Cupcakes Ahoy!

Hello and welcome to the cupcake post! Tissa, my lovely supervisor at HMV, bought me a cupcake recipe book for my birthday, and I thought it was only fair to put them to the test! Kirsten helped by making the wonderful butter - chocolate - orange - AWESOME - icing.

Step 1 - Get a book. And some awesome silicone cupcake bottoms.

Step 2 - Put said cupcake bottoms in a cupcake tray.

Step 2.5 (Not shown) - Mix all the ingredients together and then...

Step 3 - Pour lovingly into cupcake bottoms.

Step 4 - Bake at 180C until ORANGE!

Step 5 - Watch Kirsten make icing and swirl icing lovingly over cupcakes.

Step 6 - CONSUME HASTILY!

They had orange flavored bottoms (thanks to orange peel) and chocolate icing tops, making them taste like Terry's Chocolate Oranges. Only moister and awesome-er.

There are 10 left... not sure how long they will last.

Om nom nom nom.

Om Nom Nom Nom

That's right. The Breakfast of Champions. Baked beans and back bacon on toast. It was very tasty.

Right down to the last bean.

Dinner

I don't experiment often in the kitchen. I like cooking, but I generally follow recipes or on-line pre-tested food blogs. However, for some reason yesterday I was feeling adventurous, so I took one of my favourite meals (Asparagus, Bacon (chicken) feta cheese) and added a bunch of stuff (zucchini, portobello mushrooms and mozzarella balls) and made it something AWESOME. Mmmm so good. And easy to make. And you should make it. However, until you get the chance to make it, enjoy the picture.

Canned Pumpkin

After searching high and low for canned pumpkin, and coming up empty, and buying and carving and roasting and cooking and mashing a pumpkin to make my own pie, I FINALLY FOUND CANNED PUMPKIN!!

Found it at Whole Foods. Cost a whopping 1.69 and I'm going to save it for Christmas. Not sure how long they will have it around (assuming it's a seasonal import), and I still have some frozen goo left in the freezer. It'll be interesting to find out whether I prefer the canned to the fresh stuff. Either way, well done Whole Foods.

P.S. Pardon the mess in the background. I can't be bothered to clean it up. And I'm sick, so at least I have an excuse.

Pumpkin Pie

Well, with the Halloween Season upon us, and with Canadian Thanksgiving just past, and Britain not particularly participating in either, I felt it was necessary to excercise my Canadian-ness and make a pumpkin pie, damnit!

And so I did.

Here's the pumpkin I bought. It's a specific "baking pumpkin", which cost 4 times as much as the carving pumpkin of the same size that it was sitting next too. Whether it was a requirement of the pie, or a sneaky trick used by grocery stores to encourage you to buy a fancy pumpkin, I'll never know.

And here's the liquid I turned it into. Yes, I know it looks a bit like vomit... it's okay. We're all thinking it. I used the recipe off this site here, although instead of microwaving the pumpkin for 30 minutes, I chose to bake it instead to make it soft. Although this took longer than planned and was slightly frustrating.

After scraping the pumpkin out of its shell, and mixed it with evaporated milk, eggs, sugar, and a bunch of spices. Unfortunately I don't have a blender/food purifier, so I couldn't blend the mixture properly, resulting in a slightly lumpy pie. Still has lovely flavor.

First, I baked a bunch of mini-pies, which turned out quite well. Nice, bite sized morsels. Although chunky...

Oh the dishes... so many dishes...

And finally, the masterpiece! I would love to say that I made the pastry myself, too, but I didn't. Maybe next time. I have some pumpkin goop left in the freezer for future use, so who knows. This pie turned out really well, actually better than the mini-pies, since the longer baking time meant that it's less chunky in the middle.

... and, of course, the whipping cream! Can't forget that...

All in all I'm pleased that I tried this recipe, although I'm pretty sure that when I return to the land of canned pumpkin and pre-made pies, I will opt for the easier option. A fun experiment, but time consuming and expensive.

But for now, I've got pie.

Food

Lately I've bit a bit obsessed with cooking, or, at least, trying new recipes. Turns out it hasn't been as hard as I thought, and other than a slightly undercooked episode of banana bread, I've been reasonably sucessful!

