Nuggetty Goodness

Everything except adding the blueberries and shaping the cookies into balls is done in a food processor. You prolly want a sturdy food processor though, my last puny one died in horror at the thought of having to make a whole lemon tart.

Why egg whites? Because we had some left over and I wanted to get rid of them.

Why brown sugar? To make up for the lack of egg yolk.

Why not just cream the cookies? I was curious to see whether this 'reverse creaming' method works for cookies too. It works great for scones, cupcackles, and pie crusts after all. And also because washing the food processor is less work than beating in flour or folding it in with a spoon, and for me, the lazier a recipe, the better. Plus, this requires no planning (no leaving the butter out), and no guess-nuking to soften the butter. Lastly, I hate creaming butter, the sugar always tries to escape, and I get bored standing there with the hand mixer...

Chewy inside, crispy outside lemon cookie!
400g cake flour
100g salted butter (room temp)
150g white sugar
50g dark brown sugar
60g egg white
Zest from 1 lemon
Juice from half a lemon (50ml~)
Some dried blueberries (fresh ones will leak horribly)
Vanilla essence

1. Throw butter, sugars, cake flour into food processor
   
2. Pulse until breadcrumby
   
3. Add lemon zest
   
4. Pulse some more
   
5. Add vanilla essence and lemon juice to whirring food processor
   
6. Pulse until dough looks right - sort of like plasticine
7. Mix in blueberries
   
8. Plop in fridge for about an hour
   
9. Preheat oven to 150-60C
10. Make (large) truffle-sized balls, try to get at least one blueberry per cookie
    
11. Plop balls about 2 inches apart on cookie sheet
    
12. Bake for 20~ minutes, until edges are slightly brown
    

Dark chocolate base is exactly the same as the hazelnut pistachio strawberry osmanthus truffle bar things, except without hazelnut essence.

I'm not a huge fan of white chocolate (too sweet for me), but a work human really likes these - he took this photo - so I'm plopping the green tea white chocolate part here.

Ingredients

• 50ml sweetened condensed milk (aka 1 part)
• 100g white chocolate (aka 2 parts)
  Broken into squares it comes in. I'm too lazy to do more than that.
• some matcha (about a teaspoon)
  You can get a cheap matcha from an Asian grocery ($5 or so for a small tin). Just make sure it's actually matcha, from Japan, or it will likely be waaaaay too bitter.
  T_T I thought I could be a cheapo-nug and get a 500g bag of green tea powder from Taiwan. Don't do it!!! That stuff is foul.
  Don't use ceremonial matcha (the stuff the ninja ladies in Lustbader books do tea ceremonies with) - other than being very expensive, IMO it's a waste. You lose the umamis and delicate flavours once the white chocolate steamrolls over them.
  

1. Dump white chocolate in a bowl.
2. Shove bowl in microwave, melt at half power for 15s.
3. Stir.
4. Repeat Step 2 and 3 until there are just a few nubs of unmelted white chocolate left.
   Should be about 3 - 5 minutes or so of heating in total. Do NOT just set the microwave to half power for 3 minutes and nuke. You need to do the irritating nuke and stir because white chocolate burns very very easily. If you just nuke without stirring, it will burn, and there's no saving it. Well, you could pretend you wanted to 'caramelise' it. XD You can also do all this on a water bath if you want. ;)
5. Stir until the unmelted white chocolate goes away.
6. Plop in condensed milk, stir stir stir till incorporated.
   It will look a bit greasy, don't worry about it. :)
7. Assuming you've also made the dark chocolate bottom, pour that into some kind of (parchment-paper-lined) pan, make pathetic attempt at forming some sort of 'slab'.
8. Plop the green tea white chocolate blob on top, and make a further sad attempt at slabbing it evenly.
9. Decorate in a suitably 'artisanal' fashion.
10. Put gently in fridge (no need to cover unless your fridge has stinky things).
11. Ignore for at least 4 hours.
12. Remoof from fridge, cut into squares.
13. Eat all the leavings that are ~_o 'unfit for presentation'.
    

Ceremonial matcha
I realised I was doing too much matcha-ranting in the ingredients section, so I moved that here...

