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Not to be confused with the previous catch-up post, where I went to Sydney in July to see Mary Poppins, I am just back from an embroidery weekend in Sydney and my handiwork (plus a little bit of shopping)
is here ....dumped on the sofa on Sunday night.
Spring is coming and so I'm off to the garden but I'll fill in the details of the trip and the blanket later on...
Over the next couple of weeks, I hope to catch up with posting some crafty stories that have been going on in my home. I have been somewhat distracted by our extensions. We renovated our house by increasing the size of our kitchen and making a rather small study nook for the children. We started in earnest with builders and diggers and all that in February and then by mid-July the worst of it was over. We are now in a process of finishing off bits and pieces and re-establishing other parts of our life. For months, it seemed like all we did was manage the renovation but actually we did some other fun things as well - like our visit to Sydney to see Mary Poppins. And after I catch up with the backlog of paperwork created by the renovation, I have knitting, tapestry, and embroidery projects that all need some internet viewing time - demanding things that they are.
Mary Poppins, the musical, was in Melbourne last year and some of Tess's friends from school went down to see the show. Let's just say there was a LOT of talk about Mary Poppins at school last year. The girls even started writing and practicing their own stage version at lunch times. We borrowed the DVD from the library so that Tess could participate in these playwriting and schoolyard acting sessions. We didn't hear about the Melbourne show until quite late in its run, so there were no tickets available during the time that the children were down visiting grandparents. In about May 2011, it moved to Sydney and I promised Tess we'd go and see it there.
She let me have quite a bit of fluff time, you know that time where you look at it online and tickets seem expensive and no particular time seems to make sense to take off from home, and you aren't quite sure what level of ticketing you need, and where to stay in Sydney and blah blah. Eventually, she decided I wasn't being decisive enough and so I was prompted regularly to get on with it. And I am so glad she did, I did, we did. She prompted, I got on with it, and we went. It was fantastic. The whole weekend was step-in-time, skip skipity fun.
I enjoyed getting away from home, hanging out with Tess, the production and exicitement of the stage show, the day off school, exploring Sydney. We had wonderful weather, good meals, exciting shopping trips. It was wonderful. We had so much fun at the show we both wanted to go back and see it again. Since returning home, the CD has had a lot of rotations and Tess can now sing most of the songs. She laughs at me when I muddle up all the 'lets go fly a kite' lyrics. She has a fantastic memory for the lyrics, I'm better with a tune and just make up the lyrics as I go along - there are a lot of things that rhyme with kite! And see that parrot umbrella....well we needed one of those...
I decided that what seemed easiest was to go to a Sunday evening performance and have Tess miss one day of school. Lots of the child-friendly performance times were all booked up and so it was going to either be a mid-week performance or a Sunday night. We decided to stay in a hotel right next door to the Capitol Theatre. It was very convenient and took lots of pressure off us. I grew up in Sydney but after years and years in Canberra, I do find the big city takes a bit of getting used to regarding traffic, parking, buses, people, all that.
In early August, the show won a whole lot of Helpmann awards just after we saw it. There have been plenty of reviews and, like many of the professional reviewers, we loved it as well. The set was most inventive with the house opening and closing and changing shape. The music was the lyrical, toe tapping, sing-a-long type stuff. There were spectacular bits where Mary flew through the air, where Bert tap danced upside down on the ceiling, where kites flew up in the atmosphere. It was all stylistically choreographed. The costumes were loads of fun and I'm certain that the ladies sitting in the seat next to me were actually dancing along. The wooden sprung floor of the old theatre seemed to be bobbing up and down in the audience.
In the end, I did decide to splurge and buy really good seats. I suspected that it would be a good show from everything I'd heard. I also remember from my own childhood the excitement of going to a live show and I wanted Tess to have those memories as well. Afterwards, when I was chatting with my Tapestry ladies at our monthly class, I found out a few of them regularly go up to Sydney to see live shows and one, who has a teenage daughter, goes up once a year with her daughter for the latest show. I think maybe that would be a nice life.
The day after our Mary Poppins was a Monday and we both felt deliciously naughty as we got the school text message saying Tess was absent from school. Sydney was turning on the most beautifully warm mid-winter day. It was sunny and blue sky bright. We had a list of places we had to visit - Haigh's Strand arcade shop, the Nut shop, then buying bathing suits in Myer, and onto Morris & Sons. After which we took a bus to Circular Quay for lunch, before a final fabric stop on the way home.
Tess chose the lunch spot at Circular Quay. She had been up to Sydney during the July school holidays with her grandparents and they had lunch here on the Concorse near the Opera House. It was all surprisingly easy - skipping out on the boring, dirty, renovations, missing a day of school, sitting in the warm winter sun eating pasta on the promenade of Australia's most beautiful harbour, buying wool for future weaving projects, bathing suits for summer holidays, fabric for more pyjama sewing and generally sharing life. Small moments of escape that soak up joy seem to be the best moments of life.