My first attempt at a new recipe was this. I read it on the website and my mouth drooled just reading through it. So I grilled up a steak (above), which, if I might say, I'm getting pretty good at.
And then topped it with caramalized onions in a cream and blue cheese sauce. The end result was so good I ate it before I took a picture, But you can imagine. It was freaking awesome.
And, the next day I got to use the creamy leftovers to make a fetucinni alfredo! That's right, innovation. Hahahaha.
And then last night I made a pie! To be fair, I didn't make the pastry, that came out of a roll, but I did mix the pork with the mashed potatoes and pinched all the corners to make it pretty. Excuse the tiny hold in the bottom, I wanted to make sure the bottom was cooked before it got too cool.
And I made cookies! This is before I put icing on them, and before they were devoured by some of the people I live with. And yes, that's my apron. I know, it rocks.

I'm running out of food recipes to try, so if you have any favorites, let me know! I want more recipes. :)

Covent Garden's Giant(ish) Cupcake!

Last Wednesday I was in Covent Garden to enjoy a slice of a rather large cupcake. Now, I can't remember if it was supposed to be the world's largest cupcake, or the UK's largest cupcake, or even London's biggest cupcake. Either way, it was the largest cupcake I've ever seen... even if it wasn't big enough to terrorize Tokyo Godzilla-style.

You can see the London Transport Museum in the background - an excellent museum.
See? It's not as big as you thought right? Still, I figured I'd better queue up to grab a slice.
Here's the cupcake-cutting. People started going a bit mad when they started cutting, thinking that they were going to run out of cupcake or something.
Either way, I got some! And it was very tasty. And vanilla, which is the best.

I didn't stick around to see if it all got handed out, or what was in the centre of it.... but I did definitely enjoy my cupcake slice.

Salmon Crusted Tuna

I made sesame-seed crusted seared tuna with mashed yam last night. I'm enjoying the sesame seeds, but the tuna wasn't as good as the salmon was. I ended up drizzling soy sauce on the tuna to get some flavor. It was a bit dry.

I'll stick to salmon and steak for now!

Salmon nom nom nom

Today Tamryn (flatmate) and I headed down to Camden Market. We didn't get down there until about 2 p.m. - we wanted to make it a late day since she had a bellydance thing she wanted to go to at 7 p.m. Camden market was as packed as ever, but we had a lot of fun walking through the stalls. It's been a while since I went through the market in such detail - I usually hit my favorite stalls and move on.

I bought a new purse (oh hush), one that I'd been eyeing at a store at the mall where I worked - I was going to buy it a while back, but when I went to buy it they had sold out. It's brown and purple and lovely.

Tamryn bought some dresses, a skirt, and some scarves. She definitely cleaned up - finding some lovely items.

After that she headed off to bellydance thing and I came home to cook dinner. I had left some salmon out of the freezer since I bought the variety that said it shouldn't be frozen (uhhh....?), so I decided to cook it! I found a recipe for sesame-seed crusted salmon with yam fries, and I tried it, and it was soooo good. The sesame seeds on the salmon made it taste just awesome! I ate it before I thought to take a picture, so no picture for you, but man, I'm going to make that again tomorrow! (Edit: I've now added that picture!)

The weather is starting to get quite warm here - it was sunny and about 17C today - out in the sun it got hot! I'm looking forward to some lovely weather in the upcoming weeks. Hopefully it'll stick around long enough for you people!

Anyways, just thought i'd update the blog - it's been a while!

SUSHI!

So, today I made sushi! Yay! I got the idea to make my own sushi while at Waitrose, shopping for cleaning supplies. I went down the 'ethnic foods' aisle to get some more soy sauce, I saw a box of sushi rice and thought to myself 'I should make sushi!'

A quick visit to Chinatown to stock up on more sushi supplies found me spending 20 quid on the following:

• 2 packs of seaweed sheets (10 per pack)
  
• 1 box of sushi rice (will need to buy more, cheaper at the asian grocery store)
  
• 1 cucumber
  
• 1 avocado
  
• 1 bunch of spring onions
  
• 1 pack of crab-sticks
  
• 1 pack of salmon trimmings
  
• 1 pack of pre-cooked shrimp
  
• 1 huge bottle of soy sauce
  
• 1 pack of chopsticks (can't eat sushi with a fork!)
  
