Today I Made:

[Moo]

If you like banana bread, you should totally try smitten kitchen's pear bread. Soooo good.

[freezeblade]

Today I'm stress baking:

Italian olive oil/herb sourdough bread (Thyme, Basil, Oregano, Tarragon, Rosemary)
Muffins (Can't decide between strawberry, double chocolate chip, or something else, depends what's in the freezer/pantry)

[Liri]

If you like banana bread, you should totally try smitten kitchen's pear bread. Soooo good.

On it.

[PAstrychef]

Shrimp stir fried with cabbage, broccoli, red pepper and chestnuts, and soba noodles in an orange-sesame dressing. They worked well together.

[DGames | Bard]

Shrimp stir fried with cabbage, broccoli, red pepper and chestnuts, and soba noodles in an orange-sesame dressing. They worked well together.

This sounds pretty good! What oil do you use for the stir fry?

[PAstrychef]

Whatever vegetable oil I have open. I think this week it's canola.

[Zohar]

It was a lovely day and we had a picnic with lots of friends in the park. So yesterday I made lemon bars and today I made a potato salad with asparagus and soft-boiled eggs. Both were big successes!

[Moo]

Mmmm that does sound very good. I love asparagus.

I made a heavenly curry on Friday, but my dirty secret is that it was using a packet of sauce. It had 4 ingredients and took 50 minutes in the pressure cooker (10 of which were trying to reassemble the lid after giving it a thorough cleaning...). I am so glad I found the pressure relulator thingy for my pressure cooker.

Yesterday I made a cheese and herb quickbread and an asian inspired coleslaw* for the bbq (braai) some friends came over for. Also blush sangria to drink and chocolate fondant puddings for dessert but they were a total wash; they were overcooked, "boiled" out over the top of the ramekins, and the chocolate separated a bit so they were sort of egg-coloured at the bottom and overly chocolatey on top. Poop. Still edible but not great and NOT pretty.


*I have no idea what to call it (and don't want to be culturally insensitive). It's shredded cabbage (red and green), chopped spring onion, torn coriander leaves, toasted sesame seeds and toasted almond slivers. The dressing is soy sauce, vinegar, sugar and oil. It's delish though whatever you call it.

[Nath]

Cooked a bunch of Indian food over the weekend. Chickpea curry on Saturday, made with dried chickpeas rather than canned for a change. And last night: temple-style yogurt rice, spicy dry-fried okra, and Chettinadu mutton pepper fry.

[freezeblade]

Over the weekend I made a mulberry coffee cake with the mulberries from the yard. Unfortunately the tree has never been trimmed or shaped as far as I can tell, so the majority of the berries are more than 30' above the ground where I can't get to them

[Quercus]

mulberries from the yard

Sooo jealous!

[Sandry]

This weekend I made hummus because I couldn't actually find any regular flavor to buy in my local grocery store (instead I found edamame hummus and "taco inspired" flavor...wtf?), and also a few flavors of cupcakes for my housemate's birthday (chocolate hazelnut, chocolate orange, chocolate peppermint and just plain chocolate) with chocolate ganache on top, and then lastly I made a normal tofu with veggies curry for food for the week.

I sort of want to just make more cupcakes again, but I have no need for them. It would be bad of me. But delicious.

[Ginger]

Yesterday I made some plain white rice to go with the dinner somebody else had made. It was pretty easy.

[Moo]

Last night I prepped a balsamic beef potroast and a mixed berry and almond crumble for friends coming over for dinner tonight. The roast is in the slow cooker while I'm at work, the crumble will be topped and baked while we eat. When I get home I just need to wrap the camembert in puff pastry and bake as a starter with some baguette slices, bake potatoes for mash, and make green beans with bacon and some steamed pumpkin.

I am not looking forward to the rush of getting everything ready and getting the kiddo to bed at the same time, or the cleaning up afterwards but it feels nice to make an effort for food again. I have been veeeery lazy for a while.



Tomorrow my parents are coming over for a steak braai (bbq) as it's my mom's birthday, I haven't decided what to make for dessert. Suddenly I can't think of a SINGLE thing she loves!

[Zohar]

A pile of sugar!

Sorry, that's unhelpful. Yesterday I made a very sad sandwich at 11PM and kind of hated myself for eating it. It was not fun, or delicious.

