My Recent Failures

I have to admit, this post is a little embarrassing but below is a a small collection of shitty ass dishes I've made in the past; some tasted bad, some looked horrible and some were both. Personally, I think it's a bit silly to think that every dish you will make will go flawlessly or will taste delicious every time. These days I've gotten good enough that it goes alright most of the time but there are some days where I feel like I'm hugest noob of all time LOL. I've never claimed to be amazing at cooking and below is a small showcase of why. Enjoy :)

Spanish Omelette

So this is a dish I copied from watching Jamie At Home. There was no recipe but the whole thing was easy enough. It looked delicious on the show and was made of seemingly delicious ingredients so this one should've been a win/win. Nah B. For starters, the chirozo sausage and potatoes are baked in an omelette but the omelette itself was bland as hell. The rosemary didn't go well with the dish, the potatoes were decent but didn't add any flavour to the omelette. Also, this was the first time I've ever had chirozo and my first impressions were not great. Maybe I had a bad batch but these sausages had a really bad smell to them. I'll try them again before I make up my mind. Jamie, you are boy but this dish sucked my balls.





Double Chocolate Cookies

I think I found this recipe on the Martha Stewart website. I modified the chocolate chip cookie one I found to make it more chocolatey, I cut some ingredients to include more cocoa powder and things like that. As you can see from the picture, I don't make cookies that often. Cookies and cupcakes aren't things I usually make although I love them. There are enough girls around me that make those things so I don't really need to :) Sometimes I have a huge craving though and then shit seems to go terribly wrong lol! In terms of the cookie itself, it tasted alright but I'm not really sure how to make the cookie more gooey and soft. I also don't know how you get the chocolate chips to show on the top. My shit just melts. Iunno. Whatever. I'll work on it.


Spiced Banana Crepe Suzette

To be honest I don't really know what this tasted like because I had the hugest allergy attack while I was cooking it and by the time it was done I couldn't taste it :( However, I feel that it didn't taste as good as it could have. For starters this was the first time I ever tried to cook crepes and I was not very successful. The pics below can attest to that lololol. Next I had to make a citrus sugar syrup with lime and orange and from what I could tell it was WAY too sour to put on top of this dish. Other than the fact that my crepes were mediocre and the sugar syrup was too sour, this dish was probably alright. FYI I had to flambé the whole thing (when you light alcohol on fire in the frying pan) so that was pretty sweet. The banana's were spiced with pumpkin pie spice, and the whole thing was topped with lime zest, coconut and vanilla and hazelnut gelato. I'll work on this one cuz I think it will taste delicious after I figure out how to stop being a noob.

Left: First crepe (pan was too hot, batter was too think) Middle: Second crepe Right: Third crepe (batter was loosened and heat was lowered. Still too yellow for some reason but it tasted alright.

Banana Fritters

This is probably the worst cooked and presented dish I have ever made and I didn't even make it that long ago. Maybe like a month LOL. I got this recipe from the F Word and Gordon just made it soooo much better than I did. To start, the banana fritters were grossly under cooked. I don't deep fry that often so I had no clue how hot the oil should've been. Basically the oil was WAY too hot and when I put the battered banana's in they burnt sooo fast and the result is in the picture. PROTIP: heat the oil slowly and test it with something small, it should slowly sizzle with bubbles. Next I was gonna sprinkle some melted chocolate all around it in a circle. I fucked up bad... I messed up the first circle and then I just gave up and tried to go for a messy yet artistic look... obviously that didn't go well LOL. The cherry on top was to sift some chocolate icing sugar all around it. Since I'm retarded, I prepared the sugar right above the plate so when I put a few table spoons of sugar in the sifter most of it just fell through and there is a giant pile of sugar in the bottom left of the plate. Shit like this just happens sometimes.... UGH 

I don't know why I keep cooking with bananas :P Until next time!

Spiced Pork Chops

So I made this little dish on Valentines day... Or what I like to call, Tuesday...UGGHGHGHHGH #foreveralone

Anyways, I'm still on my quest to eat more veggies and so far, its going ok, I still haven't brought myself to make a salad yet. I really want to too... fuck. Maybe next time.

Roasted Asparagus w/ lemongrass, ginger, and tea vinaigrette
From (Gordon Ramsay's Maze)

I would probably charge about $26 for this appetizer

This was a really complicated little appetizer. Took a while to make cuz it was pretty finicky to assemble. Also this dish was way out of my league. Haven't ate anything like it yet so I have no idea if I did it right lololol

Ingredients
- Asparagus, bay leaves and thyme
- Lemon ginger tea vinaigrette
   -  lemon grass, ginger, lemongrass tea, rind of lemon, lemon juice, black tea, white wine vinegar, sugar, salt olive oil

Cooking
- For the asparagus, I had to blanch them which is a technique that you can use to cook veggies. Basically, you cook your veggie in boiling salted water for a brief period of time until they are just tender, then you take them out and plunge it into an ice bath to remove the heat and stop the cooking process. This allows you to to keep a vibrant colour on your veggies as well.
- After I blanched the asparagus, I had to skewer bay leaves and thyme through the asparagus (which is a huge pain in the ass holy fuck) and then baked them with some salt and pepper, more bay leaves and a few thin slices of butter.
- With the vinaigrette, I just put all the ingredients together, brought it to a simmer and took it out and strained the result. The vinaigrette was interesting because it had a slight hint of tea flavour. However it was way too sweet so I should've put more white wine vinegar and a little more salt I think.  

Spiced Pork Chop (From Gordon Ramsay's Healthy Appetite)

Pork chop with garlic potatoes and rainbow carrots

I spent so much more time making the sides than the actual pork chop. Shit took forever cuz of all the boiling I had to do lololol

Ingredients
- Pork chops: chili powder, paprika, salt and pepper, thyme, olive oil, garlic, star anise, coriander seeds
- Potatoes and carrots yo

Cooking
- For the pork chops I just marinated the pork chop. I found that if you marinate meats on wax paper instead of doing it in a bowl, you can wrap the meat in the wax paper when you are done combining the ingredients and save space by not having to put the bowl in the fridge or wasting a zip-loc bag. Gotta save mother nature man. She's beautiful and you people are turning her into a whore!
- One note about star anise is that it is a pretty strong flavour. The seeds are taste a little "aniseedy" and that ain't me. If you ever try to marinate with them, make sure you crush it finely, that's my tip.
- For the garlic potatoes I boiled the potatoes for about a million years and when they were done I sliced them up and fried them up with butter, seasoning, coriander seeds, and garlic until they were crispy. Pretty delish.
-For the rainbow carrots, I blanched them an cooked them with some butter, seasoning and coriander seeds and tossed it with some fresh coriander. PS I nutted when I saw there was such thing as purple carrots. Shit got intensely real for me after that.

As a fun fact, coriander is also called cilantro. Don't ever say I don't like to have fun. Proof. Word is bond yo.

Raging My Dream 2012

Near the end of 2011, I put my cooking slightly on hold to focus all my attention on Skyrim and getting fresh to success. I did start to miss cooking though so by the time 2012 came around I put everything else on hold and I have been cooking like some sort of mad man. No time for going to school or doing any kind of studying. No time for work and chasing that paper. I haven't even had time to meet sexy single ladies... not that I have some sort of waitlist or anything lololol I still have time for tennis though, I mean, I am the Prince of Tennis :D

This post will be less informational I think since I'm gonna be talking about so many dishes lolol.

Beef Satay w/ Peanut Sauce (From Gordon Ramsay's Maze)

I made a lot more than the four but it didn't look good on the plate. Anyways, I'm still perfecting my beef cooking skills so I accidentally cooked this beef tenderloin to medium rare instead of medium like I wanted. Still so fucking delicious though, so tender and melt in your mouth. I'll never go back to buying meat at the grocery stores. I mean meat is often the highlight of you meal, the main thing. You should go and buy from a place that cares about the quality of your food as much as you. You'll pay a bit more though but its definitely runs laps around that shit you get at Zehrs or whatever. Plus it is highly likely that the animals were treated much better than the ones at the grocery store so that's always a bonus :) The peanut sauce was pretty easy to make but peanut butter is super oily so there was a lot of oil floating around. Not sure if there is a way to avoid it, too lazy to look it up lol. Maybe I should emulsify it or something

Puff Pastry Pizza

This dish came out on a whim for me. I just sat here one day and I was like, "I wonder if I can make pizza from puff pastry" and I did. And it was so fucking delicious. You can basically top it off any way you want, I just used a bunch of different salamis (gypsy, hungarian etc). A couple of key points though, try to look out and buy good quality mozzarella. Not that pre-shredded shit that is so dried up. Good mozzarella will be super soft, and packaged in its own milk. Totally worth it. Second, there are a few things you gotta do when you prepare puff pastry. In a nutshell, you gotta thaw it (don't bother making it lol), then flour your surface, you COULD roll it out, then poke holes with a fork all over except where you want the crust, brush it with some eggwash if you want, bake it at 180 C for about 8 min or so, then put your toppings on. At this point you could wrap the pizza's and put them in the freezer or just bake them and eat them. Delicious yo. PS I made my own sauce, but in the interest of length I'll post that up another time.

