mutteringhousewife

March 20, 2013

Vegetable Soup, yes in the Thermomix

I’m supposed to be doing recipes from the Thermomix book for the first week. This is a book that has recipes for apricot chicken and beef stroganoff. It’s a very patchy publication. So I’m not in the mood. But I’m picking stuff up, like how to start off a soup.

You chuck in a halved small onion. A smashed clove of garlic. Zap for ten seconds on speed seven. It won’t pulverise them, it will chop them up fairly severely. Put in a slice of butter. Mix for two minutes on hundred degrees on speed one. It just gets them to translucent. We need a verb for “put in Thermomix and add some settings”. I’ll ponder that for a bit.

Put in two tomatoes, cut in half. Cut in half four zucchinis that some kind person bought for you in the mistaken belief that they were cucumbers. Add them to the pot. Zap for ten seconds on speed seven. Add in a cup of frozen chicken stock and a tablespoon of that ultra salty Thermomix vegetable stock. I can’t bring myself to throw it out, so I may as well use tiny bits of it here and there. It can’t go in the compost, it would kill it. I was going to put in cauliflower, but I forgot. You could put in any vegetables really. Cook for twenty minutes at 100 degrees on speed one, which just moves it around. I put the steamer basket over the hole in the lid because I thought it could do with being reduced a bit.

It sounds cringingly healthy, but it was surprisingly tasty and satisfying. I didn’t even put cheese in it. It had a bit of body to it.

It made enough for two, so I’ll have it with toast for lunch tomorrow. I may have to follow it up with a chocolate bar, but at least I’m getting my lycopenes.

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March 19, 2013

Deconstructed Sushi – in the Thermomix

I have used the Thermomix for all kinds of things in the five days I’ve had it. Not for dinner though. Tonight was the night. I’ve blogged about deconstructed sushi for dinner. It was the perfect proof of concept.

Normally this dinner involves cooking salmon wrapped in foil in the oven. Rice in the rice cooker. Omelette in the frying pan. And the rest is raw, so lets not bother with that. Here’s how you do it in the Thermomix.

Put the steamer basket in the Thermomix bowl. Press the scale button. Weigh three hundred grams of rice into the basket. Take the basket out. Weigh eight hundred grams of water into the bowl. Put the basket back over the water.

Place the lid on the bowl. Place the Varona basket over the lid. Put two slabs of salmon in the basket.

If you were cooking for anyone mildly adventurous, you could have whipped up some ginger, shallots and garlic prior to filling up the bowl with water, then rubbed it over the salmon. However. There’s a steamer plate for the Varona that goes over the basket. Line that with baking paper. Pour over a couple of eggs beaten with a bit of soy sauce and sugar. Curse a little as they drip over the edge of the paper because you’ve been a bit frugal with it. Bend the paper into more of a bowl shape.

Bung on the lid. Cook the lot for fifteen minutes at Varoma temperature on speed four.

Well, it all worked. Not sure how much I like the look of a steamed omelette, but it tastes fine. The salmon and rice were cooked properly. It sounds like a bit of palaver, but it’s just a stack of steamers, all of which go in the dishwasher, so hurrah from my washing up team who can have the night off.

Preparation time was about five minutes, cooking time fifteen, which I spent cutting up the raw veggies, so that could be the quickest dinner I’ve ever prepared. The machine is a little noisy for what it’s doing, which is just heating up and sloshing around water. And I don’t like the name Varoma. It doesn’t really reflect what the thing is, and sounds a bit like a feminine hygiene product. I guess it needs a name. Steamer? That’s almost as bad. OK, marketing is difficult. Minor quibbles really. This is definitely my preferred rice and fish preparation method from now on. Might stick to doing omelette in the frying pan, just for textural reasons. Yes, yes, I am having fun.

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March 18, 2013

Panettone

Tempted though I am, I’m not going to subject you to my whining about being disabled. I’m saving that for later in the week. Instead, I bring to you my children’s complaint for the weekend. “How come you’ve been baking all weekend and there’s nothing for us?”.

