James put so much effort into out Halloween foods last week that I thought it would be a shame not to show them off!
He spent all day cooking because Halloween is his favorite holiday of all time, we had so much food it was ridiculous.
He made Mummy sausage rolls. He made his own Crescent Dough (they don’t sell it in Aus) from scratch!
Devilled eggs which had bloody cracks all over the bottom.
Bone shaped bread sticks, again totally from scratch. He’s so good at baking bread!
Baked potato/sweet potato chips and grilled haloumi. Not sure how these ones were spooky but I’m sure there was a reason XD Apparently the haloumi were going to be frankensteins and the chips were black and orange, but the dye didn’t take to the potato and he ran out of time with the frankensteins.
Onion and bacon dip again from scratch. This was SO delicious, I ate a ridiculous amount of it. I ended up having some kind of allergic reaction to the onion he used so my face was a little puffy and I was tearing the entire night. I had to re-apply my false lashes 4 times because they glue just wouldn’t stick >_<
Totally worth it though because it was delicious.
And the pièce de résistance? Graveyard cake!
James’ mum apparently used to make this for them as children.
We didn’t have all of the American ingredients but he did very well anyway and it was delicious!
For drinks, Celina made the most delicous betty sorbet smoothies.
And they were served in my custom goblets.
Spoooooky XD
Of course we had all of the usual candy and we bought some imported things like candycorn. We all ate far too much and watched Silent Hill. The next day James and I had the traditional post Halloween breakfast of candy 😀 Best Halloween so far!
The kits come from Japan and cost a couple of hundred yen which is only a couple of dollars. Roughly 100 yen = AUD$1.00. To get them in Australia the minimum cost is around $15. Kim brought this one back from Singapore for us. The idea is that you make the candy yourself, it comes in powdered packets which you mix and pour into molds. Each kit has different flavours and a theme, we made the sushi one this time.
The very famous RRCherrypie does instructional videos if you want to see some, they are totally addictive!
This is the contents of the box, you have to cut open the plastic package because it has instructions as well as places to measure your pieces.
One by one you empty the packets into the corresponding plastic area, add water, stir and leave to set.
These parts were the egg and tuna topping.
I was kind of crap at making the nori wrapping XD It’s like trying to roll out bubble gum!
Totally serious business!
But in the end it does really look like sushi! And it even comes with soy sauce.
Both mine and Kim’s panda bento suffered slightly from user fail but it was a really fun way to spend time! The sushi was all grape flavoured but other kits vary.
You can get them on Amazon, ebay and a lot of other online stores, just google Kracie or Poppin Cookin kits. Hope you guys enjoyed as much as we did!
Today’s Food Friday is quick simple and has very cute results!
Mini chocolates 😀
I bought this mold from Daiso for $2.80. It’s silicon and can be used for chocolates or any number of other things. I really liked the tiny designs!
All you need to do is melt chocolate, pour in, stick in the fridge then eat 😀
I decided to try making some strawberry chocolate which turned out to be delicious! I melted the white chocolate in the microwave the added a little strawberry Nesquik powder.
After stirring well it turned pink.
It was a little lumpy but more stirring fixed that.
The end result was very cute and so yummy!
They were great to eat on their own but now I want to make a bunch and use them to decorate things! Next stop, adorable cheesecakes 😀
One of my favorite Korean restaurants, Gami Chicken, has the most delicious kimchi pancakes. They are quite expensive though so one day during a massive craving, James decided to try and make some at home.
They turned out quite delicious! This recipe is a combination of some he found online and some from the Korean cooking books we had.You need:
1 cup kimchi
1/2 an onion
Pinch of salt
Pinch of sugar
1/2 cup flour
1/3 cup water
We found kimchi at the local Asian grocery store for $4 a jar. I wasn’t really planning to use it for anything else so it was fairly cost effective. Celeste is always telling me to try making my own though which I really should some time! One of my favorite TV shows at the moment is a Korean show called “We Got Married” and on the show quite a few of the couples have tried making kimchi. Their results are usually quite hilarious so for now I think I’ll stick to the $4 tubs XD.
So step one was cut up the kimchi so it was quite fine.
I don’t like spicy things so James drains the juice out of the kimchi so that this version is extra mild. If you like spicy things you can add more juice. If you add juice make sure to add less water.