Herb Crusted Cod w/ Silky Mash (From Gordon Ramsay's Maze)
I'm trying to make an effort to cook seafood and so far shit is going well lol. Cod fillet is super expensive though fuck. Anyway, this is the first time I made mashed potatoes and it wasn't as silky as I would've liked lol. I think I should invest in a potato ricer and pass the potato through a sieve more than once. This little dish tasted pretty good, but I think I'm going to add in the optional tomato paste layer in-between the cod and the herb crust. 


Mango Soup w/ Lychee Granita (From Gordon Ramsay's Maze)

My first little attempt at alternative desserts. This dish was very simple and super tasty. The "soup" was overripe mangos (for extra sweetness) and a bit of lychee juice and passed through a sieve to remove all the fibers. As a bonus, there was lychee granita (with mint) which is basically like a snow cone. To make the granita, you are supposed to make the ice really granular and/or super fine. I got it pretty good, but I think next time I will use my food processor and that should work much better. Anyways, super delish :)

Black Angel Linguine (From Jamie Oliver's Cook)

So this is a pretty cute little dish...If you do it right LOL. So you are supposed to use black pasta (it's tinted with squid ink) but I used this dark green basil pasta. And the "angels" are supposed to be the scallops but I coloured them too much during cooking and they ended up loosing the whites lolol. Other than that, this was a really good dish.  





Chicken Pesto Pizza

This was a little dish inspired by my boss. As some of you know, I had lunch made for me everyday last term :D This little dish is really quick to make. Just fry up your chicken anyway you want (garlic, salt and pepper is simple enough). I bought pesto sauce (too lazy to make it lawl) spread that on to garlic naan that I bought too. Then put the chicken on with whatever toppings you want. Put it in the oven, finish with some parmesan, pepper and olive oil and Boom! You're done.

So I never really understood why all the chefs would dress the dish with olive oil at the end of cooking. Basically its to keep the food moist and it totally works. Plus olive oil is super healthy for you (especially extra virgin) so that's a huge plus too. 

Also, I noticed this before but this just reinforces things. I need to make more fucking veg for my meals lol! I'm gonna make a conscious effort to make salads and shit from now on... its gonna be tough lololol

Mufuckin Birthday Cake

Now that I'm trying to blog more and more, I'm slowly gaining more readers (like 1 or 2 LOL) and it's slightly nerve racking lololol. Also, my posts are so TL:DR, I should fix that. Or not, fuck ya'll.

Diamond Head
From "Extraordinary Cakes" by Karen Krasne

The writing is so fucking terrible...and I regret that smiley face lol!

After making Boobie's cake and then this one, Stefy and I have no appetite to make anymore cakes for the longest time. Don't get me wrong, I love making cakes, but we made two of them in such a short period of time. Our shit isn't simple either. These bad boys take 5 - 10 hours and we basically had to sell our jizz for a week to pay for all the ingredients lololol. Nuttin for macadamias; an honorable cause. In the end, I'm glad we made this one cuz it was so fucking delicious. So much better than Bo's dry ass cake :P

So this cake had some righteous layers to it with names I can't even pronounce and for this post I'll go through each one separately.

Bittersweet Chocolate Génoise
So the "cake" portion of this cake is a chocolate génoise. After consulting wiki, a génoise is basically a cake that doesn't use any chemical leavening (like baking soda and baking powder). After reading that, everything makes complete fucking sense because the finished cake was a little less than 2 inches in height lolol. I'm pretty sure I folded the batter properly but since I've never made this before so I either fucked up really hard or I did it really well lol. I'm going to assume I made it perfectly :)

Ingredients: unsalted butter, 8 eggs, sugar, flour, cocoa powder (I used Valrhona cocoa, my cooking mentor Mr. B told me that this brand is the shit so there you go)

One of the keys to making this génoise is to get the eggs to sabayon stage or ribbon stage. What that means is that you need to combine eggs with sugar and get the eggs to look really pale, double or triple in volume and have a "ribbon" like texture. What THAT means is the eggs will be thick and drip back leaving a trail before melting back into the eggs (looking up a video would help lol). To do this you need to warm the egg mixture over a bain marie, which is whisking the eggs in a bowl over a simmering saucepan. After 4 min or so, take it off after it is warm to the touch and put it into a mixer on high for like 7 to 10 minutes and the mixture should get thick and double in volume and the rest is pretty easy!

