Things have been rather glum around here as of late.  Whine whine whine, blah blah blah, etc. Well, I’ve had enough of that crap already (as have you all, I’m sure!), so instead, I’m going to share a recipe (with no pictures until I unlazy myself… not that it’s an exciting looking food).

It’s been pretty hot here the last couple of days.  Hot enough that we all start dripping with sweat the minute we set foot outside, anyway (prompting horrible shrieks of “I’m melting!  I’m melting!”).  The cats are a fan of the weather – they sit inside under the air conditioner all day, and they enjoy licking sweat off people, because they are disgusting like that. The dogs aren’t such huge fans – Gracie has been trying to bury herself frantically under piles of dirt, and Willie just lives in his little pond.  It’s already over 40 degrees, and it’s not even summer yet.  Heaven help us all.

Anyway, since it was rather warm, I decided to be kind and make the boy some Mango Sorbet.  We had a couple of mangoes that were just past good eating, but not rotten, so I figured it would be best not to waste them.  Now, I don’t know how good this recipe tastes, because I hate mangoes… but it looked pretty nice, and it’s damn easy.

You are going to need:

- Juice of one lemon

- Juice of half an orange

- Two mangoes

- 115g (1/2 Cup) Caster sugar

- 1 egg white, whisked

You will want to do the following:

1.  Juice the lemon and orange.  Mix the juice with the sugar.

2.  Peel the mangoes, and put all the fruit into the blender.  I find it easiest to cut off the cheeks, use the knife to make squares, and pull the fruit off piece by piece.  Then just hack at the rest or mangle it with your fingers to get the fruit off.  So long as you get as much of the fruit in the blender as you can, you should be fine.

3.  Blend the mango into a smooth puree.

4.  Combine the mango and juice/sugar mix.

5.  Fold in the whisked eggwhite.

6.  Churn in your ice cream machine.  If you don’t have one, put the mix in a frozen bowl, and store in the freezer.  Stir vigorously with a fork or something similar every 20 minutes or so.

7.  When done, store in the freezer in a sealed container for up to one month.

Easy peasy lemon squeezy!  Although mine would have been easier if the juicer attachment for my food processor hadn’t mysteriously vanished.  Oh well.  I guess mango is appropriate, because if the boy doesn’t try it soon I might just tell him where to go!

Cows are now Public Enemy Number 2 in Angela-land.  Apparently, despite all my wonderful, cheese gorging, milk consuming years (or, more likely, because of), I am lactose intolerant. 

I really do not know what I am going to do.

Seriously.  It’s life changing.

I was one of those people who would consider cheese and fruit to be a meal.  Unhealthy, perhaps, but damned if it wasn’t delicious.  And now the cheese has turned against me.  It is biting back (oh, how I would love some good cheddar right now!) 

Not to mention, all the things in my fridge that I have discovered I can no longer eat…

No more milkshakes.

No more custard.

No more ranch dressing (Oh salad, you will never be the same!)

Of course, cows and their deliciously dairy goodness are still less hated than the current Public Enemy Number One…

Rats.

Apparently rats have been living in my car.  Or under it.  Or something. 

And they decided it would be great fun to chew the timing belt right through.  Because, you know, that’s what rats do, right?

$750 later… I have a new timing belt, and my feelings towards rats are at their worst.

Especially since they can also eat cheese.

It’s OK though – I’m just planning on eating more steak.  Take that, cows!

Not sure how to gain an appropriate revenge on the rats though…

I am a sucker for kitchen appliances.  Seriously.  If I had a fortune, I’d probably spend it all on kitchen appliances.

And shoes.

And linen.

But that’s entirely beside the point.

Anyway, the other week I got myself a shiny new toaster (they had interest free on at the electrical appliances store, and I can not resist the lure of interest free shopping.  Terrible, I know!)  It’s completely electronic, makes all sort of space ship type noises, and is all controlled by some buttons.

I am fully aware that I could have purchased a cheaper, less fun toaster, but really, where is the enjoyment in that?  I swear I’ll be the first woman ever to have debt collectors on the door step demanding a toaster and bench top mixer because I couldn’t afford repayments. 

Anyway, my kitchen is horrifically small and pokey.  So, I usually end up stacking things on top of things to make room on the bench to do all the stuff I have to do.  I’d kill for a larger kitchen, but what can you do, right?

