Food@RSO

So last Sunday night, we had dinner at China Red, because my parents wanted to try a new place and catch up with us.  It's got tables on the entrance level, and then some more tables down some stairs to the basement.  The way the ordering works is that you can use the touch screen menu at every table to order and bring forth the onslaught of food, drinks, and many mango-based desserts.  But because of how you order, you need to be the one to stagger your courses so you don't end up getting your dessert amongst your mains and end up with absolutely no room on the table!  Anyways, pics after the jump!

We've been popping along to the regular Thursday night table with some of Decay's current/former workmates at Tandoori Times, for the last year or so - it seems that at least once a month, we get to a Thursday in the week and neither of us are particularly enthused about figuring out what's for dinner, so we all hop into the car, and drive to St Kilda, and sit down for some tasty Indian food while being looked after by Akash (:    

This was a request from Decay, after he'd had a look at what ingredients we had available in the fridge/pantry at the time - we had a large amount of oranges (from Decay's Mum's prolific but squat orange tree), and chocolate, and sour cream, and eggs, and butter, and what else am I going to do when faced with a recipe for one large cake, but to instead break out the mini cupcake tins and make ... 80 of the little things?  

I had some issues with the chocolate icing/topping/frosting part of the recipe - mostly because mine never actually ended up looking like the smooth glossy thing that was in the picture that accompanied this recipe - it could've been the type of chocolate, or that the sour cream was not full fat, or because I didn't work fast enough with the spreading, or that I waited, or that I didn't wait.  Didn't work it out after a couple of goes, so I topped some of the batch with a thick ganache, and the rest with the sour cream chocolate frosting. 

These were a big hit at Decay's work, but they weren't quite as much of a hit at mine - possibly because people were overwhelmed by choice that day (as these came in on the same day as the scottish tablet), and also because there weren't as many fans of the chocolate + orange combination as I thought there might be. 

It's only been in the last couple of months that I've managed to catch up on my GT readings - Decay gave me a subscription a few years ago for Christmas/birthday, and I've flicked through and daydreamed over many recipes and locations, wondering if the recipe/holiday destination would ever fit into a reasonably normal existence and not just in people's post-lottery-winning-ness - they're nice daydreams though!  This wouldn't be the first recipe we've made since we subscribed - that honour would go to the glazed salt pork we made one Easter while visiting Gran - that was delicious.  It's also not the first time I've made brioche - I've previously used a brioche recipe from Donna Hay Modern Classics V2, but seeing as I'm a bit depleted in the mini loaf tin stakes with the non-stick coating on one set pretty much all but flaked off and useless, I decided to give a big loaf a go.  The dough was made on a Saturday evening, and then it came out of the fridge on Sunday morning to get to room temperature to finish its first rise, get a punch down and shaping into the loaf tin for a second rise, then I went off for a long run while Decay kept X company and looked after the baking part of the process.  It was delicious, and none of it made its way to work - we ate it for breakfast with jam and even more butter til it was gone - that took 4 days between the 3 of us here!   Thinking back, I think I made it purely so I'd have some egg whites to have another crack at making macarons ... which given the time I started trying to make them, really just turned out to be very wrong, but still tasty, soft almond meringue things.  

So, last weekend we had a trip to visit Gran and Ginger, and Decay got the recipe for coconut biscuits, because it had been a while.  The recipe came from Gran's big box of recipe cards, and usually when coconut biscuits were made, gingernuts were made at the same time, seeing as they were on the same card.

Anyways, last Tuesday evening, in between wrangling X after dinner and for bedtime, and with a photo of the recipe to help along with Decay's memory of what coconut biscuits should be like, a batch of these were made.  They're all gone now, tasty little things they were!

Last weekend, after a trip to see Decay's mum (Gran!) and Ginger, we went over to my parents place (Po-Po and Goong-Goong), for some dinner.  Because I can't seem to have a weekend without baking involved, I made an orange and cardamom sour cream cake to bring along, and then we got to sit down to have a steamboat dinner. It's been ages since we've had steamboat, it's definitely a winter thing with us, and this was definitely X's first time!  Many pics after the jump (: