Cheapo Cooking Episode I: Asian Marinated Chicken Drumsticks with Seasonal Roast Vegetable Salad

Good Evening

Its 5pm and dinner needs a makin'! So tonight Mum and I are making some yummy barbequed chicken drumsticks and a roast vege salad (plus a raw energy salad from the Ripe Deli cookbook but I am not including that one). Btw we are serving four tonight including Dad and one very very hungry Jack.

Cooking cheaply as we have all been told is buying meats that are on special and buying produce that is in season. So what I recommend you do is to Google New Zealand (or whatever country you are in) produce calendars. This one here isn't too bad nor does this one which is the Turners and Growers site which is probably more reliable. Anyway the bottom line is that when a fruit or vegetable is in season is is cheaper and of better quality and containing more vitamins and minerals. Also check out local food markets such as the Otago Farmers Market held at the Railway station for some great deals on fresh produce. Especially apples in the winter! $5 a bucket! nom nom. In season produce also means that the food in your fridge has not had to travel for weeks on end to get to you which uses up all sorts of natural resources etc etc.

So firstly lets focus on the chicken.

I can't even remember where we got this recipe from, I think it is from Mum's friend Hil. Anyway the ingredients in the marinade you can all buy from an Asian food market and are cheaper there than at the supermarket. The initial outlay might be around $20 but once you have them they are so worth it and last a while too. We chose to use chicken drumsticks as they are the cheapest part of the bird you can get. Usually we use chicken thighs but it really doesn't matter. The thighs are just more tender.

But look at that! almost a kilo of chicken drum sticks for $4.78! In that pack we got 10 of them.

So here is the scrawled out recipe. So on top of the chicken pour on:

2 teaspoons sesame oil
2 cloves of crushed garlic
1 teaspoon crushed/chopped/grated ginger
2 Tablespoons kecap manis (sweet soy sauce)
1 Tablespoon oyster sauce
1 Tablespoon fish sauce
1 Tablespoon honey

From left: Crushed ginger (Mum can't be bothered buying fresh ginger at the moment), sesame oil, oyster sauce, garlic cloves, fish sauce, honey.

This is the VITAL ingredient. It is dark, sweet and syrupy and rather delicious. It is nothing like the soy sauce that you pop on top of your sushi. You can now buy it at most supermarkets if you aren't near an Asian supermarket.

Oh no! we ran out of kecap manis!

Never fear! Mum has an even larger bottle stashed in the pantry.

So yeah, pop it all on the chicken

Add a bit more kecap manis for good luck!

Bam! marinade complete! Now pop this in the fridge whilst you prepare the vegetables or pop them straight on the barbie. If you are super on to it you could make this in the morning and let it absorb the delicious sauce over the course of the day so are all ready for you to cook when you get home from your four hour micro lab at 6pm! Now if you don't have a barbecue I suggest you become friends with the neighbours that do! :) A quick food safety tip!: before you cook them on the hot plate I suggest you pop them in the microwave and nuke them for a few minutes. Also microwave the left over marinade left in the bowl for 2 minutes and then pour over the chicken drums to make them extra saucy!

We have this nifty non stick Teflon sheet that you  put on top of your hot plate so that you don't have to clean the barbie and you don't have to use oil.

Jack pretending to cook

You see how there is quite a bit of marinade left over, this is amazing poured back over the chicken (once cooked in the microwave of course!)

Slice open the fattest piece of chicken and check that the inside meat is not pink (unlike the photo above) and the juices run clear. I dunno about you but I quite like a bit of charring on my chicken, it gives it that nice barbecued taste. It's just the fatty skin charring that you weren't going to eat anyway!


Ok now for the vegetables. This salad is inspired by the wonderful Ripe Deli cookbook.

Now we don't actually follow the recipe here but we do use the bacon, cashews and maple syrup. You can leave out the nuts and bacon if you are feeling a bit poor they are not vital. 