Rum Simple Syrup
Simple syrup is pretty easy to make. Combine water and sugar and let it dissolve and thicken up but don't cook too long or it becomes caramel. To make simple syrup rum flavoured, we just added some Cap Mo' Dark Rum. Done mufucka.

Semisweet Chocolate Ganache
Another word I'm not sure how to pronounce lol! Basically ganache is an icing that is made by heating heavy cream pouring it over chocolate to melt. We used pretty decent chocolate for this cake btw. I like buying good ingredients for my food and not that Baker's Chocolate shit you find at the grocery store #hatersgonnahate. Shtack was such a hater cuz the chocolate I bought was a huge portion of the total cost lol!

Vanilla bean custard
Custard is a really hard thing to make properly and very easy to fuck up...and we fucked it up LOL. I mean our custard still tasted fine but it was lumpy lol! That usually happens when the cream is too hot when you mix it with the egg mixture. My tip for that is to make sure that the cream is JUST about to boil but not yet boiling before you mix it with the egg mixture. Our cream was boiling HUGE when we mixed it with the eggs I think lol!

Macadamia Brittle
This is a pretty interesting and delicious part of the cake. To make this, you need to combine sugar and a little bit of water (like 2 tablespoons) and bring it to a boil. Then you mix in the nuts and once you cook this mixture long enough, the sugar starts to dissolve and coat the nuts. The key to this though is to not overcook the sugar... which I did :(

Final Notes
So that's basically the cake. Oh yeah! there was also a layer of whipped cream in the cake. To break the cake down it was:
Chocolate Génoise glazed with rum syrup, chocolate ganache, vanilla custard, macadamia brittle and ground macadamia and whipped cream and then repeated for one more layer...mmmmm

- I also burnt my thumb taking the génoise out of the oven lol! I was cooling my thumb in several cups of yogurt for like 2 hours... those girls better have liked that cake! I almost died! I think they liked it though lawl
- I bought this shitty ass $5 cake leveler from Michael's which is this tool with a wire that you use to divide a cake into even layers.... fucking sucked balls, waste of money lol
- I'm pretty bad with assembling cakes. I can never get the icing to be even across the whole thing so my cakes always sink a bit around the edges... I should fix that lolol
- Stefy and I had to reach new levels of homosexuality to decorate this cake since it was for a bunch of girls. We wanted to make it pretty so I decided to put some flowers on it. BOOM. Girly.
- Lastly! We wanted to write something on this cake but I didn't have time to make the icing so we bought this tube of icing and it made it look like a special ed kid wrote on it lol! it was so shitty to use lol I didn't want to ruin the cake with the writing but we flipped for it and the coin told us to write on it.

Fuck this storyline son

Well I wanted a short post and this one turned out to be longer than ever LOL!

Gorgeous Slow Cooked Pasta

Duuurrr. I'm forcing myself to keep writing. I think I may have like 1 or 2 fans out there which means I need to keep........ feeding them amazing blog posts :) I think there's a really shitty pun in that last sentence there. Maybe not. Please don't shoot the pianist, he's trying his best :D

Anyways, I've posted enough about drinks/desserts so I gotta prove my worth and post about some real fucking food. This one is a pretty sweet pasta.

Gorgeous Slow Cooked Pasta
From Cook with Jamie (although if you know anything about Jamie Oliver, you would know this is his recipe just by the name lol)

Why did I leave that fork there.... FUCK!

