it's just not cricket

well actually it is cricket. i've just got back from my second day night match in three days. on sunday india were beaten by australia (yah boo sucks, couldn't hit a squashed tomato etc), but tonight beat sri lanka by just four balls. it was quite exciting at the end.

if you don't understand cricket, as an adult it's rather difficult to get the hang of it (or care enough to get the hang of it). there are rules. even though the basic premis is very simple. let's just say i'm more than happy to explainit to anyone who would like to know!

here are some random photos! hurrah!

more about me

i was just mucking about with my flickr site, and while changing my icon looked at my profile. i can be funny sometimes when i want to be:

a travelling freak, boring history girl manages to stave off itchy feet for no more than half an hour at a time. her aim is to kiss the animals in every nation on earth.

while waiting for fund for the next ticket, she works in an office. At these times she is not boring history girl, she is just bored.

china is her new favourite place on earth

it is quite possible that china is still my new favourite place on earth (although i am thinking lots about india and italy at the moment), and i would still very much like to kiss the animals in every nation on earth. cheques can be sent directly to me please....

gnocchi made easy

whilst looking for something today – not sure what, think it might have been bus timetables – i came across canela y comino's lovely site full of delicious things, like peruvian chilli paste ...... mmmmmm.... peruvian chilli paste. but she mentioned her trouble with gnocchi.

avid readers of BHG (yeah, right), will remember i mentioned gnocchi last week and how easy it is to make. it seems that this is not the case for all. maybe i have been blessed with some suppressed italian gene, or perhaps it’s just one of those things that people are told is hard, and therefore they get so wound up about it that they doom themselves to failure. Kinda like brain surgery.

anyhoo, this is how i make potato gnocchi,

you’ll need: 1 potato per person, plain flour, an egg, a pot of boiling water, a fork.

• Peel and dice the potato and boil until well cooked. Drain potatoes and mash well

• As soon as the potatoes are cool enough to handle, put them out onto a floured surface. Add a handful of flour and mix it into the mash by hand
• Crack an egg into the centre and mix in. Also add approximately a handful of flour for every potato
• Continue to add flour while kneeding until you have a dough similar in texture to bread dough.

• Roll the dough out into sausages. It doesn’t really matter how thick as long as their diameter is consistent. Using the fork cut the individual gnocchi off the sausage (you’ll be glad i told you to get the fork out at the beginning. I always forget and have to rummage around my cutlery drawer with hands caked in potato dough)
• You can just cook them like this. If you want to get the little stripes on them you can either just press a fork down onto them, or i get the fork, and place it on the far corner of the gnocchi (cutting the gnocchi will have formed little rectangles). i then pull the fork across the dumpling, rolling my wrist up, so that the diagonal corner folds in over the gnocchi. Very hard to explain, but this almost creates little ‘cups’ to hold the sauce.
• Add the gnocchi in batches to fast boiling water. Once they rise to the surface they’re ready to eat. Make sure the water comes back to the boil between batches. Once they’re cooked scoop them out of the water between batches with a slotted spoon and add to the pot of sauce to keep them warm.

• You can freeze uncooked gnocchi on a floured baking tray and then transfer to a plastic bag. But once you get the hang of making them, they’re so quick and easy you probably won’t bother anymore. They’re much, much nicer fresh

Buon apetito!

On a personal note i went to a new argentinean restaurant tonight with the brother who is in town from up north. Big pieces of steak! mum ordered the goat leg. and that’s what she got. a whole goats leg. i kid you not (boom boom). i seriously wish i had a camera. we all helped out, but she took at least half of it home. it was truly delicious!

pecans and well hung frenchmen

i've seen a post somewhere for pecan cupcakes. do you think i can find it now? can i hell. did find one on batspit, which i have adapted. whilst they were baking i watched this rather strange short film i found on her site too. it's very very french, even though it seems to have been made by a bunch of englishmen. I love the women too. even though they're not all really beautiful per say, they're all so glamorous and attractive. that's france for you!

pecan cupcakes
125g raw caster sugar
125g butter
125g self raising flour
2 eggs
vanilla extract
approx 1 1/2 tablespoons sour cream
50g pecans
1 tablespoon brown sugar
a shake of cinnamon

cream the sugar and butter together until smooth. add the flour, vanilla and eggs, then add sour cream half a tablespoon at a time until the consistency is right. meanwhile crush pecans with the brown sugar and cinnamon in a mortar and pestle until the nuts are crushed.

place half of the mix in 12 paper lined muffin tins. sprinkle with the nut and sugar mix and cover with the remaining batter. bake for approx 15-20 mins at 180 degrees, or until a skewer comes out clean.

when cool ice with 100g butter creamed with 200g of icing sugar, then mixed with 1 tspn instant coffee in 1 tblspn of boiling water.

here they are, already in their container, ready to take to work for morning tea tomorrow

finally, a recipe

The lovely ladies whose tastebuds i am vying for in this month’s CCH prize, slush at quirky cupcake and tempered woman, have informed me to be in the running i need to supply all of you out there in your cyber kitchens with a recipes for my cocktail party of cakes.