This matcha is one of my favourite ceremonial matchas, and is great value for money for drinking.

O-cha are great, and buying from them is cheaper (shipping included) than buying matcha locally in Australia. And the quality is amazing.

If you're curious about matcha brewed usucha or koicha style, then I'd advise getting some overpriced and expensive Australian stuff (T2, kenkotea, etc), and only then getting stuff from O-cha. Then you'll really be able to compare a good matcha with a terrible (or badly stored) one. ;)

So cute! Also super simple, and not as fiddly as it looks.

The only thing we actually made was the mousse.

Would have been prettier with fresh, edible flowers. But a lot more perishable, so I didn't use them. Also, I was too lazy to go the market to get those...

Ingredients
Coles icing sugar flowers - I wanted the roses, but the Coles I went to didn't have them. :(
Coles 100s & 1000s aka fairies - not the shiny silver fairies, the cute pastel fairies! Also known as dragees.
Green tea & adzuki bean biscuit, crushed - can't find pics because I can't remember the name. ;>.> The important thing is that the biscuit must be green tea, not the filling. Or else it will probably not be green enough to be moss. Or you can make your own green tea biscuits and crush them.
Chocolate mousse (eggless) - but not fatless! Ooh fat. I love fat.

Chocolate Mousse Crafting Ingredients
100g 70% cocoa chocolate
200ml sweetened condensed milk
300ml double cream <-- yes, fat, fat cream!
Some dutch processed cocoa powder (non-dutch will work also)

Chocolate Mousse Crafting Process

1. Melt chocolate in microwave, or icky double boiler. Don't burn it. :P
2. Add sweetened condensed milk to chocolate.
3. Stir till it's more or less all the same
   
4. Add cocoa powder.
5. Stir some more, again until more or less all the same.
6. Plop in all the double cream.
7. Stir some more, again until more or less all the same. Zzzz.
8. Beatbeat with hand mixer till stiff peaks. This happens FAST. Probably in a minute, tops.

Tiny Fairy Garden Mousse Pot Assembly

1. Plop chocolate mousse into ziplock bag.
2. Cut off corner of bag.
3. Pipe into cups.
   Stop at around 2/3 full. It will look like the cutest little turd. That is fine, because next we...
4. Flatten the mousse so it doesn't look quite so turdlike.
   It doesn't have to be perfectly flat. Flat like churned, soft mud is fine. After all, no one is going to be able to see it.
5. Dump carefully sprinkle crushed biscuit until you have an evenish layer.
   It's ok if you can still see a bit of mousse. Just not a lot of it.
6. Bang each pot (carefully!) against your work surface a few times to settle everything.
7. Sprinkle 100s & 1000s of fairies.
   Ok maybe a few less.
8. Place icing sugar flowers.
9. Refrigerate!
   Or eat. You can eat them at this point. Or take photos of them. Then eat them.
   

Pristine Fairy Habitat

This edible fairy garden (EAT ALL THE FAIRIES!) >.> uses exactly the same base as the Hazelnut pistachio strawberry osmanthus truffle bar things.

Except that this time round, for pretties and flavourings we haz:
- rose essence
- vanilla essence
- rose petals (from dried rosebuds for rose tea - some steamed to rehydrate them, some straight off the dry buds)
- freeze-dried peach slice, chopped
- silver sugar ball things (I think they're called 'dragees'. Or maybe 'fairies'. ~_o )
- cheap matcha (nothing you'd want to make koicha, or even usucha with - good enough to cook is good enough)

Am very pleased a nugget at how the blend of flavours turned out. If you like Turkish delight chocolates, this is just the thing, with the peaches adding interesting 'high' notes, and the pistachios adding nice texture. :X The matcha just adds fairy moss.

Blurry Chunks of Sundered Fairy Habitat

Alas, all my pics of the sliced squares turned out blurry. T_T That's what I get for taking pics after sundown!

Being the soul of restraint, it's SO unusual for me to go completely mad, and throw in the kitchen sink. Of course it is. Ahem.

