Chorizo and Cheese Okonomiyaki

Okonomiyaki?

Siri loves this recipe and so should you. I made this for five meals in a row. I can't even eat my Mama Pham's pho for three meals in a row, let alone five. I really find it difficult to eat the same food for more than two meals in a row, no matter how delicious, first world problems much.

There's not really much to it. Mix anything you want into the batter, add some extra water or stock to make the batter a bit thinner if you want. I normally use the majority of the thin batter to cover up the ingredients that could be lost in the frying pan. It cooks quite well but it makes it a bit dome shaped.

Why did I use chorizo and cheese? It was the only meat in my pantry is why. It was actually really delicious. I wouldn't knock the combination until you tried it.

Chorizo and Cheese Okonomiyaki

Ingredients:
2 eggs
1 cup of dashi or water or stock
1 cup of plain flour
1/2 white part of a leek
2 1/2 cups of shredded cabbage
1/2 julienned medium carrot
200g of corn kernels
1-2 tablespoons of finely diced green onion
As much chopped up cured chorizo and cheese as you can stomach
Cooking oil

Instructions:
1. Mix the eggs, water and flour together into a paste. Thin with more water if desired.
2. Add everything, barring the chorizo and cheese, into the paste. Mix lightly until just combined.
3. Heat up a small frying pan with a splash of cooking oil, one of the smallest ones you have, on a low medium heat.
4. When the oil starts to become hot enough to shimmer, put in a blob of the okonomiyaki batter into the centre of the pan. Spread it out in like a well, with the edges being thicker, and the centre being quite thin.
5. After the batter begins to cook, throw your chopped chorizo and cheese into the centre. Pour a small amount of the thinner batter on top.

6. Flip over and allow to cook until evenly brown. Serve with Japanese mayonnaise and tonkatsu sauce immediately.

Fijian Chocolate Cake

I have always wanted to make a really luscious coconut cake, one that was just as delicious as a Bounty bar. I wanted to have chocolate on the outside and soft, moist coconut on the inside. I wanted it to the richest, softest, moistest cake I'd ever seen, so unbelievably rich and full of coconut flavour that you'd be converted even if you didn't like coconut. I found it in this recipe that I found at this website.

 I searched a few different ones to get to this one and what really struck me was the use of a can of coconut cream. Last year, Mrs I., and I wanted to make a chocolate and coconut cake recipe, I found a few different recipes, we went home and made the cakes. I said that we should have a cake off and was pretty sure I'd win. Her daughter actually baked the cake and beat the pants off of me, which is embarrassing because her daughter was nine at the time. I've had one other chocolate and coconut based cake that had coconut milk in it and it was that cake,  the addition of that coconut milk made it so COCONUT. It just screamed coconut, like pure coconut creaminess baked into a cake with the rich subtlety of chocolate to temper it.

The recipe proportions are a bit strange for my liking. Mostly because when I printed out the recipe, for some reason, both the metric and imperial measurements were included. I chopped and changed things a bit and this became what I actually had in my cake in the picture below. I added in some desiccated coconut for the chewiness and I felt like there could've been more eggs added but I left it as is. The colour of my cake isn't as dark as the picture from the original website, but I went by cup measurement rather than weight as suggested.

I'm quite happy with how the cake turned out however, as it was very moist and intensely coconut flavoured. When I poorly attempted to split the warm cake, half of the top layer crumbled away and I ate most of it rather than attempting to piece it back together. I normally never eat my own cake but I couldn't stop eating this one.

Fijian chocolate cake

Uses:  converting people to the wonders of coconut, secretly making everyone have high cholesterol.

Cake ingredients:
210g of self raising flour
2 teaspoons of baking powder
200g of sugar
2 eggs
125g of melted butter
400ml coconut cream, remove 3 tablespoons and top up with milk/water
1/2 cup of desiccated coconut

Not much to it

Icing ingredients:
3 tablespoons of coconut cream, reserved from the cake's coconut cream
150g of softened butter
2 cups of icing sugar
1 cup of flaked/shredded coconut
Lemon juice
 

I forgot to put the icing sugar in this picture.