The basic recipe is adapted from Nigella Lawson, with some modifications to make it cocktaily. I’m not a great baker, because i’m not used to working with precise measurements as you’ll see from what ensues (see my ‘handful’ measurement below):

Basic cakes

125g of each unsalted butter (at room temp), caster sugar and self raising flour.

2 large eggs

½ tsnp vanilla extract

Cream the butter and the sugar, sift in the flour then add the eggs and vanilla and mix to a smooth batter. Now for the fun part! The original recipe calls for 2-3 tablespoons of milk. In place of this add approx 1 to 1½ cap fulls of spirit, to form a nice batter that drops easily into muffin tins lined with cake papers. Different spirits affect the liquidity of the batter differently, so start with half a cap and continue to add until the batter is smooth, but not too runny.

cosmopolitans: cointreau

strawberry daiquiris: plain vanilla (add milk). Pipe a good quality, not over sweet strawberry jam into the cakes after they are cooked.

mango daiquiris: mango pulp and milk

cowboy cocksuckers: bailey’s irish cream

B52s: kahlua

mojitos or margaritas: juice of approximately 2 limes

affogato: plain vanilla (add milk)

Bake for 15-20 minutes in a pre-heated 200 degree celsius oven. Transfer to cake rakes and ice when cooled.

For the icing

For the basic batter sift 125g of icing sugar into 100g of softened cream cheese. This makes the icing quite stiff, but the spirit added can easily make it runny. If you want extra punch in your icing, you will need to add a little more icing sugar

Cosmopolitans. A few days before take a handful of dried cranberries, place in a bowl or plastic container and just cover with vodka. Leave to sit until the cranberries are plump and the vodka is coloured. Add the liquid to the icing, and top the cakes with the fruit.

Strawberry daiquiris: add vodka, and some red food colouring for effect. Top with strawberry slices

Mango daiquiris: add vodka and some mango pulp to icing. Top with more mango

Cowboy cocksuckers: add butterscotch schnapps to the icing and top with crushed butterscotch lollies

B52s: baileys icing

Mojito: add lime juice to icing. Garnish with a sugared mint lolly

Margaritas: lemon juice and tequila icing (be careful not to add too much juice or it will make the icing too runny. You could go easy on the tequila instead but...well, you know). Garnish with lime wedges

Affogato: frangelico and coffee icing. Garnish with coffee bean

And that’s it. Off course making a batch of each of these simultaneously will leave you very full, or very drunk. And if you’re doing this to get drunk, you’re probably better of just drinking the tequila. I made a batch with one of each cake. The recipe is for 12 cakes, but by the time you’ve divided them up into separate bowls to add the flavours, and lost batter on the side of each bowl, and each spoon, you end up with around 10 cakes anyway, same with the icing. For this challenge I tried a few others that either didn’t work (note: blue curacao and cakes just don’t mix), or were a little too obvious: vodka and orange. However there were flavours i was using just to get into the spirit of it (no pun intended) that really did work – the tequila in the margarita icing was particularly nice.

One of the joys of these would be making them for some sort of girlie party. You get to eat cake and have the flavour of the alcohol without ending up completely messy. The pink of the cosmopolitans is extra cute. Of course they’re not particularly appropriate for children’s parties or prohibitionist gatherings.

happy heart

yes, i have a happy heart tonight. the merit ceremony is over and done and i really don't have to stress about anything until... well until the art show in a couple of weeks, but that's OK.

i have celebrated with lasagna di melezzana e carne, arcade fire and okkervil river albums, and the wonderful lazy eye by silversun pickups. this song reminds me of the first time i heard pavement or superchunk, and my heart sings (and my heart sings in much better tune that the rest of me)

cupcake hero, february 08

these photos are from my first ever cupcake hero entry. this month's theme is liquor. i'm not sure, but i think american's use the term liquor the way us australian's would use the term spirits. normally i'm a coopers pale ale, or a gin and tonic person. neither of these really lend themselves to the cupcake realm.

my next favourite drink is a cosmopolitan (although unfortunatley they're so delicious i drink them too quickly and become quickly very, very messy). So i decided to soak some dried cranberries in vodka to make cosmopolitan cupcakes. then i thought about affogato, and thought i could do a vanilla cupcake with a coffee and frangelico icing (i always have a shot of frangelico on the side when i order affogato). in the end i did a whole freakin' cocktail party - i just got carried away. i did screwdrivers, and daiquiris (mango and strawberry) and mojitos and blue hawaiians and margaritas and B52s and cowboy cocksuckers. These photos are of the cosmopolitan, the mango daiquiri and the margarita. the margarita was acutally really nice - who would have though of putting tequilla in a cake??

of course i had to flavour both the cakes and the icing individually, which meant using a million little chinese bowls, which created a hell of a lot of washing up, and also gave me lots of bowls to lick (any adult who says they no longer lick the bowl is likely to be lying). so i'm feeling a little sugar'd (and vodka'd) out at the moment. i can see something very savoury in my future for dinner....