james test

July 24, 2016 Cindy returned from her travels early on a Monday morning, and I wanted to have something worthy to greet her with. I turned to Nigella for help, settling on this recipe for a winter plum cake. It seemed well within my limitations technically (no separating of eggs, no layers), but still seemed fancy enough to serve as a welcome-home treat. I still managed to cock things up initially, and had to restart from scratch after combining the wrong ingredients. Once I actually read the recipe things came together pretty easily. The end result was superb: the almond essence shone through, and the canned plums added bursts of sweet fruitiness. It doesn't need much icing - I used the simple lemon glaze from this recipe . We polished the whole thing off in a matter of days - I'll definitely make it again. Winter plum cake (slightly adapted from Nigella Lawson's How to be a Domestic Goddess ) 1 600g can of plums (I could only find a 800g can, so I just snacked on the res...

One of the reasons I made the chocolate raspberry sandwich cookies was as a thank-you gift to Tracy and Lee for lending us camping gear for Golden Plains . But a lot of the cookies were just too hard and crunchy, and I left the gift-giving a little too late. Thankfully I did think fast enough to freeze the leftover cookies and icing to recycle them into mocha cupcakes. The coffee cake is from Nigella's recipe for cappuccino cupcakes , topped with the leftover chocolate icing and sprinkled with cookie crumbs, which were ground up in the food processor. Up early and unadjusted to a world without daylight saving, I had plenty of time to bake and decorate these before meeting up with Tracy and Lee for a 9:30 breakfast! A quick pre-breakfast taste test.

The second Bloggers' Banquet was nigh, and we needed to get cooking. We brought a few tried and true recipes to the table, but I also wanted to take a little something special for our chauffeur, Claire the Melbourne Gastronome . It had to be cute and sweet, but also hardy enough to weather a couple of days at home before being dragged around in a bag through variable temperatures. Enter Nigella's coffee walnut splodges. They were indeed suitably robust, with a slightly cakey texture and those softly crunching walnuts. And they were a doddle to put together. But as I tried a still-warm one on Thursday night, I said something I never thought I'd say about a Nigella recipe: "I wish these were sweeter". So, early on Saturday morning, I melted some leftover dark cooking chocolate and spread it generously on the splodges' flat surfaces. That did the trick. The chocolate wasn't sufficient to mocha up the entire batch and I'm still eating some of the l...

I've spent the last week at work collaborating with two Brisbane-based smarties, Eve and Will. We've been sharing a fun, challenging and very nerdy project and best of all, they're just cool people to hang out with. There've been outings to Kake Di Hatti and Markov Place , and when it was revealed that it was Will's birthday on Wednesday, I packed him a gift of cherry and vanilla icecream . To welcome them to the lab on Monday I gathered all my local colleagues for afternoon tea and supplied trays of brownies and blondies. The brownies were Nigella's cream cheese variety , a recipe Michael has twice previously made to great acclaim. As for the blondies, these were an entirely new baking experience for me and I knew that Kitchen Wench would have the goods: white chocolate and walnut blondies with salted caramel topping . They are almost as over-the-top as the name suggests and at least as tasty. Most importantly the quantities Ellie gave yielded a sizabl...

Christmas traditions have generally faded as my grandparents have passed on and the grandkids have grown up, but this isn't necessarily a bad thing. If anything we're better able to appreciate the food and company that does come together without any preconceptions. Three years ago, Michael and I turned up in Melbourne late on discounted flights, then spent the afternoon eating chips and avocado while watching DVDs with my brother, Mum and Mum's sister Carol. I don't think there were even any gifts or a decorated tree but the sense of togetherness was much more real than the photo stories Coles Myer would have us buy into all November. This year we shared Christmas lunch with some of my Mum's family on the north side of Melbourne. It was a very Aussie barbie with bread and salads - for the hot plate, Michael and I brought along a lunchbox full of caramelised onions, and four enormous mushrooms brushed with balsamic vinegar and crushed garlic. These reindeer cupc...

On Saturday night, Kerrie and Daniel invited a gaggle of refugees from Queensland to their home for a housewarming and movie night. They invited us all to bring a DVD to share and challenged us to team our movie choice with some thematically appropriate food or drink. Much as I love a theme, I found this one a particular challenge. The DVDs I wanted to share didn't have memorable eating scenes at all! I decided to go ahead and take Press Gang (a favourite TV series from my tween years) regardless. This series was set in a newspaper office run by high school students and featured reams of snappy dialogue, but was most compelling for the love/hate relationship between the highly strung, very English editor Lynda Day and the American wise-guy sometime-journalist Spike Thompson. So why not find an edible clash of England and America? This proved to be perfect Nigella territory. I was keen to try making her jam doughnut muffins, but they didn't really allow for early preparat...

