Little Observations of Life, Part Deux...

As life goes on, poor Ahmad notices more and more how weird this World he lives in is. The perils of blowholes, the lameness of dry skin, ah! What an adventure. Click here for Part One. I love this type of post! Enjoy.

1. Bath bombs aren't very bomb-like. They're actually quite lame. After years and years of wondering what they were like I gave in and bought some, prepared a bath, jumped in, dumped in the bath bombs excitedly, all for less bubbles than if I had farted in the water. LAME!


2. If you ever happen to meet Abu Caristmas, the Father of Christmas Beetles, do not kill him lest he sends his army of ants to come and kill your cats...

Oops! He's dead!

NUUUU! MY POOR KITTIES!!! :(

3. Box jellyfish have eyes. And can see you. And stalk you. And sting you. And eat you. Ok, maybe not the last one. But still. Freaky. What happened to brainless sacks of water??


4. I used to think I had amazing skin. Now I realise I have very dry skin. As in ridiculously dry skin. Like I flake more than weetbix. Old weetbix. Here's my arm peeling at IKEA (I seem to live at IKEA these days):

Don't look at the hot furniture look at ME!

Look how ridiculously OLD my toes look! YUK! Someone hand me some moisturiser. Urgh. I hate moisturiser. So greasy. According to my Dad, cracked feet can be cured by a long soak in water, which is something I tried. Which didn't work. Another great piece of advice.

I thought, why not soak my feet WHILE PLAYING COMPUTER GAMES! Genius! Not! Maybe I should have just got electrocuted and won this year's Darwin Award.

5. I found out what cats do when the silly hoomans are away:

SCARED YET!?

Meat

Life is weird. How do I know this? I just do.

Anyway, I've always ALWAYS had this idea since forever that being a vegetarian is haram. Like full-on forbidden. I thought everyone thought this way too! In my head it was something to do with "making something forbidden to yourself from that which was made as a provision for you." I didn't bother asking anyone (which btw ppl is a bad habit).

Then recently, after an Arabic class I asked my sheikh, "Is vegetarianism haram?" and he looks at me funny (like I'm delusional). Then he said, "No! Of course not. There's nothing wrong with it." I was like HUH WTF? BUT BUT. Then he goes on and explains how in Islam meat is considered an extravagance and how meat cultivation is a major environmental detriment which is against Islamic principles and I was all like HUH HUH SINCE WHEN.

So suddenly after all these years of viewing vegetarianism as that weird but cool concept that appealed to me and which I might have like to have done but never seriously would have has suddenly become something real and concrete. Weird sentence, I know.

I haven't eaten meat in a while now.

Life is weird.

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And good thing I like dhal.

Daring Bakers - Challenge THREE!

And the challenge for the month of July is Filbert Gateau!

Posting a bit late this month (well only 2 hours & 50 mins late since I'm writing this at 2:50 am in the morning the day after posting day and for this unfortunate incident ya'll can go thank my studies, and I'm gonna stop rambling now) but it's so good to be back posting something baking-related and I know you all missed me so very much.

Ok. Straight to business. This month's challenge is Filbert Gateau! Gateau = cake! Yay! My forte! I love cake! This month's joyful recipe is chock full of hazelnuts, chocolate, butter and cream. If you're not salivating already, please call a doctor and get yourself checked out. No, seriously.

Anyway, I had no idea what filbert's were (I thought it was the name of the guy who invented this cake) but then I realised like a few minutes ago that it's what some people call le old "hazelnut"! Maybe it's an American thing. Who knows! Back to the hazelnuts!

Firstly, we gots to have teh filberts before we can make teh filberts gateau! But nut skin is bad! So take it off! Roast them in the oven till they smell oh so toasty.

Note: I bought the hazelnuts based on weight rather then volume. BAD IDEA. 1 cup hazelnuts does not equal 250 grams. Major nut overload and major hole in my pocket. Damn they are expensive!!

Put them in a towel, rub rub rub and then voila! All the skin magically drops off! NOT. Open the towel and alas witness the tragedy that is the stubbornly half-skinned hazelnut. Well, the warm hazelnuts in the towel make for an awesome heater. Especially since it's so cold here in Sydney now. Anyway, keep rubbing till your hands turn RAW and then maybe, just MAYBE you might be blessed with a plate of pretty filberts sans skins.

Here's my happy bunch! Quite tasty to pop right in yer mouth ;)

Boil some sugar till it turns nice and golden and molten (add some water even though you're not supposed to. Shh! Our little secret. It really does help though. Just don't over-do it.) You might have caramelised it to the point of fugliness so drop a little in some cold water and taste it.

Yum? Pour it all over your nuts!

Let it cool. Then ... CRACK!! You just made hazelnut brittle!

Food processor simply was not up to the task of making a praline paste (or maybe I was just too damn impatient) and so all I got was a crumbly mess.

Hmm ... maybe the liquifier can do a better job!

Paste! Doesn't look quite so appetising though...

Onward to making the core, the GENOISE!

Ah! Genoise. I think probably my favourite type of cake to make. Never ever fails when I do it. Or was it French Sponge? Are they the same thing? Who knows!

It never ceases to be amaze me how every part of an egg can be fluffed up, aerated and increased in volume by so much. Maybe if you pulverise the chicken shell and whisk it with water you'd be able to make something fluffy with it.

Pseudo-souffle...?

Voila! Yolks and whites all fluffed up! It's so interesting how no matter how hard you whisk a whole egg, you will never ever achieve even close the volume of separating, then whisking the egg.

Then, using my handy IKEA spatula, we fold together the yolk, the whites the flour, the nut meal and some melted butter, careful not to lose any of the air bubbles. Bubbles = fluffy cake! You could always cheat and put some baking powder in there. Think of it as insurance, not cheating. Bake batter for a while...

