A two-fer

I have been working in retail since being in Australia, meaning that I have to work every Saturday and hence have a Rostered Day Off during the week - normally this day is filled with things like making the bed, sweeping the floors, doing the last weeks worth of dishes, cleaning the bathroom, washing/hanging/folding clothes... etc etc etc. But this latest RDO I thought to myself "Hey, Chris gets a whole day to himself every week as well, hows about I just leave all this stuff until Saturday and he can get his man-cleaning groove on (optimistic, yes, but I really wasn't in a cleaning mood).

So I got my baking groove on instead. I probably should have stuck to cleaning this week - it was not a good day in the domestic goddesses kitchen...

Recipe #23: Rosebud Madeleines

This was an extremely small recipe... I'm actually starting to think that Nigella's cups, teaspoons, tablespoons, etc are a LOT bigger than mine, because I am always ending up with incredibly small batters. Either that or her cake tins and muffin pans are way smaller.

This was another recipe that required excessive amounts of beating too - I am really starting to think I need to invest in an electric beater before I end up with one arm the size of a leg.

Nigellas madeleines

As you can see they are all pretty and delicately shaped with no doubt some really expensive madeleine tin that you can only get in boutique kitchen stores (I looked everywhere. Well... in all honesty - Kmart, the supermarket and a couple of opshops). Anyway, I figured this was not going to be a recipe I rocked out every other weekend, so I could probably get away without it. They wouldn't be as pretty as Nigella's, but surely I can get the rest of it right, right?

Lack of fancy kitchen gears aside, I did get to use a fancy ingredient.. Rosewater! Although I do not like to spend a lot of time hunting around for specialist equipment, I am a HUGE fan of this amazing gourmet food store I found in Perth called The Herdsman - this place is AMAZING! The freshest, tastiest, gourmet-est, fanciest food you ever will see, this is where I usually go when I am looking for something that you probably won't be able to find in the baking aisle at Woollys.

Anyway, it turns out I couldn't get the rest of it right. I had no troubles making the batter - it looked good, it tasted good, it made perfect little round blobs on the cookie tray (although very few of them because of my incredibly small batter)... but alas! Making sure things come out of the oven at the perfect time is a skill that still, to this day, alludes me!

Dooooooooooooom....

Admittedly, they still did taste ok. I don't think they were as light and 'florally' as they were supposed to be, but you could still just get the hint of Rosewater in there. Underneath that was the kind of dry, charcoallyness that were my 'Rosebud Madeleines'. Doh.

My Madeleines. Icing sugar fixes everything.

Chris' verdict: 3/5

(I thought this was extremely kind of him, I would have given them a 2/5... Like I have said before though, Chris is very generous with his ratings and will gladly eat any baking, burnt or not)

Recipe #24: Coconut Macaroons

With the disaster that was 'Rosebud Madeleines', I was a bit reluctant to continue with the next recipe... but I have never ever made Macaroons before, and my curiosity prevailed.

This recipe contained a whole lot more beating (gahhhhhh!!!!), which I was not too happy about honestly, but it came with a visible reward:

Meringue! Happy-happy-joy-joy!

I've always heard (from where I do not know) that macaroons were difficult to get right - but I have to say the actual batter part of the recipe was easy-peasy lemon-squeezy. Meringue? Check. Coconut? Check. Making cute little snowballs out of coconut-meringue mixture? Check.

The only part I struggled with (can you guess?), was... yup you got it - getting them out of the oven in time. Seriously, what is WRONG with me?! I swear I checked them every 5 minutes. In hindsight the 5 minutes before I took them out, when they looked really good and I said to myself "another 5 minutes should do it", was in all likelihood when I should have actually taken them out... I need to invest in an egg-timer.

In the end, the were mostly ok. The bottoms were a little bit on the black side... but they were crispy on the outside, a little bit chewy on the inside... and most importantly still pretty tasty. Mission.... complete?

Chris' rating: 3.5/5

Oh, and: No. Chris did not get his man-cleaning groove going on Saturday. I think it was more like a playstation marathon groove. Ah well...