So, I sat my cake tin on top of the toaster.  I always throw stuff on top of the toaster – I don’t use it all that often, and when I do use it it’s in the morning, so by the afternoon it is clearly cold and it doesn’t matter.  Then I went about my merry way, cooking dinner or whatever the hell it was I was doing, and then I went to bed.

The next day, I woke up, and went to make myself a piece of toast for breakfast.  Unfortunately, for some reason, the cake tin would not come off the top of the toaster.

Well.

Turns out I forgot to turn the toaster off at the power point.  And when I put the cake tin on the toaster, it pressed the on button on one side.  The toaster began to heat up, and my plastic cake tin (should I really be calling something plastic a tin?  What should I call it?  A cake box?) obviously began to melt, and it fused to my toaster.

So, I got it off my turning the toaster on again and remelting the plastic.

Of course, the cake tin was destroyed.  And my toaster is now full of horrible nasty plastic that smells really bad and will probably kill me or something when I make toast.

So, this is what happens when I insist on having fancy gadgetry instead of the old fashioned toasters with the lever on the side and what not.  I end up destroying half my kitchen.

I just wish I remembered to take photos of the tin before I threw it out.  Stupid!

Eggs are wonderful amazing things.  Seriously.  Who doesn’t love eggs?

At least, they are, until you are baking a loaf of banana bread, and crack an egg into the cake mix.

And it’s off.

It’s all broken apart inside, and weird coloured, and incredibly stinky.  It was the most repulsive thing I’ve seen in a while, and I have seen some pretty damn disgusting things.

I guess it’s some stupid sort of justice.  I’ve never been one to check the eggs before I break them open – I go through eggs really quickly, and I have never had an off egg before.  So, of course, I have to drop an off one RIGHT into the middle of a double batch of banana bread batter.

I’ve been humbled by an egg.

Moral of the story?  Always crack your eggs into a separate bowl, just like your mum, your cooking book, and most every TV program ever has told you to do.  What is it with mothers always being right?

As you can see, I have sweet f-all to write about.  You know that your life is incredibly boring and overworked and all that nonsense when the single most exciting thing to happen to you is an off egg!

I’m always a bit funny about baking bread.  I dislike kneading dough, I’m prone to forgetting about it when I leave it to rise.  However, beer bread is much easier than usual bread, and it has the benefit of giving me a use for the near endless supply of beer in my fridge (I swear those bottles breed or something back there)

So, here’s what you do.

Sift the flour into a bowl, and throw in the salt and sugar.  Then make a well in the centre.

Pour your bottle of beer into the flour mix.  That’s right, the whole bottle.  The recipe calls for light beer – I used a mid strength, since it was the lightest I had in the fridge.   People out this way are firm in their belief that light beer is for sissies.

Grab a sturdy wooden spoon and start mixing.  Or, if you are lazy like me, use the dough hook attachment on your bench top mixer.

Take that dough out of your mixer.  Knead it on a floured bench.  Then split it into two and knead it some more.

Throw the dough into your pregreased loaf pan, and into your preheated oven.  Cook it for about 50 minutes.

And there you have it!  Mine isn’t anywhere near perfect – next time I’ll coat the top with sesame seeds, and you can really notice where the two halves joined together (much more like bread rolls than anything else).  But, it did taste wonderful!  I found it to be a very dense bread – this may be the way I made it, or perhaps it is meant to be dense.  Who knows!

Beer Bread

Preparation time: 20 minutes
Cooking time: 50 minutes

Ingredients

3 1/4 cups self raising flour
2 teaspoons salt
2 teaspoons white sugar
375ml bottle light beer

1.  Preheat oven to 180C/160C fan forced.  Grease 14x21cm loaf pan, line base with baking paper.

2.  Sift flour, salt and sugar into medium bowl, make well in centre.  Pour in beer all at once,; using a sturdy spoon, mix to a soft, sticky dough.

3.  Knead dough on floured surface until smooth; divide in half.  Knead each half; place in prepared pan.

4.  Bake, uncovered, in oven about 50 minutes or until bread is browned and sounds hollow when tapped.  Turn on to a wire rack to cool.  Serve warm or cold.

