Left Over but not Left Behind

 In these Austere and Dire financial times, there has been the swing back to the good ol’ days of making like the Oldies did. From knitting circles to slow cookers (for those cheaper cuts of meat), everyone seems to be following the ol’ Waste No Want Not mantra.

 
I have always been a fan of this way of thinking. Whether it was being brought up in the We Are The World era (“eat your dinner – there are children starving in Africa!”), or grandparents who lived through the Depression (and would still buy the largest size of everything “because it’s better value” even when there was only the two of them that would take 5 years to get through a catering sized tin of coffee), I’ve always been one to look at the weekly supermarket specials before deciding what we’re going to eat that week. The Buy in Bulk and Save option also appeals, but I haven’t succumbed to the allure of Costco yet (not enough storage room for 50 rolls of toilet paper). But this Popping it Aside for Later can backfire a little; especially when you do a freezer clean out and find 8 chicken fillets and not the mince you were relying on for dinner.  Also, being a family with 2 grown-ups and two kiddies (of intermittent fickle eating habits), I rarely cook a full recipe’s worth as most feed 6-8. So I find my freezer accumulates things like half a can of chopped tomatoes, or 250g pkts of mince and 350mls stock. So I do try to periodically Cook From the Freezer; get rid of all these odds and ends before I buy another  “oooh, but that’s good value for ……”.

 One other frugal way of cooking I have embraced in the last few weeks is the area of Left Overs. By this I don’t mean using roast veges for Bubble and Squeak (whatever that is exactly – seems like such an old English dish. And then I saw that you could buy it from the freezer section of the supermarket, which (from what I understand) is the exact opposite of what it should be), or Christmas ham in a thousand different ways over the summer holidays; but the little bits and pieces that you buy specifically for a recipe but don’t always use it all. It can lead you in all sorts of weird and wonderful directions, and becomes almost like a family tree (Abraham begat Isaac. Isaac begat Jacob. Jacob begat Judah etc).

 Let me use last weeks’ menu to demonstrate.

 At the weekend we had a dozen eggs (the wonderful side benefit from having lovely chickens) so I made a Frittata (Vineyard Cookbook – Josef Chromy Vineyard inTas), which gave me left over….

• Zucchini, which combined with some leftover mince from the freezer made Porcupine Meatballs (PMWU Cookbook, which I’m sure would have a Bubble and Squeak recipe)
 
• Cream and mushrooms, which led to an amped up Chicken and Porcini papardelle (Donna Hay “Simple Dinners” – and I actually used penne as I had an open half packet in the pantry – score!)

•   Pesto, which I will use at the weekend for Chicken and Pesto Risotto (called “Hulk-sotto” in our house because it’s all green)

• Red capsicum, who joined the green capsicum already in the fridge to make Quesadillas (“Jamies Dinner” Jamie Oliver) – which gave me left over roast chicken for some delicious sandwiches, as well as spring onions (I always have left over spring onions – why can’t you buy them individually?? I even looked at planting some in my garden. Though I did read somewhere that you can plant store-bought ones in the garden and that keeps them fresh for longer. Thankfully my Tupperware keeps them slime-free for a good few weeks)

 I then cooked (from scratch, no leftovers were involed in the cooking of this dish) Beef in Guinness with Dumplings (Vineyard Cookbook, Skillogalee Winery in SA)) on Saturday night for some friends who came over for dinner.  The recipe made a mountain of savoury dumplings (which was my first use of Suet!), meaning I was on the lookout for a beef dish with gravy/sauce to make use of the 40 odd I had left over. I settled on Southern Sausage Stew (“Jamie’s America” Jamie Oliver) and used the dumplings instead of the boiled rice that the dish called for. Which went brilliantly well, but (you guessed it) gave me left over green, red, yellow capsicum and celery; which I am happily going to use to make Gumbo (again “Jamie’s America) this weekend, as it will also use chorizo and bacon and clear up more freezer space!

