High tea with Maureen

Late night chocolate fudge brownie cravings

Posted on 3 March 2013 by amandalindsey

Last night at 9pm (I know, but it’s late for me) I was overcome with a desire for Ben and Jerry’s chocolate fudge brownie ice cream. Not very logical considering it was 0 degrees out. The craving then moved to Chocolate fudge brownies, and then to warm chocolate fudge brownie sundae. My excitement at the prospect increasing all the while, much to the disbelief of the fellow sitting across the table from me, after all, we had just finished a massive dinner of roasted potatoes, parsnip, carrots, beetroot, zucchini and cauliflower cheese. He concluded (probably rightly so) that this was a side effect of my having been on a detox for the past week eating nothing but fruit and vegetables often in liquid form.

Rather than just letting a good craving pass and getting on with the evening I decided to seize the moment and got googling! I was thrilled to find that all required ingredients were already in said fellows cupboard and got to it!

I used this recipe, found after searching for ‘best chocolate fudge brownies’ – great way to find recipes if you haven’t tried it, why settle for just any recipe when you can have the best ever recipe for something? It’s based on a Nigella recipe and lets face it, if decadence is the aim Nigella’s your girl:

http://www.theextraordinaryartofcake.com/2010/01/best-chocolate-fudge-brownie-recipe.html

(I halved the ingredients and used slivered almonds instead of Walnuts.)

Once he realised I was quite set on baking brownies, said fellow started, of all things, to lament! Quite a hilarious and unexpected outcome.

Apparently, if I made brownies this automatically meant that he was going to have to get up to go to the supermarket (down three flights of stairs and next door) to buy ice cream. The way he saw it, I was going to produce brownies, and then when it came time to eat them, I would say ‘well I baked the brownies, you go get the ice cream’. Ha! Brilliant conclusion! I hadn’t even started baking yet and he got all that way without my having even thought it yet! What more could you want from a man? I laughed peals of chocolate-brownie-craving-crazed-hysterical-girly-dr-evil laughter and got to it!

Brownies are so easy and quick! I had no idea. Within an hour we had hot brownies with (begrudgingly got) vanilla ice cream.

I would highly recommend giving into a good brownie craving and having a go at them if you haven’t already!

Posted in food & food experiences | Tagged chocolate fudge brownie recipe, dessert, food | Leave a comment

Back! and baking…

Posted on 26 February 2013 by amandalindsey

Dear dear friends!

It has been a thoroughly inexcusable amount of time since I last wrote. There are a great many reasons for it, all of which may appear in some other format some other time. I shall save them for my memoirs or some such nonsense!

Long story short I’m back, blogging and I’m happy again. Properly thoroughly deeply happy and enjoying life as one should as much and as often as possible if not always!

THANK YOU!!! Thank you to all of you who contacted me in various formats cajoling and hinting and pushing and shoving me to come back and write. After such an absence any good blog would be dead, thank you for allowing me another chance to save mine.

I thought it appropriate to start again in a similar place to where I started the first time. In Climbing the Croquembouche and Hip Hip Hooray!, inspired by MasterChef Australia (who hasn’t been) I decided to attempt the Croquembouche for my sister’s birthday cake. Recently, said sister, inspired herself by whatever series of MasterChef Australia we are up to now, made Lorraine Pascale’s Mojito Genoese Cake for our cousins birthday. Having decided that hers did not turn out quite as it should have, she promptly assigned the challenge of reproducing the cake to me. A task I put off for some time, not having all necessary equipment for baking in my new kitchen, in my new little apartment – at the start of last year I got a ‘real job’ again and moved properly to Germany. When my second hand ebay beaters arrived in the post I had no more excuses and set to it!

Using the recipe linked to above, I made the cake over two days, all in all I think it took about 6 hours. Surprisingly longer than the Croquembouche! The time though has a lot to do with my botching up the toffee twice. We’ll get to that.

The first difficulty was finding Pecans in Germany. It is really odd which things are normal and which are rare in different countries. Eventually I found some in the Galleria Kaufhof supermarket (similar to Myer) which has a selection of international foods. For the tiny packet it was something like four euro though! Then I proceeded to ruin and waste them – this is linked to the toffee issue. Here’s my experience of the Mojito cake…

As you can see I didn’t have a glass bowl to make a nice bainmarie so I improvised!

I don’t have a zester either, so this was not fun, and I cut myself.

Don’t have any measuring cups in my new kitchen either so was just winging it really with online conversions from grams to tablespoons and grams to cups and guessing that these mugs are about a cup size.

The recipe said ‘whisk’ here, I started whisking, then gave up, then kept whisking thinking I really wanted to follow the recipe, then gave up and continued with the electric beaters. It took a long time! I don’t know who could whisk it.

Then fold…

Then pour.. Don’t let the bubbles out!

It’s rising yay!! cake with no rising agent.

About now is when I should have taken it out of the oven.

As you will see by the next photo.

Shh!! We’ll cover it with icing!

A little uneven, we’ll cover that with syrup and icing!