[freezeblade]

Today I'm making: mulberry muffins with strudel topping

I need to figure out how to pick more of these things, before they all drop!

[Moo]

Because I hate myself, free time and enough sleep, I volunteered to make 50 cookies for our residents association's AGM tonight.

I suck at icing btw. But they are very yummy. I'm glad I added the mixed spice and cinnamon instead of the almond extract the (otherwise really lovely) recipe calls for.

"BullShit Residents Association"

[Angua]

Beef ravioli from scratch (though did use tomato purée to help thicken the tomato sauce and in the beef).

[Sandry]

I made perhaps overly healthy banana bread this week by accidentally omitting the butter (and making it mostly oats and whole wheat flour with less than a third white flour, but that bit wasn't an accident). But it was still fine. I really have to stop pretending I remember the recipe without looking it up, though!

[Thesh]

But it's such a simple recipe. I made it last week: 1/4 pound butter, 150g brown sugar, 250g flour, three medium-sized bananas, two eggs, pour in greased pan, realize you forgot the baking powder, get batter out of pan with a spatula, add 1tsp baking powder and try and stir it all in.

[Moo]

I have a healthyified banana bread recipe (on purpose) if anyone wants it, replaces most of the butter with yogurt.

[cephalopod9]

I'm making myself a birthday cake.
I mashed up two chocolate cake recipes to see what happens, and I might have made it way too dry. I don't know yet, because i put it in the freezer so i could do a mirror glaze over it, and I might have messed up that recipe too.
The gelatin didn't bloom correctly, and had sticky lumps in it. That happened last time, two weeks ago when I made a cake for a 6 year old's birthday, and mostly turned out alright.

I still have to decide what to put on it too.

[PAstrychef]

If you're worried that it's too dry sprinkle or brush it with simple syrup. You can flavor the syrup with coffee or liqueur if you want.
Simple syrup is equal amounts by volume of sugar and water, brought to a boil and cooled. It keeps for ages and is great in cold drinks. Just brush it over the top of your cake.
You can warm your glaze gently and the gelatin will dissolve. If the lumps persist, pour it through a mesh strainer.

[heuristically_alone]

Made chocolate pudding and cheesecake pudding and mixed it together. Yum!

[cephalopod9]

If you're worried that it's too dry sprinkle or brush it with simple syrup. You can flavor the syrup with coffee or liqueur if you want.
Simple syrup is equal amounts by volume of sugar and water, brought to a boil and cooled. It keeps for ages and is great in cold drinks. Just brush it over the top of your cake.
You can warm your glaze gently and the gelatin will dissolve. If the lumps persist, pour it through a mesh strainer.

Good ideas.
I made some simple syrup but decided against using it after the cake scraps I tested instantly disintegrated. Next time I'll probably use at least some all purpose flour, instead of all cake flour, but I haven't had a slice, with frosting and everything yet.

Can I freeze the prepared mirror glaze?
I'm annoyed with googling.

Spoiler:

I bought corn syrup (liquid glucose substitute because America has way too much corn) but then the recipes I found didn't use it, but now that I'm trying to look up whether freezing will destroy it, every recipe includes it. but it came out alright last time I made it with just sugar, water, gelatin, and sweetened and condensed milk. Except for some parts crystallized a little
Also I was using up the last of some candy melts, and had fewer gel colors than I thought, I was hoping it would be a deep rosy maroon, but came out more brown-ish

I think it's alright though.

Update:
It's rich and chocolatey, and it has a fairly tender crumb, but it is dry like a cookie.
picture
you take a bite, and then it turns into dust, but then instantly melts into delicious chocolate paste.

[Moo]

Happy birthday, cephalopod9! Your cakes look fantastic.

[pkcommando]

Last night I made steamed cauliflower with asiago cheese and crumbled bacon. With a drizzle of Sriracha. So tasty!

[cephalopod9]

Happy birthday, cephalopod9! Your cakes look fantastic.

Thank you!
I keep looking at internet pictures of mirror glaze cakes and feeling like Homer Simpson building a grill, but I'm enjoying my birthday cake.

Tonight I made fried eggs for dinner. They came out ugly, because that's how I like to cook them. Sometimes I likea little bit of runny yolk, but mostly I want them cooked all the way through, and I do that by impatiently breaking them all apart with the spatula. It was pretty good.