Ok what you will need for an amount shown below:

2 orange kumara

2 red kumara

2 red onions

3 corgettes

2 capsicum

3 carrots

1 aubergine (aka eggplant)

splash of olive oil (1/4 cup is more than enough)

a drizzle of maple syrup (no more than 1/4 cup)

handful of cashew nuts (optional) toasted in an oil less pan

a few rashers of streaky bacon (optional)

a few handfuls of baby spinach leaves (again optional if its on special)

one plastic bag

salt and cracked pepper

Ok so peel and chop your kumara and onions, pop into the plastic bag, pour in the half the oil and then shake the vegetables around to cover them in oil. Pour onto a baking tray, drizzle with maple syrup and then bake at 180 degrees for half an hour or until the vegetables are almost cooked through. drizzle a bit more of the maple syrup on top. Then toss the chopped corgettes, capsicum, carrots and aubergine in the other half of the oil and squeeze these on the tray to finish off for another half an hour. Mum just cooked them in two separate lots because there wasn't room on the tray. Once the vegetables are all cooked pop into a serving bowl, toss through the bacon, cashews and spinach if you wish and then drizzle with some balsamic vinegar. Yum yum!

This is an easy way of evenly coating a lot of vegetables with only a small amount of oil

The first lot of vege cooking

Second lot of vegetables; capsicum, aubergine, corgette and carrot

Toasting the cashews so they are nice and crunchy

Tossing the first lot

Drizzle some more

Now for the rest of the vege

Transfer into a serving bowl

Drizzle over some balsalmic

Sprinkle over some sea salt

Toss

Sprinkle over the bacon and cashews

And voila! Done!

Add caption

And that my friends is the Edmonds Family's dinner for tonight (along with a rather groovy looking beetroot salad).

We had a lot of left overs in the salad department so if you are cooking for less or for a group of girls you may decide to use less vegetables. Remember this is cooking and not baking so it doesn't matter if you alter the recipe slightly to suit your taste. The oil amounts are just guidelines, you could use other oils such as rice bran. Up to you or what you have available. For the salad you can add in parsnips and pumpkin later in the year.

See you soon!

Munchstaches!

Hello to you all!

Today I decided to finally try out one of my many quirky Christmas presents I received. This one in particular was given to me by my dear friend Cara. We have been best friends since year six in primary school. In year 9 she was lame and moved to Christchurch but even after six years our long distance relationship is still going strong. Cara also loves baking, the more sugary, chocolaty, caramely the better! She makes amazing chocolate and caramel brownie! Anyway she sent me this wonderful cookie cutter set which consisted of 5 different mustache shapes. Excellent!

The reason it has taken me so long to use these is that I have been in search of a cookie recipe that will work with them. This is where my baking friend Zoe comes in with her wonderful Dutch Speculaas recipe that I secretly stole from our friend Liz! Check out her ones. They are amazing.

So once our kitchen scales finally decided to work again I got underway . . .

So in a bowl beat together 220g of butter and 250g of brown sugar for 3-4 minutes until nice and creamy.

Then mix in 2 tablespoons of milk

Then in a separate bowl sieve 500g of flour with 2 tablespoons of baking powder

Next come the spices! 2 teaspoons of cinnamon, 2 teaspoons of ground cloves, 1 teaspoon mixed spice, 2 teaspoons ground ginger and 1 teaspoon nutmeg.

Sieve this all into your bowl  . . . carefully my bowl and sieve was a bit too small.

See what I mean?

So mix very slowly

The mixture was a bit crumbly so I added around about another 2 tablespoons of milk so moisten it up a bit

Now shape and roll the dough into a disc, wrap in glad wrap and pop in the fridge for 8 hours or overnight. Ok so I was impatient and left it 4 hours.

Now soften the dough a bit in the microwave and roll out.

This is Chris, he was a bit enthusiastic . . .

These are the cookie cutters! You can flip them over and imprint the hair pattern on the cookie.

Thanks Chris.

Now once they are all cut out and imprinted pop them in the fridge while the oven is heating up to 170 degrees.

Bam! after 15 minutes in the oven they are cooked and crispy!

This mustache is known as the walrus

Hmm I tried to ice them, but I thought they looked better left plain.

