Espresso at home

Well, dear readers, it has been a while, and I apologise. Between the Winter of Doom (five bad colds and counting) and the various social events I've attended/catered/organised, there has been no time for you.

However I find myself with a rare five minutes' peace - the baby is napping, the kitchen is clean - and a troubling problem that you, reading this, may be able to help me with.

I recently had a birthday, and requested and was granted an espresso machine by my generous parents. My very generous parents: I requested Sunbeam, I got deLonghi.

Let's all take a moment to admire it because it is very pretty. It conjures up images of lazy sunday mornings, sitting on the couch opposite my husband, each of us luxuriously imbibing a hot, rich, freshly brewed coffee while the baby sits on the floor and does adorable things and shows no interest in our coffee whatsoever. There is laughter and sunshine and pyjama pants, and possibly a lazy cat being cuddly and interacting with the baby.

Is that too much to ask?

The problem with this picture is the coffee. Neither husband nor myself know the first thing about using an espresso machine at home. Well, that's not entirely true. But neither of us know the second thing, and there seem to be at least ten things before you can get to a decent cup of coffee.


At work we have a lovely Miele espresso machine where you put your pods in here and your cup over there and your milk in this jug and then go and get a tim tam and when you get back, there is a perfect latte waiting for you. At home, I get something like coffee flavoured dishwater with milky bubbles. Help! What am I doing wrong?

Part of the problem is that the coffee I make looks like this:

When it should look like this:

Husband very helpfully tells me that I have too much milk (he knows a lot about milk in coffee; he's been drinking long blacks for about fifteen years). I know that's not the problem because I have loads of milk in my coffee at work and that just makes it taste more like milk, not like dishwater. This morning I decide to just let it keep pouring until it stopped naturally. I had a mug completely full of espresso before I hit the off button. I've tried finely grinding the beans, coarsely grinding them, packing them tight, not having much in there at all - does anyone know the answer to this terribly important first world question? How do you make a decent cup of coffee at home?

Beginner's Macarons

Beginner's Macarons This story begins, as so many of my stories do these days, with the Wiggle. At 11 months of age, the Wiggle is well into 'solid' foods and enjoys a small but considered range of lovingly prepared homemade goo including leafy and root vegetables, fruit, and dairy.

Attempting to get the Wiggle to eat meat, however, is a different story. I don't know whether it's because I'm missing something or because meat's just not meant to be pureed, but all my attempts at creating meat dishes fail miserably and she refuses to eat them.

And I don't blame her. I certainly wouldn't eat them myself. So until I find a good way to puree meat - or until she grows enough teeth to chew - she gets all her protein from eggs. Specifically, egg yolks - apparently egg whites contain allergens or some such and you're not supposed to feed them to small babies. It's probably fine but I'm a 'by the book' kind of gal when it comes to things like that. Anyway, the moral of the story is that she only eats the yolks of her eggs so I am accumulating a very large number of egg whites and although I have started to throw them away, I can't bear to waste perfectly good food like that.

The proliferation of egg whites in little plastic baggies in my freezer led to a desire to finally learn to make meringe-y foods, which have been the focus of my kitchen experiments for the past few weeks. This week I decided, finally, to try my hand at notoriously difficult and fiddly but melt-in-your-mouth delicious macarons.

First: the difference between a macaron and a macaroon. They're pronounced the same, but fairly different. A macaroon is a sort of coconut biscuit. A macaron is a glorified meringue made with almond meal. Very different. Macarons need to be handled gently and they require a lot of rest, but they are worth it!

To make this dish you will need a bit of special equipment: a large metal bowl (very important that it's metal or your egg whites won't beat properly) and either a standalone kitchen mixer or electric beaters (otherwise you'll be there for hours and get RSI in your elbow).

Ingredients
3 egg whites, strained and aged (leave them on the bench, in a sealed container, overnight)
2 tbsp castor sugar
100g almond meal
1 cup icing sugar
nutella

Method
Preheat oven to 160 degrees celsius.

You have two options with the almond meal and icing sugar: you can either sift it all together, or put it in a food processor to get all the lumps out. I recommend the latter because it took me ages to sift. Once that is done, beat your egg whites, gradually adding the castor sugar, until you can turn the bowl upside down and they stay put. Carefully fold in the dry ingredients. This is a pretty delicate operation because if you go too fast and just 'mix' then you will lose all the air that you've beat into your egg whites. Rest for 10 minutes.