To top off our indoor picnic , I baked a batch of Nigella Lawson's cappuccino cupcakes. This is only the second batch of cupcakes I've ever attempted, yet they seemed just the thing to enjoy on a checkered blanket in the sun. It was mighty tempting to team them with the espresso cupcakes on the facing page of the cookbook but with a final count of 9 people in attendance, it was more sensible to restrict myself to just the dozen. I was hoping for a not-too-sweet coffee cake with bite, topped with something sweet and creamy, and was curious to try a cake batter that's made in a food processor. The method was as convenient as I'd hoped, but the flavours didn't quite live up to my expectations. The batter had a promising bitterness but it mellowed almost beyond recognition with baking. The icing, on the other hand, was the sweetest, sickliest thing I've encountered in years but I guess teaming icing sugar with melted white chocolate will do that, eh? I didn...

Although my paternal grandmother consistently baked fantastic pumpkin-sultana scones when I was growing up, the sweet scone has never really been a favourite of mine. Instead it's one vaguely-remembered instance of cheese scones, baked by my maternal grandmother for lunch, that haunts me. Earlier this winter I was reminded of them, for no apparent reason, and I've been longing for them ever since. When an appropriate weekend lunch at home didn't arise I took matters into my own hands and booked them in for dinner. I suspected that Michael wouldn't approve of scones for dinner so I prepared them on a Tuesday night - on Tuesdays Michael comes home late and I do the shopping and cooking unsupervised. To make the scones more dinner-appropriate I thought I'd team them with soup. This recipe comes not from my grandmother - rather, it's a combination of "Lily's Scones" from Nigella Lawson's How To Be A Domestic Goddess , Angie's rosemary and ...

For a couple of years, I let Michael pick his birthday cake from the Women's Weekly Children's Birthday Cake Book (a timeless classic for all ages and almost thirty years old!). Then the train cake almost undid me with stress and I restricted Michael to less imaginatively shaped and more grown-up birthday desserts. This year's selection was the passionfruit cheesecake from Nigella Lawson's How To Be A Domestic Goddess . After canned passionfruit pulp let my yo-yos down, I made sure there was time for a trip to the Queen Vic Markets on Sunday morning for the fresh stuff. It was well worth it, though if I made this again I'd probably double the lime juice for even more tang. Otherwise it's just what you'd want and expect from a baked cheesecake: a buttery biscuit base and dense, smooth and rich cake. A little goes a long way, and a lot would make a filling but very naughty dinner (oops, did I say that out loud or just think it?). This cake needs a bit o...

Many moons ago, for some no-longer-fathomable reason, I told Cindy I'd bake her a cake for her birthday. All sorts of things conspired against me actually doing so (for starters, she was swanning about Brisbane on her birthday while I was still down here) and it had become something of a running joke in the subsequent months. With four fairly empty Easter weekend days to fill, it finally happened - I baked for Cindy. I insisted that the baked goods be of her choosing, but that they had to be from Nigella Lawson's 'How to Be a Domestic Goddess'. This was partly due to the startling ratio of its price to the number of things Cindy has made from it and partly due to my desire to feel like a fully fledged goddess. Just once in my life. After much careful browsing (mostly in the chocolate section it must be said), Cindy settled on cream-cheese brownies. I have a sneaking suspicion that she combined ease of preparation with perceived deliciousness in her selection crite...

While Michael prepared tostadas for dinner, I was working on dessert. I had chosen to have a go at om ali from my Nigella cookbook, not because it was one of the most mouth-watering but because it would use up some superfluous filo pastry. Described as "a kind of Egyptian bread-and-butter pudding", it probably did stick in my mind as one of the more intriguing recipes. Om Ali Set the oven to 150 degrees. Paint 200g of filo pastry sheets with 100g of melted butter , crumpling each loosely and plonking them on two baking trays. I was unsure whether Nigella meant that the sheets should get layered on top of each other or scrunched up side by side, so I did a tray of each. The recipe wouldn't be perfect this time around, but I'd probably work out the best option and prepare all the pastry as intended next time. That's active adaptive management, people! (I'm thrilled that I've just managed to explain my thesis topic using a cooking example. Humour me...

Nigella's recipe for chocolate-cherry cupcakes was just the kind of dessert entry I was after: easily made the day before and prepared in single portions, with a look that combines a fun party treat with dark chocolate elegance. It calls for morello cherry jam in the cake batter, and Nigella likes to buy it at Sainsbury's. With the nearest Sainsbury's almost 17000 killometres away I decided to scout around for an alternative, finding zero perfect but three promising options. The first was a 670g jar of morello cherries in syrup at Safeway, which could also replace the glace cherries that Nige suggests for decoration (I hate glace fruit). Less than $4 and yum to snack on too. The second find was some black cherry jam, also at Safeway. It lacks the sourness of morellos, but has the right texture for the batter. Third is a comparatively expensive jar of sour cherry chutney, bought from a French food stall at the Vic Markets. It certainly had the right cherry taste, but...