Carly (Admin) – Page 13

Spring rolls attempt 2

Still no luck…

I tried this spring roll wrapper recipe tonight. So it is more like a pancake and too egg heavy. Good news though is that it still tastes good with the mixture so all is not lost. The rolls do crisp up in the oven.

Honestly, I didn’t feel like a trip to the supermarket to find rice flour and so swapped with cake flour (the lowest gluten flour I had handy).

I’m thinking I might put the spring roll search on hold till we move into the valley. I can then wander around china town and get some real asian ideas.

Spring rolls from scratch

I normally make spring rolls using the store bought spring roll sheets. Today I decided to see if I could make them myself. I used this spring roll wrapper recipe.

I still need a lot of practice and a surface that can heat evenly over a large space. I wantto find a video or something to see the consistency of the dough, otherwise I will need to experiment a lot more! Good thing is the mixture is flour, water and salt so not too bad if completely stuffed up.

My first cordial

Recently I have been thinking a lot more about the food we consume and the additives in them. I drink a lot of water, but sometimes it is nice to have something a bit different with dinner. This thinking plus a lot of left over mandarines that really needed to be eaten ASAP got me to ask ‘how hard is it to make cordial’ – the answer EASY PEASY LEMON SQUEEZY!!!

I used this fruit juice cordial recipe. Firstly I squeezed the mandarines to find out how much juice we had then worked out the sugar/water/tartaric acid combination. Add soda water and it is as yummy as any commercial soft drink.

While looking at recipes and concepts, I discovered some really interesting combinations. One of them being this cola recipe and the fact that there is an open source recipe for cola.

Lemon Meringue cheesecake

The first time I tasted lemon meringue cheesecake was on a romantic weekend away with my husband (not then) to kingfisher island resort on fraser island. We also got to taste crocodile, emu and kangaroo that night too. The cheesecake part is a nice twist on lemon meringue pie.

As I had many egg whites left over from the icecream and buttercream, I figured it was time to replicate this delicious creation. A quick google search gave me a simple recipe. I used more meringue then the recipe asked for. I think less butter would also be good idea in future too.

Rocky Road Icecream

For the first time last night, I made icecream! And I can’t communicate how absolutely amazing it is.

I used the vanilla recipe and instructions from David Lebovitz on making icecream without an icecream maker. To this I added cherries and mini marshmellows.

The basic theory is to make a custard, then add this to cream and chill in an icebath. Then put it in the freezer for 45min, take it out and beat. Continue every 30min till frozen. It took 6 hours in our freezer. The reason for the beating is that water freezes before fat, so you have to break that so it freezes evenly and with lots of air.

I’m really proud to report that it worked out perfectly. Far smoother than most supermarket brands and matches the smoothness of nice icecream! It took a lot of patience to let it set. If I wasn’t hoping to photograph it and also understand how hard it would get, it would have been consumed at the stage where you add the cream to the custard. I will admit to really enjoying licking the beaters every 30 min 😉

I used a stainless steel bowl for the icebath and freezing stage. This meant that it was really easy to take out of the freezer and beat with my hand mixer. I never mixed for long and just made sure I got everything that was setting around the edges mixed through. I think the other reason for my success was the quality of the ingredients. I used double pure cream so there was no artificial thickners.

I’ve now updated the baking category of the blog to ‘in the kitchen’ as there isn’t any part of icecream making that could be called baking and I’m definately going to be doing this again and again. The next one I really want to try is the salted caramel icecream.