As I mentioned last week, I made five lots of morning tea for my husband to take to his week of meetings. Two items were requested from the last set of meetings, hazelnut biscotti and raspberry slice, both of which can be found in my collected works. No, I’m not putting in a link, go find it yourself. I also sent along brownies, which I mixed in the Thermomix, ginger nuts and hazelnut meringue biscuits, which I may share with your at a later date. I did make panettone too, but we kind of went to a friend’s place for an impromptu barbeque, so I sacrificed the panettone to the gods of hospitality, who ate it all up.

The kids have been asking me to make panettone for a while now. They weren’t easily fobbed off by my initial reaction, which was “you don’t make panettone. You wait until Easter or Christmas, then you go into any shop in our suburb and pull one out of the walls of panettone that magically appear at that time. You then exchange it for one belonging to your neighbour, stick it in the back of the pantry, wait five years then throw it out.” It turns out that flattery works remarkably well on me, so I made one this weekend. And, because of its rapid disappearance into our kind hosts of last night, again today.

You can really make it with a wooden spoon, but if you have a KitchenAid it is dead easy. First you gather your materials. I’ll bet you don’t have orange essence in your pantry. Or glycerine. Apparently you can leave out the glycerine and use lemon zest instead of the essence, but the way I did tastes just like a bought one, only not redolent of dust and moths.

Place in your KitchenAid bowl 200 grams of water, fifteen grams of fresh yeast (or a seven gram sachet of dried yeast), 25 grams of caster sugar and 25 grams of for flour. Whisk them all together. Add six egg yolks and beat them in. Save the whites for fun stuff like hazelnut meringue biscuits, Thermomix macarons (can’t wait to try that recipe), or today it was lime and poppyseed friands. Beat in three teaspoons of glycerine, three teaspoons of vanilla essence and two teaspoons of orange essence. Melt together, carefully, 50 grams of butter and 50 grams of white chocolate. I’m still working on this in the Thermomix, when I have it fail safe I’ll let you know. We got there in the end. Beat that into the mix. Mix in 400 grams of flour and a teaspoon of salt if your butter was unsalted. The recipe says just mix it in with the wooden spoon, but because I had the KitchenAid running, and it was a yeast thing I thought I’d let it mix for a few minutes. It did start getting all stretchy and satisfactory looking, so I’m keeping that step.

Let it rest for five minutes, then fold in 150 grams of bits of your choice. Or not. I’m going with golden raisins this time, I’ve got a bit of a thing for them lately. They’re nicer than bog standard sultanas.

Then you choose your pan or pans. The mix is very wet, not like bread dough at all, and really sticky. So if it rises out of the pan it will droop sadly down the sides and be a bit of a bugger to get off. I’m using a small loaf pan and a little square tin. Line them with baking paper, make sure the paper goes all the way up to the top. Only fill the tins a third of the way up. Leave them somewhere warm until they’ve almost tripled in height. You can gently brush a sugar syrup on them, or sugar beaten with egg white. Or not. Bake them at 180 degrees for about half an hour. More if you actually have a panettone tin and a baking the lot as one loaf.

This produces a very light sweet loaf that looks like it will toast well if we manage to keep it for more than a day. It has that hint of orange without having peel in it (hardly anyone likes peel, it’s very sad). Have a go at it. I could do it standing on one leg.

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March 15, 2013

And I Thought the Boot was Bad

You thought you’d be reading more about the Thermomix today didn’t you. I did make a very exciting breakfast in it, but the rush and swirl of my life means that that is yesterday’s news. My friends, capricious Fate, or rather an apologetic young doctor, has put me in plaster from my fuschia toenails to my knobbly knee. Yes, it’s the skiing injury still. Apparently my foot has decided to cope with its ongoing inflammation by putting a great deal of pressure on the bone at the top of my arch, resulting in the precursor to a stress fracture. The only treatment is to immobilise the foot completely and it isn’t even allowed to touch the ground. Which means I’m on crutches for six weeks.

I can drive. It’s a waterproof cast, so I can shower standing on one leg, and I can swim. That will be interesting, but it’s the only exercise option left to me apart from lifting weights. Although having been on crutches now for three hours, the no exercise might not be such a problem, it’s quite exhausting using crutches, even more so if you decide bugger it, I’m hopping. I’m going to end up with a giant left buttock. I can feel it developing already.

