Had an urge to bake one night, and the easiest thing to make was a simple tart of apples…
And of pears…
The Granny Smith apples were really too tart (pardon the pun) for such a simple tart since the only additive was a sprinkle of brown sugar. The pears though, were superb.
This is the result of the best blueberry muffin recipe ever. I scrounged it off SMH years and years ago, which isn’t on-line anywhere. They’re reliable, have the muffin texture that you’d expect, but tastes better. The secret? Natural Yoghurt and melted butter. And no buttermilk!
Very chilly in Sydney last weekend, so what better time to make minestrone soup. Bought a soup mix from my local greengrocer. This one had potato, parsnip, turnip, carrot, celery and a couple of sprigs of parsley. Add it a few cloves of chopped garlic, a bit of canned crushed tomatoes, a beef stock cube (yes, I still use those), and lots of black pepper. Oh yes, and this curly rigatoni pasta, which were very cool.
I didn’t put any salt in during cooking. In the end, I put in a slug of light soy sauce, which worked really well. Well, that’s my bit of fusion cooking for the day.
After my visit to Kazbah, I had a craving for more Moroccan food, so last weekend I tried out two recipes: chicken and date tagine, served with curried apple couscous.
The tagine was wonderful, with the subtle flavour of cinnamon, honey and almonds. I couldn’t find any dates so I used prunes instead. And the curried apple couscous is a dream, good enough to have on its own.
I was raring to use the apples that I picked on my visit to the apple orchard, and the first recipe I tried was this apple cake. It turned out very, very well, since it’s a crumble/pie/cake all-in-one. It was also enormous, and freezes well, meaning that I still have a couple of portions left for dessert.
A couple of days later I made some madeleines for the international lunch that my department was having. It’s a little vanilla/lemon cakelette from France. Now, I know that I’m not French, but in my defence I was delegated sweets to bring and I had no way of buying anything remotely South-East Asian sweets mid-week. Besides, I don’t mind being an honorary Frenchie for the afternoon if I get to spread a bit of baking joy.
Madeleines are little pillows of gold and very yummy. I made madeleines on the weekend using this recipe. Well using the method in this recipe but the quantities of another cut out from some newspaper sometime in the last decade. Turned out well, I must say, though since it’s a tad bit dry I think I’ll be trying out this recipe next time and baking it for a shorter period of time.
I’m in a cooking mood lately (and I haven’t been for a very long time) so I made this pineapple cardamom upside-down cake. Served it to my flatmate and my family and they all agree that it’s scrummy!
Static and Silence 