more backlit lollies for you to enjoy 😀
Note – this is an automated posting. Helen is out bush until July 2ish.
Chocolate Mascarpone Tart
It was my turn to cook dinner last night and since we did not have a dessert on Sunday like we normally do I decided why not have one on Tuesday night. My plan was to make the Strawberry Mascarpone tart that I have made in the past but when I was looking at the recipe leaflet that came with the Mascarpone, the Chocolate Dessert was calling me. I quickly looked in the pantry to see what chocolate we had and sure enough we had a block of Cadbury Dark Cooking Chocolate. phew.
One thing I dislike about making dinner is that there is never any natural light around to take photos of what I make 🙁 and without photos I am reluctant to blog about what I made. I guess I should practice more with my flash and my DIY light tent which is what I use to take most of my food photos with during the day. Dinner last night was tagliatelle served on a bed of roast sweet potatoes slices seasoned with basil and topped with sautéed leeks, mushrooms and spinach topped with a rasher of double cooked bacon. It was rather nice 😀
Chocolate Mascarpone Tart
This filling recipe comes from the leaflet inside Wattle Valley Mascarpone. This makes plenty of chocolate cream. To fill one 8″ pie crust you only need probably between 1/3 to 1/2 of what the recipe makes.Filling
250g Chocolate
250g whipped cream
250g mascarpone
2 egg whites, whipped.Tart Shell
One fully cooked 8-9″ sweet pastry shell. I used a Dorie Greenspan recipe for Sweet Tart Dough from Smitten Kitchen. I highly recommend this recipe it makes a delightful pastry shell.Melt the chocolate and stir in the remaining ingredients. I whipped it after this to add some more air to the mixture and that worked out quite well. Fill a tart shell with the filling and transfer to the fridge to chill for an hour or so. If you don’t want use it to fill a tart you could fill small ramekins with the mixture and chill them.
Serve with whipped cream and strawberries or whatever berry takes your fancy.
Variation idea, I was just thinking that this could be quite nice with small chocolate chips or or perhaps coffee mixed through the filling.
bright, happy colours
Anyone for some snakes? Backlit by the wonderful Australian sun.
Strawberry
The local strawberry season is just starting and mmmm I love the strawberry season. On my way home from work the other day I saw a sign at the local fruitshop which said “Strawbs, 1kg for $6”. You think I could resist that? Or more to the point do you think I could not take photos of said Strawbs?
I picked up some extension tubes the other day and have been having a really good play with them. I am also having fun playing with my flash on an off camera cord. The results, I have been having fun and taking photos 😀
Julie Le Clerc, cafe@home
I first noticed Julie Le Clerc when I was in NZ back in February, her books were seemingly everywhere I looked. The other week when I was browsing the library shelves to see if there was any new cookery books that I hadn’t looked at before I saw Julie’s cafe@home on the shelf and without having a flick through I grabbed it off the shelf. I have really enjoyed reading it and plan to make some more things from the book yet.
On Sunday, I had a quick panic when I thought it was my turn to cook morning tea for work on Monday so after a quick flip through the book I settled on the Coconut Cream Loaf, it was only after I had baked the cake did I realise that I was a week early. Oh well I now have slices of cake tucked away in the freezer to be taken as morning/afternoon tea when needed.
Lemon Coconut Loaf with Pink Icing
(adapted from Coconut Cream Loaf with Pink Icing, p. 162)125g softened butter
1C sugar
2 eggs
165ml coconut milk
1.5C self raising flour
3/4C desicated coconut
juice of 2 lemonsPreheat oven to 180, grease and flour a 21cm loaf tin.
Cream the butter and sugar. Then add eggs one at a time. Add the coconut milk and lemon juice. Stir in the flour and coconut. Pour into loaf tin and bake for 40 minutes or until cooked. Ice with simple icing sugar icing and decorate with some more coconut.I have really enjoyed this cake warmed up in the microwave for a few seconds as it really brings out the coconut flavours.
Blueberry Brioche Scrolls
(adapted from Blueberry Scroll Buns, p. 62)Julie’s brioche method is quite simplified compared to the others I have seen round the traps in that the dough is not cool risen but warm risen like you would traditionally do for a normal loaf of bread. This means the time between the beginning and completion is severely reduced.. A basic brioche dough is given and then a number of variations are given, the Blueberry scrolls are one of them.
Plain Brioches
1/4C warm water
2tsp active dried yeast
2tbsp sugar
4C plain flour/strong flour
1tsp salt
1C warm milk
2 eggs
2 egg yolks
150g softened butter
1 lightly beaten egg to glaze1. Place the warm water in a small bowl and sprinkle in the yeast and sugar, leave the yeast to activate for a little while.
2. In a small cup lightly beat the 2 eggs and 2 egg yolks together. In a large bowl combine the flour and salt. Then add the yeast mixture, eggs, softened butter and milk, mix to combine.
3. Turn out on to a floured bench top and knead till smooth and glossy (I needed to work into a moderate amount of extra flour as I found the dough to be rather wet. Place kneaded dough into a lightly oiled bowl, cover with cling wrap and leave in a warm place to rise until doubled in volume, about 1hr or so. Lightly press back the dough, turn out on to the bench top and give it a light knead.
