A weft yarn

HCB - Red Fruit Shortcake (or shortcake ... where's the fruit)

I am posting this a bit late and I've only done half a job but I'm really thrilled with this. I made a shortcake in a flan tin and I can fill it with fresh fruit and it will be beautiful. A few short weeks ago, I would never even have attempted such a thing. Now look at this. I'm very proud. I'm also trying to distract you from the fact that it's half completed. I managed to squeeze this baking in just before my oven was dismantled to be replaced with the new one. It was a bit of a rush job and I didn't quite think through the final stages. Furthermore, it is winter here in Canberra and summer fruits are not particularly abundant or cheap. I priced Raspberries at $10 a punnet and strawberries at $4 a punnet. I'd probably need about three punnets to fill the flan. So, I may look for other options to feed my family. I could probably put a creme anglaise in the base and then top it with kiwi fruit and passionfruit and maybe some dried cranberries that I found at the local markets.

The picture of Rose's Red Fruit Shortcake is beautiful in the cookbook and Marie's version on the original Heaveny Cake bakers site is also stunning, so for now you'll have to content yourself with these photos.

As part of making the shortcake you need to know what size your flan tin is, then you either make the White Gold Passion Genoise batter or the Genoise Rose batter. I did the latter. Making the genoise was very like the process undertaken for the chocolate cake in the Raspberry Trifle. However, it has an additional step - making beurre noisette, which I gather is like a browned (not quite burnt) clarified butter. You put the butter in a heavy saucepan and heat it until the milk solids are brown and then you strain it and discard the browned bits of butter, leaving a clarified butter (which I know from Indian cooking as Ghee - though even thinking of Indian cooking in the middle of baking delicate cakes is a bit weird). Beurre noisette is probably a french baking technique and if I knew my french cooking better I'd have other associations in my mind ....anyway...

 

After making the beurre noisette, you put it to the side, then make the Genoise batter which is warmed eggs whipped until light and fluffy and much increased in volume and general fluffiness.

To the butter you add a little bit of the egg mixture to lighten it.

Then you add the flour to the egg mixture and then the lightened butter to the egg mixture and voila - genoise batter.

This is then "escorted to the flan tin" (stealing the words of the Indian chef Korma dasa - can't stop with the mixed brain cooking metaphors). It looked a bit full.

It came out beautifully and now I just need to find some seasonal fruit.

Cross stitch progress on the scissors keep

I have been making progress on the cross stitch embroidery project. It may seem like I have some projects that I favour more than others in my rotation system, but this is not so. I love them all equally.

I decided last year to use the rotation system to manage my tapestry, embroidery and knitting projects. The only thing was that I was at different stages with each project and recently I've decided I'd like to get them onto a somewhat equal footing. For the first few months of the rotation system last year, I spent a lot of time knitting and not much time on the embroidery. I'm now very close to being at a reasonable state of balance, which isn't like a karmic thing but more like a warning that in the future there could be many weeks between posts on each project. I have ten projects and in a normal week I get to spend about ten hours on a project. One of the ladies in my tapestry class mentioned she spends about three hours a night working on her embroideries. Her children are grown and have left home so she has plenty of time!

As for now, here's the progress on this project.

I've managed to put in all the mid-gold colour, which defined the bird's foot, neck and parts of the celtic twists in the corner. The pale-gold colour was next and this defined the corner twists and the beak. I still have quite a bit of the pale-gold to stitch into the picture.

I have been better about getting my cross to always fall in the correct direction, but still not perfect. Perfection is for another day.

 

Previous posts

Celtic scissors keep - update (May 26, 2011)

My next Celtic scissors keep - new kit (May 13, 2011)

Celtic scissors keep - finished (May 3, 2011)

 

HCB - Mud turtle cupcakes

This week the Heavenly Bakers are making chocolate cupcakes. This was a five stage process: batter, ganache, soft sticky caramel, pecan topping and then composition. If you wanted to get through all the steps in one day it would take some thoughtful reading and planning. The ganache and sticky caramel have to heat, cook and cool before step 5 - composition. I needed to make them over a two-day process anyway, given some family commitments, so this didn't pose a challenge for me.

I was nervous about making these little beauties though. Funnily enough, it triggered all these memories from my childhood. When I was growing up, my mother was an excellent cook who always used fresh ingredients and made everything from first principles but she never baked or made sweets. She also was busy working and raising six children so she didn't ever teach us to cook. However, she never stopped us from using the kitchen or trying things out. In fact, I think she rather liked it as we grew older and we occasionally baked or even more rarely, made dinner. But I digress.

