Eat for the Earth - the picture gallery

So we hosted our Eat for the Earth dinner on Tuesday and it was awesome! I have some (bad!) pictures of the event, so here goes:

The semi-organic lemonade, home-made. Semi-organic because I couldn't find local organic sugar so I sticked to the regular stuff:

Starters was a home-made roasted tomato and red pepper soup:

Fresh organic tomatoes from Woolworths slow-roasted in the oven for about 6 hours:

Until it looks like this:

The peppers were from the Bryanston organic market, and went under the grill until properly blackened. Then into a pot to slooooowly combine all the flavours. We didn't even need to add any stock, because the tomatoes still had enough juice left in them to make the soup liquid enough.

That then got pureed and served. Beautiful.

Then we had a pizza course, home-made bases made from organic flour. One had brown mushrooms and the other mozzarella balls and baby tomatoes (all from the Bryanston organic market). The tomato one had fresh basil from the garden added just before serving.

This was then followed by the main course - butternut canneloni topped with a spinach and ricotta mixture, organic passata and an organic cheese sauce (with organic butter, flour, milk and cheese!) Baked in the oven and served with salad from the garden.

And to end the evening, an Italian apple cake with all organic ingredients except the sugar and baking powder:

Oh, and for the kids I made cupcakes, topped with green icing and let them decorate their own "gardens". They loved it!

All in all the evening was a fantastic success. A few more pictures:

Hanno in the very messy kitchen, filling the butternut canneloni

My friend Dee grating some pecorino cheese from the Bryanston market for the cheese sauce:

Everyone had an all-natural meal, baby included:

And my geek friend Simon wearing my dune-inspired apron, after lighting the fire. The wine was Laibach's Ladybug 2009, a beautiful (and award-winning) organic wine.

The table setting. We used potted African violets as decorations, and they doubled as thank-you gifts for the guests.

And there you have it! The results for the winners should be out this week, and we're holding thumbs that we did enough to qualify for one of the prizes. But even if we didn't the food was phenomenal and the evening was awesome, and it's all for a good cause.

Plants vs zombies - the birthday

So the theme for my youngest's second birthday was based on the coolest PC game ever. Not that she plays it, obviously, but if I'm in front of the PC, she generally demands "I want zombies! I want zombies!" until I play a level while she sits on my lap. And since I try to reflect their preferences in the theme for the birthdays, she got a plants vs zombies birthday.

The cupcake-cake:

The birthday girl:

And her friend eating a zombie (she'll obviously be a major defense factor in the zombie apocalypse):

Tinkerbell cake

I was on leave for the last two days, to prepare for my oldest's birthday party tomorrow. Here's the cake:

The figurine on top is store-bought and not edible, but the rest of it I made myself and it's all edible. I'm pretty happy with the result.

The other side:

Some of the flower detail:

It's 8pm now, 14 hours before the party starts. It's raining cats and dogs outside, so we may very well be in trouble. At least we'll have cake!

Cake decorating course!

I had my first "advanced" cake decorating course yesterday. It was with Learn2Craft, I've done both of her beginners' courses as well. New for the advanced course were two important aspects: tiered cakes and modelling chocolate. I'm going to show off shamelessly here:

 The most time went into the three-tiered one at the back, obviously. We made all the flowers by hand, and the second layer was my first chance to use an impression mat - I love it but it's going to take a while to do it perfectly! Here's a closer look:

 Look how the bottom piping on the right melted when I put it in the car! It was literally in the boot for about 2 minutes while I went back inside to fetch the other container with the other two cakes, but in that small time the icing melted and many of the flowers fell off - so I had to reattach them at home. Clearly the car was too hot! My friend Lee held her and my three-tiered cakes on her lap on the way home, otherwise I think I would have had real trouble.

A closer look. I'm proud of how the flowers turned out!

The second cake was my first attempt at making arum lilies, and I think it's the prettiest flower I've made to date:

The stamen in the middle is dipped in egg white and then in semolina that has been coloured yellow, to give it that authentic look. Isn't it beautiful!

Then the last little cake, which arguably isn't as pretty as the other two, was covered in modelling chocolate with a chocolate rose on top. I found the dark modelling chocolate quite hard to work with, you'll see my rose is not perfect by any definition. But the discovery of the day was the white modelling chocolate - it tastes SOOO much better than fondant, you can roll it thinner and other than that you can do pretty much anything with it that you would normally do with fondant. I'm excited to do more modelling chocolate work!

For some reason I can't upload the picture I want to show you - just a close-up of the small cake. I'll try to edit after I've posted this. I'm still too new to blogging to be able to troubleshoot effectively.

