A 'marbled' banana bread.

Found four bananas blackening quietly in the bottom of the fruit bowl today.
Attempted to make it a marble cake, failed spectacularly.

Tiramisu for a birthday dinner.

Sibling no.3 turned his first double-digit number yesterday.
As is family tradition, we are allowed to choose three courses for a birthday dinner.
He went for vietnamese spring rolls, followed by rendang, with tiramisu for dessert.
For some reason he didn't choose the crispy spring rolls (why? why would you forgeo something deep-fried?) and instead went for the fresh variety. I must admit, they taste totally amazing thanks to the great filling my mum makes.
I think it involves carrot, pork mince and some form of cabbage, as well as copious amounts of fresh grated ginger, a few cloves of garlic, red chilli, and a splash of nam pla (fish sauce). I made nuoc cham (a dipping sauce of lime juice, nam pla, sugar and red chilli) to go with them. Once constructed, they look gorgeous with the slightly translucent rice paper skin shining whitely against the plate. They were delicious with a few tiny purple basil leaves tucked inside too.


I was going to write about the rendang (a sort of curry dish popular in Malaysia. It's usually made with beef, and it's slowly cooked. Once all the liquid has evaporated, the curry paste is added and fried with the then tender meat). However, I realised it is highly un-photogenic. Like, even worse than stew . You can see what I mean by clicking here .


So we shall instead skip gaily onto dessert.
It's a bit weird to sing happy birthday whilst crowded round a tiramisu and sticking candles in it, but that's just the way we roll. Yeah.
This is the recipe I used.



The whole thing turned into quite a debacle.
I had already started making the sponge when I realised I had only 6 eggs - the recipe calls for something like 9.
Secondly, there was no sugar in the house apart from muscavado.
Thirdly, I managed to scramble my egg/sugar mixture when I left it on the heat and wandered off to do something else..

So I ended up making a few adjustments to the recipe.
I was meant to use 3 eggs + 3 yolks in the sponge, instead used only one extra yolk.
And, since I screwed up the egg mixture for the mascarpone layer, that ended up eggless.
With everyone else at work/school, I had to work out which bottle in the cupboard was rum. I naively thought it would actually say 'rum' on it (that's not too much to ask, is it?), so when I couldn't find any I instead sniffed my way through about 5 different drinks until I found the one that smelt like it would be good in this dessert. I still do not know what I put in there!
Luckily the muscavado worked - the soft dark sugar gave the dish an extra flavour not to be found in caster, and lent the mascarpone and cream a lovely colour.

Anyway, I thought it was pretty cool the way the eggs and sugar turned from this:



into this:


Or maybe that's just me, I'm very easily amused.

I have a shameful secret..

My name is Sophie and I am a fussy eater.

There.
I said it.

Alas, dear friends, it is true. I am and always have been very picky.
It's not that I don't try different foods - how can I not? I'm mixed race after all - but it just so happens that most of what I try I don't like.
I really, really hope I grow out of it, but to be honest I'm not holding my breath.
I mean, how can I write about food, photograph food, savour food, and love food when I don't like half of what I cook?
Remember those cute little spiced beef patties I made on Wednesday? Yeah, didn't eat them.
And the Italian beef stew that I waxed lyrical about? Didn't touch it.
Other things that make me ever so slightly green are:

-fish
-shellfish
-in fact, any seafood
-beef, bar the occasional burger or steak
-dried fruit and candied peel
-curries of any kind
-mushrooms
-lamb
-sausages
-bread & butter pudding
-charcuterie
-stew
-meatballs
-Middle Eastern spicing
-Indian spicing
-risotto
-celery & celeriac
-aubergine
-pork (except bacon, duhh)
-coconut
-lemongrass & lime leaves
-ravioli

Okay, let's stop there before you lose all faith and denounce me as a philistine and person of ill-repute, as this lady clearly does.


I thought I should own up before continuing with this BLOG OF LIES. I am so ashamed.
So next time you read about me fawning over some lovely fat, speckled sausaged that were delivered from the farm, you'll know I'm talking bs.
Oh dear, I really haven't thought this through..

How frankly atrocious of my tastebuds to betray me in this way!

Challah-like bread pt. 2 - (slightly) better photos.

I wasn't satisfied with the previous photos of my first loaf of bread.
So here are some new ones.*
Isn't this your lucky day?
(Hah.)



Yet again my braiding is an epic fail, but the texture of this loaf is actually better than the last.
It looks a little dark because it's currently 2:39am. I felt slightly sick so went to bed at 5:00pm, woke up at 9:00pm, and now can't get to sleep again.
There's nothing like a little thereputic late night baking, so hopefully it will aid me in losing conciousness.




*I know, I know, they still really suck. It is, however, far too late at night/early in the morning to be worrying about artistic merit or even whether the photo is in focus or not.

Chocolate chip cookies.

Oh no! I can't find my ancient digital camera that I keep here at the flat. No photo today ):
I've only made CCCs twice before, and they have always been disasters - flat, spongy, delicious disasters. You know the type of cookie that's really chewy and thick? That's what I've aimed for, but when they come out of the oven they've collapsed into cakey puddles of (not so much) joy. They tasted nice and were chewy, but it just wasn't what I wanted.
So I've been scouring the internet ever since for a recipe that sounds good, and decided for this one. I halved the mixture because the full amount claims to, rather disconcertingly, make 60 cookies. So these are the modified amounts.

Ingredients:
1 & 1/8 cup plain all-purpose flour
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 cup of butter
1/4 cup granulated sugar
1/2 cup soft light brown sugar
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
1 egg
Chocolate chips

How to do it:
Preheat oven to 375° F/Gas mark 5
1. In one bowl mix together the flour, salt and baking powder.
2. In another cream together the butter (I used salted but you can use unsalted) and both sugars. Beat in the egg until the mixture is homogenous and completely blended - it will be quite runny.
3. Add the flour mix into the butter mix and stir until combined. Stir in the chocolate chips (or chocolate that you've chopped yourself).
4. Shape into balls and place onto a lined baking sheet.
5. Bake for roughly 10 minutes until slightly golden, then take out and leave to cool for however long you can restrain yourself. If you want smaller cookies make the balls of dough smaller and bake for 7/8 minutes, and bake for longer if you want bigger cookies.


By halving the amounts, this is meant to give 30 cookies. I actually got about 15 from it, and these weren't even very big. This recipe is fantastic, the cookies come out browned but soft inside, and perfectly sweet and salty.
However, it's still not exactly what I'm looking for - I'm beginning to think only factory machines can make the perfect American cookie. ):

Original recipe here.

Oh, and you can roll any unused cookie dough into a log, wrap in clingfilm, and store in the freezer. They can be baked without thawing.

Cheesecake.

It was mother's and step-father's 7th anniversary the other day. Seeing as it was only two days ago you would think I'd be able to remember what we had for dinner*. Alas, I cannot, and only have memories of dessert because there was photographic evidence!
Anyway - cheesecake. Personally I favour the unbaked kind, but since mother is on the baked team I made the latter.
It was originally a plain cheesecake with a hint of citrus through it (juice of half a orange), but then someone managed to excavate some raspberries from the freezer so I made raspberry sauce to go with it (raspberries, the rest of the orange juice, tiniest hint of vanilla).
Unfortuently this was definitely the worst cheesecake I have ever made - I ran out of sugar so it wasn't sweet enough, and we were one pack of cream cheese short - but the flavour of orange and raspberry together worked nicely. Disaster (not quite) averted.

*Update: STEAK! We had steak! I totally remember now!