The very first thing I tried to make as a young person, many moons ago, was a sweet called chocolate caramel toffee turtles. They were made up of a toffee centre into which you stuck pecans for legs and chocolate for eyes and used chocolate for general decoration. I also remember them to be complete time-consuming failures. The caramel toffee never set hard enough, instead pooling into blobby bits of sticky stuff with pecans and chocolate oozing out everywhere. I'm not even sure anyone tried to eat them - and I probably had an awful lot of cleaning up to do. What I did learn is that some things are hard to make if you've never seen anyone do it, and just reading instructions is not always enough. Furthermore, some things actually take precision - like baking and turning sugar into a caramel or a toffee. Probably not the best project for a child to start cooking.

So fast forward through about 30 years of living out of home, reading lots of cookbooks, watching lots of cooking shows, doing and doing and doing lots of baking (not so much sweet making), then you'll meet the person facing her turtle toffee challenge.

First though, I made the batter, following the instructions I'm coming to love - mix the wet ingredients with the cocoa first (sour cream, eggs, and vanilla added to cocoa) until it makes a slightly lumpy batter.

Then the cocoa mixture it is added to the dry ingredients, which have been mixed in the stand mixer. The butter and cocoa mixture are added alternatively until fully mixed. Then batter progresses into the cupcake wrappers and into the oven.  The batter makes 16 cupcakes.

On the next day I made the "mud" from the title - I thought at first the mud referred to a chocolate mud cake recipe. But no, the chocolate cupcakes are Rose-famous delicate and light as a feather. Nothing stodgy and muddy about the cupcake. The mud actually refers to the ganache - which is just good quality dark chocolate and heavy cream (with a bit of vanilla extract). As the Lindt dark chocolate isn't very sweet, the ganache is quite a strong and not a very child-friendly taste (but I love it).

In the spirit of long, rambly, memory driven posts....when I was 17 and first attending University I met a girl  who became a kind of close acquaintance while we were at Uni and then I lost touch with her. Years later, I went to another University in Sydney to do my Master's degree and met her sister. I knew almost at once that they had to have been related as they shared a very unusual surname. This new friend, who became a close friend, went home and said "I've met so and so and she says she went to Uni with you, do you remember her?" and her sister Katy said "Yes, I remember her. She loves chocolate". I still laugh thinking about that. Down through the years, and across time, it is remembered that I love chocolate.

Back in the present, I then made the soft sticky caramel. And it worked perfectly - at least perfectly to me. Delia Smith taught me how to make caramel years ago through a cooking show and a set of cookbooks. Here's a link to her current media on making caramel. Her videos were better and more fun. She added some fantastic out-takes on the end of the videos showing the caramel going all pear shaped. Which I loved, given the memory of the great turtle toffee disaster. Anyway, no disasters now. The Caramel worked and was a good taste, a good consistency and I followed Rose's advice and put the caramel and the ganache in disposable piping bags for the composition part of the cupcake cycle.

The pecans are toasted in the oven for about seven minutes and this didn't end up causing much colour change but did give them the nice toasty nut taste.

Composition is: piped ganache across the top of the cupcake, then pecans added into a head and legs shape, then caramel piped into the middle to make the start of the shell, then ganache piped on top of the caramel and then chocolate bits added to give the shell a bit of turtle-shell look. If you are careful and parsimonious with your caramel it doesn't need to ooze on the cupcake, but I rather like the oozing and did about half half.

In conclusion, I survived the revisiting of the Great Turtle Toffee Disaster of the 1970s. I loved these cakes, the combination of tastes in the ganache and caramel and pecans and the lovely light chocolate cupcake. But the downside is no one else in the family loved them. One child hates nuts. The other child didn't like the mud (dark chocolate ganache) and my husband just didn't love the combination, or the ganache.

Samburu blanket thread painting: Giraffes

I have been working on my Samburu blanket from Jenny McWhinney. When last I reported, I had just returned from my workshop with Jenny in Sydney. I had really enjoyed the workshop and was excited about this project. Since then, I've filled in both of the Giraffe's necks and I'm ready to move the Quilting frame so that I can stitch their legs and the grassy, hot savannah that they are standing in. I'm using one strand of Paterna/Paternayan wool and a Chenille needle (size 22). The paterna wool gives the embroidered picture quite a textured feel, a bit like the texture on an animal. I love that tactile effect, which reminds you that you'd like to stroke the neck of a real giraffe (if only it wasn't a huge animal, and either in a zoo - which is sad, or in Africa - which is far away).