This final photo is from australiaphotos.co.uk. and shows you where we were sitting > under the white umbrellas to the right.
This was a reasonably labour intensive cake with four components (cake, curd, syrup and frosting), of which a couple involved cooling to room temperature before progressing. It was a cake I was looking forward to making, as it looked and sounded so lovely in the book. While I am more of a chocolate lover than a white chocolate lover, I had really enjoyed the Dreamy Creamy White Chocolate Frosting on the banana cake that I made a couple of months ago and Rose suggested that this frosting was fluffier and more velvety. Furthermore, I do love passionfruit. We've had passionfruit vines in the past. Not at present, because the builders were a bit hard on our garden and managed to store building supplies on top of the vine, thus crushing it to death. Sigh. Anyway, this is a lovely cake. I enjoyed making and eating it.
Last week I adapted the presentation of the cake to suit one of my children's taste. This week I did the same. Thus a quarter of the cake was removed as one child, who had helped me with the baking, didn't like the icing as we made it, so I agreed to give her a separate plate with a quarter of the cake all passionfruited up but no icing.
I also digressed from Rose's instructions when I did not remove the passionfruit seeds from the curd or syrup. We've always just eaten the seeds. We eat a fair bit of passionfruit and just halve them, scoop out the pulp and add it to fruit salads, pavlovas or our mouth - without any further intervention. I rather like the look of the little specks of black seeds and probably could learn to think of them as something requiring removal if it was absolutely required. No one in my family would think twice about seeing passionfruit seeds on a passionfruit cake.
I used all of the passionfruits below in our cake, either as curd or in the syrup.
First, I made the curd. Which I was happy with, then allowed it to cool. Then I made the syrup, which I didn't photograph and which sort of crystalized when cool. When it came time to assemble the cake I reheated it so it would be runny.
Then I made the cake batter. I love the process of making the Genoise batter. You heat the eggs and sugar and then whip them for five minutes in the stand mixer. They fluff up and look lovely and light. Incorporating the flour is a fairly gentle job so that you don't flatten the lightness of the batter. I was mildly concerned about all the cornflour I was adding as I wasn't sure how it would taste in a cake. As Wondra or Cake flour are unavailable in Australia, Rose gives you substitutions to use which basically involve using plain flour and cornflour. To make something resembling Wondra, I used more cornflour than flour. In the end, while the cake was light in texture, I thought the flavour of the cake was bland. I've used the Genoise Rose recipe previously and that calls for Cake flour. I think I preferred that mix better.
Rose also asks that you remove the cake from the pan immediately it comes out of the oven. When I take a cake out of it's pan, I've a habit of just flipping the cake over onto my hand, removing the pan and then flipping it back over to rest on the cooling rack. Hah. This cake was structurally so light, you can see my handprint! Thankfully, it made no difference to my ability to cut it in half for the passionfruit curd, and you couldn't see the little hand once the velvety frosting was spread. Ah, the magic of frosting. The frosting actually tastes a bit like cheesecake, what with all the cream cheese in it. But I kind of have to quibble about the frosting and say that I actually prefer the Dreamy Creamy White Chocolate frosting. My taste memory of that frosting is that it had a more pronounced white chocolate taste. The texture and presentation of this frosting may be slightly better but I think I prefer the taste of the other one. So, lessons learnt? Maybe make the other Genoise cake recipe and maybe make the other frosting but do add the passionfruit curd and syrup but maybe stick with the seeds - cause that's what we always do.
I'm going to have to miss next week's cake as I'll be away in Sydney for the weekend embroidering Elephants and having lots of laughs, and reading novels on the long bus trip and maybe having coffee with my brother (if he's got time). Have fun with the chiffonlets and dulce.
This week's baking adventure is a chocolate cake and to be frank, the photo in the book really didn't appeal to me and it isn't a cake that I'm familiar with, so I probably would have passed over it to, maybe, next week's cake (that one looks nice!). I'm really glad I didn't avoid it though. Not so much because it was a huge hit. The cake itself was popular, which is good, because if you've been following my family's reaction to Rose's chocolate cakes, the last couple have been a bit too strong in flavour. This one was amazing. The chocolate taste was nicely balanced and the cake was light yet moist. It was perfect for my family and I was relieved to find a chocolate cake that everyone liked. The icing, on the other hand, got mixed reviews. My son liked it but the rest of us found it way too sweet. I don't think I'll be revisiting the icing.
The main reason that I'm glad I didn't skip this cake is that I'm learning so much about baking cakes. There seem to be new techniques every week: adding boiling water to cocoa to release the flavour, oil instead of butter, adding unwhipped egg whites to the batter, heating sweetened condensed milk with egg yolks. I seem to never know what's going to be asked of me next.
The baking of the cake is quite interesting. Rose tells you the batter will be thin and only fill a quarter of the pan - true. Then it will rise up and grow to the top of the cake pan - true. Then it will sink slightly in the middle - all true. And then unlike other cakes, once removed from the oven you have to remove it immediately from the cake pans to cool. When you do this, it feels like a sponge and you get a hint of its light texture.