The first crushing realisation was that I’m not going to be able to get a takeaway coffee for six weeks, because I won’t have any hands free. I suppose being forced to sit at a cafe isn’t so bad. Then, how am I going to hang out the washing? The girls at the cafe helpfully pointed out that I could put the wet washing in a bag and sling it over my back, so that’s sorted. Shopping will be problematic. I’m pretty sure if I can find a park up on Ramsay Street, Frank will take my fruit to the car, and perhaps I can wait until the kids get home to unload it. I am not not not going to use Coles Online because they suck more than I can bear to think about. I used to use them when the Horror was little and not fit for public consumption, and they’d always bring me stuff that was close to or at expiry, and the order was never complete.

I can cook, so that’s a relief. I had already organised my baking corner so that almost everything is to hand and if I hop over and open the oven first, getting a baking tray in there only requires one hop. I have the oven door open right now letting some biscotti cool down before I attempt to hop anywhere with it. My husband had put in an order for five days worth of morning tea, because he’ll be away all next week reorganising the Army, and the Army vastly prefer my baking to the officially endorsed Arnotts Assorted Creams. I’d hate to let down the Army.

Yes, that’s right, I’m on my own all next week. That means my dear children will have to make themselves very useful indeed or risk getting poked with the crutches. By the time the husband gets back I should have developed some upper back and buttock musculature, some coping mechanisms that don’t involve too much alcohol and should be complaining less so it’s probably best for our marriage that he’s away.

Of course the hardest thing will be accepting help. I had to start almost before the plaster was dry, because my car was parked down a set of stairs from my doctor. A very kind lady offered to take my handbag and crutches while I swung myself down the stairs by the banisters and it really was a lot quicker than doing it myself. My first instinct is to bark “I’m fine!”, but I’m not. Hopefully I will be soon, the plaster is due to come off the Friday before the Verdi at the Town Hall, of which more later, and hopefully all my bits will be behaving themselves and will be allowed to be free.

And look! It’s denim blue! I have a bit of an urge to bedazzle it.

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March 14, 2013

Eek, Thermomix

Not sure how to put this, so I’ll just come out and say it. I have a Thermomix. I didn’t buy it! My dear parents, avid readers of this blog, read between the lines and thought that despite all my protestations I might really like a Thermomix. So they bought me one, aided and abetted by my sister who has actually become a Thermomix consultant in the last few months. If you’re in Brisbane and Thermocurious, get in touch with Erin Williams.

A Thermomix doesn’t just arrive in a box, it is hand delivered by your local consultant. She sets it up, gives you a very thorough lesson in how to use it and in the process you make a vegetable stock concentrate. Let me tell you, Thermomix, it is too salty. Too salty. I don’t care if it prolongs the shelf life, I have a freezer. I’m going to make it again with maybe a third the salt. Apart from that, I had a very enjoyable morning indeed, tinged with a little guilt that she wasn’t the demonstrator for the original party that started me off. My demonstrator was very knowledgeable and interested in cooking herself, so we exchanged tips and stories and generally had quite the excellent time.

I am again astounded at what I won’t be needing in my kitchen any more. Scales. That metal steamer I do broccoli in. The rice cooker, which was on its last legs anyway. The coffee grinder. The milk foamer that goes with the Nespresso machine. I’m definitely going to keep using the KitchenAid for baking, but I won’t have to get the extra bowl I was planning to fork out for, a Thermomix can deal with egg whites like nobody’s business. I will probably keep making bread by hand, because I think it’s different every time and I like kneading. I will also keep using the blender if it ever comes back from holidays for Boost Juice purposes because I’ll allow the kids to use it, but they won’t be getting their sticky fingers on my Thermomix. I could probably cut down on my metal bowl collection and won’t need all three saucepans, but they’re a set and I’m pretty sure my parents bought me those too, about fifteen years ago.

So why am I not cooking things in it right now this very minute? Well, that is because I’m hanging out with the neighbour’s new puppy, Peppa, who was going to have to have a day all by herself if I didn’t come over. She is helping me out by chewing on the recipe book I’m flicking through.

