Its like Jamie Oliver recipes. He tends to list somethign in the ingredients list and never mentions it again! Most of the time though my MO with recipes is to give them a read, take the idea, shit the book and make it up based on first principles. Not so much with cake though although I do make sponge in the old fashioned way of equal flour, sugar and fat based on the quantity of egg and pastry half fat to flour, half lard to butter.

Edit - no point changing because Planets will have grabbed this already but I meant SHUT - shut the book!

Yeah shit those books man especially jamie oliver ones
I think once you've been cooking a while like you say you have the knowledge of how things work and can just look at recipes for ideas ....baking is different though because it is more precise.
Also there are different types of cake from your basic victoria sponge to your jaconde, angel food, madeira, swiss roll, wheat free, that one where you whip eggs over a bain marie (can't remember it's name!).

I really want to give opera a go all those tasty little layers mmmmmmmm
Has anyone been to Vienna? i saw a Rick Stein programme about food in Vienna a few weeks ago and i'd love to go.

You have been watching too much cake porn. You have turned into a patisserie nerd.

hahahhahaah it was my distraction before i went in for my op! i just really got into it and tried all sorts. The only recipe i couldn't improve upon was Michel Roux Sr's tarte au citron. It was the most precise (the most fragile pastry ever) recipe i've ever done but it was exquisite. Perfecting things and tweaking them was the only thing that could keep my head quiet and not worrying...


GENOISE!!!! genoise is the whippy one over a bain marie yum

There's a thread in GD entitled "people are having more gay sex"

so far i have misread that as:
people are paying for more sex
and
people are having grey sex (whatever that is )

glasses or sleep i can't decide which....

GREY sex? 50 shades thereof?

I am with you on the cake porn. I love to read recipe books while drooling and thinking of tweakages I could do to the recipies. Cake porn, dinners porn, snacks porn, puddings porn....you name it I've indulged

must be my brain tweaking the thread titles

i have really enjoyed this RIck Stein series where he goes somewhere for a long weekend and cooks and eats the food that city/area is famous for.
Rick Stein got me into spanish food when i watched his series on spain. After years thinking it was all octopus and paella i realised it was all the ingredients i love and cook with frequently!! i was doing spanish cooking without realising it!!
Do you have a favourite style/country of cooking Twass ?

I guess most of what I cook is meditteranean in terms of herbs used, flavourings etc. I've just had a dish of roasted med veg with two small pork escalopes. That's typical of the sort of thing I do. Fair bit of good old British fare too but often with a continental twist or two.

Yes i do a lot of italian/spanish/greek inspired food too
i also go through phases of chinese and thai cooking which i love
i hadn't cooked mexican for ages and did that again recently and now i'm addicted!
I love making something up with random bits of stuff you have left in the fridge some of my most favourite meals began that way!!!

Same here! I enjoy the challenge....I'm famous amongst friends for being able to make something tasty from practically anything. I think a love of food helps here in terms of knowing flavours and what will go with what. I've several friends of my sort of age who can't cook and buy ready things most nights or take out. How they can afford it is one thing but also it's completely inferior to food you've cooked from scratch yourself

i know exactly what you mean.
i'm surprised at how many people don't really cook unless it's heating stuff up or pouring ready made sauces on stuff.
Apart from the cost like you say (my weeks food bill would only cover their food for a day or two!) there's so many weird ingredients and chemicals in that stuff that i know makes me ill and i'm sure contributes to a lot of people's ill health. Things like palm oil and weird chemicals and sweeteners in savoury food as well as stuff to make it last forever....
You can make a delicious meal in the time it takes to cook rice (10 mins) so it's not even time consuming. Agree with you regarding the inferiority too!!

That's what puts me off, that and the vast amounts of salt and sugar they seem to need in a savoury dinner. Very odd indeed. I use very little of either when I cook. Decent quality ingredients add their own flavour, and herbs and garlic help virtually all savoury dishes.

Definitely. Am totally into roasted garlic those little beauties are delicious i smear them over anything i can
Yeah i don't really use salt either.
I remember being at a friends house they were roasting a chicken (prepare yourself for a horror story) when it came to making the gravy they poured all the meat juices down the plughole, boiled the kettle and made bisto gravy granules. my face was

I've been in houses where that happened.....a criminal offence!!! Gravy granules are foul! I've never bought any. Ghastly chemical things! Without proper gravy your average chook hasn't much flavour at all. It's all in the gravy which should contain the meat drippings, a decent amount of meat fat, a bit of cornflour and the water your veggies were cooked in. A wee bit of gravy browning [caramel] if you really want a deep brown gravy. And nothing else!!!

exactly! it's the first entirely dry roast dinner i have ever had

"out of my head" dinners. They can be brilliant. Trouble is you can't have them again if they are successful.

What other choice did you have? Drown your dinner in fake gravy?

Although I make a mean drop of gravy my mother's was EPIC. The smell of it, and the intense meaty flavour....she was a genius! I do mine the same way but I'm sure hers was superior. We'd all be nipping back to the kitchen to ladle more of it on our dinners throughout the meal. There was even a gravy spoon laid for the scooping up of every last drop of it once all the food was gone

I should explain my mother didn't hold with gravy boats, because they didn't hold enough and the gravy got cold. Hers was made in the meat tin and a very low gas was left under it keeping it good and hot, for seconds

Bib SNAP!!!!
I was going to say my mum makes the best gravy ever i do exactly the same and mine is nice but somehow just not as good!!!! hahahahah Mums are the QUeens of gravy!

The other week I had a couple of artichokes left over from a tin I had opened because it was 3 years past it sell by . I softened sliced onion, added crushed garlis mushrooms and the artichokes which I chopped up. I added thyme and parsley and when cooked through a spoonfuil of creme fraiche. I had it on a baked spud ., It was delicious!

I think their repetoire of dishes was smaller than ours. My dad didn't really hold with foreign food. Meat, two veg and gravy was dished up four or five days a week [although weekdays it would be mince, a chop or sausages]. Therefore they were just superb at gravy because it was practically the staple diet!!

That sounds divine! Tinned veg never really go off as such do they, unless the tin gets damaged

I was looking for a post about Calum Best (you now THE post by angie plasty) the other day and while i was looking for it i found your post about finding some vaccum packed veggies which you stir fried after eating you noticed the packet aid "use by 2002"
i definitely need some sort of An digestive system transplant therapy !!!!

Yes cast iron constitution here. But as Twass says the tins don't really go off although the food can taste tinny.

Hiya, weather here is so beautiful, we were checking fences and water supplies until an hour ago.

Hmm, cake or gravy? Have to have both.

goodness mending fencess in the dark tk ? Or are you enjoying some midnight sun?