 Now the jury is probably out on whether all of this Using Left Overs is really saving money as I usually need to pick up and ingredient or two, which, like yesterday at the Farmer’s Market can lead to it being three or four or nine (The Smoked Bacon man was there- I had to pick some up!!). But is certainly gets your brain thinking in different ways and cooking meals you may not have. Which, is never a bad thing.

  And as I am not one of those cooks who can stand at the fridge/pantry and conjure up a meal from random bits and pieces, I must say how much I love the trend in cook books to list recipes by ingredients (thankyou Delicious, Donna Hay and Jamie Oliver). In fact I have taken this even further and have created my own “What to Do With Extra….” Notebook (nerd alert!), where I list ingredients and recipes that can use them. So I know that when I have left-over roast chicken from a lunch date, that I can look forward to Mulligatawny Soup, or an Asian Omelette.

 Or perhaps just pop it in the freezer for Next Time.

PS – made another “Street Food” recipe at the weekend: Zapiekanka, which is a Polish open baguette sandwich with sautéed mushrooms, ham and cheese which is then grilled. Needless to say, it was awesome, even before slathering on ketchup and mayonnaise.

 Na zdrowie!! (or not – if you ate them every day J)

Fat is Phat!

 Another cooking “first” at the weekend, and this time it wasn’t an exotic Asian ingredient or a weird spice, but cooking with lard.

 Which brought up a few issues.

 Firstly – what exactly is it? I knew it belonged to the Olden Days Cooking Ingredients group, with things like dripping and suet. So I called my grandmother who, apart from being a fantastic cook in the CWA vein (she taught me how to make a fabulous lemon meringue pie, and her Yo Yo’s and apple slice are family get-together staples), always regaled me with stories of Sunday night supper of “bread and dripping”; very weird and exotic sounding to a 6 year old, and I could never shake off the image that they were eating candle wax drippings….

 However she was unsure, as she hadn’t cooked with it either. She knew that Dripping was animal fat but didn’t know what made it different from lard. So off to the other receptacle of culinary wisdom – Wikipedia. Apparently, dripping is traditionally beef fat, while lard is pork fat.

 Good to know.

 The second issue was getting my head around cooking with Lard. Brought up as I have been in a health and diet conscious time, the idea of using LARD!! did worry me a little. Wasn’t there a low-fat –low-cholesterol-healthier-alternative available? Was I going to end up looking like the Stay Pufft Marshmallow Man from Ghostbusters? Was I condemning us to early-age bypass surgery?

 However as I had cooked gnocchi carbonara the week before, with fried pancetta, a cup of cream and gnocchi fried in butter, I put it in the same “it’s not an everyday meal” category.

 Third was where to source it. I knew from the yearly articles on How to Make the Best Plum Pudding, that suet was the way to go and it usually had to be ordered specially from a butcher. Luckily for me, Lard can be found at your local Coles fridge section, right next to dripping and duck fat.

 Which did get me thinking about all of the different fats and oils that are around I n these health conscious times. Growing up, there was always a large bottle of Crisco vegetable oil in the cupboard which was used for everything (except roast potatoes, for which mum used a lard/dripping/meat fat combo that had been poured off from previous roast dinners and left t o solidify in a special crockery pot in the fridge). However as I went to put my packet of lard in the butter conditioner of the fridge, I had to move aside the copha (for chocolate crackles), the butter (for one of life’s simple pleasures;  fresh white bread sandwiches ) and put it in top of the ghee (for certain Asian dishes). Thankfully the duck fat sits on the top shelf or we would have been in real trouble.  And that’s without even looking at my Oils and Sauces shelf, which is comparatively simple at the moment with just olive oil (lite and spray versions), sesame oil (again with the asian cooking) and chilli oil (for dumplings). But it has been host in the recent past to macadamia and grapeseed oil (great for salad dressings) as well as peanut and sunflower oil (for frying). All this from a group that is technically not considered a Food. They sit up there at the top of the food pyramid thinking they’re important when actually its just because they don’t fit in anywhere else. They must have a great time in their therapy group.

