There’s something to be said for a lazy pancake breakfast on the weekend, however it’s usually lazy for everyone except the cook! Which, in my family, means me…
While everyone else in the family gets to lounge about, drinking tea and reading in bed, if there’s to be a pancake breakfast it means that I’m usually working at a flurried pace in the kitchen, trying to get everything ready before hungry stomachs decide that they can’t wait and reach for Friday night leftovers or toast instead…
Dutch baby pancakes (also called German pancakes – though this is not the same as Apfelpfannkuchen), are very different to the fluffier, cakier pancakes that are common in Western cuisine. With no leavening agent and a very different flour : egg : milk ratio, the end result is denser and eggier, but that’s not to say that they’re any less delicious!
These babies are definitely the way you should go if you want a truly lazy pancake breakfast – the hands-on preparation time is all of about 5 minutes (though you can increase that to 10 minutes if you want to serve this with a fresh fruit salad like I do), and once you pop it in the oven you can sit back and relax with the rest of the family till it’s done, at which point everyone can sit down to eat together 
Now, that’s definitely my idea of a lazy pancake breakfast!
Dutch Baby Pancake
(Slightly adapted from the recipe at About.com)
Ingredients
1/2 cup all-purpose flour, sifted
3 eggs
1/2 cup milk
2 tbsp unsalted butter, melted
1 tbsp unsalted butter, at room temperature
1/4 teaspoon salt
1. Preheat oven to 180 degrees C with a cast iron skillet (or oven-safe frying pan) inside. Break eggs into a large bowl and lightly beat together. Add the milk, melted butter and salt and beat lightly again.
2. Gradually add the sifted flour to the egg mix, beating it in lightly with a fork.
3. Take the 1tbsp unmelted buter and toss into the heated skillet in the oven and give it a few seconds to melt. Swirl it around, then pour in the batter and bake for 20-30 minutes, or till puffed high and golden
Serve however you wish! Traditionally served with lemon juice, clarified butter and sprinkled sugar, I prefer to use it as a kind of fruit bowl with chopped season fruit placed in the middle and dusted with icing sugar! Of course, to make it even more decadent, you can add a dollop of lightly whipped cream and drizzle of maple syrup…if you like
You can serve this baby in the skillet, tossing everything inside and giving everyone a fork, or if you prefer to do things in a more orderly fashion, you can pull it out of the pan (if your skillet is properly seasoned then this baby will slide straight out!) and serve everyone neat little wedges so they can enjoy it however they like
Other recipes for dutch baby pancakes/ German pancakes:
[tags]pancakes, German pancakes, Dutch Baby pancakes, breakfast, recipes[/tags]
So about a month ago, I got sent to Sydney on a 2 day work jaunt, and decided to take the opportunity to put the call out to any Sydney foodbloggers who wouldn’t mind catching up for dinner while I was in town. Luckily for me, Helen (Grab Your Fork), Suze (Chocolate Suze) and Reem (I Am Obsessed With Food) put their hands up, and after a bit of emailing back and forth, we decided to try Bodega Tapas Bar in Surry Hills for dinner (which, luckily for me, was also just up the road from the hotel I was holed up in!)
Part of the reason that I pushed for this choice was that I had only just visited MoVida the week before, and had so thoroughly loved my experience that I was curious as to how other places would do it…
To be honest, the food was pretty fabulous! While the fare was not quite as spectacular as Frank Camorra’s offerings that I’d experienced at MoVida the week before, I really couldn’t fault any of it. However, I did feel a bit let down by both the bread and the dessert – after experiencing two amazing artisan breads at MoVida (which the girls and I had adored so much that we actually got a second plate!), I felt that the bread here was a bit bland (which served to accentuate the olive oil that it was served with, rather than enhance as I had experienced at MoVida).
And dessert? Okay, so I bake a lot, but I don’t have much of a sweet tooth, and I couldn’t finish mine at all (and kept pushing it helpfully in the direction of Reem in the hopes that she’d help me out!). The flan didn’t have the soft, melty texture that I expect with that sort of dessert, and the ginger biscuit it was served with did not give even the slightest hint of ginger flavour. The only redeeming part of the entire dish for me was the dulche de leche ice cream, which delightfully creamy, but melted far too quickly for my ice-cream nibbling ways 
Food aside, it was fabulous to meet all three ladies, and I commend them for not being overly taken aback by the loud, swearing and eccentric Melbournian who visited their home town Thanks for the lovely time, folks!