Spoon or pipe into little circles of the mixture on to baking paper in trays. Try to get them all as even as possible because you will have to go and match them all up with partners later on. Rest for 10 minutes.

Bake for 12 minutes then allow to cool thoroughly on trays. Gently remove from paper and find each shell a partner of the same size.

Get a generous dollop of nutella (or a filling of your choice!) on the end of a knife and put it in the middle of one shell. Get the 'partner' shell and gently 'screw' them together. The filling shoud squish out to the edges and look beautiful. Do this with all your pairs until they are finished - you should get about 20 macarons.

Chai Cupcakes with Vanilla Bean Frosting

One of my girlfriends is in the Army, so when she says "I'm in Sydney for a week!" we all drop whatever we're doing and go to see her. Last visit we were all being merry at a restaurant when I discovered that she was free the following Saturday. Before I knew it, everyone was coming around to my place and I had promised to make cupcakes in whatever flavour my Army friend wanted. She chose Chai.

If you are someone who thinks that Chai is a type of flavouring syrup which gets added to lattes, stop right where you are. Chai acutally just means tea in most South Asian countries but in Australia it specifically refers to Masala Chai, an Indian blend of spices and black tea commonly consumed with milk and sweetener. The mix of spices in Masala Chai varies but most of them will contain cloves, nutmeg, star anise and cinnamon at the very least.

When Saturday rolled around, Husband and Wiggle were both deathly ill with a cold so I made some hasty phone calls and got morning tea moved to a friend's house. Fortunately I'd organised it as a 'bring-a-plate' affair so it was easy to move.

The cupcakes were a big hit and my choice of Vanilla Bean for the frosting, which I had agonised over, turned out to be spot on - flavoursome enough to complement the cakes but not overpowering. These ones I will make again!

Ingredients

1/2 cup hot water
1 tbsp Masala Chai
1/2 cup milk
125g butter
1tsp vanilla essence
3/4 cup castor sugar
2 eggs
1 1/2 cups flour
1/4 teaspoon ground cloves
1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1/4 teaspoon chinese five spice

100g butter
1 vanilla seed pod
2 cups icing sugar
2 tbsp milk

Method

Put Masala Chai and water in a saucepan and bring to the boil. Boil 2-3 minutes and reduce to a simmer. Add milk and simmer a further 3-4 minutes. Remove from heat. Cream butter, sugar and vanilla essence until pale and fluffy. Beat in eggs, one at a time. Add flour, ground spices and 1/2 cup of your freshly brewed chai and mix thoroughly. Spoon batter into patty pans and bake at 180 degrees for 20-25 mins or until a knife inserted in the middle comes out clean.

Beat butter until very pale. Split seed pods and scrape the beans out into the butter. Add icing sugar and continue beating. Add milk, a little at a time, until desired consistency is reached. Spread over cooled cupcakes and enjoy!

Kitchen 101: Oven and Stove

I've decided to make a few 'Kitchen 101' posts to share the things that have taken me years of trial and painful error to learn. Most of these things are specifically applicable to baking and desserts, but I do my fair share of savoury cooking as well.


Before you can cook anything, you need a well-equipped kitchen. So my first Kitchen 101 posts will be about all the things you need in order to do all the things that I know you want to do. But before you can even start to stock your kitchen, you need an oven and a stove.


Yes, I know, that's really obvious. And yes, you might assume that everyone already has those things so I shouldn't bother. But the truth is that not everyone does. I've been in apartments so tiny that they barely had a sink, let alone a big ole oven and four-burner stove. And my parents, who have a large and beautiful kitchen with acres of black granite bench and a ten-foot-high pantry, sadly let a friend talk them into getting a two-burner stove. My mother has regretted this decision for seventeen years. So to start the basic equipment spiel, I will indeed start very basic and say that you need an oven, and a stove.


