Happy Birthday Me!

So like I said, on Saturday night I went out drinking to celebrate my 22nd birthday. However, Sunday was my real birthday, and this was the night of my enormous Nigella-based feast. (How else would you expect me to celebrate?). I went a bit nuts with the food, because I forgot how many people I invited, and kinda just kept telling my friends to “come, come and eat, it’ll be so fun!”. I was a bit paranoid that I wouldn't have enough food, so kept adding more.

The whole menu was…

2 roast chickens, with a mushroom and breadcrumb stuffing
Onion Sauce
Roast Potatoes
Beef sausages
A large rump steak (what the hell, it was already marinated and in the freezer, so why not)
Proper English Trifle
Hazelnut Cake
Chocolate Raspberry Pudding Cake

So in addition to the trifle and hazelnut cake, which I’d made in advance, I added the following 3 recipes to my list.

349. English roast chicken with all the trimmings – plus some
350. Onion sauce
351. Chocolate raspberry pudding cake

The first thing I made in the afternoon, was the stuffing for the chickens. Nigella’s recipe include bacon, but a few of my mates don’t eat pork, so I left it out. What you do for the stuffing is cook onion (and bacon, if you’re including it) in oil, then set it aside, and cook finely chopped mushrooms in the same pan. Once everything’s cooked down and fragrant, you mix the onions and the mushrooms with breadcrumbs, parsley and thyme.


stuffing

2 of my mates, An and Jess, were spending the day with me, so whilst I was making the stuffing, I delegated the task of peeling 2 kilos of potatoes to them. I then parboiled them in readiness for roasting later that night.

Next thing to do was the chocolate raspberry pudding cake. This can’t be made in advance because it needs to be served warm. And although microwaving the finished cake back to warmth it is an option, it’s easy enough to be made on the night of your dinner itself. To start, melt butter, raspberry liqueur, sugar, dark chocolate, and coffee in a pan until smooth and combined. Next, beat this liquid into sifted flour and cocoa, followed by two eggs. A warning: this mixture is extremely tasty, so don’t be too pedantic about scraping it into your cake tin.


choc raspberry pudding cake mixture

Speaking of which, you pour half the mixture into a lined and greased springform cake tin, cover with raspberries (I used cheaper frozen berries to no detrimental effect), and then the rest of the cake mixture.


choc raspberry pudding cake raw, in tin

Then it needs to be baked for 45 minutes. Now, another word of warning – the mixture is extremely runny, and Nigella advises not to panic or to add more flour. But that’s not the problem. The problem, for me, using my Nigella Lawson Living Kitchen 23cm springform cake tin, was that the bugger leaked on me!! Cake mix was dripping through the sides of the tin and onto the floor of my oven. Luckily, crisis was averted when I shoved a baking tray directly underneath to catch all the drips. And after about 10 minutes in the oven, the cake had firmed up enough to stop dripping, so not too much mixture was lost. Phew!

I should add here, that all the time I was cooking, it was my parents who were cleaning up the house and making it presentable for company. Thank-you!

As soon as the cake was done, I shoved the stuffed chickens into the oven.


raw chickens

The trifle needs some finishing touches a couple of hours before you eat it. You cover it with whipped cream, and a caramel made by boiling orange juice with sugar, and some flaked almonds.

And I started on the onion sauce. It’s a béchamel sauce, with the water used to boil some onions added, as well as the chopped boiled onions themselves. It was at about this point that my friends started arriving.

Here’s Bonnie helping out with the sauce.


Bonnie - "I'm cooking"


roasted chickens

Aren’t they gorgeous? I shoved the potatoes in the oven as soon as the chickens came out. I think roast chickens are such a great food for entertaining - they're easy, delicious, and impressive. Every one of my guests commented on the warm and inviting smell of roast chickens as they entered my house.

And while the potatoes were in the oven, I grilled a steak and some sausages.


why not add a steak?