1) Hmm wanna make truffles but too lazy to roll balls. Okok let's make truffle bars.
2) Drat, no Nutella, was planning to use that. Ooh but look, hazelnut essence. Ok!
3) Pistachio looks so pretty in choccies, let's throw some in.
4) Hey I have those freeze dried strawberries, and pink is pretty with green. Chop some of those and put them on top!
5) Oo yellow is pretty with pink and I just happen to have dried osmanthus flowers...

And so we have these Hazelnut pistachio strawberry osmanthus truffle bar things.

Best of all, they're super easy to make (well the base is), and you can throw as many 'pretties' as you like in / on top.

Ingredients
200ml sweetened condensed milk (aka 2 parts)
200g good 70% cocoa dark chocolate (aka 2 parts) (broken into squares it comes in. I'm too lazy to do more than that.)
25g~ honey
25g~ butter (salted, unsalted, doesn't matter. I used salted cause lazy.)
some vanilla essence
some hazelnut essence
some freeze-dried strawberries (chopped)
some osmanthus flowers
some pistachios (whole)

Crafting
1) Dump chocolate, honey, butter in a bowl.
2) Shove bowl in microwave, melt until melted. Until the chocolate and stuff is melted. Not the bowl. If the bowl has melted, you've gone too far. Safest to stop when there are a few lumps of chocolate left, and finish it by stirring it all into a homogenous gloop.
3) Throw in essences, stir stir stir till incorporated.
4) Plop in condensed milk, stir stir stir till incorporated.
5) Mix in pistachios .
6) Pour into some kind of (parchment-paper-lined) pan, make pathetic attempt at forming some sort of 'slab'.
7) Decorate with freeze-dried strawberry pieces and osmanthus flowers in a suitably 'artisanal' fashion.
8) Tos...put gently in fridge (no need to cover unless your fridge has stinky things).
9) Ignore for at least 4 hours.
10) Remoof from fridge, cut into squares.
11) Eat all the leavings that are ~_o 'unfit for presentation'.

Notes
If you want to mess with the ratio of condensed milk to chocolate, more milk will give you softer trufflepieces, more chocolate will give you harder ones (duh right). This ratio gives you pretty much perfect 'fancy truffle' texture. Not too squishy, not too hard, just right.

I don't care if stuff is flourless, eggless, butterless, whateverless one way or the other, but I do care if there is less stuff I have to do. ;)

These are one-bowl, no creaming, no softening butter, etc. Basically just dump and stir. Perfect!

I didn't change the recipe at all (unusual for me), though ofc I didn't really measure stuff, I just eyeballed it...

Only things I did change were the baking times (and I think) the portion sizes.

I tend to like my cookies to be 1 teaspoon or so, rather than the 1 tablespoon that a lot of recipes seem to like.

I also reduced the baking time, because at 11m, the first batch was waaaaay overdone. Still edible, but with edges beginning to burn.

I don't think it's a problem with the original recipe though, which is great.

I think it may be that:
- my new oven runs hot
- I'm baking on parchment paper on a black cookie sheet
- my cookies are smaller

With those things in mind 8m 15s at 175C turned out perfect cookies for me! :) Yey!

Also, if you tend to think more in ratios like me, the ingredient ratio is roughly:
- 4 parts peanut butter
- 4 parts dark brown sugar
- 1 part egg
- some choc chips
- some baking powder

Really nice cookies, and super lazy! Crispy on the outside, fudgy on the inside, and almost no work. :X

I did change her recipe slightly, to make it less sweet. Plus I added orange essence. And less vanilla essence.

My tweaked version

• 2 c. powdered sugar
• 3/4 c. unsweetened cocoa powder
• 1/4 tsp. salt
• 3 large egg whites
• Some vanilla extract
• Some orange essence
• Some gold powdered sugar for sprinklies
• Bake 7m 30s at just under 180C
  

Technique-wise, it's exactly the same as what Kate posted! Yep, no need to beat those egg whites! WOOHOO! :X

I'm not a big chocolate fan but I like these a lot. ^_^

Recipes act as a guide at best. There are so many variables so that you can't duplicate the dish exactly. At best, you approximate. Learn instead, to be guided by your own sense of taste and experiment with flavour combination. This often requires some imagination. This is not going to come to you immediately. Patiently, build up your experience and palate. As always, this will come more naturally or easily to some. Some will have a longer learning curve. But if you are always relying on recipes, you will not be able to break out of that. Your learning curve has not even begun.