Ideally, I would be cooking in a fan-forced digitally controlled double-oven (my parents do have one of those!) and have a shiny, stainless steel gas or induction six-burner stove. However my oven is older than I am and takes 20 minutes to heat up and the four-burner electric stove is also older than I am and takes 20 minutes to cool down. This is ok. Very few people have much say in their oven and stove. If you are renting you have no say whatsoever and even if you own your place, like we do, replacing them is an enormous and costly undertaking. Gas isn't available to everyone and induction is extremely expensive to install - especially since you have to purchase a whole new set of pots and pans to go with it.

If you have a crappy oven, like I do, the trick is to make friends with it. Learn its quirks and idiosyncracies. You might need to go 5-10 degrees higher than each recipe specifies, or cook for 10 minutes or so longer. You may (and this is what I do) have to do a dry run of more or less everything in order to know what is going to work. Fortunately I now have a set of standard 'base recipes' which I know well and can adapt to a large variety of situations.


The way to work with an old electric stove is to imagine that each burner only has one temperature setting. You might have two hot burners, a medium burner and a low burner. If you are going to cook something that requires a high heat followed by a lower heat (for example poaching eggs, which I do almost every day), you will need two burners dedicated to this dish. If you are cooking a large meal in a small kitchen this can take a lot of planning and organisation!


I should also note that along with your 'extremely basic' kitchen equipment you need a fridge and freezer. Do I really need to go into detail? Even if you don't cook at all, you need them. That's all.


Next time on Kitchen 101: Small Appliances and Why I Can't Throw Out My Microwave.

Harvest Feast

My apologies if that last blog post left you feeling sad. It certainly made me feel sad. So I will now offer you an antidote: an epic win of a French Provincial feast.

THE PLAN
The idea for this party grew from a diet that the Cowboy had recently started. Which is ironic given that the whole meal ended up requiring over two kilos of butter, but that's a different story. While musing on the theme of 'healthy', I came up with the idea of using locally sourced, organic foods from local farmers' markets. The Cowboy thought this was fantastic and we hit on the idea of a 'harvest feast' - perfect for early Autumn, we would celebrate the way peasants used to once upon a time. With better cooking equipment, of course. Peasants led (naturally) to France and at once we hit upon a unifying theme for our food - French Provincial cuisine (hence the butter). Save-the-dates were sent immediately and we raided our French cookbooks to come up with a feast-to-end-all-feasts.

THE MENU
Appetisers (not very French, but very yummy)
Chilli Garlic Bread
Hand-made Olive Tapenade
Toasted Brie with Brown Sugar and Hazelnuts
all served with fresh baguette

Entree
Wild Barramundi with Vanilla Sauce
Cabbage Galette

Mains
Coq a Vin (definitely the standout dish of the evening!)
Pork with Blackcurrant
The Cowboy's Veggie Stacks

Sides
Garlic Pommes Puree
Basil and Rocket salad with Melting Tomatoes

Dessert
Luke Mangan's Chocolate Tart
Miss Jess's Almond Cake with Custard Frosting and Strawberries

I was thinking of you, dear readers, as we prepared this feast and took some photos to share. Unfortunately once we got up to the party I forgot to take photos of the finished dishes. Next time, if you are attending one of these dinner extravaganzas, please remind me!

PREPARATIONS
The Cowboy and I sat down at the start of the day and carefully planned what needed to be done when so that we would have minimal getting in each other's way, which was fortunate as multiple dishes coming out at the same time did cause some problems. We have defintely learned that lists and timetables are the key to successful dinner parties - and fortunately we are both list and timetable sort of people. Husband (who was responsible for the coq a vin - credit where credit is due!) is not so much a list-and-timetable sort of person and found this slightly frustrating. Fortunately his flexible approach came in handy for the Wiggle's timetable, which she declined to share with us but followed determinedly all by herself. Lesson two: next time we host a dinner party, we need to invite one of the guests to come from the start of the day as a dedicated babysitter.

THE DECOR
A very popular item at our Seven Deadly Sins dinner was a printed menu at each place so that people could keep track of what they were eating without having to ask again and again. This time I decided in the spirit of our French Feast (and out of contrariness) that I would translate the name of each dish into French (through a dodgy online translator, unfortunately my French is limited to one phrase) and let our guests figure out what they were. I was going to try and find some wildflowers for the table, but ran out of time - fortunately the Cowboy came to the rescue with some lovely multi-coloured bunches of roses with greenery. The plan this time was to serve dishes on plates in the centre of the table (for SDS we plated up in the kitchen), which meant lots of room in the middle of the table and also plates already set at each place. We had a mix of plain white and floral plates which we decided to use to our advantage. A few natural-coloured and beeswax candles from Dusk finished off the setting beautifully.