As might have been expected, my dinner was running a bit late - people started arriving at 7, but we only ate at about 8:30. Sorry guys! At least they had Big Brother to keep them entertained.

I delegated the task of chopping the chickens to my mum - she's an expert.


The key to remaining goddess-like


chicken inside


Chicken chopped up Hainanese style

My mum very cleverly chopped up the chickens into small pieces so we all could get some. Only my Malaysian mates realised this though.

Georgina: Hey, it looks like Hainan chicken rice!
Mark: Yeah! Your mum rocks, she chopped the chickens Chinese-style! Where's the rice and the soup and the cucumber?

Here's the spread.


the spread


Onion sauce - it looks like a vast bowl, but trust me, it gets eaten!

Toni: Can I get the recipe for this sauce?


Sausages


Stuffing


Roast potatoes - not quite as brown as I would have liked, because I pulled them out of the oven slightly early. But we were hungry, dammit!


It's a buffet!

I can't believe it, almost ALL the food got eaten. This hardly ever happens with Nigella-portions. I think we had, like, 3 pieces of chicken, 2 potatoes and half a sausage left at the end of this meat-and-carb orgy. I see now that I forgot to add any vegetables, but no-one seemed to mind. I was pretty stuffed at the end of the meal though.

And here are the desserts. I really loved how they all looked together, similar in shape, yet different in colour, taste, and presentation. In fact, it kinda reminded me of my days working at that buffet restaurant, but without the creepy co-workers.


3 desserts


finished whole choc raspberry pudding cake


hazelnut cake, finished


finished proper English trifle


Inside of choc raspberry pudding cake

The raspberries look fab, glinting red inside the dark cake. But I'd suggest using more raspberries than you think you need - they seemed to become a bit sparser after baking.

This is my dessert plate below, but don't worry, even I wasn't able to finish the whole thing.


one big plate

All the desserts were delicious! We cut the cakes into teensy-weensy pieces so we could all share them and try some of everything. The hazelnut cake was gorgeous, nutty and fragrant, and my dad particularly loved it. He had 3 pieces. The chocolate cake was also beautiful - deep and rich and chocolatey. The trifle went down particularly well, especially amongst my Jewish, challah-loving friends, who were really excited at the prospect of a challah-based dessert. It wasn't too alcoholic, too rich, or too sweet. It was just right, a big bowl of cream-and-berry-swathed deliciousness.


Friends

What a lovely way to celebrate my birthday!

Happy Birthday to Me in Advance

It was my birthday on Sunday, and I had planned a mega huge super special feast to end all feasts, which included, naturally, 3 desserts. But being the planning and social-function addict that I am, I had also planned a big night out drinking on Saturday night. So naturally, I had to do some things in advance.

347. Proper English Trifle (Cooking in Advance)
348. Hazelnut cake (Dinner)

I thought that these were good desserts to prepare together, because the trifle requires 8 egg yolks, and the cake needs 8 egg whites. I made the trifle first.

Trifle is a dessert made up of layers, which is served from a bowl. The first layer was made of challah... AKA Jewish bread.


challah

So you start by slicing the challah and cutting off the crusts, then making little sandwiches with the challah slices and raspberry jam. Then you soak them in a Grand Marnier/Marsala/orange juice mixture, and layer them in the bottle of a glass bowl.

The next layer is raspberries. Nigella stipulates fresh, but they're extraordinarily expensive, so I used frozen.


trifle layers - raspberry

The next layer is a custard, made with the 8 egg yolks, sugar, and cream which you infuse with orange zest.


custard layer

At this point, it can go into the fridge and wait overnight. The next day, you put the final touches on the trifle and eat it! I stashed it in the fridge and got on with the hazelnut cake.

The hazelnut cake is, as Nigella might put it, hysterically easy. Simply whisk 8 egg whites until stiff, then fold in ground hazlenuts, castor sugar, lemon zest, and some flour. Spread into a springform cake tin, and bake for an hour. Ta-dah!


hazelnut cake, raw

Stay tuned for photos of the finished products...