Instructions for cake:

1. Sift all the dry ingredients, flour, cocoa powder and baking powder, into a large mixing bowl. Add in the desiccated coconut. Line your cake tin and preheat your oven to 180C.

All the dry stuff!

2. Beat the eggs lightly, and pour on top of the flour. Add in the melted butter and the coconut cream.

Plus the wet stuff~

3. Mix vigorously for several minutes.

Makes a cake!

4. Pour into your cake tin and bake in the oven for at least 40-55 minutes. Skewer should come out nice and clean. Allow to cool before attempting icing if desired, otherwise consume immediately.

Well, almost

Instructions for icing
1. Heat a large frying/saucepan on a low medium heat until warm, throw in coconut and stir frequently until evenly golden brown. Set aside to cool.

Be patient!

Ta dah!

2. Cream the butter until pale, soft and fluffy.

Using a whisk is silly fyi.

3. Sift in half the sugar and coconut cream, and mix vigorously until incorporated.

Coconut cream is such an odd grey colour

4. Sift in the remaining sugars slowly, while mixing. Add some lemon juice to lessen the sweetness if required. I used about a quarter of a large lemon.

Buttery

5. Split your cake into two layers and spread a layer of icing in the middle of cake.

Blob!

Please note, cooler cakes are easier to transfer ):

6. Carefully transfer the top back on and ice the sides and top of the cake.

I need to work on my icing skills

7. Press the toasted coconut to the top and sides and serve.

Thank god for coconut eh?

Flourless Hazelnut and Chocolate Cake

There's a girl named S., at work who is a coeliac, that unfortunately means she cannot tolerate gluten in her diet so when she does eat things containing delicious gluten such as pasta, bread, beer or sausages, she gets bloated, has stomach pain and feels nauseated for days. If she chugged through this intolerance, in the future her intestines would've been so scarred as to cause malnutrition, a severe drop in iron levels, anaemia and she would be at a great risk of developing a lot of different cancers.

In any case, she's a smart girl and when diagnosed, she made the change to gluten free straight away. At the same time, she craves all those delicious gluteny things like doughnuts, cake, a good bread that is tall and all that fun stuff. Whenever we have stuff at work, either as a gift from patients or stuff bought in by the other nurses, she often can't have any because it contains gluten. Its become a lot easier these days but eating gluten free isn't easy.

I took pity on her and decided to make her a cake one day. This was one of the first cakes I baked when I started baking for work, its a very simple five ingredient cake. I got the recipe from Taste.com.  This is basically my go to recipe for chocolate cakes, and I add and change ingredients to it all the time. Its one of those great mix, pour and bake cakes that you can whip up in a flash, its dense, chocolately, very moist and has a great crumbly texture from the hazelnut meal. Somehow its also very light and quite tall for a gluten free cake due to the huge amount of eggs. Every time I bake this, someone asks for the recipe and I always forget to give to them, so Z., and H., here it is. S., for whom the cake was made, doesn't know how to make this cake because she valiantly resists all attempts for me to teach her how to cook.

Flourless Hazelnut and Chocolate Cake

Ingredients:
150g of butter, chopped
200g of milk cooking chocolate, broken up
3/4 cup of sugar
6 eggs
1 1/2 cups of hazelnut meal, sifted

Instructions:
1. Chop up all your chocolate and butter. Melt in a bowl that fits snugly above a boiling saucepan. Have your butter on the bottom so that melts and frequently ladle the butter onto the chocolate. Once melted and glossy, put aside and continue making the rest of the cake.

Melting chocolate in a saucepan is a mistake.

A chunky mistake.

2. Separate your eggs into two different bowls. Line a 22cm cake tin and heat your oven to 150C.

Unskillful separation

3. Add the sugar to the yolks and whip/beat until thick, pale and fluffy.

Yep.

Its the colour of beige!