Recipes are like GPS. There are often helpful to get you to your destination. But over-rely on it, and you will cease to think or map out your own sense of direction. After a while, without GPS, you become a stranger in your own city.

That is the same problem with cooking entirely from recipes. We use the ingredients without asking why and we never seek to understand the essence of the dish. The experience with the dish remains contained within itself, locked in its own recipe, and you will never try to do something else from it.    

- Cooking without a recipe, The Food Canon

I got a wok!

And I didn't set my apartment on fire! (My last personal encounter with a wok resulted in a fire - just a tiiiiny one - in the middle of my wok, and failed Home Economics exam.)

AND I managed to make *proper* Cantonese sweet and sour pork omg! I was so surprised that it all got eaten without any documentation. :P

Not sure I would make it again though... so much *work*! I guess it depends on how desperate I get to find real sweet and sour pork done right in Melbourne. I found only one place, that did it right ONE time, and then they changed the darn cook! Hrmph.

>.> Now, about that sauce... I hate tomatoes, so I had to find some other way to get a nice, authentic-tasting sauce... (I don't care about authentic ingredients, I just care about authentic taste.)

Behold - my cheaty non-tomato sweet and sour sauce!

As usual, I didn't actually measure anything, so this is me thinking of what I madly shook into the bowl and approximating. :P

Crafting materials
2 large oranges (juice and zest)
4 tbsp caster sugar
2 tsp balsamic vinegar
4 tsp cornstarch
3 drops red food colouring, 1 drop yellow (totally optional, it doesn't look traditionally 'red' enuff without the colouring, cause no evil tomatoes)
Tiny bit of salt (optional - only needed if you think the stuff you're putting it on may not be savoury enuff.)

Crafting method

1. Zest oranges
2. Squeeze tiny bit of juice into some kind of microwave-safe container
3. Add cornstarch and stir until you get a slurry
4. Add rest of orange juice, orange zest, sugar, balsamic vinegar, and food colouring + salt if using
5. Stir stir stir until sort of homogenous
6. Nuke for 3m to 5m
7. Check on the sauce in 30s intervals. You want it to turn sticky and drippy, but still liquid. Sort of like... wimpy glue in the sponge-topped bottles that they give to kids to do paper art or school crafts (...not sure if they even still make that lol)
   Wait no nevermind, better description! You want it to turn sticky and drippy, but still liquid, like warm honey! Woot! :P
   You can make the sauce on the stove as well if you don't have a microwave... But in that case, I have no idea how long it takes, just what it should be like (see above).
   

That's it really... >.>

Yay! An orange creamsicle with chocolate rice bits rose thingie!

Turns out that with the right tool (yay trowel), making icecream roses is really quite easy, and rather fun!

The trick is to start off with thin squarish pieces for the base, rotating the cone as you go along.

Then, towards the outer bit of the flowers, slowly start using thin rectangular pieces, rather than squarish ones, for the outer petals.

Also best done with icecream right out of the freezer - letting it melt just makes things messier and more squidgy.

Smooth icecreams are obviously the easiest to work with, but chunky icecreams work fine too, except for marshmallows. The darn things bounce all over the place and don't cut very well. And even if you manage to cut them, they try to fall off the petals...

Interestingly, these roses pack a LOT of icecream into a single cone. About 2 scoops worth, even if it doesn't look that way.

They also offer a nice way to mix flavours! So far I've just done the centre as one flavour, with outer petals as other flavours, but this is mostly because I only have one trowel...

21 cones later, it takes me about 2-3 minutes to make one rose. It's really very easy, once you get the basic concept down. Plus, as mentioned before, it gives the icecream a super 'fluffy' mouthfeel.

Now I'm wondering why this isn't more popular at icecream / gelato / frozen yoghurt shops.

If you want to try it out, but don't want to get a trowel...you can use a pie slicer, but their tapered heads are far from ideal. It's hard to get good leverage, and even harder to cut the icecream in thin slices. You'll end up with a different shape of petal, that can be quite tricky to maneuver. It's not unpossible (see previous post), but the trowel makes a HUGE difference, and isn't expensive.