I was inspired by Chris' random patchy ginge stubble (slash I didn't have brown or black food colouring).

And here is my brother Jack (on the left) and his mate Jack (on the right).

So I am thinking about doing a cheap flat cooking segment soon, thoughts?


Ciao!!

A Good Day to Bake Chocolate Cake and Vanilla Cupcakes

Good evening once again.

Today my friend Ashleigh (http://kiwigirlskiwiblog.wordpress.com/) and I had a baking date. We decided to make a layered chocolate ruffle cake. There was our first mistake: layered. The cake mixture we used (thinking we would need a lot of it) was massive! Like huge! Turns out the three layers we wanted turned into five . . .

So for fear of a toppling cake that would fit no cake box alive we decided to split it into two and three stacked cakes.Leveling the tops of the cakes was such a pain, I think I will invest in one of those Wilton cake levelers.

 So the three stacked cake was supposed to be this ruffle cake, buuuuuuttt . . . we ran out of icing sugar (as we had already used 1.5kg worth already) and so the icing was a bit too runny (second mistake!) and the ruffles looked like the hillsides of Nelson (sliding down the hill). So that failed. So instead we just iced it. Plain and boring. We had gotten to the point of CBFed and we ended up with this:

Isn't is monstrous? And that is only three layers. I added some glitter on top to make it a wee bit fancy.

Then we wanted to cover up the bottom edge's messiness . . .

So we added a wee bit of ruffle using my mini star nozzle that had icing in it left over from the cupcakes we also made (they shall come in a sec).

Ta daa!! Doesn't that look tidier now.

Ok so what about the other two layers? 

This terrible looking melted, crumby mess went from this:

To this! WIN!

Success I think yes! WINNING!!!! All I did was start by making one rose in the middle of the cake and then just piping adjacent roses until I came to the edge (a rose is piped using a 1M Wilton nozzle and starting in the middle swirling outwards). You can see in some places there are wee incomplete roses. In the gaps in between roses I just piped a curve of icing to cover the base but to also blend in with the surrounding roses. You can also see I did it along the edges too. This was a chocolate cake with a cream cheese icing (odd mix I know). Even though I crumb coated and froze the blasted cakes I still managed to get crumbs in it, also I don't think my base layer was thick enough as you can see the cake through the icing. Sort of like trying to cover a black wall with light pink paint; you need a lot of layers.

Sorry, I am quite into taking photos at the moment. I have a really average point and shoot which is extra basic (hence the cheap price I bought it for). I originally got it so that if I went out to town and dropped it no one would cry over it. Only problem is that I haven't used it in town because I don't go anymore. I am a nana.

The cake recipe we used was really big (it used 3 cups of sugar!) so here is another recipe which tastes exactly the same but has smaller proportions and makes quite a decent cake as it is. The final batter is really runny but never fear, just make sure the bottom piece of baking paper you use to line the base of your spring form tin goes up the sides about three cm or so). 

Mocha Chocolate Cake ( a recipe from Sue!)

Add the ingredients in the order stated below, beating well between each addition.

2 large eggs

1 3/4 cups castor sugar

1/2 cup sunflower oil

1 cup buttermilk (or half and half yoghurt and milk)

1 teaspoon vanilla

then sift in together:

2 cups flour

1/2 cup cocoa

2 teaspoons baking soda

1 teaspoon baking powder

Once that is all beaten and smooth add:

1 cup of STRONG black coffee

Pour into a well lined spring form tin and bake at 180 degrees (Celsius!!) for 1 to 1 hour 10 minutes or until a skewer just comes out clean.

Once cool, ice with whatever you want, we usually ice this with a chocolate ganache! :) Ill pop that recipe up another day, Oh the suspense!!

So those cupcakes eh? we ended up making mini ones. Except we didn't expect to make 32 mini ones . .

By the time we got around to icing the cupcakes we had given up (or at least I had - Ashleigh made pretty, tidy swirls) so I just made big star blobs then covered them with random sprinkles. They taste delicious though. We used the Hummingbird Bakery vanilla cupcake recipe.