4. Pour in the chocolate and briefly mix.

Glossy

5. Sift the hazelnut meal onto of the wet mixture. Endure how long it takes, you'll find clumps of hazelnut everywhere which you can break up, you get a bit more air into the mixture and ensures an even mix. When you get to the last 1-2cms of thicker bits, either discard or use in the cake up to you.

Chunky!

6. Beat your egg whites into soft peaks.

This fluffy.

7. Fold 1/3 into the hazelnut chocolate mixture. Fold gently and once incorporated, fold in the other 2/3s gently. 

8. Put into your prepared cake tin and bake at 150C for 40-50 minute until you can poke a skewer through the cake and come up with a few damp crumbs.

Flourless Dark Mocha Cake

So this is the story of the best cake I've ever made, that everyone seems to love and why I hate it. Did you know I have a super sensitive ability to detect bitterness? I can't eat bitter melon, I don't drink coffee unless its in a frappe, diluted with a ton of milk and with heaps of sugar. I even take my tea white with like three sugars, this is one cup of tea. Yeah, I really can't stand bitter things.

My face when I taste something bitter

I also don't like desserts. Everyone knows this, hand me a bag of chips and I'd finish that thing solo. Cake? Will have a miserly slice taken off and then tossed into the bin when its super dry and gross. True fact, I once had a bar of Cadbury's Marvelous Creations in my fridge, it was there for six months before it was finished. Girls at work were like, "omg you have so much self restraint." Its not self restraint, its like waving lettuce at a shark or something, I'm just not interested.

This shark is an abomination

So why did I make it? I made it because a patient of mine the previous night had pulled me aside and thanked me profusely for looking after her and giving me a block of chocolate. So that block of chocolate was made into a cake that was full of love and appreciation. Maybe that's why the second form of this cake wasn't so great because it was made out of commissioned money from Mr M for Megababe, Z., and Mrs M, and some annoying kid ran into me at the market so it got all squished and gross.

I didn't like this cake. It was a very unsweet cake with a very bitter edge from the dark chocolate and mocha used. I wanted to make a chocolate and coffee cake that tasted like a hot cup of mocha coffee, baked or poured into a cake. Something that tasted like real coffee and would give you a buzz when you ate it. I was reading a lot of coffee cake reviews where they just added instant coffee and the flavour was really lackluster.You know what nurses like though? Chocolate and coffee.

Only thing we love more is gossip

I used my basic recipe for flourless hazelnut and chocolate cake, tasted a bit of it when it was raw and then rounded out the flavour with some cocoa powder and vanilla bean paste.

Flourless Dark Mocha Cake

Ingredients:
200g of 70% cocoa solids, dark chocolate
150g of butter, cubed
4 eggs, separated
3/4 cup of sugar
1/4 cup of cocoa powder
2-4 tablespoons of instant coffee*, dissolved in 60ml of hot water
1 teaspoon of vanilla bean paste/extract
1 1/2 cups of hazelnut meal

*If using a strong ground instant expresso use as little as 2 tablespoons. When I ran out of Nescafe Expresso, I used Nescafe Golden Rich Instant Roast instead and had to use 4 tablespoons to match the flavour. Otherwise two shots of expresso can be used.

The usual cohort

Instructions:
1. Chop your butter into cubes and break up your chocolate as finely as possible to reduce cooking time. In a large bowl that fits snugly above a saucepan of boiling water, melt your chocolate and butter together until melted and glossy.

The usual

So shiny

2. Line a 22cm cake tin. Heat oven to 150C. Separate your eggs.
3. Add sugar to yolks and beat until thick, pale and glossy.

An orange ying and yang basically

Pale and delicious

4. Add the melted butter and chocolate to the yolk mixture and mix until combined.

Glorious

5. Sift the cocoa powder on top of this yolk mixture, add the vanilla extract and stir to combine.

Rounds out the flavour

6. Dissolve your instant coffee in water and mix into the chocolate mixture.

Just some coffee

7.  Sift the hazelnut meal onto the chocolate mixture. With the final few chunky crumbs dump then into the mixture, or discard as wanted. Mix until just combined.