• 2 mini plates
  
• 1 tiny bowl for soy sauce
  
• 1 wooden paddle
  
• 1 bottle of rice vinegar
  
• 1 wooden bamboo rolling mat
  
• 1 bag of sesame seeds
  
• 1 packaged of unagi (seasoned eel)
  

I used the mini-table in our little kitchen and laid out all my supplies for the sushi making:

So far we've got a knife, a towel, cutting board, tub of water, sushinori, sesame seeds, soy sauce, avocado, sushi rice, rice vinegar, plates and chopsticks, a damp cloth, my bamboo spoon thing and my rolling mat. Yay! You'd best take a look while it's nice and clean, since it doesn't stay like this for long...

Oooh yes, look at that arrangement.
First off, I started by rinsing out 1 cup of sushi rice. Yes, I wrote down instructions off the internet and you can see those to the left.
I put 1 cup of sushi in the pot with 1 and 1/4 c of water. I will add less water next time, because the rice was slightly too wet. Left that to boil, the covered and let it simmer for another 6 minutes.
I then sliced up my slimy avocado (gross!), as well as the cucumber and some spring onions for good measure.
For fish I have some smoked salmon trimings (will buy whole salmon next time, the trimming were a bit too small), some pre-cooked shrimp and some fake crab logs.
So, after the rice cooled, I added 1/6 c of rice vinegar, 2/3 tbsp of sugar and 2 tsp of salt - miced it all together and got ready to go! I was making inside-out rolls (I like those better!), so I coated the outside of the rice with sesame seeds. I would've liked to use a bit of roe, too - but didn't see it at the store and I'm not sure I'd use enough roe to make it worth my while.
After that I flipped the sheet over, added the crab, avocado and cucumber and rolled it all together! The only hitch in my plan was that the knife we have in the house is horribly dull! Like, so dull I probably couldn't even break my own skin. Boo! So I may have massacred the sushi a bit trying to cut it, which was too bad since it looked so pretty as a log!

Either way I did manage to cut it, and made another roll of salmon and cucumber, which was also inside-out. I also made a couple little hand rolls of shrimp and a ball of rice, since I didn't think I could eat three whole rolls on my own. That's 6-8 peices per roll!
But, despite the auful cutting, they turned out rather good! The crab ones were my favorite, since the salmon bits were a bit odd. The shrimp were also quite tasty.
Don't mind the mess. Sushi-making is a complicated procedure, after-all. heh. Cleanup wasn't nearly as much fun as the making-of.
But all in all it was a very sucessful (and TASTY!) adventure. Next time I made sushi I will break out the eel, although I will definitely need a new knife. I'm sure I can get a cheap one at Sainsbury's, and then I can save it just for those events where I need a super-sharp knife.

Mmmmm unagi.

Anyways, I think this definitely beats eating out - price wise, although I can't do fancy things like dragon rolls or tempura - but for those everyday cravings I think I'll be making more sushi at home.

In fact, I'm craving some again. Maybe tomorrow...

Wow

Yep, okay, I've been a blogger slacker, I'll admit it. I worked so much during the festive season that I didn't really feel like blogging and since I've been unemployed I've been searching for a couple to fill our spare room. Now that we've 99% found that couple, I'm back to living a slacker life for a while which means, more blog posts for you! Yay!

I've still got a bunch of pictures and such that need posting from way back in December, so bear with me while we look at my Christmas photos!

This was taken Christmas morning. It is our lovely little tree surrounded by mountains of gifts! I'm glad he got to fufill his Christmas destiny. In fact, he is still guarding the living room as no one has the heart to pack him up. We'll just pretend he's now my birthday tree and leave him up until the end of the month at least.

Here is our lovely turkey pre-cooking. We bought a turkey that had no legs, in fact. It was a lovely 6 pounder (I think??) and just the right amount of food for us - not a huge amount of leftovers. He had a hollow chest cavity (wasn't stuffed) and so he cooked within an hour or so. We gave him a bed of veggies and rubbed him down with butter and herbs.

And about an hour and a bit later, here's how he turned out! Lovely and brown and crispy. I can safely say that this was an exeptionally awesome meal! If the turkeys weren't so freaking expensive I would be eating turkey much more often!

Nicole also bought a trifle mix box for dessert, so here she is posing with our trifle concoction made to order in a bowl. I did the sprinkles...

Toasters and Toast

Okay, so here's a thought. English toasters only toast on one side. Yes, I think its funny, too. One side is all nice and toasty and the other side becomes soggy and sticks to the plate. Not cool. However, I put up with it, and even tried stopping the toast halfway and and rotating it.