The Chocolate Cake Verdict

So, the Chocolate Birthday Cake. As I said previously, I took a slice to work on the day I made it (Sunday) to share with my workmate Daniel. Mum & Dad also had a slice each that night. But this still left about 75% of the cake which needed to get eaten. Over the next few days, I ate a few more slices, but I also brought it around to share with people.

I took a couple of slices to uni the next day to share with my mates. We ate it at our favourite cafe, while discussing diets, exercise and healthy eating. (Irony!)


Adri gives it the thumbs up!

On Tuesday, my brother ate a slice.

Daniel: Sarah, this cake is fantastic. It's not dry, even though it's a few days old.

And on Wednesday, I brought some to work to share with Bonnie and Michael...


Michael eating cake

It was ok, but I think it was getting a bit dry by this stage.

Tonight I polished off the last slice. In order to salvage it from 5-day old dryness, I took a tip from Nigel Slater's 24-Carat Brownies, which I have yet to make, but really, really want to. For complete and utter indulgence, he suggests serving his already "dense and fudgy" brownie with vanilla ice-cream and warm chocolate fudge sauce. I microwaved the last slice for about 20 seconds, topped it with a scoop of Connoisseur vanilla ice-cream, then heated up some leftover chocolate sauce (from the poires belle Hélène), and poured it over the cake and ice-cream.



I ate this and watched David Lynch's Lost Highway on DVD. Perfect end-of-week relaxation!

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

I trust that by now you're all nursing your post-post-St. Patrick's Day hangovers. And here is, in this author's humble opinion, the perfect, hangover-salving meal.

306. The Irish Club's Irish Stew (Dinner)
307. Birthday Cake (Basics etc.)

The choice of Irish stew is a pretty obvious one, I must admit. But the birthday cake is more of a stretch. You see, in the run-up to St. Paddy's day, my friend DG made a dreamy-looking version of Nigella's Chocolate Guinness Cake. Ever since she showed me the gorgeous photo, I'd been craving it. Bad. I didn't have any chocolate cake. And unfortunately for me, the Chocolate Guinness Cake is in Feast, not How to Eat. Help was at hand though, with Nigella's chocolate birthday cake, in the Basics etc. chapter of How to Eat. Phew!

The birthday cake is a pretty basic double-layered chocolate cake, covered in a ganache. To make the cake, you melt butter, chocolate, sugar and condensed milk together, and then stir it into sifted flour and cocoa together, followed by 100ml recently-boiled water and 2 eggs.


cake mix

I put the cake into 2 sandwich tins, and baked it at 180C for 25 minutes. While it was baking, I got on with the stew.

Nigella's Irish stew consists of layers of ingredients. Firstly browned lamb chops, then vegetables (carrots, onions, parsnips), then par-boiled pearl barley. Between the layers you sprinkle a mixture of parsley, sage and rosemary.


pre-potatoed stew

Then you pour some warm stock over, and cover the whole lot with thinly sliced potatoes.


potatoed stew

It only take 1.5 hours in a 160C oven,which is a lot less than some of the other stews I've made. After it's cooked, there's the option of browning the potatoes under the grill, which I chose to do. Nigella says that the whole point of the stew is that it needs no accompaniment, except for a lot of bread and butter.