The pattern is traced onto a piece of Solvie, which will be cut away and dissolved on completion. And Jenny has drawn some blue lines to indicate the direction the threads take.

If you'd like to see an inspiring photograph of the real thing, check out this 2010 national geographic photo comp.

 

Previous posts

Giraffes, Africa, Blankets - embroidery - thread painting (March 23, 2011)

 

HCB - Banana Refrigerator Cake with Dreamy Creamy White Chocolate Frosting

In my fruit bowl I often have bananas that could go into a cake - ie those bananas that have developed brown spots all over their skins,  you know the ones where they are delicious in a cake but not so delicious to just eat fresh. So, I was keen to try out the recipe for Rose's Banana cake during free choice week. I had a lot of choices for free choice week, given I've only made 3 of the potential 90+ cakes, and still I chose banana cake. It was worth it. I loved this cake. It was light and moist, flavoursome but not overwhelmingly sweet and the frosting - the title says it all - dreamy creamy. My tasting panel of husband and children also really loved this cake. Though my husband felt the sides of the cake were overcooked - and I did actually have oven issues again. My new oven is due soon (we're talking weeks not months).

To make this lovely cake, first you process the bananas and sour cream, then add the other liquid ingredients (eggs, vanilla extract, lemon zest) in the food processor. Then you transfer to the mixer, beat in the oil, sift in the dry ingredients and finish the batter. It ends up being quite a fluid batter. Which is very different to my experiences last week with the Swedish Pear batter which was so thick. It was a very moist and soft and light cake. Not oily and heavy, like some fruit/oil cakes can be.

 

For some reason, I didn't photograph the process of making the frosting - not sure why. Distractions anyone?

For the frosting, I used Lindt white chocolate to make sure it had enough cocoa solids in the white chocolate, and then included the cream cheese, unsalted butter, creme fraiche and almond extract. It was creamy, subtle, thick, just tangy sweet with a touch of almond taste. I iced it just like Rose did in her book - that is, just on the top of the cake. I also cut off the dome of my cake to make it flat, like in the book and I really liked the presentation of the cake after I did it.  Everyone agreed this cake was on the "make again" list.

Alice Starmore - Oregon Vest - swatch

As you know, I've been knitting a test run fair isle project to prepare for the main event, which is to be an Alice Starmore Oregon vest. Well, I finished the fair isle cowl, knitted with a cotton/acrylic blend from Lion brands. As it was being knitted, we all felt it was very long, and I did struggle a bit with the tension and the carrying of the wool at the back - sometimes too loose, sometimes too tight - so, I was pleased to finish it and move on. Cotton as a fibre doesn't have much elasticity and while this is cozy soft, I do feel it shows every imperfection in the knitting. But more importantly, I don't know that I particularly like the feeling of having my entire neck swathed in volumes of stuff. I love wearing scarfs but not so sure of this thing. Perhaps I'll wear it to the garden in these freezing mornings.

As a finishing technique, you hem the top and bottom of the cowl.

Perhaps it would help if I wore it with some coordinating effort. I was always impressed with the ladies in Me-Made-March that they went to such effort to coordinate their outfits and accessories. I'm a bit slapdash in that department. Anyway, perhaps a nice coordinating blouse would help with the look of this thing (or not).

Anyway, moving onto the main event. I'm really excited to actually start work on the Oregon vest. Typically, I found it easier to work with the wool instead of the cotton. My tension is quite even, the stranding at the back of the work isn't that difficult because through most of the pattern in the swatch you aren't actually carrying the wool very far - a few stitches at most.

As mentioned previously, I'm a fairly tight knitter so my quick estimation of the stitches in the swatch tell me I'll need to go up a needle size from the 3.25 to probably a 3.5. I didn't like having to cut the wool at the beginning and the end of the swatch because I felt it was so wasteful and being the nervous nelly that I am, I wasn't confident that I'd have enough wool. So I kind of did the bare minimum of a swatch. Usually, it should be a complete square but mine is more of a rectangle.

I love the colours and the constant but subtle changes.

It really doesn't look like much wool when it's sitting here on my sewing table, waiting to form up into patterns. Beautiful though.