Pre hazelnut

Gritty

 8. Beat your egg whites to soft peaks and fold first 1/3 of the mixture into the chocolate mixture. Then fold the final 2/3 of the beaten egg whites.

Mixing!

Pretty colour

9. Pour into your cake tin and bake for 40-50 minutes. Skewer test should come out with slightly damp crumbs.

Baked/Unbaked Lemon Cheesecake

My Kindle broke. There is a puncture/shatter mark on the screen which has caused a weird transition effect, its frozen on one of the screensavers but if you turn on the power switch, you can still see text in the corner. A sign that my Kindle is still self aware and loves me, even though its very old and sick.

I love you Kindle #1

As an Aussie, it is near maddening to get a Kindle replaced since you have to ship it back to the US before its one year warranty expires. I actually got my Kindle in the February of 2012, which at the time of writing was a little over 14 months ago, I got myself and Yassmin the same ones. Hers was a 21st birthday present, specially equipped with a plethora of books so that she would have something to do when she went to the oil rigs in Indonesia and Sudan later on.

That being said, I've left this post unpublished so long that I now have a new one. My sister got me this new Kindle for my birthday. Its much lighter and slimmer than the other one. I uploaded the books from my old Kindle straight to it through Wi-Fi. My only complaint is that the buttons are so tiny and sometimes it doesn't register my page turning.

Yay!

This is an original and not in the least bit replicated from my other cheesecake recipes post. Haha, I'm joking its nearly the same.

Baked Lemon Cheesecake

Uses: making others fat. Regaining your title as cheesecake queen.

Ingredients for the biscuit base:
250g of crushed sweet biscuits
100g of melted butter

Ingredients for the cake part:
375g block of Philadelphia cream cheese
3/4 cup of sugar
1 cup of cream/milk/soy milk
2 eggs, just combined
Enough lemons for 1/4 cup of juice
Plus their rinds
Instructions:
1. Process your sweet biscuits in a food processor. If too lazy to wash, attempting to be healthy, cooking with a small child or masochistic, crush the packet by hand. Heat the oven to 180C.
2. Melt your butter and combine with the biscuit crumbs. Take out all your cake stuff and allow it to come to room temperature. If in a rush, microwave your cream cheese for 15 seconds.
3. Wrap the outside of a 22cm springform tin with aluminum foil and place the butter/biscuit mix inside this. Crush firmly down and against the sides of the tin with a glass tumbler to get an even coat. If feeling lazy, just squish against the bottom.
4. Bake in the oven for at least 8-10 minutes or until lightly golden brown. Allow to cool while making the cheesecake part. Turn the oven down to 160C. Juice the lemon/s and grate off the rind.
5. Process the sugar and cream cheese together until smooth.
6. Mix in the milk/cream/soy milk. Mix in the lemon rind and lemon juice too.
7. Carefully fold in your eggs. Do not overmix or bad things will happen.
8. Bake at 160C for at least an hour. Do not open the oven until you think its ready. The centre should jiggle merrily, or alarmingly like a raw cake just in the centre. Allow to cool somewhere until set, it will firm up later on.

Unbaked Lemon Cheesecake

Uses: making others fat. Regaining your title as cheesecake queen.

Ingredients for the biscuit base:
250g of crushed sweet biscuits
100g of melted butter

Ingredients for the cake part:
375g block of Philadelphia cream cheese
3/4 cup of sugar
1 cup of cream/milk/soy milk
1 tablespoon of gelatine in
1 cup of lime curd
Enough lemons for 1/4 cup of juice
Plus their rinds

