Mardi Gras King Cake

Mardi Gras in February is celebrated in different ways all over the world, but the festival is perhaps most synonymous with New Orleans. I visited New Orleans as part of a US road trip in September - you can read my travel review here - but while we missed Mardi Gras, we were able to see behind the scenes at Mardi Gras World.

Essentially a factory tour, we were able to see the floats and giant centrepieces of the parade being built and painted. Our visit began by watching a film explaining the origins and workings of the parade and we were able to try on some costumes, and eat some King Cake.

King Cake, we were told, is eaten from epiphany until Mardi Gras, and represents the three kings who went to visit the baby Jesus. It is made from a sweet dough that is sprinkled with cinnamon and sugar and rolled up into a ring or crown shape, then always decorated with the same three colours - purple, which symbolises justice, green, which represents faith, and gold for power.

I found it quite amusing that in the same way that traditional English Christmas puddings contain a silver sixpence, bringing luck to the person who finds it in their portion, King Cake for the same reason contains.. a little plastic baby Jesus. I saw packet mixes for the cake which proclaimed on the front of the box "complete with plastic baby". Quite.

I decided to make a King Cake this month for Mardi Gras and to remind myself of my trip to New Orleans, but I was a bit delayed as I ordered the sanding sugar in the correct colours online - from different sellers - and the gold never turned up! I found I had some yellow at home already but it was about 10 days after Mardi Gras by the time I got around to making this.

Mardi Gras World

You know how your mother or school teacher always said "make sure you read the recipe properly first?" Mary Berry always advises that on the Great British Bake Off technical challenge as well. I feel that I've properly learnt my lesson  after searching for a King Cake recipe online and choosing this one from My Recipes.com. It was only as I added the flour - one of the last ingredients - that I thought the quantity of ingredients seemed a lot, and went back and looked at the recipe again. And saw at the top it said "makes two cakes".

Why? Why would you do that? This isn't a cake where you bake two layers and sandwich them together - you literally end up with two separate cakes. One for you, and one for a friend I guess! By the time I realised it was too late, so I did indeed end up with two cakes.

Go to the link above for the full recipe - it's quite long but pretty straightforward. Here I'm melting the butter with sour cream

I used my Kitchenaid to knead the dough

It was very easy to roll out - pliable but not too sticky. I sprinkled the top with sugar and cinnamon though in retrospect I would have used more.

Roll up and form into a ring

After baking in the oven it is very puffed up!

I mixed up some icing and spread it over the cake

Adding the coloured sugars in sections

The King Cake in all its glory, complete with Mardi Gras necklaces and a mask I bought in New Orleans. The cake was delicious - it reminded me more of an iced bun as it's a milky sweet pastry rather than a cake really. I didn't put a plastic baby into mine but I think it's none the worse for it!

I'm sending this to Love Cake, hosted by Ness at JibberJabberUK.

I'm also sharing it with the Food Year Linkup, hosted by Charlotte's Lively Kitchen.

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Alphabakes Round-up February 2016: Y

We didn't have the easiest letter for Alphabakes this month and I think it may have left a lot of you wondering why.... or Y! Unsurprisingly there were a lot of yogurt entries and a fabulous looking one involving a giant Yorkshire pudding. Here are the recipes you shared with us this time.

I love the name of this Morning Glory yogurt loaf from Suelle at Mainly Baking. It's a breakfast bread popular in America and very moist as it contains pineapple as well as coconut and raisins. Suelle says it's a bit like what we call in the UK a tea bread and I definitely like the idea of cake for breakfast!

 

I made this chocolate Yule log just after Christmas but didn't get around to blogging about it until this month! It's a less sinful recipe from Lorraine Pascale's Lighter Way to Bake.

 



I also made this fruity yogurt brulee which is a lovely light dessert and also really nice for breakfast! It was nice to find a use for my cook's blowtorch again.

This is a very healthy and quite unusual recipe from Chardonnay and Samphire. Here we have yuzu-spiked cauliflower and roasted buckwheat. Yuzu is a Japanese citrus fruit with a distinctive zesty taste that apparently goes really well with cauliflower; this sounds great either as a side dish or a main course.

My Alphabakes co-host Ros at The More Than Occasional Baker made this plum and blueberry yogurt cake; the blueberries on top look very bright and colourful. The addition of yogurt makes it nice and light.

 

This Greek yogurt and honey cake with a honey yogurt buttercream glaze from Dom at Belleau Kitchen was actually inspired by Ros's cake above. You can tell just from looking how light and fluffy it is.