 And speaking of therapy – what is with “Extra Virgin” olive oil, or EVOO as some (annoying) foodies call it. Isn’t being extra virgin like being extra pregnant – you either are or you aren’t? Sol was right – oils ain’t oils.

 But back to Lard. Why was I starting down this shadowy path which could end in deep fried Mars bars and Elvis style cooking?  Because of a new cookbook (why else?!?).

 Lonely Planet’s “The Best Street Food – where to find it and how to make it” had arrived in Husband’s store and make a very quick trip to my kitchen. It’s  great fun read with entries from all around the world: churros from Spain, Brik from Tunsia and breakfast burritos from USA (Australia’s contribution was  meat pie) as well as more exotic entries such as ‘walkie talkies” from Africa – which are boiled chicken heads and feet (geddit?)

 My first recipe tried was for choripans from Argentina, which were a chorizo sausage hot dog with a tabouleh-like topping. Delicious! But I had my eye on the Baozi from China, which are the steamed pork buns that were always my favourite at yum cha. So I took out my lard (“for perfect pastry and baking”) and set to it.

 It’s a weird substance; almost pure white, very soft and almost fluffy like. Not surprisingly, it reminded me of an episode of The Goodies where Tim ate scoops of this weird looking white stuff and subsequently got very fat. It had to be melted before mixing with the flour and yeast, and did take a bit of heating to melt. It didn’t seem to have any distinct flavour either way, and although my pastry wasn’t the “ fluffy white cumulus” that the book described, I think that was more due to there not being a step to activate the yeast (which I will try the next time I make them). However they still were delicious – the pork filling was sweet and savoury at the same time. Not exactly as I remember from the Tai Pan in Doncaster, but I think it is one of those recipes that the filling ingredients will vary from place to place and are passed on only to a Sacred Few. But I can add baozi to my praw and shitake dumplings and fresh spring rolls for the makings of a delightful asian banquet.

Pastry "circles" ready for their filling

Filled...

Crimped and ready for rising

Steaming...

Baozi!

 And as I had the book out (and a public holiday with not much else to do), I thoughts I’d give pretzels a go!

 Growing up, pretzels were the small chip-style things that were always “making me thirsty!” A few years ago the large baked pretzel stands started popping up, giving us a whole new take on The Pretzel. These were what I was hoping to make with the entry from USA. Their fat of choice was Butter, which was rubbed into the flour to make the dough, and then followed the usual rise, shape, rise, cook process of many baked goods; so deceptively easy to perform but very difficult to master! Being my first time I experimented a bit with the thickness of the dough rolls to work out what would hold their shape the best through the double rise-boil-bake process. They didn’t seem to be as elastic as I liked (but then I probably didn’t knead them for long enough) and I tried a few ways to flip the risen bagels over in the pot of boiling water with limited success. I remember visiting a 24hr bagel baker y in London many years ago and I recalled massive vats of simmering liquid with long wooden staff like utensils; much like the wash women of old used. But I could be remembering something completely different….

 However I did manage to get a few out of the pot and onto the cooking tray all in one piece; the thicker pretzels seemed to fare better but they all were a bit weak at the ‘twist points’.  A smattering of parmesan or Murray River salt for variety, and then baked in a super-hot oven. As you can see, mine didn’t have the smooth sheen of the ones in the shops, but they still managed to have the “crunchy on the outside, chewy on the inside “ quality that the book extolled. Taking their advice, I ate mine with mustard on the side for dipping, as well as aioli, which I’m discovering goes pretty well with everything savoury!

Thick versus thin

boiling ... and falling apart

Pretzel flipping utensils - none passed the test

Post-boil prezel pieces, glazed and ready to bake

Out of the oven, looking vaguely pretzel-ish

Yum!

 So now I’m off to decide where in the world I will send my tastebuds travelling next…..

The End is Just the Beginning

I emptied a jar last week.