You can make your own Nutella! I also rather like the look of the Chinese drinking porridge, very healthful. I am totally going to steam fish in the steamer thing that sits on the top. Sadly I think the first thing I’ll be cooking in it is pasta from the pasta shop for the kids dinner tonight, I’ll be going to parent teacher night with the Muffet, the Moose had tennis squads and the husband is playing soccer until late this evening. It’s tough to find a meal that will cater to all those needs. Actually, I could pulverise the Parmesan first, but you need to cut it up into chunks. Easier than hand grating it, I would imagine. No, locals, I don’t like the Parmesan from the IGA, I prefer the Kraft MilLel, it’s tangier, but you do have to grate it yourself.

So you will be hearing a little bit, from time to time, about Thermomix from me. If that doesn’t interest you, talk among yourselves until I get a sewing project going or go on holidays or something. The consultant almost had me convinced that I also need the Thermomix insulated bowl that you keep rice warm in, or make yoghurt in. Maybe I do need one. The catch is that they won’t just sell you one. You have to have a party. I don’t suppose any of you want to come to a Thermomix party? I’m thinking a Friday morning. You get lunch. And they really don’t hard sell, but they do plant a seed that lodges in your brain and starts burrowing, burrowing…

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March 13, 2013

Vaguely Asian Stock and What I plan to Do With It

I’ve been flicking through Adam Liaw’s Masterchef prize, Two Asian Kitchens, and what a pleasure it is. Completely unlike Gordon Ramsay’s cookbook whose only point seems to be “I’ve got blue eyes!”. Adam’s cookbook is thorough, not too fussily photographed and accessible, which is really saying something as he doesn’t dumb down those Asian classics at all. You really feel like you could whip up Gong Bao chicken, if only you’d bought Chianking vinegar at the Asian grocery shop you were last at rather than Zhen Jiang. Pea brain.

I’d been paying particular attention to the stock discussion. I’ve been a bit bored with the chicken stock I usually produce, I feel like the flavours aren’t right for an Asian dish. Adam discusses two stocks, a general purpose one and a master stock. I first heard of master stocks on the the first season of Masterchef, but they never really went in to what they were. What they are is just a stock that you reuse. Back in the olden days you’d have a pot on the fire all the time which you’d keep topped up with water and you’d chuck stuff in, vegetables and herbs and bits of meat, and you’d fish stuff out and you’d never empty the pot. That’s the principle of a master stock, but in this age of Dettol everyone finds that idea a bit erky, not to mention perky. There are modern ways of doing it, but that’s not what I was planning to chat about.

Adam’s everyday stock was based on chicken bones, which I had, and pork bones which I happened to spot at the local IGA. There was also those little dried fish in the recipe, but I couldn’t come at that, so I left them out. I also didn’t bother with kombu. You put the pork bones in a large stock pot. You cover them with plenty of cold water. You bring it to the boil. You forget about it briefly because the dog has his foot caught in his ear again. You are a bit horrified at the amount of brown scum bubbling on the surface, so you tip the water and scum into the sink, retrieve the pork bones and give the pot a bit of a rinse. Put the bones back in the pot. Add the chicken bones (they’d already been cooked), two thick slices of ginger, five unpeeled cloves of garlic, six chopped green onions, a small, unpeeled brown onion. I also put in a whole lot of celery tops, because I happened to have them and I like the flavour of celery in stock. Cover with water, this is going to make a lot of stock.

Adam says you have to watch it so it never boils, just gently simmers, otherwise it will become cloudy. Well, I can live with cloudy, so it may have come to the boil a few times for the couple of hours I had it going for. Let it cool a bit while you go and pick up the Moose from debating, then strain it into your most giant metal bowl. You don’t want to put that straight in the fridge, it will heat everything up, so gently place it in the sink and surround it with some cool water. It will drop to tepid in less than the time it takes a Horror from Outer Space to perform his choir warmup song for you, with repeats. Put it in the fridge.