Previous posts

Fair Isle cowl progress

My next project - Alice Starmore

HCB - Swedish Pear and Almond Cream Cake

This week's cake is a Pear and Almond Cream Cake that has connections to Sweden.

I love the combination of fruit and almonds and before I started on this journey to cake baking along with the Heavenly Cake Bakers, I often made upside-down cakes. Plum upside-down cake, Pear and chocolate upside-down cake, pineapple upside-down cake - all delicious. The usual technique is to put the fruit is a syrup of some sort, often brown sugar syrup, and place it in the bottom of the pan, then the batter goes on top and after baking, you turn the cake upside-down to serve. But in this case, we are doing something quite different.

Before I describe the cake construction, I'll tell you a bit about the almond cream. This is made with an almond paste, which is processed with caster sugar, to which butter, eggs and vanilla are added. It made quite a creamy consistency and tasted beautiful. In preparation for making the cake there was a bit of discussion around whether to make or purchase almond paste. I read that some of the original bakers had used marzipan and so when I couldn't find anything called almond paste in the local delicatessens I purchased the marzipan. I see though why some bakers suggested making it. It's quite expensive and you only need a small amount and I did sort of stress maybe I wouldn't use it again and it would dry out and be a bit fat waste....but..the cake was so outstandingly delicious, I'll be surprised if my family doesn't tie me to the kitchen and make me produce it again.

Again, though, with the new techniques. Rose has you mixing the flour and butter together, not the butter and sugar - very interesting. My butter, eggs, and sour cream were all at room temperature but the butter was still fairly stiff. My room temperature, as mentioned last week, is about 19.5C, so a bit colder than Rose recommends. I'm not sure what I could do to compensate for this?? I ended up with quite a stiff batter. Perhaps I should have mixed it for longer? Perhaps I should have pre-mixed the butter before adding it to the flour? Things to think about for next time.

 

After you place the batter in the bundt tin (newly purchased and squeeky shiny) you make a little channel in the top of the batter where the almond cream is placed. The idea is that you don't want the almond cream touching the sides of the cake tin. Then on top of that you place the sliced pears. The pears and almond cream are then to sink down through the batter and end up at the top of the cake. Nifty, huh?

At the 50 minute mark, I pulled the cake out because it was passing all the cooked tests - looked cooked, bounced back, toothpick came out clean. In fact, it looked a bit too brown for my liking. My oven cooks very unevenly and I had rotated the pan during cooking but still one side looked a bit browner than the other. We'll be replacing the oven in the next month or so, and I'm really looking forward to that event!! Unfortunately though, it looks like not all the pears have made the journey from the top to the bottom (which is really the top - what a paradoxical cake).

Then to make matters worst, despite cooling for 10 mins and jiggling as described in the instructions, clearly I'd missed some other vital step and low and behold I left large chunks of the cake in the tin. Sigh. You can see that while lots of pears have made their way, not all have completed the journey. The cake smelled so fantastically appealing though and my attentive family were circling around the kitchen. We each had a piece and they raved about this cake. Then I wandered off to upload photos and begin the blog post. When I returned, 3/4 of the cake was eaten. I guess they'd be happy if I made this cake again. And, I kind of think I need to, given it didn't work perfectly and yet it has for others in the group, and it so clearly a cake that you'd like to make over and over.

Santas - embroidery update

So, ten hours of Santa sewing and I have hats and heads and beads and little green felt leaves. Just the boots to go to finish off the front of the little red Santas. But, in the spirit of being respectful of my new rotation system, despite having a head of steam up here on these little fat Santas, I am putting them away and moving on to the next project.

There's lots of fiddly bits in this type of embroidery. When I bought the kit, I was pretty inexperienced and didn't know what to expect. I just liked the idea of working with felt. It seemed kind of homey and gentle and soft. First the yellow dots on his coat, and now the little green leaves. I embroidered the leaves while they were in one big piece of felt, stopping and starting the thread at the beginning and end of each leaf! Then they are cut out, one by one, and sewn on, only at the bottom half of the leaf, so they kind of sit up a bit on Santa's hat. Before I put his beard on, my daughter said he looked a bit girly with his beads and leaves on his hat. Haha. I think his boots will help define him.

Just so you know where we are going with all of this, here's the cover of the kit.

Finally, boots embroidered and waiting for next session. I have to make some red and white cord, and I didn't enjoy that last time but maybe this time, I'll just jump right in, having done it before.

 Previous posts

Felt ornaments - Christmas santas April 2011