It was while cooking my second massaman curry in about 6 weeks (as the first one was a bit too spicy, so the Search for a home-made equivalent to our awesome local Thai take-away continued)

And it wasn’t just any run of the mill jar of pasta sauce or jam; it was a jar of kaffir lime leaves.

And this gave me a happy sense of pride.

 For this meant that I had been cooking enough different (and Asian leaning) recipes over the last year or so, to use a WHOLE JAR  of such an exotic ingredient that I didn’t even know it existed before I saw it in a recipe (and had to go to a new Asian grocery store to find).

  I guess that the Empty Jar validates that weird ingredients can and do get used in a myriad of receipes; as long as you are adventurous enough to Keep Trying New Things.  And Empty Jar has also quietened that little voice in my head that whispers as I by yet another jar of curry paste (at last count I had 4 different types in my fridge), “You know you’ll only use it once and then it will sit at the back of the fridge and grow mould”; the culinary equivalent of seeing a cute top on sale and never having the right occasion to be worn. Which did make me feel better as I sourced tamarind puree and black vinegar for yet another New Recipe to try (seriously – how many types of vinegar are out there?? There’s balsamic, white, apple cider, red wine AND white wine… it goes on and on).

 But Empty Jar also signifies a shift that has occured in the Basics that one has in ones fridge/pantry. Persian fetta has its own space on my fridge shelf (for spreading over wraps or adding to scrambled eggs),   I have added Palm sugar to the caster/brown/white section;  rice wine and fish sauce sit happily next to tomato and barbeque sauce; and if I want oil, I can choose from sesame, sunflower, peanut and good ol’ EVOO. Some might call this plethora of ingredients a bit excessive and indulgent, but I like to look at it as Expanding My (culinary) Horizons and Doing the Job Properly.  Its like the thrill I had when I saw Szechuan pepper corns listed in a recipe and knew that I already had them in my cupboard; slightly different from the “oooh I’ve never cooked with THAT before” thrill, as it seems to stamp you as a Serious Foodie, rather than one who dabbles.

 So to you, Empty Jar I say Thank You. I have had a lovely time experimenting with you through marinades, curries and laksas and look forward to many more delicious collaborations

August and everything after

It’s always reassuring when you use a gadget more than once; it does feel like its purchase has been justified!

 The pasta maker has (reassuringly) been getting a bit of a workout over the last month.

 First up was the aforementioned Prawn Ravioli, which was quite decadent and yummy (if a bit fiddly to make). It was also a great pasta-making-learning-experience for me, mainly that pasta expands when it is cooked! So even if the size looks OK and that sheets are not too thick when you are assembling said Ravioli, it will get bigger and thicker after cooking! Oh well, not a grand drama; it mean they were more mega-entrée sized rather than classy dinner party main meal size pasta parcels!

 But taking that all on board, I next made some fresh tagliatelle again to go with a Tobie Puttock Leek and Prosciutto pasta recipe.

 And it worked a treat.

I can now recognise when the pasta has been compressed enough for the machine to go the next thickness (or thinness, as the case may be) level, and have settled on ‘2’ as the proper size for my pasta (might use ‘1’ but only for angel hair spaghetti). I was also very liberal with The Dusting of Flour.

 And I have found making pasta to be very calming and therapeutic.

 Something about turning eggs and flour into gorgeous strands of pasta coupled with the rhythmic turning of the handle… . I wonder if there is there is room in the New Age World for foodie meditation??

Another Pasta Making First was hand-made gnocchi. I didn’t have the specified potatoes (recipe asked for Sebago) so was a bit worried they would be a bit heavy and gluggy (as some gnocchi can be). I also didn’t have a ‘potato ricer’ and even had to jump on Google to find out what one was.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potato_ricer

 Basically it’s a glorified big garlic press, that a foodie friend assured me “it gives you the perfect texture for much less work”. I used my trusty old masher and some elbow grease and it seemed to turn out fine. I can see the advantage of one though – especially as there are ones that peel and mash all in one (!!!) but I think I’ll survive without that gadget for a bit longer.