Vanilla Cupcakes:

40g Butter (softened)

140g castor sugar

120g flour

1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder

1 egg

90ml milk

1 teaspoon vanilla essence

In a bowl, beat the butter, sugar, flour and baking powder until a sandy, but even consistency is reached. Beat the egg into the mixture and beat until smooth. Then add half the milk, beat until combined and then add the rest and repeat. Then add the vanilla (adding extra for good luck :) ) and beat for a few minutes to really make sure the batter is smooth. Oh yeah don;t forget to sieve the dry ingredients first. Spoon into paper cases to 2/3 full and bake at 180 degrees (Celsius!!) for 20-ish minutes or until golden brown and spring back upon touch. Leave to cool and then ice with a plain vanilla, chocolate or other icing of your choice :) This should make about 12 (depending on how big your cases are).

Cool bananas! 

Time for a sleep I think. 

Happy baking!

Melt a Rainbow Take II

My posts seem to come in two lately. 

Ever since I did this the first time around last October/November Mum has wanted to try it too. So here we go . . 

This time we decided to get actual Crayola crayons. Turns out they are water soluble and so don't produce as waxy a trail as I originally would have liked. Although on the flipside they look sort of like watercolours which I like. 

So here goes. So first step, line all your crayons up on a canvas big enough.

Next, using a hot glue gun, stick on the crayons one by one.

 Next, with your hairdrier, heat the row of crayons on a low heat, angling downwards so that they melted wax doesn't splatter up and so the wax trails don't cross.

Stop when you have the right amount of meltedness :)

Mean, now where to put this . . .

Banana White Chocolate Cake: A Cake for Chris

New Years.

The most overrated celebration I think. Why get hideously drunk on NYE only to spend New Years day feeling awful? Anyway, Chris and his friends are going to Whitianga (a 2 hour drive when the traffic is good) for a few days over the celebratory period and wanted me to come. My friend Sarah (who I do not see very often) is up from Wellington for a month and her sister is having a gathering at their lovely home in Devonport (a 20 minute drive from my house). I really want to hang out with Sarah as she is a cool chick. So in short, Chris is making me feel bad for choosing my bro over my hoe, or my mate over date. Whatever. aaarhhggg. There is no choice about it, I am staying in Auckland. But as a supplementary prize to my actual presence I am baking Chris a cake. His favourite sort of cake. A banana cake. Whoop! How exciting . . .

So here is the making of a rather good banana cake recipe (complements of my friend Alex :) who gave it to my brother a few years ago).

Not a very complex ingredient list. Afterall it's just banana cake . . .

Cream 125g softened butter . . .

  . . . with 3/4 cup castor sugar. Castor sugar is finer that standard sugar and so will cream more easily and result is a fluffier cake. Some people only ever use castor sugar in their baking. Makes sense really. I always use it in cupcakes.

Cream!!!! That butter looks awfully yellow, I really should get around to popping some batteries into my actual camera rather than just using my ipod.

Then crack in two eggs, beating well after each addition. You want the volume to increase quite a bit - more egg beating = more cake!

 Cracked this egg with one hand . . . like a boss!

BEAT!!!!!

 These poor bananas :( You need three small ones or 2 biggish ones. These were a tad green so I had to prepare them  . . .

Poor bananas :(

Ever made a penguin banana? Peel the skin into thirds, take a bite then flop the third with the hard knobbly bit over to make the beak!! My uncle Mark taught me this. Invaluable skill this is.

Hmm delicious looking brown stuff. I cannot stand mashed banana. bleh the texture is horrendous.

Oop don't forget the vanilla :) I had a splash rather than a teaspoon.

Next sift in 3/4 cup self raising flour, 3/4 cup plain flour and one teaspoon of baking soda into the mix. Beat until just combined (don't want to overwork that gluten).

Sievy sieve sieve

Now here is where I stray. This is supposed to be an "I'm sorry" cake so I thought it needed a bit extra . . . like white chocolate.

Flip and some dark chocolate just for luck.

In the oven you go for 40 minutes at 180 degrees (Celsius!!).


