I tipped the flour onto my kitchen benchtop, made a well in the middle and poured in two eggs, which I had already whisked up.

Next I slowly worked the flour into the egg, and then kneaded away until all the flour and egg was combined and I had a nice smooth dough.  It didn't take as long as I thought it might, and I have to admit, it was quite therapeutic...  Then I popped it into a lightly floured container and covered it with a tea towel and left it alone for 20 minutes.

While I was busy kneading, Hubby jumped into the kitchen and finely sliced up a heap of parsley, a couple of cloves of garlic and about 100g of speck.  The recipe calls for pancetta or bacon... but we love speck and we had some, so we used it.

 

Next I whisked up three eggs, added some salt, pepper, 50ml of cream and a heap of grated parmesan.  The recipe calls for about half a cup, but I probably used more than that (I love cheese, I just can't help myself).

Next was my favourite bit - actually making the pasta.  I cut the dough up into fist-sized pieces, sprinkled it with cornflour and got stuck in. 

The pasta maker was a Christmas present from my parents-in-law.  They've had it for years and never used it, and lucky me, it's actually made in Italy, rather than some cheap machine I probably would have bought but for their generosity.

So to make my pasta, I fed a piece through the machine on the widest setting, then folded it over and fed it through again, then folded it over and fed it through a third time.  After that, I fed it through twice on each setting until I got to setting five.  We tried for setting six, but the dough started to look stretched and like it was going to break.  Hubby thought it could have done with some more flour to stop it sticking, but we decided to just roll it through the cutting attachment and leave it at that.  I have to admit, a second set of hands at this stage is very, very helpful.

A little bit of pasta goes a long way, so at this point I was very glad I had halved the recipe before I started - even this much pasta is too much for two (unless you want to eat til your sick of course).  There was something IMMENSELY satisfying about having made this pasta myself.

While the water for the pasta came to the boil, I popped the speck and garlic in a pan with some olive oil and fried it off until it was crispy.  Yes, that is smoke.  No, I didn't set the fire alarm off.  Or burn the speck.  Or burn myself.  Perhaps next time I won't use such a high heat....

Once the water was boiling, Hubby dropped the pasta in for me and we let it bubble away for about five minutes.  It would have been quicker with a bigger pot, but you have to use what you've got.

Because I had more cooked pasta than we needed, instead of pouring the sauce into the pot,  I transferred the pasta I wanted into my fry pan (which I'd taken off the heat) and stirred the speck through.  Then I poured in the egg and parmesan mix and the parsley and stirred like crazy.  You need to get everything off the heat because otherwise you'll end up with pasta and cheesy scrambled egg.  The pasta is hot enough to cook the egg, and as long as you give it a good stir as you go, no scrambled egg.

In the class, Erik taught me how to make a pasta nest when presenting.... but I didn't get the hang of it then and I haven't got the hang of it yet... but still, with an extra sprinkle of parmesan, salt and pepper over the top, this meal turned out AWESOME.

This is the end result.  As a side, Hubby made a salad of lettuce, basil, tomato, bocconcini and sliced up crusty olive bread which was topped off with olive oil and balsamic vinegar.  I thought this was rather nice, given it was meant to be a thank you dinner for him and he still ended up in the kitchen somehow...

I love this recipe.  I love that it was the result of a class I loved (and will be going to more of).  I love that it was so simple.  It was easy, tasty and I think you can tinker as much as you like (next time, mushrooms and chicken pieces, I reckon).  Nothing beats freshly made pasta, and making it just isn't hard.  I maybe wouldn't make it mid-week given time restraints, but it certainly is going to be a regular in our house.