Most of my meals tend to be improvised dishes that I throw together out of whatever I can find around the house.  Living on your own means that things people would consider to be ‘normal’ to have stocked in the house (like bacon*) are generally not lying around, because things go off before they get used.  Or I plan to freeze them, but find my freezer is full again (if I get seriously into cooking, I’ll need to buy a decent freezer).

Anyway, I wasn’t much up to cooking anything too difficult today.  I bought a slow cooker today, but of course I couldn’t really use it to make a very good dinner tonight, so it will have to wait until tomorrow.  So, I fell back on the old standby – pasta.  I usually make a creamy pasta sauce, but I have never really been happy with it, so I decided to fiddle with it a little.

Creamy Chilli Garlic Whatever The Hell Else There Is In There Pasta Sauce

(Probably only enough to make two smallish serves, multiply as you will)

• Half a medium white onion, finely chopped
• 250ml cream (I generally just use long life tetra packs, because, hello… stuff goes off!)
• 2 slices ham, chopped (because that’s all I had)
• 1/4 cup finely grated parmesan cheese
• 3 cloves garlic (I may have used 4 cloves, but I like LOTS of garlic)
• Sweet Chilli Sauce, to taste
• 1/2 Tbsp cornflour (I think.  If it’s not enough, hoick more in)
• Sploosh of olive oil (oh, 1Tsp?)
• Salt and pepper to taste

1.  Put enough olive oil in the bottom of a saucepan to coat it, and heat it up on medium-high heat

2.  Put the onion and the garlic in the pan, and cook the onion until soft, stirring frequently.  If you don’t stir it, you end up with brown onion at the bottom of your pan, which makes your sauce slightly brown.  And it looks gross.  I know because I may have done this.

3.  When the onion is soft, turn the heat down to low, and put the cream, ham, cheese, cornflour, sweet chilli sauce, and salt and pepper in.  Stir until the hotplate has cooled/sauce stops boiling, and leave to simmer until heated through.

4.  Throw it over pasta, or through pasta, or whatever, when your pasta is ready.  Really, this step probably wasn’t necessary, but eh.  3 steps looked too easy or something.

I took a picture, but it looked really bad.  I’m awful at photographing food.  So, have a picture of a snail instead.  Snails are kinda like food.  I mean, people eat snails.  Maybe not THESE snails, but snails nevertheless.

This recipe could probably be improved immensely with additions, if I had them around the house.  Like bacon, not ham.  And chicken.  And shallots.  But, you’ve gotta make do with what you’ve got, right?  And it tasted fricking AWESOME.

*I actually hate bacon on its own.  I never eat it unless it is in something, so more often than not I omit bacon from recipes.  Which is a shame, because I LOVE it in things.  Or I’ll substitute ham, if its handy.

It’s really hard to worry as you roll out pastry.

Baking makes me feel worthwhile.  It’s ridiculous, and not at all worth uttering aloud, but when I bake, I feel like I might actually be a half decent person someday.  Someone who can deal with what life throws at her, and will have someone who cares for her.  Perhaps even someone to have children with one day.*

Last night was a really rough night.  Not sure why, I’ll go with hormone levels being weird at the moment, but all I could do was sit there and cry as I thought to myself “I’m alone, I’m lonely, and I think I am too scared to ever leave this place and see if I can find someone”.   Sure, there’s a couple of people who I have casual involvements with, but there is no one with whom I could imagine being with forever.  Or, rather, there is, but they just aren’t interested.

My friends are trying to set me up with this guy in town.  He’s a lovely guy, rather attractive, very quiet, but when he does talk, he has the loveliest Irish accent you could imagine *swoons*.  But something is stopping me.  I don’t know what it is, but I just can’t bring myself to bother.

So, I sat and cried about what a dismal mess my life feels like.

This morning, I got up and turned my sorrow into a pie.  Like I said, it’s hard to worry as you roll out pie crust.  It’s really hard not to smile as you make meringue peaks on top of your pie, and watch them go golden brown in the oven.  And I’ll be damned if you can’t help but feel good when you eat a lemon meringue pie.

Pie.  It really DOES solve everything.

*I say I don’t want children, but really, deep down inside, I suspect nothing would make me happier than having a man I loved and a baby.  People to love and care for, people to belong to.  I seriously have no idea what is going on with this absurd cluckiness!