Next the onion was finely chopped.
Salt and sugar in too.
And flour and water.
Mix it all up until it forms a thick batter.
Put some oil in a pan on a high heat and pour the batter in.
Smoosh it all out so it forms a flat pancake. The batter is quite sticky, so this can be a little difficult.
Let it cook in the oil until the sides crispy up. Take a peak at the bottom to make sure it doesn’t burn!
Flip it over and it should be golden. Flipping can be pretty hard, and if you are doing the one, two, three cartoon pancake flipping method then make sure that all the oil has been absorbed by the pancake 😉 You don’t want that sucker to splash hot oil everywhere when it lands back in the pan!
Cook the other side until it matches and it’s ready to serve!
This made a pretty huge pancake so I ate half and saved the rest for later. You could probably make two with the amount of batter we made, but it’s easier to cook it all in one go.
So delicious, crispy, really quick and easy to make for lunch! Yum!
What do you guys normally do for lunch? I feel like I’m always rushing because I work while I eat most of the time so I don’t cook as much as I’d like to >_<
It’s time for another one of Jimmy’s guest posts!!! Neat! Oh, and we’re making baked donuts. OMGKJDNKJDCNKD!!!!!! YES!!! YESYESYES!!!!!!!
So every 6 months or so I go on a bit of a health kick. It’s usually brought on when I’m going through photos and I’m like, where am I in all these photos? I only see that guy who looks like he could be my twin from a planet inhabited entirely by edible couches that are both delicious and majorly comfortableOHMYGODTHATSME. This will not stand. So I go to the closet, pull the secret lever, go through the secret passage way, solve the skeletons riddle, past the pit of dispair and find my running shoes. Dust them off, freak out a little because a spider crawled out and nearly touched me, back through the pit, get stuck talking to the skeletons wife (who is a major chatterbox btw, but she brought me a pie so what can I do?) back up the secret passage and through the closet. Then I pop on the shoes, look out the window and chicken out because it looks a little like rain. But you know, I play some wii fit tennis and stuff. IT TOTALLY COUNTS! It has “fit” in the title of the game!!! Then the next day I look for rain, but it’s a beautiful day outside. Stupid sun. Not even a swarm of bees on the horizon. I manage to drag myself down to the street and the little green crossing man lights up with a hint of mockery, as if to say pfft, good luck…and that’s what gets me going. I’LL SHOW YOU CROSSY MAN! I burst into run, get about three steps and twist my ankle.Me: oowowowowoww, Violet, I hurted my self…
Violet: Did you remeber to stretch first?
Me: Stretch? What am I, a woman!?!
Violet: You get no sympathy. And you get to make me dinner.
I sometimes manage to actually run every now and then, and when I do I try my best to eat right, but I still love baking. So before I bake anything this conversation takes place:
Me: Are people actually going to eat these if I make them or am I going to end up eating all of them again?
Me: You go to hell cupcakes!!! You go to hell and die in a fire!!
Cupcakes: But we’re delicious!
Me: Oh. Ok.
Violet: Who ate all the cupcakes!?!?!
Mrs. Skeleton: I can make a pie!
Everyone: NO THANK YOU!!!!
And now we come full circle. I needed something that I could bake, would taste delicious but would still be healthy-ish if/when I end up eating them all. These donuts only have something like 300KJ each and since the daily recommended kj intake is around 8500, you can eat 28 of these bad boys a day!!!
Ingredients:
1 3/4 cup all-purpose flour
1/4 cup cornstarch
3/4 cup sugar
2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp kosher salt
3/4 cup low-fat buttermilk at room temperature (I can never find buttermilk so I use regular milk with a little bit of lemon juice, but mix them separately so the milk doesn’t curdle.)
2 eggs at room temperature
50g of room temp butter (if you are really eating healthy then you can sub this with 2 tbsp apple sauce or light margarine)
1 tsp vanilla extract
1/2 cup blueberries
Ingredients! Assemble!
Combine all your dry ingredients in a sifter and…sift them?
Just make sure that they all mix together well.
add all the wet ingredients except for the lemon juice
Give everything a good stir, THEN stir in a few quick splashes of lemon juice
At this point I poured some of the mixture into a lightly greased donut pan because Violet likes plain donuts, but I like blueberries, so I made 6 plain and 6 blueberry. I have also made mixed berry and mixed berry with cream cheese which was really nice.
