Week 12: Mille Feuille

Hi everyone!

This week I attempted the classic, French dessert that sent sweet Karmen packing last week. It’s the mille feuille! In plain English, it's known as a vanilla slice, but that doesn’t sound half as impressive, does it? 

Almost all mille feuille recipes recommend using store bought pastry, because it’s so much easier. But has anybody ever won MasterChef with pre-packaged pastry? No, they haven't. I don't want easy. I want heartbreakingly, bathroom floor sobbing-ly difficult. Manu’s classic recipe was the closest fit to my brief. Unfortunately he's a judge on MasterChef's rival show, My Kitchen Rules. I felt like I was betraying Matt, Gary and George, by using Manu's recipe, but I couldn't find a better alternative.

Rough puff pastry

Surprise, surprise: I screwed up in a major way. So I decided to start cooking at 5pm. That means that I read the recipe for the first time at 5pm. It turns out that Manu’s ‘proper’ puff pastry recipe takes hours upon hours to make. He literally recommended making it over two days!! But I don’t have time pouring out of my ears, so frankly, Manu and his idealistic recipe can piss off. Luckily, after a little googling, I found MasterChef Zoe’s speedy rough puff pastry recipe.

The problems didn’t stop there. Our household’s food processor is the bane of my existence. It’s older than I am, and even less functional. It’s also ridiculously tiny, so I had to painstakingly split all my pastry ingredients up into two batches. I’m utterly surprised my pastry came out golden and flaky. It was marginally overcooked, but I could hardly blame that on a dodgy food processor.

Crème patisserie

This is what shame looks like.

Unfortunately my first batch of crème patisserie was lumpy, since I didn’t stir it enough. I do think the recipe’s ambiguity is partially at fault, so naturally, I’m going to completely blame the recipe for my failures. Damn you Manu, for ruining my crème patisserie dreams.

Guess what happened next. Somehow, in the process of whipping up a second batch, I managed to drop a bloody egg. I haven’t done that since I was ten! Besides that egg and ego shattering drama, my second lot of crème patisserie came along perfectly.

Fondant Icing

Obviously working with fondant icing and melted chocolate caused an insurmountable amount of chaos and mess. The icing on my mille feuilles was a little lopsided and decidedly asymmetrical, but y’know what? I love them just the way they are. I've never felt more proud of a culinary creation.

A bad photo of beautiful pastry babies

Ranking rubric

Taste: 9.5/10- the pastry, crème patisserie and icing were lovely!

Presentation/resemblance to dish: 8.5/10- they were rustic, ok?

Time: 5/10- Roughly four hours- which could’ve been 3.5 if I had an operative food processor and actually remembered to preheat the oven for once in my sad life.

Kitchen Mess: 1/10- Despite cleaning up twice during the cook, somehow I ended up with an absolute bombsite.

Thanks so much for reading! 

Cheers,

Rosa

Week 11: Crème Caramel

Hi everyone!

Just three ingredients:
that's my kinda recipe

Yes, I’m a day late. And yes, I hate myself. But at least I had the company of MasterChef whilst I wallowed in my self hate.

This week I decided to take on the French classic, crème caramel. To be honest I’m starting to run out of stereotypically hard things to cook, which also happen to be cheap as chips. Crème caramel seemed like both. The two components are caramel and custard, and I’d never made either. I fell head over heels in love with the ingredient list, which was even cheaper than chips. Eggs, milk, sugar- that’s it! All pantry staples!  I didn’t even have to part with the comforts of home to purchase ingredients.

Caramel

Heating sugar and water, what could possibly go wrong? 

Burning said sugar and water, that’s what. 

Perhaps 'slightly charred caramel'
will be the next hipster
food trend

I deeply regret not keeping a more watchful eye on the troublesome stuff. However I will say, in my defence, I’d never made caramel before. I had zero idea what I was looking for. The bubbles on top of the caramel were lightly coloured, so I thought sweet, I’ll just leave it be. It turns out that the bubbles lied to me. It was only when I stood directly over the pot that I could smell the slight char of the decidedly darker caramel underneath. But it wasn’t bad enough to discard, so with a shrug, I poured it into the ramekins. After that, I couldn’t second guess my decision even if I wanted to, because the caramel was rock hard within seconds.

Custard

Appearance-wise: a solid 10/10

Perhaps it was the stress of boiling caramel, but my usually proficient egg separating skills let me down. Luckily my whisk didn’t fail me. After a spectacularly disastrous first date, my whisk and I have developed quite the loving relationship. It stay put when I tell it too, like a perfectly well trained dog. I can only dream of finding a husband who exhibits such good behaviour.

Baking my custard children was pretty nerve wracking. Thankfully, other than a brown, scalded patch on one of my darling cremes, they were cooked perfectly! Demolding them was just as scary, but alas, they came out easily.

Ranking rubric

Taste: 8.5/10- they were scrumptious: the custard was silky, and the caramel only slightly burnt.

Presentation/resemblance to dish: 10/10- they were even prettier than they tasted.

Time: 7/10- it wasn’t a time consuming dish at all, and that’s coming from Queen Dawdler herself.

Kitchen Mess: 9/10- twas a perfectly reasonable amount of mess

Thanks for reading. Keep enjoying MasterChef! I dunno about you guys, but I’m totally rooting for Matt to take home the title.

Cheers,

Rosa

Week 10: Apple Strudel

Hi everyone!

Making a strudel makes
me a real chef, right?