As one of the family doesn't like nuts, I included the pecans on only one side of the cake. They are meant to be mixed into the icing but I didn't think that would give the nut hater a good enough visual message. I know it looks a bit odd to have a half-decorated cake, but aside from that, I also found the yellow, dripy icing a bit creepy. Looking back at the book, it wasn't quite so dripy. Anyway, next week's cake looks nice.
I am heading up to Sydney in a couple of weekends to take Jenny McWhinney's next class in the Samburu blanket, which will be Elephants. I'm really looking forward to it. I enjoyed myself a great deal last time. Jenny is lovely and funny and sweeps you up with her enthusiasm and desire to make embroidery arty and fun. In my mind, I've kind of made the next class a deadline for finishing the giraffes. Not because it's that kind of class but more because having deadlines just helps keep the focus. I make things partly for the process, the peace it brings, but also for the outcome, a thing of beauty (hopefully). So in some slow, methodical way, I am a completer of tasks.
Here is my progress to date. I have moved the large hoop down over the body of the Giraffes and almost finished the spots. One leg, the far right one, awaits spots. Otherwise, I can tick spots off my list. I'm sorry this isn't a better photo. It's so blurry it really just serves the purpose of documenting that "yes" I have been working. I'll try and check my photos before packing away next time. When I noticed the photo wasn't very sharp, the bag of blanket embroidery was already packed neatly in the cupboard and the next project was occupying my attention and sofa.
There are about five colurs used in the spots and some of them are overlaid. If I remember, at the next photo session, I'll try and capture that detail.
I also found that despite my desire to make the deadline, my self-imposed 10 hour rotation sewing pattern was interfering with the 'just press on and get it done' mentality. I managed to put in 2 x 10 hour sessions and then honestly it asked to be packed up and put back in the cupboard so someone else could get some love.
So, sometime soon, I'll need to pull this back out of the cupboard and press on and see what I can do to make the deadline.
Previous posts
Samburu blanket thread painting: Giraffes (June 18, 2011)
Giraffes, Africa, Blankets - embroidery - thread painting (March 23, 2011)
This week with the Heavenly Cake Bakers is a free choice and I've chosen something that I'm pretty sure we'll all like and that my son often orders at cafes: Sticky Date Pudding. I have never made this before so can't really compare baking experiences but it is common in the cafe world in Canberra so I can compare tasting! Rose's take on it is a cake baked to be just like a "pudding". I was running a bit late finishing off last night and so the kids had gone to bed and Tim and I sat up late eating this warm, runny, perfect pudding cake.We loved it.
The cake is perfectly pudding-like. It was almost uncanny. I've made loads of steamed and self-saucing puddings and they have an interesting composition. They have a cakey looking structure to them but when you cut into them they are kind of squishy and spongy and so they seem designed to take up gooey sauces, like chocolate or caramel or lemon. Usually though they are made in pudding basins and cooked slowly in steam baths (sometimes I do them in the oven, sometimes the crockpot). This, however, is baked just like a cake, but arrives cooked just like a pudding. Isn't she amazing, that Rose?
The first step is to steep the dates in warm Guinness. Oh, memories of Ireland. No point drinking Guinness unless it's on tap. You need that slow pour with the rich, creamy, thick head of beer. So, just as well my husband only bought enough for the recipe, cause a girl wouldn't like to drink too much Guinness while baking. Oh no, she wouldn't.
I loved this bit. You warm it on the stove and then add baking soda. Rose warns you it will froth up and fizz and sure enough....
Such fun. Then, the warm Guinness is shared with the dates and left until room temperature. You've really got to read Rose's recipes before starting or the timing can go astray, hence the late, after kid's bedtime finish. After they reach room temp, you puree them in a food processor to make a gooey, date paste, which is added to the cake batter.
While the cake was in the oven, I made the butterscotch sauce. I love that Rose has weights for all her baking. In fact, I kind of suspected I'd love baking along with her when, a few years back, I bought her Christmas Cookies book and she provided a conversion table for measurements-to-weights. I now use that book all the time to convert to a metric weight any baking recipe that says 1 cup of flour, or 1/2 cup of butter. It is so much easier to weigh everything. Having said all that, 30mls of lemon juice was a bit strong on my palate. I kept tasting the lemon through the butterscotch. Strong flavours are perhaps best blended by taste...? Still, how can you not love brown sugar, butter, and cream sauce. And really, I'm picking here because this was a beautiful cake-pudding creation.
And now that the timing is understood, it would be easy to make for guests. We had friends, visiting from China, drop in on Sunday for dinner with about 2 hours notice. Thankfully, I usually have a reasonably decent dinner planned for a Sunday night so we had slow cooked lamb shanks and gingernut pudding on the menu and it was easy to say - why don't all four of you join us for dinner. In the future, I could just as easily have this lovely date pudding on a Sunday night menu.