Next day you can scoop off the fat on the surface with a slotted spoon, or, in my case, a perforated pasta strainer. The stock has more of a meaty flavour than my usual chicken stock but is a lot more neutral. The first thing I’m planning to do with it is to flavour a couple of cups with black rice vinegar and five spice, maybe some dark soy sauce and boil some rice noodles in it for dinner tonight. They’ll be served topped with some Chinese BBQ pork I picked up today from Burwood and some choy sum and fresh shiitake mushrooms stir fried with chillies and maybe some sesame oil. Obviously a non kid dinner. I am going to make them sample the BBQ pork, one of the great joys of life.

Of the remaining stock, I’ll freeze some as it is, and some I’ll reduce down for a concentrate. I wonder if that will work. That will be to flavour dishes, rather than to make a soup or stew. I have vague thoughts of making a master stock with some of it, but I can’t see myself using it much until the kids are a bit more adventurous with their eating. I do like the sound of the aromatics he suggests putting in the master stock, cinnamon quills, star anise, Sichuan peppers, fennel, cloves, so I may just make that and call it flavoursome stock rather than master stock and only use it once. Nobody need ever know.

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March 12, 2013

Lime Shortbread

The Moose must have been bitten by a Boy Scout because last week, on his way to tennis, he helped an elderly man load some boxes into his car. His reward was some tiny limes from the tree in the man’s front yard and he was very excited to show me the fruits of his virtue. And you know that I always love unconventionally acquired food.

It had to be something with lime zest. Fresh limes straight from the tree, no wax and looked like no juice also. I thought about cola, but the Moose isn’t that keen on it. I am though, so was tempted to go ahead anyway, but while doing some bedtime reading of Tish Boyle’s The Good Cookie, a constant source of inspiration, I came across a recipe for lime shortbread. Winner.

I would strongly recommend hauling out the wallet and getting some Pepe Saya butter for this one. I’ve done a fair bit of testing now and if you’re rationing yourself then you should save this butter for pastry and shortbread. For those perusing from a different country, Pepe Saya is a cultured butter made from the milk of contented cows and is a very fine thing indeed.

OK, recipe. Place in a bowl two cups of flour, three quarters of a cup of icing sugar, a quarter of a teaspoon of baking powder, half a teaspoon of ground ginger and a tablespoon of fresh lime zest and mix them all up. Scatter over the top one hundred and seventy grams of cold butter chopped into chunks (I actually did the conversion this time). Cut it into the flour mixture until the butter pieces are quite small. The KitchenAid did a perfectly adequate job of this. Stop the KitchenAid and pour in two tablespoons of lime juice and a teaspoon of vanilla essence. I had to get the lime juice from conventionally acquired limes, those tiny ones were solid with green seeds inside. Mix very slowly until the dough just starts coming together. Squish it about a bit with your hands to make it smooth, then divide the dough in half. Roll each half into a log shape and wrap in plastic wrap. Stick it in the fridge until it’s good and solid again. You may want to go and process some concert subscriptions and work out how to convert a sheet into a toga for when your youngest son goes to the Literature Festival as Zeus. No, I didn’t think Zeus was a literary figure either, but he got it past the librarian.

Take the plastic wrap off and slice the logs into biscuits about four millilitres thick. They don’t spread very much, so you can place them quite close together on your lined baking sheet. Bake them at 160 degrees fan forced (180 degrees not) until they’re just starting to go golden around the edges, it will take about fifteen minutes and keep an eye on them. Don’t let them brown.

Those aren’t the limes, they’re just for illustrative purposes. I warned the kids that the green flecks in the biscuits weren’t mould, they were lime zest. That could be an issue with their visual appeal, but goodness they taste good. Not as soft as shortbread often is, almost crunchy and a very definitely limey. You can’t really taste the ginger, but I think it adds a bit of complexity to the flavour. Like I said, winner.

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March 11, 2013

Spelt bread

Soon I’ll be having soy in my coffee. Yes, I made spelt bread. But I have a good excuse. I have a tetchy tummy and it has been suggested to me that I may benefit from the low FODMAPS diet put out by Monash University specifically for those of uncertain digestion. I had a look, and it certainly had quite a few foods on its naughty side that I have a lot of problems with. Specifically stone fruit, dairy products and lentils and pulses. You hear a lot of people carrying on about dairy being the root of all evil, but when a dietitian tells you to lay off the lentils I pay attention. Those things are lethal.