 But my gnocchi was light and fluffy, and even tastier as the recipe called for it to be pan-fried before adding the pancetta-based carbonara sauce (so definitely not a Heart Tick recipe). Pity Son 1 and 2 weren’t enthused … or maybe it’s not (more for us!!)

 Next up? Lasagne with fresh lasagne sheets (the last one I made was still using up the dried (Shudder!!) sheets in the cupboard)

 In other cooking adventures, I made Gumbo at the weekend.

 Hubby has been watching the TV series Treme, which is set in post-Katrina New Orleans and has a big focus on the culture of the region; food, music etc. Which naturally led me to flick through the ‘Louisiana’ section of my Jamie’s America cookbook.

 He describes Gumbo as a stew-cum-soup (or a stoup!). There is no set recipe for traditional gumbo, as the idea is to thrown in whatever you have around (meat and veges). The most important thing is that it has a roux made with fat (usually from the meat) and flour,  and the ‘holy trinity” of onion, celery and peppers. He lists a Surf & Turf gumbo (with prawns, crabmeat and sausage), but I lent towards the Spicy Meat Gumbo. The first step was to cook the meat and I knew that we were onto something good then.

Have you ever smelt chicken frying with bacon and chorizo?? Mouth-wateringly enticing.

And really with that combo, whatever else you add will be icing on the cake.
I probably didn’t cook the roux for long enough (some people cook it for up to an hour to get the colour dark enough, but who has time to do that?) and it would probably have thickened up if I had’ve let it cook longer, but there was a hungry crew to feed. And surprisingly, Son 2 loved it! As did we - a mixture of yum made it much more interesting than any of the stews I had as a child (sorry Mum!)
So with that success, I may give the Surf n’ Turf one a Go (if I can find some okra and crab claws), but the next Cajun delight I’m planning on tackling is Jumbalaya (they have such cool names of things!! 'Jambalaya' is French for 'jumbled' or mixed up' - it's a rice and meat and veges dished based on the whatever-you-have-around philosophy).

 Other new and successful Recent Recipes of Note – Hot and Sour soup (thai style noodle soup with prams and chicken), Conchiglioni - which are giant pasta shells filled with a meat sauce (Hubby called them Pasta Pirate Ships to get Sons 1&2 to eat them... successfully!)  and a massaman curry, which seemed to get milder after sitting it the fridge for a few days! Go figure!

And as a variation on a popular theme, I will say Keep Calm and Keep Cooking

Fresh is best

I do love my cooking gadgets.

One of my newest favorite stores in The General Trader, which has the most amazing array of bits and pieces and Cool Things to Cook and Make Things With; things you never even realised that you needed! Like four different grades of microplane zesters, or cool shaped cookie cutters, or a flavour injector! Or things you may have done without in the past, but now that you've bought them you realise how awesome they are and Gosh Darn It! Why didn't you buy them before?!?!? (my ceramic pie weight are the most recent addition to this category)
 So when I received a General Trader voucher recently, my Gadget Fairy did a very strange and eclectic Excited Dance in my head.

 I have resisted the temptation in the past to get a bread maker (more due to space restrictions than anything, but also 'cause yeast products and I have developed An Understanding), but I will admit to a popcorn maker and a milkshake maker sitting in my cupboard and getting an occasional spin.
 However, I have been eying off a pasta maker, ever since I had fresh pasta at a friend's house for dinner. She assured me that it was "So Easy!!" to make, and as I had previous pasta making experience (albeit with an industrial strength machine), I went and purchased (in the words of one of my favorite poems), "a shiny new machine".

