This is mainly because I am notoriously bad at baking pretty much anything. I don’t mind having a crack at things but it’s a rare day when I produce something that not only tastes good but looks good too. I’ve had Anzac biscuits reminiscent of macaroons, chocolate biscuits that reminded someone of dog turds. You name it. People just don’t like my style of presentation which is mostly accidental.

Yesterday was fairly cool even by my standards so I decided to have a crack at some good old fashioned cooking FROM SCRATCH! This is something I almost never do and really, what is from scratch cooking anyway? Do those people go out and mill their own flour? Perhaps culture their own cheese? Of course not. So really everyone is a packet cook – it’s just the degree of dependency on product packaging that differs. It always cracks me up when someone gives me a recipe for something FROM SCRATCH and it contains a packet of cake mix or a packet of something else. Anyone can embellish upon a basic packet mix but it takes some kind of talent to come up with a recipe that consistently turns out right time after time.

I found the perfect pancake recipe in the Better Homes & Gardens magazine (July 2011 edition) and now I’m just a tiny bit obsessed with different types of toppings. Pancakes are supposed to be easy but I’ve always had trouble with getting them to be perfectly round and golden. And the flipping bit….for some reason that always goes terribly for me. I’ve since discovered the Breville Pancake Creations gadget which now has a happy home in my kitchen drawer. They turn out much neater than the pan flipped ones below but just as yummy! It’s a spin on banoffie pie and for anyone who is a fan of that, they’d love the combination. Pssst! For a lower fat content in the topping, substitute the double thick cream for Philadelphia Cream for Desserts. It’s lower fat content but has the sweet taste. If you want to lower the energy content in the caramel topping, you could just use Queens Maple Flavoured syrup instead but it won’t taste as awesome as if you had just gone all out and used Toffee icecream topping instead.

Banoffie pie inspired pancakes - awesome!!

So on the back of that, why not a pizza made from scratch? Sure can! I even made the dough, with a little help from the Kenwood mixer. Even so, the messiness involved, the noise and all that – I’m not convinced that the end result is better than a store bought base with toppings just thrown on top. It certainly takes a lot more time! Rest the dough, knock it back and divide in half, rest again, roll it out, trim off the edges to try and make it more round. It’s a painful exercise really. Trust me – ditch the home made dough and just go get a base from the shop if you want to make your own at home.

I do have some leftover dough which I was thinking of making a foccacia with but maybe I’ll just make some pizza scrolls instead. Hope you’re all enjoying your long weekend if you have one wherever you are.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s a nice enough cake. But it needs something to replicate that familiar rum and raisin flavour that I’ve come to love so much. I’m not sure whether it’s some vanilla essence, more brown sugar or even just more rum that’s needed but there is something missing. I’m even toying with the idea of subbing some of the rum for coconut rum to see how that turns out.

RUM AND RAISIN CAKE

Ingredients
155 grams of raisins
3 liberal tablespoons of dark rum
185 grams of self-raising flour
150 grams of unsalted butter
140 grams of brown sugar
3 eggs, lightly beaten

Method
Preheat the oven to 180°C.
Lightly grease a deep 20cm round cake tin and line the base with baking paper.
Soak the raisins in the rum for at least 10 minutes.
Sift the flour into a large bowl and make a well in the middle.
Melt the butter and sugar in a small saucepan over low heat, stirring until the sugar has dissolved and then remove from the heat.
Combine the melted butter and sugar with the rum and raisin mixture and add to the sifted flour with the beaten eggs.
Stir with a wooden spoon until combined but do not overbeat.
Spoon the mixture into the prepared tin and bake for 40 minutes or until a skewer inserted in the middle of the cake comes out clean.
Serve with custard or ice cream on the side if desired.

As part of the Noice-ities theme week, Leigh and Laura are asking about your favourite winter recipe. Generally speaking, I tend to eat the same foods in winter that I would in summer. This is probably because I lack any kind of repertoire which extends to seasonal cooking as much as it has to do with a lack of a proper winter like they have down south. I have about 10-20 things that I can cook with any degree of success and fortunately, none of them seem to be any less edible in winter than they do in summer. So this makes it a bit challenging for me to pick a favourite that is more wintry than the rest. Not to mention, Rah already stole corned beef – my all time favourite comfort food that I can actually make.

So, inspired by my dinner for tonight and that it could probably suffice as a winter recipe – I vote for Chilli Con Carne. I didn’t come up with the recipe myself – it was sent to me by email and was vouched as being tried and tested many times. An email which I have stored somewhere on my computer. For reasons unknown to me, I can’t find it right now so I’ll have to make do with what’s in my memory and hope that it is right. I hope it’s right – it’s that particular memory which I’m using to make tonight’s dinner.

Cherie’s Chilli Con Carne

Much as I initially begrudged having to get Foxtel in order to get TV reception where we live, I’ve discovered that it is somewhat useful for providing some inspiration for new meal ideas. And while I’ll never be Nigella, I am learning a few new things. Like simple sometimes being better and combining fruit and savoury together can be quite acceptable. So with my new found interest for cooking something more than bottle pasta and packet burritos, I went and got a few more cookbooks from Borders. Not that I need more cookbooks – I have shelves of them that I have never opened that are hand me downs from parents and grandparents. I even have a few I’ve bought myself and never opened.

But if I hadn’t gone to Borders, I wouldn’t have found this very small cookbook called After Work Healthy by the ever reliable Australian Women’s Weekly. I generally pick my cookbooks by looking at the picture on the front, the title and a quick flick through to see if I am prepared to eat at least five recipes in there. This one passed the test, so in the shopping bag it went.