Lunch


Cooked


Open

Oh my goodness, I cannot even begin to tell you how much I loved this stew! I love a stew at any time, but this one was especially divine. The meat had softened during cooking, and all the flavours melded together fantastically. Even the parsnips, which I normally don't like, tasted good in this context. Both my mother and I ate heroic quantities, and went back to dunk our bread in the delicious sauce. There's just something about the richly flavoured, fattily gelatinous sauce coating the pearly grains of barley which keeps you going back for more.


one plate

Fortunately, the dessert was just as good, although I didn't end up eating it until much later at night. I iced the cake while the stew was in the oven, and left it sitting, majestically, on our kitchen bench. The icing is a chocolate ganache - equal quantities of chocolate (half dark, half milk) and cream. You chop up the chocolate into fine rubble, then heat up the cream and pour it over. Let it sit for 5 minutes, and then beat it with an electric mixer until thick and smooth. Ideally, I imagine that you would start by slicing the cakes flat, leaving you with a perfectly flat surface upon which to pour your ganache, letting it set glossily with minimum interference from a spatula. In this way, the finished product would be a hat-box shaped, "sachertorte shiny" affair.

However, I never bother to slice the domed top of my cakes flat. (That's laziness and greed in equal measure). And putting two domed cakes together results in some excess space which needs to be filled. I poured most of the ganache on top of the cakes, and then whipped up the rest quite stiff before spreading it around the sides to fill in the gaps.

So as you can see, the result isn't a perfect one, but I hardly think that you'd turn your nose up at it. In fact, when you really, really need chocolate, any old thing will do.


Cake

As I said previously, I didn't get to eat any cake until a bit later that evening. As soon as lunch was over, I had to dash to the train station to get to work. I cut a couple of slices, stashed them in an old tofu container, and took them to work to eat on my break. One for me, one for my friend-slash-workmate Daniel (emphatically NOT my brother), who just loves to eat chocolate cake. We ate them out the back, on nice serving plates, sprinkled with cocoa from the cocoa duster we use for cappuccinos. Rocking.


sliced cake

Daniel: That is an amazingly chocolatey cake.

Too right. I'm taking the cake around to share with other friends and family, so stay tuned for another post on the verdict of the cake!

Fancy Schmancy

Do you ever get a sudden, irrepressible urge to bake? I did this morning, at about 9am when I was supposed to be getting ready to go to uni. Instead, I baked a cake which took longer than expected, and ended up missing my first class. Whoops.

301. Fancy Cake (Basics etc.)

The fancy cake is yet another one of Nigella's citrus-flavoured almond-based cakes.

39. Clementine Cake
47. Moorish Cake
186. Almond & Orange-Blossom Cake

It is basically the same as the Moorish Cake, (in fact, the Moorish Cake is a variation of the basic "fancy cake" recipe), but with different proportions of ingredients, and without the orange syrup. It's called "fancy cake" because it is made in a brioche tin, giving it a fancy shape. The actual cake mixture is quite simple - you beat egg yolks with sugar until light, then fold in almond meal, lemon zest and beaten egg whites.

I didn't have any lemons to hand, so I used the zest of a seville orange, retrieved from the icy depths of my freezer. Furthermore, whenever I make this sort of cake, I whisk up the egg whites first, and leave them, in their stiff peaks, to the side while I get on with the rest of the cake. This is to save washing up. You see, I use my KitchenAid mixer for all stages of this cake, and when you whisk egg whites, you need your equipment - the bowl and the whisk - to be scupulously clean. Doing the egg yolks first means that you need to wash and dry the equipment before beating the egg whites. Egg yolks, on the other hand, require no such lavish attention. If you do the egg whites first, you don't need to wash anything before you beat the egg yolks. You can just scrape the beaten stiff whites into another bowl, not worrying about the bits that remain on the equipment.

I've found that egg-whites don't come to too much harm if left out for a short period of time. In fact, back at my old job as a cook at Crown Casino, our soufflés were made up and portioned into ramekins in the afternoon, in the pastry kitchen on the opposite side of the complex. We'd transfer trays of ramekins of the raw mixture from the pastry kitchen to our own kitchen (none too delicately), and cook them to order in the evening, which could be as late as 10:30pm. They always turned out fine.

Anyway, the egg whites for this cake only stayed out for about 15 minutes. No worries.