When I first embarked on my grand mission (keeping this blog), I undertook intense research. And by research, I mean googling ‘hard things chefs should know how to make’. According to one of the many sites that I browsed and do not remember, apple strudel is one of those hard, chef-y things. So guess what? This week I made apple strudel!

I was caught choosing between a recipe by Martha Stewart and another by some Viennese website’s recipe. However, the Viennese website's was cheaper and had step by step photos, so it was an easy win in my book. Also, the writer claimed that it was her grandmother’s recipe. And come on, nothing can beat a little, old Austrian lady’s strudel.

Dough

I was surprised at how tiny the ball of dough was (later it's rolled extremely thin). The recipe requested that the dough be worked for ten minutes, and I mentally readied myself for torture. I swear every bloody time I've kneaded dough or pastry, my arm has desperately wanted to fall off. Alas, not this time! The strudel dough was an absolute dream- it was like kneading a fluffy marshmallow!

Filling

Dubious looking
'chilli rum'

I have no idea what a Macintosh apple is. To me 'Macintosh', conjures images of an Irish man in a kilt. As far as I can tell, Macintosh apples don’t exist in Australia. By that I mean that they weren’t at Woolies, and that’s pretty much the same thing. I compromised, using Granny Smith apples.

The raisins had to be soaked in either rum or water. I asked my family members if we had any rum, as more of a joke than a genuine enquiry. I was pretty surprised when my mother said that we did, and fetched the dodgiest looking bottle I’ve ever set eyes on. Nobody knows where it came from. It honestly looked like Captain Jack's secret, 30 year old stash of rum. I didn't use it, I'm not insane.

Also: the combination of toasted breadcrumbs in butter, sugar and cinnamon is sinfully good. I may or may not have eaten half of the mixture.

Strudelling it up

After rolling out the rested dough with a rolling pin, the dough had to be hand stretched until it reached paper thinness. Unfortunately, delicacy has never been my forte. Needless to say, holes appeared. But that’s alright, it’s rustic right? Rolling the strudel up was simultaneously the most stressful and satisfying thing I’ve ever undertaken. It reached the point of explosion a few times, so yes there were a few tears, but thankfully they didn’t affect the taste!

I now know what true love feels like

Ranking rubric

Taste: 9.8/10- so good, so ridiculously good. The tastiest thing I’ve made so far. The only thing that would have improved it was ice cream.

Presentation/resemblance to dish: 9/10- a beautiful log of crispy pastry, with only a few charred edges

Time: 7/10- my deadline was 4:30pm (afternoon tea time at my place) I started at 1:15, finished before 4, and actually had extra time to eat lunch in between. So yeah not too bad!

Kitchen Mess: 8/10- The amount of washing up didn't make me want to die. What a day of surprises.

This apple strudel is the best thing that’s happened to me.

Cheers,

Rosa

Week 9: Tempered chocolate

Chocolate + me = love
(and mild self loathing)

Hi everyone!

I’m a slack ass. I broke my personal rule of posting every Sunday, reinforcing the fact that my self-discipline levels are about as high as a school stoner. I literally have no excuse; my chosen recipe only requires one basic ingredient! It’s everybody’s best friend and worst enemy: chocolate. This week I decided to temper the gorgeous stuff, because it’s always a big deal when anyone does it on MasterChef.

Sidenote: I baked and iced cupcakes too, because tempered chocolate on its own is pretty useless.

Tempering chocolate

I followed The Guardian’s guide to tempering chocolate. Basically, you melt chocolate, then add some more room temperature chocolate. It was pretty much as simple as it sounds. The only hitch was that it took me at least 4 minutes to realise that I’d turned on the wrong stove ring. Also there was the issue of the few unmelted chunks left in my tempered chocolate, which I cleverly solved by eating them.

Moulding decorations

Now for the fun bit. I watched a YouTube video of some European man who made up for his lack of personality with his excellent chocolate crafting skills. He used acetate sheets to mold his chocolate, and I panicked a little, because all I had was uselessly flimsy cling wrap. Alas, I was blessed with a very rare moment of genius, and improvised by chopping up my mother’s plastic Marbig folder.

Curls: bane of my existence,
devil on earth

Firstly he shaped some sort of ornate hoop, so I did too. Then he ran a funky rake like contraption down the chocolate, which I did not do too, because I didn’t have one. I used a chopstick instead, which did the job, albeit shakily and without finesse. But my hoop didn’t crack, so that’s a win in my book.

Next were chocolate curls, which were a nightmare and a half. For setting purposes, I had to curl my chocolate covered acetate around the interior of a cup. That was frustrating and fiddly and chocolate dribbled everywhere. And it all came to nothing, because tragedy struck. My set chocolate curl cracked upon removal. I blame the damn chopstick.

Lattice: love of my life, beat of
my heart

Into the piping bag my (now cooling) chocolate went. I drizzled out a couple of lattices. They were beautiful.

Lastly were the chocolate decorations. I’m a pretty good drawer, so I was excited and prepared to ace this. And do you know what fate decided to throw at me? Fate had the absolute nerve to slap me in the face with hardened chocolate. I only got to pipe one measly heart, and then I was left with a piping bag filled with set, unusable chocolate. Oh well, at least my one heart was very pretty.

Ta da!

Ranking rubric

Taste: 8/10- they were chocolate cupcakes. So they were yummy, but nothing ground breaking.

Presentation/resemblance to dish: 8/10- They were very cute cupcakes

Time: 2/10- three hours all up, we all know I’m a snail

Kitchen Mess: 1/10- I was scraping hardened chocolate off the kitchen bench for at least 10 minutes

Have a great week and see you Sunday (I promise this time)!

Cheers,

Rosa