 I decided to make fettuccine first, as that would let me try out both attachments (and I I had a spare packet of dried in the cupboard in case it was a disaster). I set aside an afternoon to play and fiddle and Perfect My Technique, but I was pretty confident. After all (in the words of Jeremy Clarkson- how hard could it be???
 (For those who don't watch Top Gear, this phrase is usually followed by vision of some monumental cock-up with cars in various pieces or on fire)
 But I am pleased to report that it was "so easy", in fact - almost Child's Play. A pretty simple reciepe of 1 egg and 100g flour for each person chucked in a food processor, kneaded together  and rolled out, then fed through the pasta machine a few times and voila! I got Son 2 in on the act and he did a great job of Turn Turn Turn! with the handle (except when he wanted to see what happened when he turned it the other way. Answer - backwards pasta and a cranky mum). In fact the only misstep was not putting enough flour on the pasta sheets before putting them through the cutter. 

 They did end up sticking together a bit (as you can see in the photo), but I was able to resurrect it with the annoyinging slow technique of separating each piece and dusting with flour (which I wont be doing again!).

Resurrected Pasta

 I cooked Jamie Oliver's "Fresh Tagliatelle with sprouting broccoli and oozy cheese sauce" (from "Jamie at Home"), which is a wickedly delicious sauce made out of melted gruyere and creme fraiche (and not much else).

Boiling pasta and melted oozy cheese sauce

  And it was a super delicious dish - I threw in fried bacon and some pine nuts as well for good measure. So not a very Points Friendly recipe but it was sooooooo yum!

  
So a successful and encouraging first Go. Next up, I'm looking to make lasagne with fresh pasta sheets, as well as home-made ravioli; The Vineyard Cookbook has some rather exciting ones, likeTim's Ravioli (from DeBortoli Vineyard) with fetta and potato, and a prawn ravioli. Mmmmmm....

 And my Gadget Fairy now has her sights on a proper tagine so I can churn out some "authentic" Moroccan cooking. Now where did I put my fez....?

Random Receipes

I couldn't really think of a theme or overarching idea or thing-to-link-these-together for this posting. So let's just call it "Cool Receipes I've Tried and Why They Were". (sounds like a topic for Son 1's Show and tell!). There seem to be quite a lot of curries and spicy foods; coincidence or me rebelling aganst my meat-and-three-veg upbringing??

• Chicken Laksa: this one I tried as part of my quest  to have our regular Thai-and-movie night home made. It was great fun as I had an excuse to go and explore my freindly neighborhood asian grocery store and find things like fried Asian shallots (which made it look very authentic), kaffir lime leaves (in a jar not fresh, but better than nothing) and Thai basil. Very easy but very delcious.

• Lamb Red Duck Curry: which taught me that curry is kind-of color coded, with green not so hot but red quite hot! But it did let me use plam sugar again (which I love using as it makes me feel very chef-like grating it up), and my mortar and pestle to pound peanuts, which makes me feel very apothecarian (if that's even a word???)

• Sri Lankan Chicken Curry: (from 'Amanda's on the Edge' at Windsor Edge winery): this was exciting as I got to make a curry past from scratch! It's funny, as a few years ago, I had dismissed this act as crazy when a foodie mate said that he had done it himself; surely just buy it in a jar?!?!?But it was lots of fun mixing it all together, even if the end result didn't look restaurant quality (still tasted delicious!)

• Risotto with Red Wine (from Jamie Oliver): I have always been a fan of risotto, ever since I was shown how to make it properyl (thanks Sheree!), but I always used white wine, and most memorably with chicken and pesto (mmmmm). Now I love red wine as much as the next person (especially on a Friday night on the couch with chocolate) but I was a bit wary about how it would go in a risotto. But my fears were unfounded as it was awesome; a lovely winter take on an already wintery dish. I also got to use dried porcini mushrooms for the first time, which was made even cooler by the fact that I had bought them at Salamanca market in Tasmania! Delicious!

 Other recent cooking adventures included a Yule dinner with roast turkey and a encore of the triple-cooked roast potatoes, with sticky date pudding and maple walnut ice cream for dessert (which survived an only partially frozen ice-cream maker bowl), and a tomato soup with molten bocconcini (you cooke dit int he over for a few minutes) served with garlic and parmesan bread (the garlic was roasted first so not as strong a flovour, which is great for hte kids - very yum).

