Celadon Sweets

Anyone who remotely reads about food on the internet will know about macarons. I can vouch that 90% of the food blogs, or the baking blogs at least, I have read will have mentioned these little things. And with good reason, they're reasonably difficult to make, nigh on impossible to get perfect and they are beautiful. Ladurée is probably the best know macaron maker in the entire world, though its most certainly not the only notable one, but for the purpose of this post, you'll come to learn how obsessive I've become.

For those who don't know, i'll give a brief overview. Macarons are almond and meringue crisp shell cakes/biscuits, with a cream based centre, all sandwiched together. The centre is usually some sort of ganache, but the possible flavours are endless. Ladurée's range from the basic vanilla or pistachio, to chocolate and passion fruit, lily of the valley and liquorice.
There are other masters out there though, Pierre Hermé for example, offers an even bigger variety, with matcha green tea, Azuki red bean, lime and ginger all in just one macaron. There is one I noticed on his website that looked pretty amazing, called Arabesque, which was apricot and pistachio. I'm quite intrigued, perhaps when i'm a little more practised i'll give it a go!

I'm going to be perfectly honest, I am an absolute sucker for good branding, not necessarily fashion, but food I definitely am. I was a sucker for Gü and i'm a sucker for Ladurée. When you live in a place where people won't pay over £10 for anything food-wise, it's quite exciting when something new and stylish pops up. Perhaps that's just me? I suppose I am a food retailer's dream, I am quite impressionable.

But it's difficult not to be impressed when you see their shop, it's just beautiful. It's celadon façade hints at style, the subtle bohemian shapes notes the history of the place and the intricate metalwork atop can only, I presume, emulate the process of making these beautiful little things, and all the other pastries they sell for that matter. I know, i've become more than a little obsessed (and don't worry, the phrase "Macaron Mad" will most certainly not be gracing this page today...other than there). Ladurée is just an amazing place, it's hard not to get swept up in it's wake.

Now, please don't think of me as naïve. It's not that I'm unaware of the power that luxury brands have over people. It's just like I'm seeing myself in third person buying these things and I can almost hear the CEOs rubbing their bigwig hands together. I don't know why, a bad habit I must shift no less. Don't judge me!

Ladurée is by no means the worse offender of luxury brainwashing, it did come from an integral source. It came about in 1862, when a miller, Louis Ernest Ladurée opened his first bakery just outside central Paris, at 16 rue Royale. At the time, tea rooms were relatively rare and women weren't allowed to congregate in public, so after a doubtlessly revolutionary talk with his wife, Jeanne Souchard, good ol' Louis opened up one of the first Salons de Thé in Paris. Though there were many a cafe strewn across the city, Ladurée had the advantage of allowing women to come together and talk freely in a public space. I'd make a crude joke of Sex and the City here, but it feels tasteless. But there they are, still at 16 rue Royale in Paris, with nine more tea salons opened in Paris alone, one of the nicest on the Avenue des Champs Élysées. They have spread globally, luckily for us, with twenty more of them dotted around the globe; Harrods in London, Dubai, Milan, Zurich, Riyadh and Nihombashi Mitsukoshi in Japan. It may be a big business, but it is so worth €2 a pop for a macaron!

As this is only a relatively short post i'll keep it simple, it's my 21st birthday on Monday, and i'm cooking up a storm for those who are coming for the feast on Sunday. So i'll have more recipes than I can handle to share from my exploits. I'd share the macaron recipe today, but I've not tested it out yet, and I wouldn't want to give out a recipe that is untested, oh no! What would thou'st think of me?

It's going to be an epic journey, but I must mention how excited I am! I've set myself up for utter failure so I'm presuming anything above that will be a bonus. The reason I'm starting so early is because (i'm going on rumours here) egg whites should be aged for 2-3 days prior to the making, to produce the best meringue results. As I said, just rumours so far, but i'm taking any tips I can get my hands on to up my chances of doing well.

So until then my little muffins, enjoy perusing the macaron craze. Remember, there is more than one magical refuge in Paris!

Peace
JR

When the Banana Boat Comes in.

When my mum enquires as to what i'm having for dinner, I automatically go to my happy place, my recipe rolodex. I think of every meal i've ever made, and then what I fancy. Ruling out the carbohydrates helps me narrow it down to mere hundreds. Then comes whether I fancy beef, chicken, pork, vegetables etc. I do admit, fish is never the first, second or even third on my list. But I fancied something lighter tonight, so I decided upon salmon. This entire process lasts only a few seconds, eyes glazed and mouth gaping in deep thought.

