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Flourless Cake

More on cakes: One of the best experimental cakes I've made thus far is flourless; it uses almond meal instead! I dunno off the top of my head how to make it but it's really tasty, and gluten-free, and you can make it just about everything free and it tastes super! I notice too that for some reason I now have more options when I post a message like: click here but I don't know if this means I can put other html up? let me try:
Yay! A different colour!.
Any way I'm also reading this famous book called Lolita- its pretty good.

Cake Base

So I've started baking cakes. I use a recipe for butter cake from a cooking book by Margaret Fulton; something along the lines of 1/4 cup butter with 3/4 castor sugar and vanilla essence creamed then add two eggs and beat then fold in 1 cup flour then 1/2 cup milk then another cup flour. Bake at around 160 celcius for 30 minutes.

What I've done successfully to change the taste, is to replace some of the flour with almond meal, and/or add some orange rind and juice- the extra liquid means a bit more flour or equivalent. Also food colouring is fun, plus you can use any type of essence like almond or peppermint - it doesn't have to be vanilla. This is a good cake to cook 'cause its really fast and really tasty and there's all sorts of different offspring from the mother recipe above.

Meringue

Made some meringue from the egg whites I didn't use in the lumpy custard... suuuugaaaar! Finished reading Crime and Punishment. Good book- I even said that out loud after I'd finished and then felt embarrassed that I had said it was a good book to myself out loud, also no one was around so I had no reason to but I did. Shows how much it must've been a good book. I've never thought about cooking with an axe until just now.

Lumpy Custard

Today I did a maths exam of three hours in the morning and history exam of 1.5 hours. That totals to 4.5 hours of exams for which there is no historical significance.

In other news I attempted to make French cream custard... it was lumpy, so I'll have to work on that before I have any original tips.

Banana Gems

Pancake mix- a thick one w/ lots of eggs, then you take little hunks of a banana dip them in the mix and put them in lots of oil on a pan on a stove. You have to move them around a bit but its all good in the end. YUM YUM.

Marsupials

Well I just cleaned up a half-eaten ring-tail possum. And it occurred to me that what was more gruesome was the thought of how gruesome the half eaten possum would be to clean up than the actual reality of cleaning it up; it was easy. In fact it was very interesting. I think the possum had been killed the other night by a wild cat, so it was still fresh; great looking meat. Now that is an interesting cooking point- marsupials. The best marsupial meat is from a kangaroo, it's just like beef steak but better in some respects. If you're going to be BBQ'ing, Kangaroo turns out with a much better texture than beef. Also, for that special feast you were planning, whole 'roos thrown in a fiery pit are great. Perfect for weddings and birthdays.

Chicken Parmigiana

This is seriously the best of the best when it comes to not wanting to cook something terribly hard but still not something too boring. DO NOT under any circumstances use chicken breast, ALWAYS use thigh. This leads to a much juicier tastier meal. OK, so first you cook the thigh on one side, then you flip it over and put the cheese on, Mozzarella of course. Then pour Parmigiana sauce onto each bit of chicken. Let the chicken cook a while longer until you are pretty sure it's nearly cooked all the way through. THEN, you turn the heat down and put a lid over your saucepan and let it simmer. What happens is the cheese melts properly, the sauce becomes infused with all the chicken juices, the chicken with the sauce, to some extent, and there you have it. Also anything left over in the pan should be put on a side dish of pasta, tastes great. YUM!

Pancakes

To make the perfect pancake there is no strict recipe! However you do need to have an idea of what the pancake is going to be used for. I make two types of pancakes; sweet and savoury. Sweet has sugar in it savoury doesn't. Basically, if your making pancakes for four people you use four eggs, and so on. The you add plain flour, milk and sugar until the mixture is sufficiently thick. When I make breakfast pancakes I like to have a thin mixture because it spreads out all over the pan. When I make say, entrée pancakes, I like to have a thick mixture so that the pancake has some height. In both cases they have different textures because of the thickness that the mixture has. When it comes to cooking the pancakes, I fiddle around with the temperature until I get the type of pancake colour that I feel for the day. Sometimes I like them browned, so lots of heat, sometimes I like them blonde, so a bit less heat and maybe even more than two flips per pancake.