Ok so who here doesn't know how to line a cake tin? Right well here I shall show you:

You will need: one cake tin of your choice, baking paper, a small knob of butter, a spoonful of flour, a pair of scissors and a pencil/pen.

Pop the bottom of the tin out and trace a circle around it on the baking paper.

Ooop cut my paper a bit big there.

Next, cut around the circle leaving around 2cm extra paper around the circumference.

 Like this.

Next, take a knob of butter and a bit of the cut off of the baking paper and use it to grease the sides of the cake tin.

Next take a spoonful of flour . . .

Pop it in the tin like this then rotate the ring until the flour has reached right around the ring.

Bang off the excess flour over the sink.

Beautiful. You won't see any cake sticking to that.

Then pop the baking paper circle into the tin (pen/pencil side down).

Pour in the cake mixture and you are ready to roll!!

 Bam!! Cake!!

It came out of the tin so easily

I failed on the rose front. It's too hot in our kitchen. the roses melted. Bleeeh.

Ok here you go Chris. Here is your banana and white chocolate cake. Nom nom. 

Byeeeeeeee

Purple Velvet Cupcakes

HELLO!!Publish Post

Wow it has been over 2 weeks since I last posted. When you no longer have to study you no longer have to find means of procrastination. Chem went well(ish haha) and food systems went even better (it was a week after chem). Anyway I have been back home in Auckland a week and I am already bored. Casually needing money to buy craft supplies . .

I did however take a wonderful trip to Milly's in Ponsonby. My favourite shop ever. If its kitchen and cooking related they have it. They have a whole cave dedicated to cake decorating. Excellent. So half an hour and a grumpy Chris and $20 later I exited this paradise with a 1M nozzle and some white-violet edible glitter. So worth driving over the bridge haha and scaring myself and Chris and the rest of Auckland's motorists with my driving.

This trip was inspired by my making of these red velvet cupcakes from the Hummingbird Bakery Cookbook. The nozzle I had bought a few weeks ago was too small to make the roses I had wanted on these cupcakes. Never fear, they turned out lovely anyway and were gobbled up in no time at all.

Sorry about the below average quality, I am still using my ipod's camera. Cbf charging my camera batteries . . .

Anyway so here is the messy adventure that is my purple velvet cupcakes . . .

BEAT!

Oh hey! Cookies! Something I just whipped up earlier at the request of my brother, Jack..

Ok so I use the Wilton gel food colouring, which meant that I had to add extra water to the cocoa in order to make a paste. Uhhhg it went EVEYWHERE except my white tshirt luckily. It stuck to the spatula, the spoon, the sides of the bowl. Such a pain. But lovely colour :) So worth it.

Thick paste of despair.

Reliving this sticky purple mess is just painful.

Now it just looks black.

Haha since we didn't have buttermilk (which is a by product of butter production funily enough - i'll give you the food lesson another day) but basically it is a low fat, acidic, bacterially full, lumpy mixture. I substituted it with milk with a tub of plain vanilla yogurt. The yogurt lowers the pH of the milk which is what we want :)

I couldn't resist turning the milk purple . . .

Next I added 150g of plain flour. Mixed in half the milk mixture then half the flour then half the milk then half the flour. Bam. Mixed.

Like my apron? I decided things were getting a bit too splattery for my brother's white tshirt. Time to armour up.

White wine vinegar and baking soda :) Hmm this brings me back to beach volcano building with Dad that and simple acid base chemistry. Now children, what gas is being released?

Mix this in well and beat until smooth.

 The other day I went to the supermarket and found these purple themed cases. Perfect. Hmm they were a bit too small however so the resultant cupcakes were a bit flat - an even greater surface area for which to place icing. hmm :)

Oh No!! what is this?! Left over mixture!! How terrible. I am now forced to make some mini cupcakes . . .

Plus two casual loner cupcakes . . .

Hmm  told you I made a mess . . .

Ta daaa!!!! Clean! Mum and Dad will never know.

And here they are, starting to think colouring them doesn't make much of a difference as the cocoa just drowns out all other colours. However, they do appear purple in the light, lots of light.