So a little background about this dish. First off, it serves 4 to 6 people and I ate this all by myself...meaning I ate this over a course of a week lol!! Fuck, it sucks not having anyone to cook for #foreveralone. Also! this dish is supposed to be made with a whole fucking duck. I love duck so much.... but it costs a million dollars for a whole duck, and its so expensive for pieces so I had to cheap out. I replaced the meat with beef and before anyone says shit about shit, I know it would've been wiser to replace it with another bird, but I felt like eating beef so fuck ya'll :D Duck would've made this dish SO much better though with the sweet and sour style #justsayin

Ingredients
Agro Dolce Sauce [the star of the recipe since there is no duck :( .....]
- Pancetta, red onion, carrots, celery, rosemary, cinnamon stick, garlic, plum tomatoes, red wine
Also, meat, parmesan, butter, orange zest and juice, red wine vinegar
And Rigatoni

Notes to Ingredients
The sauce is pretty sweet for this one, its like a new sweet and sour taste I'm not used to when it comes to pasta. Additionally, Mr. Oliver put down pinenuts and sultanas to put into the pasta. FYI sultanas is like white grapes (English snob I know lololol) I had white grapes but I opted not to put it in. It would've added to the sweet and sour taste, but adding that AND pinenuts made it seem like the dish was super busy with all these little bits and bites to eat so I took it out. I mean I had ground beef, little diced up celery, carrots, pancetta, pasta and then I'd also have these two. Meh.
Also, this is the first time I used Rigatoni pasta. Never had it before :D

Cooking
- This one is a longer cooking pasta, the sauce took hella long to reduce and simmer
- One little tip about cooking pasta (I can't remember if I've mentioned this) but when you cook pasta you should always set aside some of the cooking water. It helps when you are putting together the pasta with the sauce at the last minute and you need to "loosen" the sauce with a little water. The starchy water is a little bit more effective than just regular water
- I've always been slightly confused about the terms boiling and simmering. Seems obvious and maybe it is but there is a tiny difference and instead of trying to explain, here's a British guy to do it for me :D

That's about it for this one! I'm making another cake with Ducky this week. Hope it's awesome!

Dranks on Dranks

So here are bunch of alcoholic drinks or random fruit drinks I've made. I like play around with the garnish and presentation. Not very good yet lolol.

I made this drink up by adding a bunch of shit I had together, I think there are too many flavours so you should probably take one out. Mind you, I did invent this while I was drinking lol! I don't have a name for this one lol.

- In a shaker put in:
- Ice
- 1 oz Sour Puss Raspberry
- 1 oz White Rum
- .5 oz Peach Syrup
- Splash with Pineapple Passion Mango Dole Juice
- Shake well and garnish with a yellow cherry

Also made this while drinking. I loved this one a lot cuz got me proper fucked lol. I used alcoholic whipped cream that you can only get in the states. At first it makes it look like someone took a shit all over my drink. If you let it melt and mix together, this drink tastes awesome :)

In a small glass
- Put in Ice
- Fill it partially with Bailey's Coffee
- Splash a bit of milk
- Top with CREAM(TM) Alcohol Infused Chocolate Whipped Cream
- Garnish with a chocolate disk (I made that and it looked horrible)

This one is a special drink a friend's ex-gf liked to drink. I respect the drink so I have to post it, tasted so fucking good.

In a glass
- Put in ice
- 2 oz Havana Club (you NEED Havana club, no other white rum. Also, apparently you can put in as much Havana as you want and it doesn't make it taste bad lolol)
- Splash some cranberry, orange juice and and top with grape Crush
- Garnish with a lemon wheel
- Fucking delicious

Here is a simple non-alcoholic fruit smoothie thing I made. I played around with the garnish. It's called the "Golden Wonder"

- In a blender
- 2 Passion Fruits
- 2 Mango Nectarines (or Peaches or Yellow Plums)
- 1 Banana

I took more time making the garnish than I did the drink lololol. The one on the left is just banana with a spoon of passion fruit in the middle. The middle one is just a banana star. The one of the right are two banana bowls with passionfruit inside (pretty delicious).

Lastly, I was gonna make a layered fruit drink, kiwi at the bottom, then pineapple and grape on top. The thing I didn't realize is that kiwi tastes like absolute shit when you juice/blend it. The acids in it fucks with the taste hard. Don't ever do it. Cuz of that I just gave up and drank the grape and pineapple on its own. Still good :D

That's it for this post. I really hope I post the rest of my shit before I get lazy again lololol.

Two Colour Jello Shots

I have a lot of shit I've made in the last year that I have been too lazy to post about. I should use my new found urge to blog and blog as much as I can before I get lazy again lol.
Aside from cooking I also love making drinks/bartending. My love for this started when Quarters (now 1280) at McMaster offered a one day bar tending course that I took part in lolol. Shit was pretty fun and I've been trying to be a master bartender ever since; along with trying to be a master chef and prince of tennis :P

Two Colour Jello Shots
I made these for Rong Time's last birthday (don't think she remembers though but that's all good lol!). I think a lot of people liked them, but I was told there was one hater. I wish I knew it was good but by the time I gave them to her party, I was super drunk and could not taste/judge the quality that well lol!