And on that note, I think I will have to go and trawl my thesaurus for new words apart from Yum and Delicious. Either that or stop cooking such yummy food .....

Baked Goods....

 One of the things I love about a new recipe book or foodie magazine is creating the List of New Things To Cook; so much potential!! So much yumminess awaiting! But it is a bit tricky when the recipe are variations on ones I already have in my files. What to do??? Do you stay loyal and not even try the new version? Or give it a try, realising that you may have to part ways with a recipe that has served you faithfully for many years for the younger cooler version?? What a delicious conundrum!

 This happened to me recently after Delicious magazine ran an article about the lady behind The Maven Bakery (which is apparently a very famous in Sydney institution). There was a great selection if yummy things to bake, but there were a few "double ups".

  The first was The Maven Fudge Brownies. I have a fabulous brownie recipe that was sent in to Epicure by a reader and it has seen me through many compliment laden lunches, dinner party desserts, baby showers and "Because It's Friday!"s at work. But they were more at the 'cake' end than the "fudge' end of the brownie scale so I thought it was worth a shot. Similar ingredients and method with melting chocolate and adding ingredients to it; the new one asked that the eggs be beaten for 10 minutes, which with a hand held electric mixer was a bit of a pain (my fairy godmother hasn't procured a KitchenAid yet!). Also walnuts were the added nut whereas my favorite is macadamia. They also did the favoured step of adding coffee to a chocolate dish, which, as a coffee non-fan I am always wary of.

 However.

 They were kind of awesome.

 Very fudgy, but still cakey; dense, but not in the make-you-sick way. They received rave reviews up and down my work department (AKA The Guinea Pigs).
But where does that leave my first love? I sense a Brownie-Off in the future where we can compare them side-by-side.

  The next try-out was Double Chocolate Cookies, which wasn't strictly a double up. My first cookies recipe was for Tollhouse cookies and was from the side of the choc-bits packet. Your basic cookie recipe and quite delicious for such an inauspicious beginning. The next version was for Neiman Marcus cookies (from the famous? American chain store). A bit more fiddly, with the addition of oatmeal and grated chocolate, they were crispy on the outside and chewy on the inside; the closest home made to a Mrs Fields cookie I had tasted.
So this was a chocolate dough (cocoa was added in with the flour) and white chocolate chunks through. A different technique in that you rolled up the dough into a log, chilled it and then sliced it up (rather than just spooning them onto a tray) to make very profesh looking cookies

 And they were yummy!

 So I think these two can sit side by side and co-exist quite nicely in my repertoire. I can have an Ebony and Ivory (living in perfect harmony), or a piano keys cookie combination!

  The final of the trio was Mandy's Chocolate Cake (Mandy being the Maven Bakery lady). It came with the endorsement of "This is my bulletproof cake. It's easy to make, dense and not too sweet!""

 High praise indeed.

 So my expectations were raised, especially as my Mississippi Mud Cake, is MY "bulletproof cake". So yummy and easy that is had become my standards kids birthday-cake cake, as it will stand up to a tonne of colored frosting quite well.

 Firstly, Mandy's cake was in 2 cake tins, so automatically more washing up. The two cakes didn't rise that much, so I was unable to cut them in half as requested (to make a triple layer cake) which wasn't a big drama, but a deviation none-the-less.

 Then I made the 'filling' - melt chocolate, mix in cream cheese etc etc etc

 THEN I had to make the glaze, which had an egg in it, meaning it was supposed to thicken.

 But it didn't.

 So it was very runny all over the cake and plate and bench and such. Hmmm ....

 So for me the cake itself was easy, but then you still had to make the filling. And the Glaze. And then put it all together. So that part - not so easy (well, doing nothing except putting it on a serving platter is easier!)

 It was dense - quite nice
 
And it was 'not too sweet', but that may have been the over 1 TABLEspoon of coffee essence! Quite coffee flavoured for a chocolate cake (not not really my thing). So although it was quite nice - the ol' faithful wins out (hooray!)

But stay tuned for the results of the "Brownie Off" ...