Those of you with sharper memories will remember that when I made the Moorish Cake, I had a bit of drama going all over town trying to find a tin. In the end, I didn't use a proper brioche tin, but a brioche-shaped ceramic pudding dish. As you can see now, I have a proper brioche tin. And it was ludicrously easy to find. They're actually sold at The Essential Ingredient, only about $12, in the right size, and with non-stick surface. I found it, by chance, about a week after I made the Moorish Cake, and I felt quite the douchebag when I saw them.

So, the cake takes an hour to bake in a 160C oven.



After cooling in the tin for 10 minutes, you have to turn out the cake, which is not that easy, considering how many crevices there are on the tin. My only advice is to be patient and gentle with the cake. I used a butterknife and a plastic chopstick to wedge it out, slowly, and in one piece.


le gateau upside down

When I made the Moorish Cake, I served it upside down, which I think looks better, but Nigella does stipulate turning it up the right way, immediately.



I let it cool in the kitchen whilst I spent the day at uni, and ate it in the evening with my parents. I assume that you're supposed to serve this type of cake plain, but I couldn't bear the plain brown top (and was afraid the cake would be dry), so I topped it with strawberries which I'd macerated in castor sugar and orange flower water. And served it with crème fraiche, just as I did with the Almond & Orange-Blossom Cake.



It was fabulous, and not dry at all. There was a fantastic contrast between crunchy top and the fragrantly dense moistness within. I do believe you could make any egg-white leavened cake in a brioche tin to get the "fancy" thang happening, but I can't honestly see why you'd want to go past this one.

Happy Birthday Allstar, Part III [The Eating]

I hadn't seen most of my friends from my old work for over a year. (Before my current cinema, and before my terrible 3 months working in a restaurant, I used to work at a different cinema, which is where I met the lovely Alistair). Apparently, Daniel, who still works there, has been really bigging up my cooking in my absence. This surprised me, as I, unlike Daniel, tone down the food-talk in everyday conversation, so as not to make me appear like a crazy Nigella-obsessed loon.

Some quotes from the weekend:

"So Sarah, Daniel tells me you've been cooking some fantastic stuff..."
"How's your food blog?"
"I hear that you appeared in a magazine!"
"So what's your favourite thing to cook?"
"Hey, did you hear that? We got a compliment! The gourmet chef likes our nachos!"

I pulled out the cheese stars on Saturday afternoon as we were all chillaxing by the pool. They taste just like Cheds. In other words, they taste awesome. And their salty crunchiness was perfect with a beer on a warm afternoon.


joe with stars

Joe: You could sell these. I'm serious!


Jo, Al, Jaffe with stars


Symone reading my article

And later that evening... it was time for cake!


the cake


allstar with cake


Box o' cookies - these were all the extra ones that didn't make it onto the cake but were delicious nonetheless.

The cookies and the cake went really quickly - there were about 15 of us up there, and sugar always seems to be welcome.


1/2 cake

Nigella was right. As she predicted, "Your child will be more interested in the cake’s icing than in the texture or taste of the sponge itself". People liked the icing, and as you can see from the photo below, even shaved off slices of icing to eat.


people like icing

Now, as regards the stew - I didn't serve it up to everyone. Partly this was because there wouldn't have been enough for 15 people, but mainly because I was still pretty wrecked from the previous day of cooking and passed out in my room during dinner time. Whoops. They had snags for the BBQ, they were fine.

One more thing, you may remember I was planning on making Nigella's patented marmite sandwiches (vegemite, in my case) while I was up there. But again, Nigella was right.

"I have come to the conclusion that sandwiches are primarily there to placate the parents: they act as a nutritional sop, making the grown-ups feel better about all the sweet stuff the children are really eating; it thus looks like a proper tea, not the full-on sugar orgy it is".

I didn't end up making the sandwiches - I was too relaxed to bother, and to tell the truth, no-one really seemed to mind. Biscuits, cake, nachos, BBQ sausages and all the other generic supermarket-bought snacks seemed to satisfy all our meal and munching needs.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY ALLSTAR!