[Moo]

Last night the boy and I made smitten kitchen's margarita cookies as the kiddo's birthday present to my dad. Sugar cookie-ish recipe with lime and orange rind, a splash of tequila, and a sugar and salt topping. They are pretty good, and he was much more handy in the kitchen than I remember the last time we baked together. It was really fun. The cookies are great, although I'm not sure they taste like margaritas until someone tells you they're supposed to.

[Zohar]

Was there any issue with the kid wanting to have some tequila? I'm assuming the actual cookies don't have enough in them to be alcoholic.

[Moo]

It's 2 teaspoons to two cups of flour so yeah not much tequila; and no luckily he pulls a very disapproving face if someone even in jest asks him if he wants anything alcoholic. He's like a little lawful good cleric.

[PAstrychef]

Summer dinner menu-vichyssoise, asparagus cheese soufflé and a good baguette.

[Moo]

Made a "banoffee cake" for my dad's birthday.

First the good:
I tore a hand towel in strips and put them (wet) around my cake tins; they baked so beautifully even! No dome in the middle, so no cake lost to cutting it even. So that was good.

Now the bad:
1) So there were four layers, and two were sandwiched together with caramel (dulce de leche) and then another two sandwiched together. Turns out that even stabilized with gelatine, dulce de leche folded into whipped cream is NOT a good filling to put between these two cake sandwiches. The top layer kept slipping and sliding off whenever I left it for more than 5 minutes. So I scraped the the filling out from the middle and off the outsides and top, replaced it with just another thin layer of caramel, and then just put the whipped cream/caramel on the outside. What's worse than having to ice big cakes? Having to ice it twice!
2) The banana cake, despite calling for 5 bananas, was disappointingly dry. I baked it on Friday (icing and assembling on Saturday morning) and we ate it Saturday night, but it was only by Sunday that it was more like banana bread than dry crappy shop bought cake.

It was ok. Not quite what I'd hoped for. But better than no cake I guess? Still, caramel. Mmmmmm.

[Zohar]

I did a bunch of stuff this weekend. Saturday I tried to make a type of "biscuit cake" that's very common in Israel. Basically you dunk (UK) biscuits in some cold coffee and layer them with what apparently is called "Quark" in English but in Israel it's a very spreadable, soft cheese, mixed with some sort of instant pudding. Unfortunately I can never find a similar cheese here (the closest I've gotten in texture is Fage yogurt) so I just made the instant pudding packets with milk. It turned out firm, but basically pudding and biscuits, so not the greatest success story.

Yesterday I made a big salad with roasted beets, peas, snow peas, lightly-pickled onion, sprouts, avocado, lentils, and mint and cilantro. I also made pasta alfredo. I don't usually make it and I was surprised how little time it took to prepare.

[pkcommando]

Not "cooking" but yesterday I beat the heat with a grown-up lemon/limeade slushie. I took my recipe for lemonade (1/2-cup sugar, 1-cup concentrated lemon juice, fill to 2 quarts with water) and instead went to 1.5-cups between the lemon juice and lime juices. I cut the sugar just a little bit more, and replaced the water portion with ice, gin, and vodka. I also added at least 5 dashes of mint bitters before giving it a good run through the blender until it had a smooth consistency. That's the longest I ran an appliance to make something over the weekend.

Even a virgin slushie - but keep the mint bitters - would have been a good relief from the heat.

[freezeblade]

what apparently is called "Quark" in English but in Israel it's a very spreadable, soft cheese, mixed with some sort of instant pudding. Unfortunately I can never find a similar cheese here (the closest I've gotten in texture is Fage yogurt).

Sounds like you could replace with Fromage blanc or Mascarpone?

[Zohar]

Fromage blanc looks like what I'm looking for, but I don't think I've seen that in our grocery stores. Mascarpone is a bit too dry and chunky.

[Moo]

That's weird, must be a regional thing. I've never seen chunky marscapone.

[Zohar]

I don't remember when I last had mascarpone, and I was going by the google image search results for it. I might be wrong, it does look pretty close.

[Angua]

The apocalypse cheesecake is supposed to use marscarpone, but my mum substituted cream cheese and yoghurt (we don't have at home). I don't think it's meant to be dry and chunky.