The Birthday Torte - Finale

All done and what a hit.. no iPhone, no camera, so had to use on my old Nokia phone.. hence the quality of the photo.. but the cake was a great.
I ended up cooking three of the Tortes, and two chocolate mousse cakes of varying sizes, thinking I could put them all together.
However, at the last minute I ditched all my presentation ideas and went for a single spectacular 'look' with the three Tortes of varying sizes, fixing them together with whipped cream, covering the whole think with whipped cream, then dripping chocolate ganache (unwhipped) creatively over the entire edifice. Finishing it off with berries, ribbon, some leaves at the bottom and three of my mother's day flowers. (Left the chocolate mousse cakes for extras.)
To serve it though was a bit of challenge.. what I did was take off each cake and place it on a separate plate and cut from there. I would then quickly redecorate the remaining layer so that guests didn't feel like they missed out on the topping.
It looked good and tasted fantastic, and what I discovered is that guests really, really want a piece of the BIRTHDAY CAKE. They don't want a piece of chocolate mousse cake.. or cheese cake, although these were equally delicious and made with as much love ..they just want a piece of the action.. and there was plenty to go around.
Still feeling the warm glow of cooking compliments, although I must acknowledge the generous persons who gave the recipe to me.. Hopefully coming soon!

The Birthday Torte - Stage 2

One cake down, and now my camera is on the blink. Jorge is complaining of the dates... do I make 4 more cakes and place them on a large board in this sort of a design.. And of these 4 cakes, should they all be Date, Chocolate & Walnut Tortes, or do I make 2 different ones.. what is the etiquette of a birthday cake? This is my idea for the presentation of the cakes on a painted board I have.. one cake for each decade?

The Birthday Torte - Stage 1

Well, I now have well over a kilo of local dates.. not the plump ones, the other ones that don't look as good but taste better (Khadrawi dates), a kilo of dark cooking chocolate (Callebaut - see note below), a kilo of almonds, 2 dozen eggs and a few bags of castor sugar. With any luck I should have a couple of Chocolate, Date and Almond Tortes this time tomorrow.


(Note: Callebaut chocolate is apparently the chocolate used by "artisans and chefs".. Check out their website at http://www.barry-callebaut.com/)

Date, Chocolate and Almond (Birthday) Torte

I have agreed to make a cake for 60 people for a 50th birthday.. how exciting and how daunting. And, is it completely fool hardy to use a recipe that I have never used before?
I am thinking a Date, Chocolate and Almond Torte.. of varying sizes.. laid out on a board.. wait and see.

Pomegranate Molasses Iced Tea

This have become a nightly favourite for me when preparing dinner - a good replacement for that glass of red I'm trying to give up.

Ingredients
Light sugar syrup (made with 2 parts water, to 1 part sugar)
Lime Juice
Pomegranate Molasses
Sparkling mineral water
Ice
(White spirit to make a cocktail if inclined.)

Implements
Highball glass
Straw or stirrer

Method
Place Pomegranate Molasses, sugar syrup and lime juice in glass, with ice and mineral water. Stir and taste, and adjust accordingly. The pomegranate molasses tends to sit at the bottom, but I quite like the effect when drinking through a straw... a little bit like Vietnamese ice coffee with the condensed milk at the bottom.