Also, I took the chance to visit the Sydney Fish Markets on my spare day, which turned out to have a pretty decent yumcha restaurant right in the heart of it! Who knew? Unfortunately all my photos taken there turned out quite rubbish, but I am quite fond of this photo which I nabbed while walking through one of the buildings…
Too true, folks. Too true.
Tune in next time for my own variation on chicken & vegetable wonton soup, and English muffins. Which I’m hoping will prove third time lucky (the recipe turns out perfectly each time.
To all you readers on Facebook – Did you know that the Kitchen Wench blog now has a Facebook group? I tend to be much more active on Facebook than on the blog itself, so please join me as well as other readers to mingle and talk food
I adore banana, I really do…but I have a problem with the texture. That claggy, glaggy throat-clogging texture drives me to distraction in a very bad way, and I find that I just can’t tolerate the fruit in its natural state. However, that certainly doesn’t stop me from enjoying it in any other way possible, which may explain why I am always on the lookout for new recipes to try this fruit in!
When my kid sister bought me this cookbook, I was immediately smitten with this recipe…though why I didn’t try it sooner is beyond me! It’s a very dense and heavy loaf cake, but has an inexplicably moist and delicate crumb that melts on the tongue and keeps you coming back for more.
Banana & Date Bread
(from Donna Hay Simple Essentials – Fruit)
Ingredients
125g unsalted butter, softened & cut into cubes
175g brown sugar
2 large eggs, lightly beaten together
200g all-purpose flour (recipe originally called for 225g)
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp bicarb soda (also known as baking soda)
1/4 tsp ground nutmeg
1/4 tsp ground cinnamon
1 1/2 cups mashed banana (make sure it’s well mashed)
1/4 cup pure maple syrup (not that horrid maple-flavoured syrup nonsense)
1 cup roughly chopped dried dates
1. Preheat the oven to 160 degrees C, lightly grease a small loaf tin and line with non-stick baking paper. Place the butter &sugar in a bowl and beat till pale and creamy. Gradually add the egg while beating, then beat to combine.
2. Sift together the flour, bicarb soda, baking powder, nutmeg and cinnamon twice to ensure the leaveners are not clumped together.
3. Add the chopped dates to the flour and stir well to ensure they’re well coated with flour (this prevents them from sinking to the bottom during baking)
4. Stir the sifted flour & dates into the creamed butter & eggs mixture.
5. Pour the maple syrup into the mashed bananas and mix, then add the bananas to the rest of the batter and lightly mix together (do not overwork as this will make the cake tougher, and you want a nice tender crumb for this cake)
6. Spoon into the lined loaf tin and bake for 70 minutes, or till a skewer inserted into the middle of the loaf comes out clean.
Allow this loaf to cool completely before slicing as it has a very moist & delicate crumb, and if you attempt to slice it before it is cool, the sodding thing will fall apart! However, once it is cooled, slices do taste best when slightly warmed…though temperature won’t matter much when you give this a taste!
Even though I’ve dropped the amount of sugar in this recipe, it’s still quite a sweet treat so I highly recommend making a pot of unsweetened tea to accompany it.
Apologies for taking so long since my last update…I’m a bit bulldozed by things happening in my life at present and blogging has taken quite a back seat. However, hopefully things will begin to settle down soon
[tags]banana, dates, bread, cake, baking, recipes[/tags]
Okay, so this guide is more than a few weeks late…and really isn’t the best I could’ve done considering that I put it together out of sheer boredom while in the throes of a head cold…but hopefully some of you out there will find it handy!
When it comes to fondant, I’m hardly an expert. I’ve only dabbled with it a teensy bit, and have had to mostly rely on my experience with Play-Dough as a kid to figure out how to make these. Which really brings me to a point – if you haven’t tried playing with fondant, you should! It’s a legitimate reason to make cute, crazy and whacky figurines – which can be used to decorate cakes or cupcakes, and are entirely edible!
Now, since this guide will show you a step-by-step of how to make all five figures above (bear, puppy, pig, bee and giraffe), it’s quite long so I’m going to put it behind a cut. If you read through it and have any questions, just send me an email and I’ll do what I can to help!
Onwards to the guides!
First of all, the things in my fondant play kit:
1. A decent little knife for cutting fondant
2. Fondant/clay modelling tools (the fondant ones work better, but the clay tools work almost as well and cost a fraction of the price!)