I had some yogurt left over from my yogurt brulee so decided to use it in these fruity yogurt cookies. I made them gluten-free so a colleague at work could enjoy them too. They are not much to look at, but tasted good!

Jean at Baking in Franglais made this orange and ginger bundt cake using natural yogurt; the shape of the cake was inspired by the song 'River Deep, Mountain High'!

Here's a great idea from Dom at Belleau Kitchen - a Yorkshire pudding dinner plate. Basically you can serve an entire roast dinner, or anything else, on top of a giant Yorkshire pudding and then eat that too! It's been ages since I've had one of these but it might be making a reappearance on my menu soon.

 

Thanks to everyone who entere - visit Ros' site on March 1 to find out which letter we are baking with next month!

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USA Travel Review: Chicago Part 3

The last part of my 2015 USA road trip - part 3 of Chicago.

A few months before our trip we’d bought a Weber barbecue which my fiancé loves (and I love it because it means in the summer, he does a lot of the cooking!). I was surprised to find there is a Weber Grill restaurant in Chicago, set up by the people who invented that brand of barbecue, and it was just down the street from our hotel! I checked the menu online to make sure my future mother-in-law, who is a vegetarian, would find something to eat but she seemed happy with it.

 

The restaurant looked busy but it is huge so we were seated very quickly. You can see the chefs using the Weber barbecues in the kitchen so I spent a few minutes standing at the bar watching, which was pretty cool. It’s actually a fairly high end restaurant in terms of the food and prices, but the atmosphere is very relaxed. The menu is quite extensive and I found it hard to choose!

There are grill-fired pizzas (which I tried doing myself last summer), salads, seven types of burger, some ‘fire inspired’ main courses including beer can chicken which I also made myself not long ago, grilled bourbon salmon, parmesan-crusted tilapia and pasta margherita (the tomatoes are grilled). Then you get on to the ‘backyard barbecue’ section, which has some of their signature dishes – Weber’s BBQ beef brisket, and BBQ ribs – and that’s before you get to the steaks, which have their own section on the menu. The side orders sounded amazing as well and I would have happily have eaten most things on the menu!

I had a combo of BBQ ribs, which were so tender the meat fell off the bone, and the beef brisket, which is smoked over hickory for 14 hours. It came with two sides so I chose garlic mashed potatoes and broccoli which was so good. It was a shame we were too full for dessert as they sounded amazing as well!

The cocktails were amazing too and I had a 'flirtini' - a mixture of Chambord, raspberry vodka, pineapple juice and Prosecco. I might have to make that at home some time!

 

 

For our last bit of sightseeing we did an architectural boat tour with Chicago Line Cruises which was recommended by the concierge in our hotel. It lasted 75 minutes and gave us some fabulous views of the city. It wasn't cheap - about $50 per person - but I would recommend it. The river goes right through the centre of the city so you have all the landmark buildings on each side with great photo opportunities. You can move around the boat easily to take pictures - it was much better than just being on the water taxi to the Navy Pier. The tour guide was excellent and I learnt a lot about the city and the architecture.

 

The boat has free Starbucks coffee, soft drinks and cookies on board which was a nice touch (and the cookies were really good!).

 

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Bundle of Joy Baby Card

I made this card for a friend's new baby girl; it had to be a quick make as she had a daughter and I realised I didn't have any suitable cards!

I started off with a pink card blank and a pink die cut heart which I placed in the middle of the card. I had one die cut pink pram left from a set so mounted this on top of the heart. I then used a transfer for the wording to write 'congratulations' at the top and 'bundle of joy' at the bottom.

I'm sending this to the card making challenge on Crafty Sentiments as their theme is 'anything goes'.

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Stencilling a design on a cake

I'm enjoying my wedding cake decorating class even though we are already in week 5 and haven't actually been near a wedding cake yet (even a fake one). My main issue with the course though is that it was described as "intermediate level" - i.e. for people with some cake decorating experience - but we have been doing really basic things I would describe as beginners' level. Take stencilling, for instance - I'd never done it before so it was useful having it explained and having the chance to practice. For me, part of the reason for taking the class is to have a couple of hours set aside a week to focus on practicing cake decorating, which I wouldn't find time for at all otherwise.

 

But to spend half a class aimed at an intermediate level being taught stencilling was a bit disappointing. Do you want to know how to do stencilling? Well, mix some royal icing, colour it, place a stencil on your cake, and spread the icing over with a palette knife. Then remove the stencil - ta dah! Hardly rocket science - and hardly an intermediate level class. We could have covered that in 20 minutes and then spent an hour working on decorating a covered dummy cake so even if the technique was simple, by the end we would have a nicely decorated cake.