And out comes my cake. Very nice, if I do say so myself.

As you can see here, I positioned my cake next to a container of dental floss. "WTF?" the uninitiated might say, but I assure you, pleasant reader, I read no less than 10 people on the DB forums swearing by cutting cakes by floss! And so I tried it.

DISASTER. Ok maybe not "disaster" but it sure didn't work.

I used a regular serrated knife and got excellent results.
Results excellent enough for ... a photoshoot...?

"Stars Without Make-up".

WORK IT!!

I am insane. Someone me on track or we're gonna be here ALL day. Haha! You have no idea how long this post is taking me! I'm SO TIRED. This is about the moment when I start spewing out nonsense.

Whipped up some meringue for buttercream...

...took a dump of butter...

...and whipped it to tasty perfection!

And so does construction begin. I seriously need a kitchen. So messy! It's driving me nuts. It's probably not very hygienic either. Ah well! As long as it looks pretty and tastes nice.

Buttercream sides all fixed up and patched...

And GLAZED like a big fat doughnut! So shiny!

My first attempt at ganache didn't turn out so good. Choc seized up in revolt for being emasculated into liquid form (I have no idea what I'm trying to allude at. Honest.) and didn't want to play with old creamie. And so it made a sick mess. If you fail at first, cry and slit your wrists. Then try and try again.

I honestly believe that dark chocolate has one of the most amazing aromas of anything in the whole world. It is just simply stunning. Whenever I open the foil wrapping of a block I have to take a deep sniff of it and ah! So good.

Ganache 2.0 operational!

Not as smooth as I'd have wanted it, but we can't have everything in life can we? A normal kitchen would be nice though. At least my improvising skills are top notch!

And last but not least my finished cake! Nice? I suppose. Cake tasted not so nice. Pretty? I guess. Not my best work. What do you think? Please say "AWESOME!" or I'll go emo and quit The Daring Bakers. Haha. JOKE. NOT. BYE.

The Candy Man!

[Note: Videos might not work yet. Be warned, the videos are of seriously crappy quality. I used my phone! But still, better than nothing ;D]

After uni on Friday I went with my friends to Circular Quay (Sydney Harbour basically) and we danced around and had heaps of fun. Here's a panorama-ish shot I took of the Opera House and the Harbour Bridge with my phone's cool panorama function. I think it looks quite pretty:

After that we went to Sticky! The world's COOLEST CANDY SHOP!! They make THE most awesome lollies ever. They look so cool and taste oh so good. And the best part is that everything is hand-made, and they make it in front of your face! I stood there for an hour watching the guy make them. And now I can share it with you! YAY. Looky-look!


They are so pretty. Little designs of sugar. I was thinking, "HOW THE HELL DO THEY DO THIS?" and then the guy (his name is David) popped out and was like, "I'll give you a demonstration in 10 minutes." Cool! We danced around and talked to the people for a while (David used to be a lawyer but dumped it to be a candy man. LOL!) and then it finally started.

First he got out a humongous vat of super hot BOILING sugar syrup at 160 degrees celsius and poured it on to a metal bench in front of him (turns out it was a water-cooled metal thing). His assistant (Lily; she has cool hair) helped him get all the bits out:


Then Lily got out some colours and added them into the sugar and started mixing. Normally, I'm not much of an anti-artificial-stuff kinda person, like I'm ok with food colouring and stuff, but some of these colours freaked me out a bit! For example, to make the sugar syrup white (like opaque white) he added this weird white stuff. I asked David what it was and he said it was titanium dioxide. I WAS LIKE LOL WTF? He told me it was biologically inert and I was like, "Umm. Oh ok. Fair enough!" but still slightly creeped out. Anyway, here's a pic of the blue:

Here's a video!

It was cool how David worked on one side and Lily on the other side. You could tell they were a really good team. Here's the creepy titanium dioxide stuff. Didn't stop me from eating it though:


The just-a-moment-ago boiling sugar cooled pretty quick because the table was cool (LOL PUN!) and so then they slid off the metal guiding things, leaving a funky weird pliable sugar mass to work with. They started cutting it into sections (to separate the colours) and then kneaded it:

Here's a video of them folding the sugar around:

After some kneading (using heavy insulating gloves, of course) this is what we were left with on Lily's side of the cool-table. A blue blob!


Unfortunately, old titanium-white had to be a bit weird, and so kneading it was not enough! To make it really pretty and have a nice sheen, the white sugar mass had to be pulled. Literally! The point of it is to incorporate air. Kinda like a meringue. Anyway, David used a hook and some cool technique to do it:

Pull, pull, PULL!!

Magically, a creamy looking mass remained:

Then we were left with 3 blobs of cool sugar syrup:

Now the three blobs of sugar are ready to be worked with. They were making a candy that spelt "AUSTRALIA". David had to slowly make all the letters in a long 3D kinda way so that when u cut it the cross-section spelt "Australia". Pretty cool, eh? Here's Lily fixing them up:


It's then rolled into a big giant cylinder and wrapped in another layer of sugar for decorative purposes. And extra flavour, I think. Video:



NOW FOR THE AMAZING PART! The huge barrel-looking sugar mass is then stretched out into a skinny tube, which is then sliced up into the lollies! Isn't that SO amazing?? You end up with miniature versions of the big thing!! AWESOME.

Stretching it....

And then chopping them up!

I think Lily does most of the chopping. She's really pro. She uses a tool that's kinda like that teppenyaki sort of thing. She's make an awesome teppenyaki chef!! She puts the candy rods on a mini anvil and then chops away, packs them into jars, and sells them for a ridiculous profit!!

WIN!