It didn’t fit my sensitivities exactly, there’s no way I could eat grapes, beef, mandarins, porridge or bananas without suffering the consequences, but it did suggest substituting spelt bread for wheat bread. I’ve always had a niggly feeling that gluten might be a bit of an issue for me, but it’s such a bandwagon! I’d feel so silly giving up gluten. As it turns out, spelt isn’t gluten free but it’s a different type of gluten that may be tolerated better by guts such as mine. Worth a shot, I thought.

I found a relatively simple recipe on taste.com. You dissolve fifteen grams of fresh yeast (or a seven gram sachet) in a cup and a half of water. Add a cup and a half of white spelt flour and a cup and a half of whole meal spelt flour. Also a tablespoon of olive oil, a couple of grinds of salt and a tablespoon of sugar. Knead, but not nearly as much as you would a wheat loaf. I found this combination to be way too wet, so added perhaps a quarter of a cup more of the white flour. It was still quite wet, but I thought it would do. I washed and oiled the bowl and shovelled the mix back in. I covered it with a damp tea towel and took it out for a lie in the sunshine on the trampoline. I wonder why our trampoline has a burn hole in it? After about forty five minutes it had almost doubled in size, so I punched it about and massaged it into a lined loaf tin and left it in the kitchen while I went to Drummoyne.

Drummoyne took a bit longer than I thought it would. I’m planning a new bathroom and got into quite a technical chat with the proprietor of the bathroom shop. Did you know you can get floor tiles that look exactly like wood? And it’s very difficult to get a toilet that is any colour other than white these days, not that I’m terribly attached to our current peach coloured model. So by the time I got back with a sheaf of brochures the loaf had over risen a bit, so I got it straight into the oven. The rising times seem to be less than for wheat. I baked it on 220 degrees for fifteen minutes, then 180 degrees for another twenty and left it in the turned off oven while I went to pick up the Horror from Outer Space from his institution. The crust looks very good, and the thin slice that I’ve tried with a bit of butter was more than acceptable. I thought that because it hasn’t risen as much as a wheat loaf it may be a little dense, but it isn’t.

I think I can comfortably fool myself that this is bread and not some kind of hippie rabbit food. I plan on not telling the man of the house, he’s fairly unused to whole meal bread so will probably not notice. The recipe actually suggests messing about with adding linseed and decorating with flakes of oatmeal, but I didn’t bother with that. I don’t mind a linseed in whole meal bread, but I don’t have any. Maybe next time.

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March 8, 2013

Very Strawberry Cupcakes

I thought that in Year Seven you didn’t have to bring in birthday baked goods for your daughter when she turned twelve. That is strictly true. What they didn’t tell me that the girls would form a pact and pair up so that each mum got to prepare birthday treats for someone else’s daughter altogether.

“I asked Janie whether she liked vanilla, chocolate or strawberry, and she likes strawberry. So can you make a strawberry cake with cream like you do for our birthdays? Tomorrow?” Hold on a minute. For a start I’m sure the teachers won’t want to mess about with a cake. I’ll do it as cupcakes. And you can’t have cream and fresh strawberries, they need to be put on when you serve it, that will be way too fiddly. How many will you need? “Um, there’s fourteen girls in my home room, so, ummm….” I start to wonder if she’s fallen into a coma. “Thirty four!” she finally says brightly, then skips off to bring havoc to someone else’s life,

I make strawberry cake by mixing strawberries into a basic butter cake. First, you need some strawberries. Two punnets. Being a little short on time I got these from the local IGA and they really weren’t that good. Expensive, simultaneous underripe and about to go mouldy. Chop off the green bits and hurl them into a small saucepan. Cook them over medium heat, stirring with whatever implement comes to hand. You have to play it by ear a bit. This lot let out a lot of water and were very sour. I added a quarter of a cup of sugar and let them reduce down a bit, til I was in danger of starting to make jam. You want about a cup of pulp. Set that aside to cool.