4. Preheat oven to 190. Form dough into to desired shapes either a loaf or 12 mini loaves, place in oiled bakeware and leave to rise for 20 minutes or so.
5. Glaze with beaten egg and bake for 15-20 minutes or until golden and with a firm crust.Blueberry Brioche Scrolls.
1 basic brioche dough prepared to step 3
1/2C soft brown sugar
1C Blueberries (fresh or frozen)1. Roll brioche dough into a 25cmx40cm rectangle, sprinkle with brown sugar and blueberries.
2. Roll up into a log and cut log into 2-4cm portions (This all depends on what size your largest muffin pans are and what size you want your cooked buns. I cut mine at about 3cm and cooked them in a standard 12 hole large muffin pan and think they are just the right size).
3. Place spirals into greased muffin pans. Preheat oven to 190 and leave to rise for 20 minutes or so.
4. Glaze with the beaten egg from the basic brioche dough and bake for 15-20 minutes or until golden and with a firm crust.Julies’s notes say that the blueberries will melt into the brown sugar becoming jam like and will cling to the spirals of the dough. I don’t know if I used too many blueberries (you think I actually measured them?) or not enough sugar but I ended up with most of my scrolls oozing blueberry syrup out of the bottom. The recipe says it will make 12 but I only used half of the original dough to make these and ended up with 9 scrolls.
These are so yummy, however next time I am either going to make them with raspberries or chocolate as Matthew doesn’t like blueberries which means that I will be eating these by myself for the days to come.
Pantry Soup
This recipe was in a Delicious magazine as Pasta e Fagioli (Pasta and Beans) but by the time I was finished with it, it much more resembles Minestrone (hearty, pantry soup).
My cousin Erica is up in Brisbane at the moment for a training course with her new job so on Sunday we picked her up from the airport and high-tailed it to The Farm for arvo tea with Julie, the boys and Grandad. Then we spent an hour or so trying to display the wedding photos from the other weekend on the TV so that everyone could see them but without the cables to do the job easily we didn’t get very far.
In planning dinner for Sunday night I had to take into plan the Pesco-vegetarian preference of Erica and the red meat carnivore that is my younger brother, who whilst he likes fish would rather eat his own leg before he had prawns or other shell fish. That threw my idea of actually cooking seafood paella in my paella pan which thus far has only been used to make curries out the window. As I was flicking through magazines I had out from the library I came across a recipe for Pasta e Fagioli in the May 2005 issue of Delicious. That looks good I thought and hopefully the men in my family won’t kick up too much of a fuss about the lack of meat in it.
I come from a culinary upbringing (doesn’t that sound swish) where the recipe mostly serves as a starting point and by the time you are eating the meal you are quite a few steps removed from the start. This is mainly due to the addition of extra vegetables in recipes. “What! The only vegetable called for is for a small onion and a stalk of celery? That is not much of a meal. Add some shallots as well and whatever else you can find is in the freezer/fridge/pantry.†Our freezer is a sight to see as it contains many Tupperware containers of chopped celery, shallots, capsicum, mushrooms etc that at a moments notice can be dumped into a saucepan to beef up the nutritional and taste content of a meal. Consequently, my ability to give you an accurate measure of what went into the soup is about as likely as seeing pigs fly. Unless you can follow the measure of half a tightly packed medium Tupperware container? No? I didn’t think so.
Pantry Soup or Minestrone
Garlic – a couple of cloves, minced. (I mince up garlic and freeze it in teaspoon sized foil packets)
Onion – diced
Carrot – diced
Celery – thinly sliced
Shallots
Capsicum – diced
Pasta – soup pasta is good, or any small pasta – 150g or so
Beans – cannelloni and borlotti (3x400g tins or so serves 6 easily, drained)
Passata di Pomodoro – tablespoon or two
Tomatoes – 1x400g tin, whole and roughly chopped
Baby spinach – a handful or two
Vegetable stock – how much depends on how much soup you are making (9/10 times we used powder, it is easy)Either on the stove top or microwave cook the pasta till it is about 7/8 cooked.
Meanwhile heat some olive oil in a large saucepan and soften the onion. Add the garlic and whatever other veggies you are using and cook for a couple of minutes till the veggies start to soften.
Roughly mash one of the tins of beans and add to the saucepan along with the other tins of beans,tomatoes and a little bit of Passata.
In the empty tins pour in some boiling water and a little bit of stock powder and pour into the soup (you get your money’s worth this way, you won’t be throwing out any little bit of flavour). How much stock you add really is up to you as it depends on a) how much liquid you want in the soup and b) what quantities of vegetables you have used initially.
Bring this to the boil and simmer for a couple of minutes and then add the cooked pasta, simmer for a couple more minutes and then stir through a couple of handfuls of baby spinach (basil could also work nicely here I think) allowing it to wilt a bit in the hot soup and serve with some crusty bread.
In the batch I made today I also added a couple of slices of roast capsicum that I had cut into thin strips to give add some more texture and flavour.
Grandad was wolfing it down and I can’t remember he if only had seconds or had thirds as well. The Palsson men didn’t complain too much about the lack of meat in it and the rest of it also quite enjoyed it. For dessert we had a chocolate self-saucing pudding but that will have wait till next time as I have no photo.