I made this really simple, sticky marinade for chicken not too long ago and I thought it would suit this just nicely so I gave it a whirl. I posted a recipe a while back for 'Bridge Chow Mein', and the marinade isn't drastically different, just the addition of sesame and mirin, to add a little tang, and some heat with some chilli and cayenne. I'll admit, I did sort of chuck things together to see what it was like, but it worked out as quite a nice combination of sweet BBQ and sticky teriyaki. 

Teriyaki is usually only mirin (sake rice wine), soy sauce and a little sugar, but I fancied something a little bolder, so I added garlic and chilli. Why the hell not? I'm a crazy person, I know. But yes, as well as yearning for bolder pastures, I was feeling pretty lazy, and what's lazier than yummy fried noodles? I would love to put a picture up, but I am still phoneless (aka, camera-less) so i'm afraid you'll just have to make do with someone who has a better camera than me and a full studio taking a picture of something similar!

You can't beat a nice bit of stir fried broccoli!

In all fairness, it didn't look drastically different from that; add some rice noodles, cucumber and peppers and you're sorted. Word of advice though, when marinating salmon, don't use every last drop as a sauce for your solo stir fry. It's a lot of sauce, and if you're heavy handed like me, it will have a fair amount of dark soy in it. Consequently you will most likely end up with a bit of an accidental soy-marinade-mixed puddle at the bottom of your bowl, especially seeing as you've probably just gotten it out of a piping hot wok. As lovely as the marinade is with salmon and as a sauce, it is mindblowingly salty in big doses, and when you get a completely sodden, sad looking bit of broccoli at the bottom of your bowl, it's a bit disheartening. I think I might ease up on the portion size next time too, so at least i've got a fighting chance of getting to the bottom in time, either that or easing up on the soy sauce, but where's the fun in that?

Onto my recipe of the post, I am aware that i've been very lax with my recipe giving recently, so I will make sure this is a useful, but happy recipe that will satisfy your tastes somewhat. I can also guarantee that about half of you will look at this recipe, look at your fruit bowl and realise that there is a very sad, blackened banana or five looking up at you, begging to be put out of their misery. Alas! As I am persistently resistant to trends, be them through any cultural output, I bring to you a timeless classic in my eyes. Something that it endlessly useful for picking up the wasted remnants of your fruit bowl, and pretty damn tasty. I speak of course of the humble variety of banana bread.

Isn't this the cutest bread you ever saw? Nibbly bread!

This isn't really a recipe from my childhood, i'll be honest, but I really started getting into it when I got sick of eating baked bananas at University. But I grew to love this simple cake-bread and if I ever end up having children, they are going to have this every week. I've tried a few recipes over the years and I keep going back to my trusted old favourite, my good ol' G & B recipe. 'Green & Blacks Unwrapped' is possibly my most prized cookbook when it comes to chocolate (I know that seems obvious to say but still), and I am quite happy to stick with it. So I give unto you today, my favourite banana chocolate chip bread recipe. 

G & B Banana and Chocolate Chip Bread

Makes 1 big loaf

125g unsalted butter, melted

175g plain flour

2 tsp baking powder

1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda

1/2 tsp salt

150g caster sugar

2 large eggs

4 overripe ripe bananas, mushed

100g good-quality chocolate (white, milk or dark!)

1 tsp good quality vanilla extract

Optional: 60g walnuts, chopped

NB - This recipe was originally for 'Banana, White Chocolate and Walnut Bread', but dark and milk chocolate work just as well. And if you're not a fan/are allergic to nuts, you can give them a miss. I leave them out normally, just in case I accidentily send someone into anaphylactic shock.

- Preheat your oven to 180C degrees/gas mark 4. Prepare your loaf tin by brushing with melted butter and a dusting of flour.
- Mix the flour, baking powder, bicarbonate of soda and salt into a bowl.

- In a separate bowl whisk the melted butter and sugar, then the eggs one by one, followed by the bananas and vanilla. At this stage it looks disgusting, but it will turn out fine!

- Prepare the chocolate by tossing it in a little flour to stop them sinking too much in the mixture and set aside.

- Add the dry ingredients to the wet ingredients in three intervals, stirring lightly, working up to a light fold at the end to not beat too much air out of it.