Place the stencil on the covered cake or board

spread over a thin layer of royal icing using a palette knife

remove stencil

Instead, we continue to work on a covered board, using the same board we'd used in previous weeks as you can see from the picture. I had my own set of stencils though I'd never used them, so chose a leaf pattern and added some green to my royal icing. I used a bit of masking tape to fasten the stencil to the board, as you don't want it to move, and spread the icing over the top. You want to spread the icing as thinly as possible. Carefully remove the stencil and you can see it does look good.

After the class I tried stencilling on an actual cake and unsurprisingly found it was a lot more difficult than doing it on a cake board, so I wish we had done it on a cake in class! You can see how mine turned out here.

We spent the second half of the class being shown how to use a Garrett frill cutter, which I already owned and had used before but not correctly as it turned out, so I will do a separate post on this.

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Meal Planning Monday Week 9

Monday
leftover chicken from Sunday for me, gammon for him

Tuesday
probably working late

Wednesday
Lunch: pasta - use spiralizer?
Dinner: sandwich - on my cake decorating course

Thursday
Chicken/turkey provencale (from DietPlan website)

Friday
white fish, hollandaise sauce or similar for me, sausage and chips for him

Saturday
Lunch: on a train en route to a wedding hair and makeup trial
Dinner: out with my bridesmaid

Sunday
Lunch: TBA - had expected to be out but will now be home
Dinner: maple and tarragon pork chops and sweet potato traybake from Sainsbury's magazine

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Love Food Hate Waste: Food Diary Project and Tips

 

Did you know that the average family in the UK throws away £60 worth of food and drink every month? That sounds like a huge amount, but those are the official stats from the government’s Love Food Hate Waste campaign.

 

I recently took part in a project run by my local council to raise awareness of, and reduce, food waste. I had to keep a diary of what food I wasted for a week, and then go to an information session at the council office, then do another food diary for a week.

 

Love Food Hate Waste reckons that we are throwing away a quarter of the food we buy. I’m sure most people don’t waste a quarter of the food they buy from Tesco every week (having said that, I do know someone who throws away an awful lot every week) but just think about when you sort out your cupboards and find things lurking at the back that are out of date… or your child leaves half their packed lunch and it goes in the bin…. Or you cook too much pasta every single time as you can never work out how much you need (I’m certainly guilty of that!). It all adds up, and the government wants us to be more mindful of what we are buying, and cooking.

 

It’s not just about saving money for households, though that is a big part of it. Wasting food also means using unnecessary resources (money, energy, time etc) when it comes to producing the food (everything from heating greenhouses to running factories), transporting it to stores and so on.

 

My downfall is buying a specific ingredient for a recipe – eg fresh dill – and then not needing it again, but forgetting/not having time to take it out of the fridge and portion it up and put in the freezer. By the time I remember I had dill from a recipe last week it’s gone off!

 

The Love Food Hate Waste website has recipes to use up leftovers, a suggested 2-week meal planner using similar ingredients in different recipes across the week, a portion planner tool so you don’t cook too much and all sorts of information and tips about reducing food waste. It’s well worth a look!

 

Do you know the difference between ‘best before’ and ‘use by’ dates? Best before refers to quality –the manufacturer or seller can only guarantee the food will be at its best until that date, but it should be safe to eat after the date. Use by on the other hand does refer to safety – even if food looks or smells OK you shouldn’t eat it after this date – though I have to say I’m not that strict with myself, preferring not to waste something if it’s only a day over.

 

The session I attended at the council covered a lot of this, and a lot of what I heard was obvious, e.g. take a shopping list when you go to the supermarket, check the cupboards before you go. It also wasn’t hard to work out when quizzed what the main reasons were for people wasting food, or some ways to use up various leftovers (I think the lady running the session was surprised when I said you could use up leftover mashed potato in cake!).

 

I did pick up some useful tips in the session though, like: keep fruit (other than bananas) in the fridge, and label food when you put it in the freezer both with the name and the date – you are only supposed to store certain foods for certain amounts of time, even in the freezer.

 

I always thought if you bought fresh food and wanted to freeze it, you had to freeze it on the day of purchase, but apparently it’s perfectly fine to freeze right up until the use by date. So if you buy a pack of chicken breasts and think you will use them all before the use by date, but then your plans change and you have a couple left, they can still be frozen. This is a very useful tip for me!

 

Comparing my food diary from the first week to the second, I found I had wasted less food. I think because I was filling in the food diary I was making a conscious effort, but things like freezing leftovers quickly becomes second nature – and I often take leftovers from dinner to work for my lunch the next day!

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