So, I have a friend who has Coeliac Disease (gluten allergy).  This means that whenever I bake a cake or something, he can’t eat it.  So, I decided to try my hand at a gluten free sponge cake.  And then I decided to make it chocolate, just because I could.

The main reason I went with a sponge cake is because I haven’t heard too many good things about Gluten Free Self Raising Flour.  It apparently tastes quite funny, and doesn’t rise as well as regular flour (gluten being the part of flour that makes things elastic and awesome).  However, sponge cake is mainly composed of cornflour, which has no gluten anyway.  So, what the hey?

Note:  All measurements are Australian Metric measurements.  I don’t really know if cup sizes are different over there or not.

For a regular sponge cake, omit the cocoa.

Gluten Free Chocolate Sponge Cake

• 3  large eggs
• 1/2 cup caster sugar
• 1/2 cup corn cornflour (NOT wheaten cornflour, although it can be used if you aren’t making a gluten free cake)
• 2 Tbsp gluten free self raising flour
• 1/2 cup (approx) cocoa powder.  I honestly don’t know how much I used, because I just kept throwing it in until it looked right.
• 1/2 tsp vanilla essence (not required, and it may turn out better without it *shrug* I just like vanilla)

Preheat the oven to 180 C (160 C for fan forced).  Not sure what that is for you American folks, sorry.  Line two 20cm (I think that’s about 8 inches, but I could be way off) round tins (about 2 inches deep, give or take) with baking paper and grease them/flour them (whichever method you prefer.  I’m a greaser myself – butter, NOT oil!)

1.  Beat the eggs with an electric mixer on high until thick, fluffy and pale.

Seriously… I wouldn’t even try this by hand.  It takes about 5 minutes with an electric mixer.

Your eggs should look a little like this.  I guess.

2.  Slowly beat in the sugar until it is all dissolved.

3.  Throw the vanilla essence in, and sift in the flour, cornflour and cocoa.  For best results, triple sift, ensuring all the lumps are gone.  Fold the dry ingredients into the egg mixture quickly and lightly.

Try not to over mix, or you will de-fluffify (that is TOTALLY a word) the eggs, resulting in a not fluffy sponge cake.  Which would be totally lame.  However, make sure you do incorporate all the ingredients properly.  It takes a lot of patience and practice, which, from what I can gather, is why my Mum’s sponge cakes kick ass and mine still suck.

4.  Divide the mixture evenly between the two tins.  Bake for about 20 minutes.  If your oven bakes unevenly, you may need to turn them.  Or… you can be lazy like me!

5.  Take the cakes out of the oven when done.  You should be able to pull a skewer out cleanly when cooked.

Leave them to cool in the trays for a few minutes before turning on to a cooling rack.

Mine didn’t turn out as well as I hoped.  I didn’t incorporate the ingredients well enough, which is why they look a little speckled.  The bottoms look even worse, and I am a little scared to cut my cake open.

Decorating

A standard sponge cake is filled with cream and jam, and dusted with icing sugar.  For my cake, I filled it with cream and caramel, and topped it with caramel.  I would have put strawberries on top, but, as usual, the supermarket was all out.

1.  Whip up your cream.  I used thick cream that had been thickened with vegetable gum, not gelatine, as I also have a friend who is a vegetarian.

Spread the cream over the top of one of the sponge cakes.

I guess a fancy person would do it with a piping bag.  I don’t happen to own one, so I just used a spatula.

2.  Pipe caramel in some random fashion on your cake.  If you are like me and don’t have a piping bag, zip lock bags are pretty awesome.  I used two to give me some additional thickness and strength.

Cut a small amount off the corner (a bit less than the width of your pinky), and squeeze the caramel out.

Yeah, I know it looks like bad coloured dog poop on my cake.  No one sees the inside, so all good!  The reason mine has chocolate cake stuck to the cream is because I had to put the cake together and put it in the fridge while the caramel finished cooling.

3.  Put the other cake on top.

Put more caramel on top, then slice strawberries and place them on the caramel.  Or, if you are like me… just have caramel dog poop on your cake.

4.  Dust with icing sugar for extra prettiness and what not.  And to distract people from the poop resemblance.   Alternatively… you could put more cream on top and break up a flake chocolate bar over the top.  Whatever tickles your fancy.

Pretend there are strawberries on my cake

There you have it – gluten free sponge cake!  Remarkably similar to regular sponge cake!  Funny that!