I'm particularly proud of this because I think I invented this version of the jello shot. I think the other kinds of two flavour jello shots are all horizontal splits :D

You can use any flavour but the ones I made were Passion Fruit/Black Currant

Recipe

*You can make these alcoholic (like I did) or virgin

**This recipe is for one half of the jello shot meaning you have to do this twice

***If you want to make alternating colours like in the picture above, then you need to divide this recipe by half and divide out the juice, and then repeat the same thing for the second half. A little complicated, just takes a bit of math and planning lolol.

****READ ALL OF THIS BEFORE YOU TRY lololol

- 1/4 cups cold water (or your alcohol of choice)
- 1 packets of unflavored gelatin (I used 1 pouch of Knox brand gelatin which is about 1 tbsp)

- 1/2 cups boiling water
- 1 1/4 cups juice (don't use fresh juice or frozen pineapple or kiwi because it would set)
- 1/2 cups sugar (optional)

- Food colouring

Equiqment

- Ice Cube Trays and/or egg cartons or anything similar (I'll explain later)

Instructions

- Start boiling your water and put the cold water into a large bowl and put gelatine in and let it soften for about 5 min

- Add 1/2 cup boiling water (and optional sugar in) to the gelatine and stir until it dissolves

- Let it cool down and add your juice and you are ready to start assembling these bad boys

Important Notes:

- When it comes to choosing what juice you want, the key is to choosing juice that is REALLY sweet. The reason is that if you use something like juice from a juice box, it will be extremely watered down when you add 1/2 cup boiling water and 1/4 cup cold water (or alcohol). In order to balance that out you need to add the sugar or have really sweet juice. I prefer making the really sweet juice rather than adding sugar.

- What I did for this recipe is use fruit juice syrup mixed with some water, and I made sure that it was about double the sweetness. I used Monin Passion Fruit syrup and Ribena Blackcurrant syrup

- I can also imagine you could use those frozen concentrates and just add a little bit of water. As long as the juice you are adding is super sweet and concentrated then it's all good

- I added food colouring as a presentation thing. I found that regular juice is not dark enough. Especially after you add the boiling water and alcohol so I added some food colouring so that it was completely opaque.

Assembly

This is where the whole deal gets time consuming.

- Pour the jello so it fills halfway up the shot glass or fill it to the point where it covers the bottom of the shot glass and makes it way to the top when you angle the shot glass. Might be a little more than half can't remember. (I used plastic ones I found at the dollar store)

- In order to get the jello to set diagonally in the shot glass you need to place the shot glasses on an angle in the ice cube trays. This part is a long a delicate process. Just look at the picture:

- Not sure how to explain this next part but basically if you don't rotate the shot glasses while they are on an angle before they set, you will get an imperfect line. The picture is below, but basically the jello mix clings on to the dry shot glass in a weird way so by rotating the shot glass when it is angle, you wet the sides of it and the water sets in a straight line. The picture shows what I'm talking about. Sorry if that is a bit unclear.

 - Let the jello set in the fridge for a couple of hours then make the second batch and pour it into the shot glasses and put them back in the fridge (no need to put on an angle this time) and let the second half can set and dats it. Game ova.

I'll post up some pics of actual drinks I've made tomorrow or something lawl. This post got too long again.

Dobos Torte

It's been fricken month's since I posted on this thing which sucks but oh well. I figured since all my friends are busy, I got some time now to post something new lol! so bored and ronery :P

So my Boobie recently had his sweet sixteen, so I decided we had to do something special and make a cake. And if anyone knows anything about shit, they know that a cake is a minimum two man job so I enlisted my second right hand Stefy to help me lololol

Dobos Torte
From a cake book in chapters... I stole recipe lolol I wish I knew the name of it

Sucks I didn't get a picture of the cake on its plate without the wax paper and excess nuts at the bottom lol

The cake we made is called a Dobos Torte and is named after the Hungarian chef that created it. It's a multi-layer sponge cake with chocolate buttercream with a hazelnut and walnut crust. It is garnished with cake slices covered with caramel and dipped in chocolate on top. Or as my pal Fricke describes... slices of pizza on top lol! Basically, thank god this cake isn't a fucking meringue cake jesus christ lol! Also, this cake (like any cake Shtack and I make) is so bad for you lol! 1 slice might actually kill you.