Pomegranate Molasses

I spoke about Pomegranate Molasses last week on local ABC Radio, but in truth I had long since abandoned my bottle of pomegranate molasses which was looking pretty scungey. (Is this a word?) Of course, there was the initial honeymoon period where I used it in everything, and then bang! Nothing.. it had barely entered my repertoire for 18 months.. and then dear Alice wanted to talk about it last Friday.
I dragged the forgotten bottle out of my ex-linen closet-come-pantry, and in order to prepare for the task ahead, I poured some into a bowl and tasted it. Wow! It was good.. sour, sweet, thick and molasses like. I also sensed some mystery heady element... almost like alcohol. Now I was ready and this is what I discovered:
Pomegranate syrup is made from pomegranate seeds, sugar and lemon.. boiled down.
Pomegranates go way back.. to the old Testament (some believe it to be the forbidden fruit eaten by Even and offered to Adam) and to Greek mythology (eaten by Persephone, who was then banished to the underworld), but most positively spoken about in the Qu'uran, it is called the fruit of paradise.
Back to Pomegranate Molasses. Now, at the time I did this talk on radio, I had really only used pomegranate molasses in two ways.. as a salad dressing, and in pavlova. Yes, Pavlova. Only to be used for berry based fruits.. I put in a dash of pomegranate molasses and rosewater. It works, trust me!
Now, since I spoke about Pomegranate Molasses, we have finished off our old scungey bottle and bought a new bottle. The new bottle is nowhere near as nice and heavy and heady as the old scungey bottle, which Mark tells me he picked up in Hobart two years back, but it's OK. It's also much cleaner looking. It's Alice Springs, and I should thank my lucky stars that I can even buy it here, in the Centre of the Universe.
So, here is my favourite of the week (and I also added it to my boiling corn meat tonight. I figured pomegranate molasses had all the qualities that I would otherwise add as separate ingredients: brown sugar (sweet), vinegar (sour).. and that other special quality .)

Vietnam

10 days in Vietnam in April this year. Not long enough, but a good intro to this wondeful place. Why Vietnam? Because of the food and because it seemed to be the only destination Mark and I could agree on and the airfares from Darwin are incredibly cheap... I just want to say "Do it!" What a wonderful place, with so many lovely people and such great food. My food highlights were:
Sapote
Red Bridge Cooking School
Hoi An White Rose Dumplings
Tamarind Sorbet
DIY Hot Pot Restaurant
.. and possibly more, but I just can't remember right now.
Each morning, at breakfast, we were confronted with a stunning array of food: Vietnamese, French, American, Chinese, Japanese... without doubt, we would always head for the fruit.
The photo here is typical of the morning spread.. but the most amazing fruit of all was the brown fruit at the back, which I believe is a type of sapote. I did some internet research and discovered it is a different variety to the black sapote you get here in Australia. It is originally from Central/South America, and was introduced to the Phillipines and then to Southern Vietnam. What an amazing experience. A bit like eating a butterscotch fruit pudding. We even went to the Ben Thanh market and bought our own supply.
No sapote in Hoi An, but wonderful food. One of the local specialities are the White Rose dumplings, which look like little white roses with minced prawn and pork in the middle and sprinkled with crisp onion flakes. While in Hoi An, I tracked down the Red Bridge Cooking School and spent an afternoon in this beautiful location with my son Jorge, cooking many things, most memorable were the home made Vietnamese rice pancakes. Now I've since followed the recipe, and it just doesn't seem to work for me. Have I got the wrong type of rice, the wrong type of cloth, the wrong type of pot.. any ideas, anyone?
Jorge never eats eggplant, but we cooked this lovely simple dish, and he loved it. Not a great photo, but you get the general idea. The chef/teacher was a very funny fellow. Laconic.. yes, that is how I would describe him. And he made us wash our hands many times. I did start to wonder if food hygiene was particularly good in Vietnam, which is perhaps why we got no food upsets at all. I even ate prawns.. constantly.
Back in Ho Chi Minh City, Jorge and I discovered a funny hot pot restaurant. We thought we were going into a sushi train, as we saw all these little dishes on a conveyer belt.. but it was not to be. The hot pot restaurant consisted of a hot pot of soup base (Japanese, Thai or Chinese) put into a round space in front of you and then a knob which you controlled to bring it to boiling. On the conveyer belt were ingredients that you cooked yourself in the hotpot. Great for kids who like to cook and are kitchen-savvy.
Finally, and on the last day, I tasted a most wonderful Tamarind sorbet. I will do experimenting in the weeks to come, so stay posted.