I picked out a few recipes to make this week with my new-found enthusiasm for cooking and decided that this little number would be an appropriate first test. Enough fiddly stuff to make it seem a bit special but it seemed easy enough that I probably wouldn’t stuff it up. Success was very important tonight because I am from the Homer school of cooking – if at first you don’t succeed, resign yourself to a lifetime of easy, quick prepare meals involving packets and bottles. I’m pleased to say that it was a success and although the combination of fruit and chicken in the one dish seemed unusual, the flavours matched up really well. If serving it with the fruit really puts you off, you could always serve it with roast spuds instead.

But all the same, Valentine’s Day rocks around every year on February 14th like it or not. This year I decided to rebel and not go have dinner somewhere nice and eat in at home. I thought all the same I would try and do something a little spesh so I decided to have a go at some rice paper rolls. I guess I was excessively comforted by the words on the packet – versatile, quick and easy to prepare. I would like to let anyone know that Trident is lying about most of that unless you have some kind of Chinese cooking guru gene or perhaps some savvy Nigella know how. Unfortunately I got left out of the cooking gene pool so in my experience, they are time consuming and fiddly. Regardless, they are incredibly yummy if you can get past the fact that they look like a stir fry wrapped in plastic.

Vietnamese Roll Fail!

What I love about Borders isn’t so much that they have a Gloria Jeans coffee shop in there (personally I’m partial to Zarraffas but any port in a storm) but that no matter what the subject title, they invariably have a book for it. And not just one book either, generally several – unless it’s a really obscure title like Gourmet Cooking for Dummies. I’m assuming the reason why there is only one copy of that title at Mt Gravatt is because people who wish to be gourmet cooks generally have other ways of going about it – like a cooking class or they have “the way” about them. They don’t really need a book to tell them how to cut an orange in a fancy pattern, they just know. It’s genetic….or at least that’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it.

Speaking about cooking, I don’t know why it was that I ended up in Borders looking in the cook book section. I had a voucher for a full price book 30% off so you would think I would get something somewhat entertaining like a Peter Moore travel lit book or maybe something funny by Jeremy Clarkson. For some reason I glossed past the travel lit section and even the funny section and ended up with cooking. The Mt Gravatt store is only small (in comparison to the city), so there’s only about 12 shelves packed full of books all related to recipes, preparing food or the cooks themselves like Gordon Ramsay. I suspected it would start with “now if you can’t F’ing bother F’ing doing it right, then put the book down and F right off”. So I took the advice I imagined would come from it and didn’t even pick it up.

I did pick up Rachael Guy’s book in the picture below to look at it, only because I thought the title was amusing. Guy Food. It’s a pretty small book and the content fairly light on – is that because she assumes that most guys would not want to be able to cook a terrine of duck or some other poncy recipe involving stuffing a squid head. Which brings me to another point – cook books are exactly like mix CDs. Most of the stuff is on it is ok but there will always be at least 3 songs on the CD which you absolutely can’t stand. Cook books are the same, only most of them have entire sections I would turn my nose up at. Anyway, I could cook anything in there without even needing a recipe for it so I put it back on the shelf and ended up with a book called Easy Comfort Food. One day I may even open it again to cook something from it.

Does that mean they have to cook it too?

So in case I pike on the Phoney 365, I decided to set myself another weekly challenge for the year. I touched on my concept of fail cooking last year when I had a go at making some double chocolate chip cookies. I was so inspired by such comments as “kangaroo poop” and being able “to see ugly faces in them”, I’ve decided to make fail cooking a regular feature.

Here’s my latest effort – Anzac fail cookies! At first you might be thinking, well they don’t look anywhere near as horrid as the last lot but I have gotten a little deceptive in my photography. The aerial shot exists purely to make them look like flat, tiny cookies. The actual fact is that they are more like little balls of cookie with a flat base on them. How they managed to be crisp on the outside and chewy on the inside while retaining the shape of a macaroon is completely beyond me.

But if you want to know what makes these cookies extra fail worthy, I’ll share a few trade secrets:

1. Use the oldest coconut you have, it’s even better if you can’t recall ever buying any. Mystery coconut adds something special.
2. Don’t bother measuring the golden syrup, just have a rough guess. If it makes the mixture a little gooey, just add more mystery coconut.
3. Again with the bi-carb of soda, have a guess. It’s extra entertaining when you add too much to the hot melted butter and syrup and it foams up like something from chemistry class. Of course that means you have to get more syrup and butter but hey, what’s the point of cooking if you can’t have a little fun doing it?
4. A lot of people will tell you that you have to make sure your flour is “fresh” or that you should at least have a rough idea what decade you bought it in. The best part about fail cooking is that details like that really don’t matter. You’re still going for the right flavour but if the texture and appearance goes to putty, then so much the better.
5. If you’ve run out of rolled oats in the pantry, don’t despair. You know those little sachets of flavoured minute oats you can get to make porridge at work during your tea break? Those are fantastic backups. Although I would try to stick to flavours that complement each other – like honey buzz and vanilla. Strawberry and apple flavoured probably aren’t that good a mix to use in an Anzac cookie recipe.

Anzac fail cookies, just as yummy as the real thing but twice as borked!

Well this is why I do not bake…..chocolate cookie fail. But then it occurred to me….it need not be all that bad. They still taste good! They just look kind of wrong. So I introduce to you a new form of cooking – fail cooking! Isn’t that great? Now everyone can share their home made cooking because the object is for it to look as bad as possible! I have a feeling I’m going to be very good at this.

Chocolate fail cookies!