THE NIGHT
Food: amazing. Guests: eloquent and in high spirits. Atmosphere: perfect. Bedtime: about 5am. Says it all, really!

Stay tuned for some more cupcakey goodness coming your way! Husband has set me the challenge of making the best mississippi mud cake he's ever tasted, so I'll be sharing that adventure with you, and I have a few 'Kitchen 101' posts planned so there's loads to look forward to. In the meantime, share your cooking adventures with me - have you tried any of my recipes? Have you developed any of your own? Are you still waiting for Lachie to find that damn Lizard? Let me know!

Party Day Blog - the Garden Party

As much as this blog is meant to be a triumphant tale of effortlessly (ha!) successful entertaining, sometimes things just don't work. I was going to strike this from the record when it occurred to me that I would be doing my readers a great disservice by only sharing my great wins. So I present to you now a party-day-diary of an epic fail and hope that you can take from it these useful lessons:
1. Plan the shit out of it. (Remember this one - it will come in handy about Julyish!)
2. Do things the night before.
3. Sometimes, it's just not going to work. Live with this and move on.

6:20 am
The Wiggle wakes up, a little ahead of schedule. I'm keen to keep sleeping but Husband is also awake and gets her up to feed her. Urch.

7:15 am
The Wiggle is getting whingy, which I take as a sign that it's morning nap time. Perfect - she can nap now, I can sleep in, and then we can be at the shops for 9am. I have one last idea for sourcing some culinary lavender and need to get to Miranda today.

7:30 am
Hey Mummy, you thought you could sleep in! Ha! I want to play now. While the Wiggle destroys the house (again) I go online to see whether my lavender hunch was on track. Win! T2 (bless them) have a range of "just" teas which primarity consist of single ingredients that frankly you can get at the supermarket for a lot less. Lavender, however, is a definite win.

8:30 am
I'm starting to think about going to the shops ... the Wiggle is starting to think about her morning nap. Nap time wins. I think I might try and have that sleep in after all but it's just not happening so I get up to make the birthday cake I promised at the last minute. Clean house instead. Weather is not looking so great. Argh!

9:30 am
Call T2 Miranda to ask whether they have any lavender in stock. The extremely camp-sounding and friendly Anton puts a box aside for me. Call Mum to organise the stuff I need to borrow from her. Finally a bit of win!

10:00 am
Actually start making cake. Cut out a very cute stencil and start thinking about brown icing. Have a major 'der' moment while looking for the right food colour combination for brown - Chocolate! D'oh. Don't know why that was so hard to think of.

10:30 am
Cake in the oven. Realised that I haven't actually cooked a whole plain butter cake since ... ? Have put the timer on for 40 minutes and will just have to hope that that's the right amount of time. Also a little unsure about whether the cake tin I used was too big ... but the littler one didn't fit around the monkey stencil!

11:15 am
40 minutes turned out to be perfect. Pinned the stencil to the cake and got all the jars I could find out of the cupboard to put candles in. Nothing more I can do until the Wiggle wakes up and we can go out for supplies ...

11:45 am
Most epic morning nap ever. Wiggle awake at last and off to the shops.

1:30 pm
Get to Mum's to borrow supplies including a table. Wiggle is getting whingy. Supply borrowing turns out to be complicated and time consuming. Have minor meltdown, leave without table.

3:00 pm
Wiggle fed. Have major meltdown. The Cowboy calls at the crucial moment to tell me he can come around early to help. This saves me from complete collapse.

3:15 pm

Wiggle refuses to nap. Get the idea that a walk will be a good way to cool my head and tire out the Wiggle. Walk to Kirawee for noodle boxes. Distance is double what I'd thought it was and humidity is about 89%. Not good for improving mood.

4:30 pm
Struggle home. Abandon purchases in pram in foyer, get Wiggle to bed. Pour self a cold cider and lie down.

4:40 pm

The Cowboy arrives to save my butt. I'm still running around like a headless chicken but he is methodically asking me what needs to be done and doing it while keeping me focused on my own stuff. Start decorating the cake, which turns out to be much more difficult that I'd anticipated. Fortunately, the Cowboy makes salad boxes, peels potatoes and ices and decorates cupcakes while I'm attempting this.