Instructions:
1. Process your sweet biscuits in a food processor. If too lazy to wash, attempting to be healthy, cooking with a small child or masochistic, crush the packet by hand.
2. Melt your butter and combine with the biscuit crumbs. Take out all your cake stuff and allow it to come to room temperature. If in a rush, microwave your cream cheese for 15 seconds.
3. Wrap the outside of a 22cm springform tin with aluminum foil and place the butter/biscuit mix inside this. Crush firmly down and against the sides of the tin with a glass tumbler to get an even coat. If feeling lazy, just squish against the bottom.
4.Put the biscuits in the fridge to set. Juice the lemon/s and get off all the rind.
5. Process the sugar and cream cheese together until smooth. Mix up some hot water with the gelatine.
6. Mix in the milk/cream/soy milk. Mix in the lemon rind and lemon juice too.
7. Mix in your gelatine water, do not let this gelatine water be super hot or super cold. Super hot makes jelly strands, super cold means jellied water.
8. Come back in 2-3 hours and wobble to see if set. If set, eat.

Baked/Unbaked marbeled lime curd Cheesecake

I really like making cheesecake. It's really easy to do since all you have to do in the least fancy version of it is to smash up some sweet biscuits, combine it with butter and bake/press it down. Combine sugar and cream cheese, blob it on top with some kind of fruit and voile done. You can make things fancier if you want by adding other things, but at the heart of it, that's your basic cheesecake.

I'm partial to a baked cheesecake myself, with the whole lactose intolerance thing I don't get quite as sick and I prefer the difference in the texture more, like a baked custard or something as opposed to a smudgy gel. They also take a lot more baking skill to put off since they often require a water bath and hours of careful low temperature baking to ensure they have a smooth, uncracked top.

I used to make them quite a bit when I was studying, which is odd as cream cheese is STILL crazy expensive now that I have a job. Let me start by saying, the oven at my sister's is a piece of shit. It overheats by, 10-20C, we checked with the candy thermometer I got off EBay. As a result, we had a lot of fallen in cakes, flat muffin tops, slightly burnt biscuits and slices when we left it in there a few extra minutes and all other sorts of mishaps. We quickly learnt to not trust recipe cooking times with that being said, we always had to lower the temperature and add on extra time.

With that being said, the current oven I have is a dream. A perfect fan forced delight, the only issue I have is that the racks that come with the oven are quite hard to get out when there is something heavy on top. I've never burnt anything, the 180C is a perfect 180 and its lovely. However, I was unable to make a baked cheesecake perfectly in this oven on my first try. This is what it looked like.

It looks like a picture of the moon

 I frantically researched how I could possibly prevent this hideous cracking. Cheesecake lore is vast and very much insistent of the same things. Use a water bath to ensure an even temperature as the eggs help it set and whites and yolks cook at different temperatures, don't over mix your eggs into your batter as they can hide air pockets and cool it in a draft free place so that it doesn't crack whilst cooling. Simple. I had a mental blank however on how to make my springform tin waterproof, basically just wrap aluminum foil around it in a snug layer.

I'm a little impatient so I often overbake mine just a little bit so they go slightly golden brown and I can eat it faster. Its entirely up to you how the texture of your cake turns out. I actually prefer the texture of that cracked cheesecake, the insulated water one is very smooth and creamy but without the tang that unbaked ones have. I'm including the recipe for my unbaked version of the same, its basically the same thing without the eggs and with gelatine.

There is a lot of contrary advice here, especially for the marbling technique. I normally don't use the traditional technique for marble cake, where you try and make alternating blobs of two differently coloured mixtures in the pan, going around and around until the pan is full before swirling. This a nice video that explains what I'm talking about. I normally can't be bothered and just blob it in halves and get my Boyfriend to swirl for me, he always does a very good job of it, more so when we have large amounts of curd to use. Choose whatever milky/creamy drink you have on hand to mix in, it lightens up the taste of the cake a lot and provides valuable bulking if you're cheap with the cream cheese like I am.

Baked Lime Curd Marbled Cheesecake

Uses: making others fat. Regaining your title as cheesecake queen.