This mojito syrup is great! I had plenty left over and have since used it with fizzy water to make yummy summery mocktails!

In the end I put the burnt bit at the bottom. Hoping no one would notice, you could of course still see it when the cake was cut. Probably best to just not burn the cake in the first place.

Tadahh! Now for the toffee…

So. The toffee. All else had gone reasonably well so far. I mean the cake came out burnt but it was a cake! One with no self raising flour or baking powder or anything and it still was a proper cake! Then the toffee. Here is the first batch:

I was using organic raw sugar as I’ve not yet found organic white sugar here. I’d like to blame this on the fact that I burnt it – the sugar was already caramel coloured, I couldn’t tell when it was ready! Not really a good enough excuse though. After an hour I gave up on the first batch and decided to try again.

Yes. I know, you can tell, I burnt it again! At this stage though I had 5 or so hours of cake making behind me and just wanted it finished so I strew my pecans on a lightly greased plate (no slice trays either) and convinced myself that the toffee would be fine.

When the toffee was finally set I had two major problems. 1. I couldn’t get it off the plate and 2. It tasted burnt. STILL I convinced myself it would be fine and started beating it to a pulp in a plastic bag with a rolling pin. After a good half hour of scraping and beating and bashing and cries of frustration I finally gave up. All the beating with a rolling pin in the world was not going to fix this toffee. What a terrible waste of Pecans! (I rescued what I could)

Finally, I crushed the few pecans I had left over to decorate the top of the cake with and stuck them to the outside of the cake.

So here it is:

It looks pretty enough and it tasted wonderful. Still, with burnt toffee (and cake), then no toffee and too few pecans, the recipe beat me this time.

Not sure if I’ll be putting another 6+ hours in for round two any time soon, if I do you’ll be the first to know! Probably I ought first put some time into practicing toffee!

Much love to all,

Amanda Lindsey

Posted in Birthdays, food & food experiences | Leave a comment

Sunflowers for strangers…

Posted on 5 October 2011 by amandalindsey

Things are difficult, scary, I’m not happy and I’m going underground for a while. Before I leave though I want to share something with you. A remedy if you will.

I know that eating chocolate, icecream, watching happy movies, buying myself things, and all such other tricks one usually employs to divert a bad mood, will not change my situation. They are temporary distractions at best.

Instead, realising that others around me were also having ‘bad days’ which were not temporary mood bad days but, like mine, part of a string of days, turned into weeks, turned into oblivion. I decided that perhaps, if I could not help myself, I might be able to make someone else smile. Then maybe that would rub off on me, and maybe while I can’t feel thoroughly happy, maybe I can still feel good about myself and find some relief in that.
So with an hour lunch break ahead of me, another pocket of time where I would be left to my own devices to distract my thoughts. I headed out knowing I wanted to do something nice for someone else, but knowing not what.

When I was at school, boarding school, I would randomly buy flowers for my friends. Not for each one of them. Maybe for three of them here, one of them there. For no reason at all except that I liked the Gerberas and it made me feel nice. I was so happy to have friends, I wanted to make them happy.

This came back to me today and I decided on the same. I went past my favourite fruit and veg stand and got a bunch of sunflowers, which I handed out to my fellow misery guts, and which I hope through their bright yellow sunny-ness distracted their more miserable thoughts for a little while.

With half the bunch left, it occured to me that other people, strangers, people on the platforms, at the bus stops, could be having bad days too. For the last three weeks I’ve been walking around like a Zombie, frowning, slouching and probably to the outside world looking generally unpleasant. Think about that next time you see someone who looks nasty, evil, grumpy. It might not be their fault. You never know what is happening to people.

At the bus stop I gathered up all my nerve, pulled out the sunflowers one by one, and handed them to the random strangers around me. It was so much easier than I had ever thought it would be. Once I’d started it was hard to stop. Everyone reached out and took their sunflower and said thankyou. So simple. So nice. That’s how interactions with people should always be don’t you think.

One woman asked me what I got in return. I didn’t know what to answer her. I said ‘nothing’, then added ‘just hopefully it will make someone smile’. She asked if I was having a bad day. Yes. She then said ‘well, you have made me happy’.
Then her partner, whom I had also given a sunflower to. Said ‘Wait! We have to do an exchange… I have something really cool!’ He pulled out a back scratcher and handed it to me saying ‘it’s a back scratcher’ and his wife added ‘it’s retractable’. I laughed. They made me laugh. I took the back scratcher and said thankyou, wished them a nice evening and went to wait for my bus as far away as possible from the people I’d given sunflowers to. Some of them kept looking at me.

Many of them were on my bus. They carried their sunflowers on, and got off at different stops. But my favourite was a girl who got off one stop before mine. The first girl I had given a sunflower to. She stood there in the bus waiting to get out, then got out and stood at the bus stop. With her headphones in and her big bright sunflower in her hand, staring absently at the moving advertisements. She looked lovely. It made me smile.

I highly recommend giving sunflowers to strangers.