An easter egg nest

I was inspired by a cake with an easter egg nest when I was trawling the internet for easter treat ideas. So I got to baking!

The individual brownie cake, which was iced with chocolate ganache, is probably a bit small for the size of the nest but you get the idea.
Simply melt 60g dark chocolate and mix it through 20g vermicelli noodles. Many varieties of vermicelli or cellophane noodles are made of mung bean starch. Make sure to use 100% rice vermicelli as it will soften slightly with the chocolate. The non-rice ones remain tough and hard to chew!
Line a muffin or patty case pan with glad wrap and put the mixture into a nest shape and let them set.

 That quantity of mixture made four.

Once it was set, it was easy to peel them off the glad wrap, fill with mini candy eggs and decorate the top of the cakes.

  

Happy Easter!

Raspberry curd

And back to the sweet stuff!

Everyone's heard of lemon curd but it was in a delicious magazine late last year, that I first came upon a recipe for raspberry curd in a "Raspberry Curd Crepe Layer Cake", originally a Stephanie Alexander recipe.

Not for the faint-HEART-ed

At the farmer's market, I was scanning the choices available at the grass-fed, free-range beef stall, when the stall-holder must have noticed me look aghast at the tray with the beef heart. Now at $4 for an entire heart, it's clearly an economical cut, but he offered to GIVE it to me if I was prepared to cook it. I was in two minds but decided I was up for the challenge.
I did a lot of searching online for how best to cook it and the recipe that perhaps sounded the nicest was a Peruvian recipe called Anticuchos.
Probably quite luckily, I forgot to take a photo of the heart before I removed the outer fat and sinewy bits, which were really quite gross. So then I chopped it into thin pieces and marinated the meat in the mixture of garlic, red wine vinegar, chilli, paprika, cumin and oil.

The Roasted Yellow Capsicum sauce followed, and this was really smoky and delicious. Not bad going to use two whole BULBS of garlic all up: one for the meat marinade and one roasted that went into the sauce.

Back to the meat, instead of threading onto kebab skewers, I just pan-fried it in batches, quite quickly on a reasonably high heat. And served it on cauliflower rice (whizz up the raw cauliflower florets in a food processor, pile into a casserole and microwave for 5 minutes), with the sauce on top!

Now the taste was good, but you know, I don't think I'd go back. One friend was happy for a taster, and said it was delicious. But no one else seemed at all keen to come share it with me. So I got to enjoy it for several meals. And now I think I've had enough. Forever. And always. Cross my heart.... 

Caramelised white chocolate

I've been hearing about caramelised chocolate for a while so of course I wanted to see what the fuss was about. And I've always been a big fan of caramel...

Knit a pet?

A couple of years ago, I started this cute as, knitted border collie that I never got around to finishing until just last week.  I think people have called them UFOs - UnFinished Objects, so finishing it is kind of hard to believe! The pattern was in a book called Best in Show knit your own dog by Sally Muir and Joanna Osborne.

It only stands about 10cm tall, so there wasn't alot of knitting to it, I just put it away and didn't come back to it. I only had a few small pieces left to finish (like ears, and tail) so without too much trouble, I soon had a little mound of knitted pieces and loose tails (no pun intended). Once I laid them out, I could see the parts that would make up the whole.

 

With a bit of stitching up of the body, it started to take shape even more so.

And before I knew it, the puppy had been born! 

                                                 Why did I take so long to finish it??? 

 

An Eton Mess...

Rhubarb Eton Mess no less!
An Eton Mess is an English dessert essentially made up of crushed meringue, fruit and whipped cream.
This variation consisted of poached rhubarb, meringue with ground pepperberries, fresh strawberries, and white chocolate ganache - the idea was in Delicious magazine.

The rhubarb, I should add, came to me from my sister whose neighbour grew the beautiful crop. You just have to do something special with such lovely home grown produce.

Kiwi fruit sorbet!

Autumn and winter is the season for kiwifruit! A funny old fruit with its furry brown skin, that I hadn't entirely embraced for its taste or variety of uses. But a kind friend had given away some of her harvest when we visited and well, it was an offer too good to refuse.

It was my sister, though, who discovered THE BEST way to use kiwi fruit. She served me a dessert that was sublime.

Kiwi fruit sorbet. 

Make a sugar syrup with 150g of sugar and 150ml boiling water. When cold, blend this with 450g kiwi fruit pulp, juice of 2 lemons zest of 1 lemon.
Strain to remove most of the seeds, chill and then either freeze, and re-blend, or churn in an icecream maker.

To serve, a scoop or two on a plate with a contrast of vanilla ice-cream and a few slices of fresh kiwi fruit and some fresh blueberries.

It is AMAZING!!! I'm inspired to try a dessert on this theme, with maybe a layer of lemon ice-cream, kiwi fruit jelly, making a kiwi fruit gel would be interesting for a sauce too. Throw in a layer of sponge or a crunchy meringue layer...so many options. I now embrace the kiwi fruit possibilities!