Finding a donut pan can be difficult, we luckily came across this one at K-Mart for $9, but if you can’t find one try looking for a mini Bundt Cake pan, they are a little more common since you don’t usually bake donuts.
Never having made donuts before, I had no idea how much batter to put in each little thingy. As it turns out filling it to the brim was too much and mine came out as some kind of donut-cupcake hybrid that I called cupnuts. Because that sounds hilarious.
On the other side they look normal-ish. Really it’s a brilliant system because since the middle has a divit but not a hole you can put a filling like custard or jam or something there!
Unfortunately I forgot to take any photos of the icing process, but here’s the recipe!
1 1/2 cups powdered sugar
2 tbsp whole milk
A little cream cheese if you like, but again that’s going to add to the Kj count =(
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
It makes quite a bit of icing, so if you want to make less you can just keep adding a little milk to an icing sugar/vanilla extract mixture at a time and stir so that it’s liquidy but will still dry with a shell over the top when left out on the counter.
Dip the donuts into the mixture and rotate as you pull it out to get a smooth finish, then decorate with your favorite toppings!
These ones look a little…deflated. That’s because I forgot to add butter I think. I forgot to add something somewhere along the way and they came out really chewy.
These are great for parties where you can set up a make-your-own donut bar!
I’m so awesome at this being healthy thing. What do you guys think?
Finally a food Friday… on a Saturday. I think I have the flu ;_;
It’s one of James’s favorites actually: Peach Melba Tea from Oriental Tea House. I’m in their Tea Tester program so when James found out theyoffered me a box of the Peach Melba he threatened to break up with me if I didn’t give it to him XD
We made the tea as an ice tea and it was delicious, but not overly exciting, so I thought I’d bam it up a notch and try something a little different.
A while ago while I was on a jelly binge we found a new “create your own flavour!” box and snapped it up thinking of the delicious flavours we could make! The possibilites were endless… cotton candy…strawberries & cream…unicorn…but that was just the problem >_< Too many choices! When the Peach Melba tea arrived the same day we ran out of regular flavoured jelly we decided it was fate, we would make the worlds first PEACH MELBA JELLY!!!
The tea comes with some instructions on the box for optimal brewing!We added two teaspoons of sugar to a mug, then put two tablespoons of the loose leaf tea into our favorite brewy-meshy-tea strainy thingy and filled it with boiling water.
Then we put the create-a-jelly mix into a big bowl, poured in 200ml cup of boiling water and stirred until it dissolved
After about 5 minutes the tea was ready too!
We poured the tea into the create-a-jelly and whisked. Whisk like the wind!!! Oh, but also not too much because you don’t want bubbles in your jelly! James is always over zealous with his whisking.
It made enough for two of our heart shaped silicon cake pans which are about an inch deep and the size of my hand spread out. If those aren’t scientific enough measurements for you then you’re at the wrong blog… 😉
It was about this point that I made the mistake of reading the tea box out loud. Apparently you can EAT the tea bits after brewing because they are actual pieces of peaches and berries ets. James thought it would be a brilliant idea to add the tea to the jelly. I wasn’t so keen on the idea so I didn’t let him touch mine. It did actually look very pretty though, the kind of thing I imagine would be lovely at a tea party.
Into the fridge they went for a few hours until set.
We haven’t quite mastered getting the jelly out of the molds yet. It’s a long debate between the two of us as to the best way to get jelly out in one piece. All suggestions welcome! It might not look very pretty but it tasted delicious! James thought the peach bits were really nice in the jelly, but he actually hates tea so he picked out the leaves. I didn’t like the solid bits but I have really weird things about textures. The plain one was really yummy though!
Ignore that and look at it in the mold again 😀
There you have it! If you’re looking for a deicious way to keep cool in the summer or for a fancy way to jazz up a triffle, Peach Melba Tea from The Oriental Tea House! I’m not going to stop here though, now I know it works I’m going to try other teas, I think blueberry would be so good!
Illustrator. Strong tea, knitting, watercolours, and making a video game called Moonlight in Garland. Living with her adorable husband Jimmy, fluffy puppy Miss Lottie and Bergamot Bunny in Melbourne, Australia.
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