Ingredients for the biscuit base:
250g of crushed sweet biscuits
100g of melted butter

Ingredients for the cake part:
375g block of Philadelphia cream cheese
3/4 cup of sugar
1 cup of cream/milk/soy milk
2 eggs, just combined
1/2 cup of lime curd

Its pretty much the same for both +/- eggs/gelatine

Instructions:
1. Process your sweet biscuits in a food processor. If too lazy to wash, attempting to be healthy, cooking with a small child or masochistic, crush the packet by hand. Heat the oven to 180C.

Hand smooshed

2. Melt your butter and combine with the biscuit crumbs. Take out all your cake stuff and allow it to come to room temperature. If in a rush, microwave your cream cheese for 15 seconds.

Buttery.

Buttery crumbs!

3. Wrap the outside of a 22cm springform tin with aluminum foil and place the butter/biscuit mix inside this. Crush firmly down and against the sides of the tin with a glass tumbler to get an even coat. If feeling lazy, just squish against the bottom.

Like so

4. Bake in the oven for at least 8-10 minutes or until lightly golden brown. Allow to cool while making the cheesecake part. Turn the oven down to 160C.
5. Process the sugar and cream cheese together until smooth or smoosh by hand with a fork.

I really hate washing baking stuff.

6. Mix in the milk/cream/soy milk.

Creamy blobs.

7. Carefully fold in your eggs. Do not overmix or bad things will happen.

It looks like an evil smiley face.

8. Pour half of the cream cheese mixture into your cool biscuit mixture in the springform tin. Blob on your lime curd everywhere, or just spread a layer over the cream cheese. Pour over the other half. If you can be bothered, blob in a blob of cream cheese, then curd and repeat until the entire mixtures are used up.
9. With a poking instrument ie, knife, chopstick, fork, swirl a pattern through the mixture until pretty. Use restraint and do minimal swirls, otherwise you will just be mixing the curd in.

Bit too much

Pretty swirly pattern

10. Put your cheesecake in a deep roasting tray, fill the tray with water until the cheesecake is just about to float.
11. Bake at 160C for at least an hour. Do not open the oven until you think its ready. The centre should jiggle merrily, or alarmingly like a raw cake just in the centre. Allow to cool somewhere until set, it will firm up later on.

Unbaked Lime Curd Marbled Cheesecake

Uses: making others fat. Regaining your title as cheesecake queen.

Ingredients for the biscuit base:
250g of crushed sweet biscuits
100g of melted butter

Ingredients for the cake part:
375g block of Philadelphia cream cheese
3/4 cup of sugar
1 cup of cream/milk/soy milk
1 tablespoon of gelatine mixed in hot water
1/2 cup of lime curd

Instructions:
1. Process your sweet biscuits in a food processor. If too lazy to wash, attempting to be healthy, cooking with a small child or masochistic, crush the packet by hand.

2. Melt your butter and combine with the biscuit crumbs. Take out all your cake stuff and allow it to come to room temperature. If in a rush, microwave your cream cheese for 15 seconds.

3. Wrap the outside of a 22cm springform tin with aluminum foil and place the butter/biscuit mix inside this. Crush firmly down and against the sides of the tin with a glass tumbler to get an even coat. If feeling lazy, just squish against the bottom.

4.Put the biscuits in the fridge to set.
5. Process the sugar and cream cheese together until smooth. Mix up some hot water with the gelatine.

6. Mix in the milk/cream/soy milk.

7. Mix in your gelatine water, do not let this gelatine water be super hot or super cold. Super hot makes jelly strands, super cold means jellied water.
8. Pour half of the cream cheese mixture into your cool biscuit mixture in the springform tin. Blob on your lime curd everywhere, or just spread a layer over the cream cheese. Pour over the other half. If you can be bothered, blob in a blob of cream cheese, then curd and repeat until the entire mixtures are used up.
9. With a poking instrument ie, knife, chopstick, fork, swirl a pattern through the mixture until pretty. Use restraint and do minimal swirls, otherwise you will just be mixing the curd in.

Haha, there was a different picture

10. Come back in 2-3 hours and wobble to see if set. If set, eat.