Make the butter cake mix. Cream together 120 grams of butter (that’s four ounces for those of you who don’t speak SI, and yes I know it should be kilograms, but close enough) with half a cup of caster sugar. Gently beat in two eggs. Mix in two cups of plain flour and four teaspoons of baking powder. Fold in three quarters of a cup of strawberry pulp. The mix will be a disturbing flesh colour. Set out forty mini patty pan cups on a baking tray. Use a teaspoon to distribute the mix among them. Bake at 180 degrees for only about fifteen minutes, these cakes are little.

So far, so successful. If I was serving these as butterfly cakes, I’d slice a wedge out of the top, slide some strawberry jam into the cavity, slap some King Island cream on top, put the wedge back on and slather a bit of strawberry icing on and there you go. I did the jam bit.

I made some icing, by mixing the leftover strawberry pulp with thirty grams of sweet butter and three cups of icing sugar. You can just mix it up with a spatula, you don’t need heavy machinery.

I do happen to have a piece of machinery for applying the icing, a giant syringe. I just can’t get the hang of piping bags, I always feel the need for an extra hand and I end up dropping the bag on the cake. Surely a syringe would be easier.

Icing cakes is a lot harder than it looks. I tried two different nozzles. The first was pretty, but put out too much icing, and is going to need much practise.

The second put out the right amount of icing, but the result looked like brains.

Apparently they were delicious and instantly devoured. But I have much work to do on my presentation.

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March 7, 2013

Sydney Stitches and Craft Show

I love to go to a craft show, because I’m always delighted, surprised, inspired, amused, bewildered and ultimately creeped out by them, at which point I go home, exhausted. And so it was with the Sydney Stitches and Craft Show, held at Rosehill Gardens Racecourse at Rosehill, not Randwick, stupid Google Maps. I’d been there before, so I wasn’t fooled.

The tone was set by an elderly gentleman outside the entrance, shaded by a large black umbrella who was playing, to the accompaniment of a boom box, panpipes. He would put them down occasionally to attempt to flog a CD to anyone that got too close, but most of the time it was continuous panpipes at a pretty high volume. Carefully avoiding him I waded through a sea of excited pensioners all filling in the form for the lucky door prize to get at the treasures within.

For those who haven’t been to the Stitches and Craft Show before, its bread and butter is this kind of thing.

These are fat quarters, and are used in quilting. Apparently you cut them into shapes and sew them to other bits that you’ve cut into other shapes until eventually you get something big enough to either give to your loudly protesting nieces and nephews at Christmas, or to hang on the wall. They’re not much use as bed coverings now that everyone has doonas. Needless to say, I have no interest in quilting and do not wish even to know why they are fat or what they are a quarter of.

You’ve also got your scrapbook and paper craft shops, a couple that are threads and wool, including one that was selling this:

Pre-felt! The possibilities!
Also shops specifically for your nanna to buy supplies to make nanna rugs,

,
Shops where Professor Umbrage bought her cross stitch kitten,

And sadly only a few bead shops, and even more sadly they were only selling cheap Chinese stuff. The one that was selling Swarovski and brand name stringing materials was doing so at a vastly higher price than I could get them at Fusion, so I didn’t bother. If I wanted cheap Chinese stuff, and it definitely has its place, I would go to I Love You Beads on Parramatta Road, then I could get cheap organza bags too.

I’m putting this one in to make my sister laugh.

Possibly they should have had the arrow up the other way, but that’s all I’ll say about that.

There was even a stall flogging needlework cruises. Needlework cruises. Surely they couldn’t get a whole boat load of embroiderers? I didn’t stop to ask.

I did love some of the cutesy stall names, like KimoYes ( selling kimono fabric), Punch with Judy, Picklemouse Corner, the Status Thimble, Crafty Frou Frou and Miss Rose, Sister Violet. Actually, those last two were the only ones I bought anything from. Some black and white stuff from the former,

And some outrageous trimming for the dream handbag I started making for myself about this time last year from the latter,

But eventually the crowd takes its toll on me. The mob that makes up the crowds at this kind of show is principally senior ladies with a good handful of teenage girl school groups. Neither group has any respect for personal space and after a couple of hours I have been jostled more than my system can tolerate and I must away for an hour or two of peace before picking up my little darlings from school. Now all I need is a few free days to get some serious crafting done. I might have to ignore my committee duties for a bit.

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