German chocolate cake

2 weeks ago, my very good friend Lee had a birthday party and I offered to bake her a cake. She's a chocoholic and requested a chocolate-caramel-type cake, so I decided to try a German chocolate cake from this recipe book. The recipe was fairly easy, the filling was special (although VERY sweet and rich) and the end result looked quite pretty. Here goes:

Ingredients for the cake:
100 g (3.5 oz) sweet milk chocolate
Half a cup of water
2 cups flour
1 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
pinch of salt
250 g (8.8 oz or two sticks) butter
2 cups sugar
4 eggs, separated
1 tsp vanilla essence / extract
1 cup buttermilk

Ingredients for the filling:
4 egg yolks
1 1/4 cups evaporated milk
1 1/2 teaspoon vanilla essence / extract
1 1/2 cups sugar
190 g (6.5 oz or 1 1/2 sticks) butter
2 cups dessicated coconut
1 1/2 cups pecan nuts, chopped and roasted

Ingredients for the icing:
250 g (8.8 oz or 2 sticks) butter
1 1/3 cups cocoa powder, sifted
5 cups icing sugar, sifted
2/3 cup milk
2 teaspoons vanilla essence / extract

Preheat the oven to 180 C (350 F). Grease and line 3 round 7 inch cake tins.

I'll walk you through how I did it, not just what the recipe says, which will never be exactly the same thing. So to start off, I didn't have sweet milk chocolate, only dark chocolate (52% couverture) so that's what I used.

Put the chocolate and water into a glass bowl and microwave for about 2 minutes, stirring once. You don't want the water to boil or the chocolate to melt completely, but the mixture should be warm enough that the chocolate will melt when you stir if afterwards.

In a mixing bowl, sift the flour, bicarb of soda and salt together.

At this point the recipe tells you to start beating butter and sugar and egg yolks in your electric mixer, but if you're like me and you dislike washing your mixer bowl, start by beating the egg whites until they form stiff peaks, and tip it out into a bowl. You can rinse the mixer bowl but it's probably not even necessary - and it's far easier to clean out egg whites to prepare batter than to clean out batter so you can whisk egg whites, which needs a super-clean mixing bowl.

Now measure your butter and sugar into the electric mixer.

Then, with the paddle attachment, beat the butter and sugar until light and fluffy.

Add the egg yolks, one at a time, mixing well in between. Scrape down the sides of the bowl if necessary.
Blend in the melted chocolate and vanilla essence, until has an almost chocolate-mousse like consistency:

Add the flour mixture alternately with the buttermilk, mixing well after each addition. Now mix in the whisked egg whites gently.

Pour the batter into the prepared pans and bake for 30-35 minutes. I had to bake mine a little longer - maybe 40 minutes in total. You'll know they're done when they spring back a little when you press them in the middle with the flat side of a knife or fork. When they come out of the oven, immediately run a small spatula around the edge of each layer. Cool in the pans for 15 minutes and turn out onto a wire rack.

At this point I ran into a bit of a disappointment, as the cakes didn't turn out well at all, despite the fact that I greased and lined the pans really well. It stuck to the greasing paper, which was additionally greased with butter so it really shouldn't happen:

That's the underside which should be flat - so I really don't like the actual cake recipe all that much. In retrospect I think if I make this recipe again I'll use a different recipe for the actual cake but I will use the filling and icing again - this is quite an expensive cake with the chocolate and buttermilk and all that, and while it gives a nice dense cake I think there are other ways of achieving that.

While the cake is in the oven, start preparing the filling:

Combine the egg yolks, evaporated milk and vanilla in a saucepan.

Whisk until well blended. Add the sugar and butter and cook on medium heat for 12 minutes, stirring constantly.

Remove from the heat. At this point you'll need to protect your tongue and waistline because it smells exactly like hot fudge (which it is, mostly) but it is VERY hot so succumbing to the temptation to take a spoonful might give you blisters.

If you bought roasted nuts, you can just chop them up, otherwise dry-roast them in a pan over low heat and then chop them up:

Add the coconuts and pecan nuts to the fudge filling. Mix well and cool until you can easily spread it.

For the icing:

Clean up your mixer bowl, and then mix the butter and cocoa powder until combined. Add half of the icing sugar, followed by the milk and rest of the icing sugar. Add vanilla and beat until fluffy. I didn't take pictures of this bit, sorry!

I used only about half of the icing sugar and half of the milk and it gave a nice dark not-too-sweet icing, which as it turns out was an inspired choice as the filling is REALLY sweet. In fact when we had the cake that night it was actually a bit overpoweringly rich and sweet, which was disappointing. My friend Lee did say it improved vastly by the next day so maybe this cake is best made a day or two in advance.

So, on to assembly:

Spread half of the filling on the bottom cake layer and the other half on the second, and top with the third layer. You'll have quite a high cake:

Choose the layer with the flattest bottom to go right on top, so you can ice the top as flatly as possible. Then spread the icing evenly over the sides and top. I think this goes well with very little decoration, so I just added a candle:

And here's a picture of the sliced cake, from about 5 hours later:

So what I'd do differently:

1. If I use the same cake recipe, I definitely won't use couverture chocolate. I really couldn't taste the difference that actual chocolate makes in this recipe.

2. The filling is perhaps a bit thick, so I might use less coconut so that it can spread thinner. Hanno also doesn't really like coconut, so an alternative is to use just a lot of nuts with the fudge, which would give it more crunch and it could be really lovely.

3. I'd make it a day or two in advance so all the flavours have a while to settle together.

Anyway, so there you have it! Let me know if you've tried something like this.