Then our toaster semi-broke. Well, it still toasts, but the handle thing doesn't stick down, so you have to hold it down for the duration of the toast, which is annoying. However, you always get the perfect toast, so its got its up-side. (On a side note, I haven't yet e-mailed the landlady to determine if this is our responsability to fix or hers).

However, i've just given up. So I'm now doing my toast in my frying pan. I did burn the toast yesterday when I tired (there seems to be a 3 minute window of 'white-toast' and then about a 10 second window of 'well done' before it gets to 'burnt', so it can be a touchy science), but today it was much more satisfying.

Just a thought.

As well, my roommate, Rhi, is going grocery shopping this morning with the car, so she's going to drive me to work. 90p saved - Yay!

I am the Cooking Master!

Okay well, not really. But I did make this last night:

And I think it looks pretty spiffy. Lemon chicken, asparagus and lemon/rosemary rice. Albeit, the rice came from a bag, but still. Hah.

I visited the library yesterday and took out a couple cooking books so that hopefully I can improve my skills.

I e-mailed my resume out and applied for several jobs this morning, so I'm hoping that I'll hear back soon enough. I also am going to call my local Job Centre Plus and apply for an NI (National Insurance) number on Monday.

Today is midly miserable - it's raining and looks windy. I don't know yet if I'll bother to go out today. I might stay in and clean and do laundry. Hopefully tomorrow will be nicer and I will do some shopping (grocery, mainly) and see if anyone else is hiring.

Things I've learnt in London

Here's another lovely edition of the things I've learnt in London - the foodie edition!

• Ranch dressing doesn't exist here.
• Neither does Kraft Dinner
• You can't buy decent quality maple syrup, either.
• However, you CAN buy two of the three listed above at the Canada Store.
• However, they will charge a HUGE markup for anything of the sort.

Other things they will sell at the Canada Store:

• Bick's Pickles
• Bull's Eye BBQ Sauce
• Aunt Jemima Pancake Mix and Syrup
• Tricuits and Ritz Crackers
• Crisco Shortening
• Dentyne Ice Gum
• Heinz Beans
• Jell-O
• Jet-Puffed Marshmallows
• Kraft Peanut Butter (OMG I have to buy some of this - the crappy stuff I bought isn't very good)
• Nibs
• Tim Horton's Hot Chocolate!

And this was all gathered from their website. That's it, I gotta go and check this place out. Not that I really want to spend extra grocery money on stuff I could buy in Calgary for $1 that's over £4 here. Bah.

I'll let you know what other goodies I find when I visit the store!

Yay!

My first home-cooked-english meal. Whole wheat pasta, ragu and some random cheese I bought at the grocery store. Yum yum! Beats pizza any day, in my opinion.

Thoughts on Food

Note to self: grocery store eating is much much more profitable than ordering in food. For example:

While wounded, I ordered pizza with my roommates. I ordered a large (13.5") pepperoni pizza and chicken fingers. Total cost approximately £20 with delivery, tax and tip. Total meals: 4-6

When semi-better (today), wandered down to the grocery store. With another £20 in hand, look at all the food I bought!

That's right! With the same amount of cash I managed to buy:

• Honey Shreddies
• Milk
• Mayonaise
• 4 Bananas
• 3 Apples
• 2 'Giant' Chocolate Bars
• Jam
• Bottle of Coke
• Sliced Turkey/Ham (not quite sure what this will be like, but we'll see...)
• Loaf of Bread
• Ragu
• Cheese

All together that's probably about 10-20 meals. Grocery store wins!

I'm just happy to have some 'real' food like pasta and fruit and toast and sandwiches - it got tiring eating nothing but dry cereal and leftover oranges (stuff that the old tennant left for me).

Of course, all of you who do a lot of grocery store shopping will already know this, but I just wanted to point it out. Of course, after I got home from the grocery store I still looked up the menu for Gordon Ramsey's Restaurant here in London, as well as Yo!Sushi.

Anyone wanna give me £120 to eat 7 courses at Gordon Ramsey's restaurant? No? I guess it's pasta for dinner then... Haha.

As a side note: Yes my foot is slowly getting better. I did manage to hobble down the street to the grocery store. It hurt while walking though, a lot. My foot and leg actually started shaking by the time I got down the hill and I was sufficiently wiped by the time I had bought my food and walked back. That is partly to blame on the high humidity today, but mostly on the foot, I'm thinking. If the weather tomorrow is decent, I think I'll head into the city - I'm tired of being cooped up here.