Ingredients
For the Cake:
Typical shit like cake flour, salt, a million eggs, icing (confectioners') sugar, and vanilla
For the buttercream:
bittersweet chocolate, icing sugar, unsweetened cocoa powder, vanilla, and a million sticks of unsalted butter

Notes to ingredients
- Chocolate: A while ago I bought Callebaut Semi Sweet 51.8% chocolate for the other cakes I made. This time I used Lindt Semi Sweet 49% chocolate and I liked this one way better I think. I'm just nerding this up hard. I KNOW whoever would read this doesn't care about that at all...moving on
- Cake flour: So I hang out with a lot of lazy and/or cheap fucks and no one I know is as precise about cooking as I am. Point is, there is a huge difference between cake flour and all purpose flour. I cringe when I imagine a situation where someone doesn't have cake flour and they will substitute it with all-purpose cuz they are too lazy to go out and buy a new bag of cake flour. Basically, all flours have a certain % of protein content and that affects the gluten present in the flour. That gluten determines the elasticity of the product and controls how chewy it is, how much the batter/dough rises etc. Cake flour has the least amount of protein content and is much finer. Therefore they are perfect for cakes and cupcakes as it minimizes how much the batter rises when it cooks and makes the cakes "light" and "fluffy". All-purpose flour is good for bread or cookies because you need a chewy consistency and you need a dough that rises (with the help of water, yeast and kneading).
TL;DR...use the right fucking ingredients!

Cooking
Making the Sponge Cake:
- Always sift the flour when you put it in the bowl... Stefy
- We had to beat the yolks until pale and thick. Pretty generic so we had to guess what that should look like
- Then we had to mix the egg whites with some sugar until stiff peaks but I didn't get it to make stiff peaks after so long so I just gave up when it seemed thick enough lolol There's a lot of generic instructions that you have to power through. Stupid cook books.
- We only had 2 9-inch cake pans and had like 7 layers to make. Luckily these layers were so thin it took like 5 -8 min to bake.
- Protip: A lot of people just butter the pans before putting the batter in. You gotta butter AND flour the pans. The butter tends to stick and prevent cakes from rising properly so the flour helps with that. Just sift a small handful of flour on your cake pans after you butter/grease them
- Protip: Smack the cake pans on the table to get the air bubbles out. I did it but I was a scrub and didn't do it enough. You have to bang like 20 times and you can see like a hundred bubbles rise to the top. Your cake will be very flat and pro if you do this. We only did this with the last layer... the first 6 were so shitty lol!
Melting Chocolate
- As easy as it sounds you can still make mistakes. Haters out there might be so offended that I'm even writing about this lololol
- What I mean is there there are typically two methods people choose when they melt chocolate. Double boiler or microwave. Double boiler is when you steam some water and put a heatproof container like a metal bowl top of it and use the heat from the steam to melt the chocolate. This method is fine, except for the fact that you have a great chance of having steam get in contact with the chocolate and when that happens your chocolate will seize, meaning it will become hard and lumpy. Plus with a double boiler you need to constantly stir so it doesn't burn. The microwave is my method of choice because no water is involved. Just put your microwave at 50% power, melt it in 30 second intervals, take it out, stir and mix it up and keep doing it until it is melted. Make sure there is no water in your bowl or spoon or whatever :D
-Also, melting chocolate is easy when  you have even pieces. So if you have a block of chocolate then you gotta take the extra step and shave the chocolate so it is even
Making Caramel:
- Caramel is usually water and sugar but this time it had butter and lemon juice and that made it a slightly different experience lol. I hate making caramel so Stefy gave it a shot and he did it pro! He is now the caramel master.
- We had to cook it until it was "caramel" colour lawl. It took a while to cook the caramel at medium heat so we turned it up and it changed colour faster so make sure you don't over cook or it dries out really hard
- Protip: When you make caramel, it dries in your saucepan really fast and makes it hard to clean out. Just put water in it, bring it to a boil and pour out the water when the caramel dissolves. Just remember, caramel is just water and sugar :)

That's about it. Assembly is pretty easy. Maybe not but this post is long enough already. That reminds me, I need an icing spatula lolol. Sorry for the ridiculously long post. There was a lot of shit to talk about and as you can see... it was all gold :)

Walnut Covered Prawns with Ponzu Sauce

This little bitch is still alive! So much hattnin in my life I can't even hear the time to write this blog or cook anything. But anyways, after looking at the pictures for this dish, I have now decided to always plan how to garnish/present a dish beforehand. I believe presentation is accounts for 50% of how good the dish is. That and I find that garnishing and preparing the presentation of food is one of the most interesting parts of cooking so imma gangsta this shit up whenever I can.