- Sprinkle in the chopped, floured chocolate and fold gently once or twice, add to the loaf tin and bake for about an hour - an hour quarter in the over.

- It should spring back under your finger when it's done and a knife should come out clean, but after removing from the oven, run a knife around the edge of the tin to prevent too much hassle. It doesn't normally play up, but you never know, sometimes the tin isn't non-stick enough, a teeny little bit burns and breaks half the side piece off the bread or what have you.

How very artisanal!
Overall, it's very very simple to make, and so nice, especially with a cup of tea and spread with nutella if you're into that kind of thing, I just enjoy mine plain. This whole banana chocolate chip bread was all my sister's idea, in all fairness. She mentioned my brother's chocolate chip banana bread, in quite specific detail, and how amazing it was, so it naturally made me want to bake some cake. Dang it.

I'd like to briefly mention before I go about how happy I am with this little blog of mine, it's coming up to the year mark and i've surpassed 2000 views. Which is pretty awesome to say it was just to document my journey. Thankyou if do read this though, it is kind of nice to share. Until another day my dear readers.

Peace
JR

Cooking For Your Fellow Geek

One thing that I am perfectly happy to admit openly is that I am a massive geek. I've been recently going through my stuff to sell on eBay and I hadn't reached the stage where I could fully appreciate the extent of my geeky tendencies. I'm sure many before I and many after will brandish this title with pride, geek chic and all that, but I do seem to relish the fact that I am just a geeky girl. I realised i'd been unintentionally thorough as I was growing up too, as I seemed to have covered all bases of geekdom. I've got the book reading (which I don't really personally count, but some do consider learn(d)ing to be geeky), then my interests in gaming came merrily trundling along, then there's my everlasting love affair with Mr Tolkein, my brief rendevous with Star Wars, and Stargate, and Stargate Atlantis, and Dragon Ball Z. Oh, and my unwavering interest in clouds.

This is relevant I promise. The reason I bring this up today is because I was thinking about life, as you do, and what my next 60 (too optimistic?) years of baking will be like. I just don't know whether i'm ready to commit to cooking regular shaped cookies for the rest of my life, it's a big decision, you know? So I went looking for cloud biscuit cutters, and to my dismay, found nada, nil, niente. So I went to the next logical step, finding somewhere that can make the designs I want...still nothing. I wonder if i've just found a massive gap in the market? I know I would pay £5 to be able to make biscuits in the shape of gollum's face, there's only so much my inexperienced hands can carve out of biscuit dough.

After this little detour I went a knocking around on some of my geeky websites, trying to find some unusual cutters and I found some pretty cute ones. For instance, I found these ninjabread men ones which were vaguely amusing

It sends me back to a summer spending half an hour carving biscuit dough into rude sex positions

But I also found some rather creepy ones, i'm sure this is probably lovely to someone out there, but honestly, if I had a tray of these, i'd feel like I was being watched...

There is just something really ominous about this.

I'm not quite sure whether I would even take these to a baby shower, it might just freak out the parents even more. I shouldn't really complain about the lack of choice, there were some pretty cool Star Wars ones I found, it's just me being fussy and wanting to have everything down to the last detail to my taste, even if they did do a Legolas cookie cutter, i'd probably complain his eyes were wonky or they got his fishbone braid wrong. It's also the fact that living in the UK is a proper pain, because it makes you redundant to half the cool stuff because the American sites won't ship overseas.

I would honestly, love to tuck into a Yoda and milk everyday.

But enough with the complaining about lack of choice for now, if there is nothing there, I will make my own, that is the way to do it! I would gladly serve a Boba Fett or a Frodo instead of a smiley face in my prospective bakery any day of the week. Maybe that's just me, would it freak children out too much? I would quite like, on a side note, to have my own personal decoration printer. One that produced alphabet tiles to imprint in decorations in whatever font I fancied. Arial-esque fonts are overrated, and I could make biscuits to match my banner and everything, wouldn't that be fun. I do rather like custom baking bits and pieces, and until i'm skilled enough to pipe like a ninja then i'm going to have to rely on gadgets (which is ironic, because it'll be the use of such gadgets that will prevent my improvement).

For this evening, or early morning should I say, I shall leave it as a short post as i'm not feeling particularly inspired. But I will come back within the next few days with something more substantial, and with a recipe! I'm sorry for being so haphazard with my posts, you'd have thought my brain would have taken advantage or this joblessness, apparently not! But do not lose faith! Dream on.

Peace
JR