3. Clean, small-tipped paint brushes
4. Colouring pastes and gels (avoid working water watery dyes as they will give you GRIEF)
5. A small rolling pin for rolling the fondant
6. Fondant stamp-cutters
7. Wilton grass icing bag tip (it’s what I used to make the grass in this picture)
8. Frangipani petal cutters – I have these in a range of sizes and use the smallest to cut mouths and bee wings
9. Vegetable shortening – if your fondant becomes too hard or dry, working a little vegetable shortening helps it to become soft and pliable again
10. Tylo ‘glue’ – an edible glue I purchase at my cake supplies store, which is marvellous for sticking fondant pieces together. If you can’t get access to any, you can use natural vanilla extract in a bind (do not, however, use water as I find it doesn’t really wor and just gives you sticky fondant)
11. Gum Tragacanth – a very fine powder which can be kneaded into fondant to thicken it and make it more stable and pliable to work with. Not necessary, but I find that fondant is much easier to handle when I add a little of this in. The down side is that it dries the fondant faster than normal, which means you do need to work quicker and that mistakes are not as easily rectified.
12. Icing sugar or corn starch – the natural heat from your hands will make the fondant sticky, so having this on hand to dust your working surface and your hands will help make the whole task more manageable!
13. Fondant! Whether self-made or store-bought, it’s up to you! I don’t have a mixer strong enough to mix it up, so I buy blocks of premade from my baking supplies store which suits me just fine
In this picture, we have:
While I was born in South Korea, my family immigrated to Australia when I was just 4 years old, therefore I never really had a chance to spend much time with my extended family – especially my mother’s parents, whom I’ve always loved and yearned for more time with.
We did go back to Korea for a few years, and that gave me a chance to spend a bit more time with my maternal grandmother which helped me to understand more about the role that food played in our culture, as well as where my mother had picked up her flavour instincts from! Sadly, nanna was taken from us unexpectedly while we were living there, so the only way that I can find out more about her now is through the stories and recipes that my mother shares.
This is one of them. My mother says this is utterly unaltered from the way that nanna made this all her life, and so when I make this recipe, I sometimes like to imagine her busy hands in the place of my own, and wonder whether she would approve of the way that her granddaughter was making this dish
I’m posting this recipe in reply to a special request by Stephanie at Dispensing Happiness, who wanted it to introduce her son to Korean food. I hope he and the rest of your family enjoy it
Korean Braised Potatoes
Ingredients
2 large potatoes (or 3 medium)
3-4 cloves garlic
1 – 1 1/2 tsp gochugaru (finely-ground Korean chilli powder)
3 tbsp Korean or Japanese dark soy sauce (not Chinese – it has a completely different flavour)
1 tbsp white sugar
2 tbsp malt syrup
1/2 cup water
A pinch of salt
Toasted sesame seeds, to garnish
1. Peel the potatoes, then cut in half lengthways. Take one half of the potato, cut it lengthways again, then turn and cut into fairly evenly-sized pieces (to ensure relatively even cooking). Repeat with the remaining potatoes.
2. Rinse the chopped potato in a bowl of water, then either steam/boil/microwave until the potato is half cooked. This is definitely not a traditional step, but using this shortcut will cut your cooking time in half!
3. Meanwhile, take 3-4 garlic cloves and use your kitchen knife to finely mince them.
4. Once the potatoes are half-cooked, drain them and sit them to cool for about 5 minutes. While they are cooling, mix together the soy sauce, gochugaru (Korean chilli powder), garlic and sugar.
5. Heat a large pot or work with a little olive oil over a very low heat, then slowly sautee the potatoes with a pinch of salt until they can be poked through with a fork without them breaking in half.
6. Once the potatoes have reached this stage, pour over the soy sauce mixture and stir to coat.
7. Add the malt syrup to the water and stir to mix, then add it to the pot and stir well to combine.
8. Put the lid on and allow to slowly cook, making sure to give it a stir occasionally so that the sauce evenly coats the potatoes, and that they do not stick to the pan. You will notice that the longer you braise them, the more the sauce will reduce and the darker it will become.
If the sauce disappears entirely before the potatoes are cooked, add a little more water to the pot and stir it through and keep cooking. You do not want these potatoes to be overcooked – just cooked enough so they hold their shape and are soft to bite all the way through with no crunchiness.
9. DO NOT SERVE THIS DISH HOT! Instead, allow this to cool at least to room temperature (as this is when the flavours will shine most), then plate up and garnish very simply with a pinch of toasted sesame seeds.
[tags]Korean recipes, spicy, savoury, potatoes, vegetarian, side dish[/tags]
Others who have tried this recipe:
- Stephanie @ Dispensing Happiness
