This was good but could be better. I’m not very good at cooking chicken, I tend to over-do it because I’m too paranoid it wont be cooked and it winds up dry/chewy. Any tips anyone?
Chicken breast strips dipped in flour, then egg/milk/garlic, then breadcrumbs/parmesan with mashed potatoes, spinach and a sauce thing of cream-cheese/gherkin-spread/chives.
I made this cake for my sister’s 21st party she is a patisserie chef in training, so it was a daunting task to begin with, she gave me tips for doing the cake covering, naturally things still went wrong, but the rescue attempt from my ever so vaguely artistic brain came into action and it came out not half bad. First time I’ve ever done something close to this (except make the tiramisu cake).
1. Make a tiramisu cake from this recipe. Carefully transfer to a nice plate, I sat the underneath of the pan outside of the edges (mostly because I couldn’t find the proper base) but it made it easier to get out. Cut your greaseproof paper to size (a little higher than the edge of the cake, use string to measure diameter etc).
2. Carefully remove the edge. Run a knife around the edge first, it should slide off quite eaisly. Squash any cake that goes astray back into it. The cake is made of squashed cake so it’s quite alright to be a bit ‘mud-pie’.
3. Nice. Not bad, but this is why we’re covering it in chocolate. You can serve it this way if you like. Dump some cream on top (or left over tia-maria cream) and coat with shaved chocolate. Or…
4. Find a metal or glass bowl and sit it over a saucepan of water, heat the water and stir the chocolate constantly. I used 1 pack of chocolate melts, there was plenty.
6. Looking good, keep stirring.
7. Spread the chocolate over the paper like a maniac, coat it, smooth it out and get the edge as straight as you can. In hindsight I should’ve spread the chocolate all the way to the edge to get it straight… why I didn’t I don’t know!.
8. Leave the chocolate a little bit, I think this is where I went wrong (left it too late) apparently just as it’s losing it’s gloss. Wrap the cake KEEP IT SMOOTH (here’s also where I kind of screwed up).
9. You can peel off the paper fairly quickly. Do it carefully. Cry if you break it.
10. Hmmm. kind of crinkly – not much you can do about that. But the top edge, ergh! That’s not how it’s meant to look. Search the creative depths of your soul for a solution. Attempt to crack off some of the top to get it a little more even. Vaguely better, but not much. Try a hot spoon on the top, that kind of helps… hmmm
11. Genius! After making funky middle strawberry. Brainwave hits to use cut pieces around the edge to hide the mess.
12. This was the mess of leaving the chocolate a little too late. Nothing can be done! So stop worrying and put that edge to the back when you serve it.
13. And it now doesn’t look half bad!
A cafe IÂ frequent sometimes serves possibly the best pie/cake thing on the planet. It’s entirely full of poppy-seeds, not too sweet, not too savory, it has a cake/pie type crust and for the life of me I cannot work out what it is in it. I have scoured Google to not too much avail and the closest looking recipe I have come across is this one:
Recipe for German Poppy Seed Cake
I intend to experiment slightly to get something close to what I really like, the addition of the baked sour-cream layer sounds pretty darn good as well. Shall share success or failure when I get around to it and once I work out what farina is and what I can substitute (Semolina?).
Well the Problogger tried it and it intrigued me. It’s a Delicious Magazine recipe which means it’ll appear on taste.com.au soon enough. It’s tasty but really too sweet to eat a big bowl, small amount before proper dinner (but who does that when you’re just cooking something easy for tea!) would be okay.
So the verdict: nice but not mind blowing and you can’t eat a large quantity of it. It’s not particularly mapley, more just sweet.