Here is the 1M nozzle I bought. If you want to make pretty roses this is the nozzle for you. To learn how to make them check out this tutorial I found. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYy2uiK6T94

My 12 inch piping bag was to narrow at the tip so I had to snip of about half a cm in order to fit the big nozzle.

FIRST ATTEMPT AT THE ROSE! WIN!!!!!!!

Oh arn't they pretty :) Mum will forgive me for baking almost immediately after she sees these.

Wait, ones missing . . .

Fatty  . . .  Here is Jack by the way.

Naawwwwww :) I also sprinkled them with my new glitter - which you probably can't see in this picture but trust me, it makes the roses look all dewy and lovely.

I did some experimenting on the mini cupcakes too.

 Here is the recipe adapted from the Hummingbird Bakery Cookbook

60g butter softened
150g castor sugar
1 egg
10g cocoa powder
20ml purple food colouring (since I used a gel I added a dollop and a few teaspoons of water)
1/2 teaspoon vanilla
120ml buttermilk
150g plain flour
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1 1/2 teaspoons white wine vinegar
Cream cheese icing

Preheat the oven to 170 degrees C.

Beat together the butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Add the egg and beat until extra fluffy and well incorporated (see the photo above). In a separate bowl make a paste out of the cocoa, food colouring (and water) and vanilla. Add to the egg, sugar, butter mixture. Turn the beater down to slow and add half the buttermilk. beat until well combined then add the sifted flour. Add the rest of the buttermilk then flour. Beat until the mixture is smooooooth. In a small dish mix together the baking soda and vinegar then add to the rest of the batter. Beat this in well. Spoon the mixture into paper cases until two thirds full and bake for 20 minutes or until the sponge bounces back when touched. Once the cupcakes are COOL (very important) ice with a standard cream cheese icing (ask your mum if you are not sure how to make one). Dust with magical fairy glitter and immediately hide from your brother.

This should make 12 large cupcakes.

So that is my morning cupcake (and cookie making) they received an overall 8.5/10 from my brother (quite a score haha).

I also bought a ruffle nozzle . . . so next time you see me I shall have a ruffle cake to show you. Exciting.

Chemistry

This is so exciting. Me blogging? haha not that anyone will read this. We don't really have much of a blogging culture in NZ, well unless you are some artsy alternative emo kid or something. Twitter is also another thing we don't really do. Smart phones and their network plans are too expensive to tweet every single thing that pops into our heads. Although I do have an account. My friend Georgie and I took the piss out of all the celebrity tweets by updating every 2 minutes about what exactly we were doing. Aaah. Study procrastination. Now I really should be doing chem study right now, but I am not really inspired by the Schrodinger wave equation at the moment. 

The main purpose of this blog was to share my baking adventures and crafty diy adventures. Except at the moment I am not adventuring very far. You see we are in the middle of uni exams. Whoop! Yeah. Plus at the hall I am staying at (where I am a second year - why did I return another year? I ask myself this everyday) we don't really have a kitchen. Some houses have one but communal kitchens annoy me. Stuff always gets "borrowed" and when you need to make something and just as it is too late to turn back you realise you are missing a vital ingredient. Frustrating much.

Speaking of kitchens, I can't wait to move into my new flat next year with the girls. Its going to be awesome. Kinda strange living in an actual house like situation without parents. Bill paying, gross.

Ok so I may as well start the ball rolling with this Hummingbird cake I made. Do you know the Hummingbird Bakery? well my Auntie has their book. Omgoodness it is filled with the most wonderous things. Anyway this recipe is from there. I really want to try their Brooklyn blackout cake too. I digress. I iced this cake with a tonne of cream cheese icing. I also made it with two layers (I was too lazy to bake a third) so there was icing in between also. So good. So sickening. I gave myself a pat on the back for this creation.

Yes I also love the iphone (or in my case ipod touch) app Instagram. It makes me look like I am a cool indie kid with an expensive camera and excess artistic flair coming out of my bottom.

Then I added sprinkles . . .

The receiver was most pleased with this cake. So were his friends who gobbled it up whilst he recovered from his birthday 21 shots.

Yum. That is all.