5:30 pm
Miss L and entourage arrive with the rest of the food. Now there are two babies and too many people for my tiny apartment. Stuff everywhere and I'm struggling to do anything, running around and doing little bits of things. This party would definitely have benefitted from a little organisation of the written-down variety. Guests due to arrive in half an hour, house a massive mess, stuff still in car and foyer, nothing set up outside.

5:50 pm
Miss L has pretty much set up outside, thank goodness, with a table cobbled together out of two other makeshift tables. Cake is finished and somehow doesn't look half bad - although certainly not as cute as the stencil I made. Chicken is ready to go in the oven, potatoes cut up and waiting in a stock pot, cupcakes iced and on their stand and the salad boxes ready to go. House. kitchen and self still a mess.

6:10 pm
Get a text from guests to say that they are stuck in traffic and running late. General hysterical celebration. Assemble lanterns only to discover that most of them don't work. Husband, who is supposed to be at uni, arrives home to help. More hysterical celebration.

6:30 pm
Lanterns not working, hang them from trees anyway. Fill garden with jars of candles, forget to take photos. Set out a couple of little tables with huge white tablecloths on them and chairs from inside to create that awesome bring-the-indoors-out thing. All looking pretty good but while this is going on the house is still a mess and things still need doing in the kitchen.

7:00 pm
Guests of honour finally arrive after massive traffic delays. Put the chicken drumsticks in the oven (because drumsticks should only take half an hour to cook, right?) and go to sit outside in an imitation of relaxation. Salad boxes a big hit - at least something is going well.

8:00 pm
Drumsticks not cooked. Guests of honour need to leave due to tired babies. Other guests not arrived yet. Serve cupcakes and birthday cake even though dinner hasn't been served yet because, well, dinner isn't even close to ready. Monkey cake is appreciated and cupcakes are a big hit. Guests of honour leave.

9:00 pm
Other guests arrive. Get drumsticks out of oven. Flavour insipid. Begin clean up and go to bed.

So, all in all, a complete fiasco. Stay tuned for the much happier tale of Harvest Feast - the little dinner party that could!

The Cupcake Odyssey: Rosemary

Rosemary is probably my favourite herb. I love everything about it - the way it looks, the way it smells, the way it goes with all my favourite savoury foods, the sweet-spicy flavour it has, even the way it looks as a garnish. So when I was looking for unusual flavours to put into a cupcake, Rosemary was a bit of a no-brainer.


What was more difficult was coming up with a suitable frosting. I have always paired my cupcake flavours so that I have one flavour in the cake and another in the frosting, and I didn't see why this should be any different. I settled on muscat, which is another old favourite, and settled down to work. At first I thought I'd try a plain muscat icing. Which was disgusting. Then I thought I'd try a muscat-marscapone frosting, which looked very promising as I'd found several recipe suggestions on teh internets and figured that if other people could make it work, so could I. The problem with this was that once mixed with marscapone, the only part of the muscat that was discernable was the alcohol, which was not what I was going for. Eventually I thought I'd make a muscat-toffee glaze. Let's not go into the gory details of that particular disaster.


Eventually, I had to concede that rosemary is just such a fabulous flavour that it needs no accompaniment. And voila - it didn't.

Rosemary Cupcakes with Buttercream


Cupcakes

2 inches fresh rosemary, stripped

125g butter

3/4 cup castor sugar

2 eggs

1 1/2 cups self-raising flour

1/2 cup milk


Buttercream

2 cups icing sugar

100g butter

2 tbsp milk (approx)


Method

Cream the butter and sugar together until pale and fluffy. Add eggs, one at a time. Put the rosemary leaves in a spice grinder and grind until finely minced. Take a moment to inhale the amazing scent. Add rosemary, flour and milk and beat until smooth. Spoon into patty pans and bake in moderate oven 20-25 mins or until a knife inserted into one of the cupcakes comes out clean.


Beat butter for frosting until very pale. Add icing sugar slowly, while beating. Add milk until the desired texture is achieved. Spread over cooled cupcakes and top with a rosemary flower.


I think these may be my favourite ...