Walnut Covered Prawns with Ponzu Sauce
From the KW Record

I made wings too but I didn't marinate them so ignore that :D

Ingredients
Crushed walnuts in a Pestle and Mortar
Panko Breadcrumbs (special Japanese bread crumbs. Found these at Zehrs of all places lol)
Typical ingredients for batter mix (flour, eggs etc)
Huge amount of oil
Ponzu (mixed with some other things like cornstarch and shit)

Notes to Ingredients
Ponzu sauce is a pretty common Japanese sauce. Its citrus based and that's all I really remember. If you've eaten enough Japanese food I'm sure you've tasted it. It's basically the same sauce as the one the ones on the chicken skewers at all you can eat.

Cooking
First step on this bad boy is deveining and peeling the raw prawns. Prob best to do this over a clean sink and a bowl and use cold water whenever you need to rinse of the shrimp cuz this bitniss gets a little finicky. So yeah, just gotta peel the shell/legs off keeping the tail of the shrimp on. Then run a knife down and take out the digestive tract. Alternatively you could poke the shrimp with a toothpick under the digestive tract and pull it out from the bottom. Pretty delicate way of doing things, its like manually deseeding grapes. Probs shouldn't do it that way lolol

Second step is to coat the shrimp and deep fry these gais

Tips
- First, there is usually an exact temperature the oil should be at for deep frying so you should try to follow it. If its too hot, you could burn the outside and undercook the inside
- make sure the entire shrimp is generously coated with the egg so that everything sticks to it properly and cooks evenly
- Shrimps cook hella fast, 1 - 2 min max. I cooked for longer and the shrimp were very hard. I'll remember for next time lolol

Happy Birthday Illie Mako

So as most of you know, I had a birthday sometime this week, who even knows. Anyways, my friends all chipped in and got me this legit 7" Japanese Santoku blade. Putting this thing in my hand feels amazing I haven't tried it out yet so hopefully it is sharp as fuck. Also, when I found out about Japanese knives, I learned that they are sharper on the right side than they are on the left, like a 70/30 distribution. Not sure why but it makes sharping this thing a lot harder if I wanna keep that edge...and I do. Fuck, gotta figure that out. Prob gotta use a stone. Anyways, Thanks gais! I love it.

Yeeeee

So, in honour of Stefy's parents leaving, I decided to write on how to cook rice since the kid had so much trouble the one time lololol.

There are 3 ways to cook rice, each more deadlier than the last.
1. Rice cooker method
Easiest way to cook rice. Rice comes out perfect every time and doesn't stick to the sides. I don't even measure anything out with rice cookers, I put some amount in, and make sure there's a bit of water above the rice (like 1cm or less) and then cook it.

2. Absorption Method
This method is exactly the same as the rice cooker basically, except you are using a saucepan and unlike your rice cooker, your saucepan wasn't blessed by a monk, therefore, you can easily fuck up your rice.

How much piggin rice do you need?
For 2-3 people, 1 cup (250 ml) rice and 2 cup (500 ml) water
For 1 person, 1/2 cup (125 ml) rice and 1 cup (250 ml) water

How can she slap?
- First, figure out how much water and rice you need.
- Lastly, put the water, rice and a pinch of salt into the sauce pan and put the stove on High and boil it for 9 - 13 minutes (with a lid of course)

3. Boil and Steam
So at this point I should point out that the way you cook rice will determine how the rice feels and tastes. With the absorption method, the rice comes out heavier (because it absorbed all the water) and stickier (because it absorbed all the starch). This method makes the rice more filling and Asian style. The boil and steam method makes the rice lighter and less sticky which is good for absorbing sauces and curries and such. Personally, I prefer this method of cooking rice, because you waste less rice. With the other method, if you have a shitty saucepan, the rice will usually stick to the sides and burn. Yeah the rice in the middle is ok to eat, but the rice that is burnt is wasted and a bitch to clean out after wards.

How can she slap?
- So with this method, it does not matter how much water you use (well there is no such thing as too much, but don't put in a teaspoon of water for 2 cups of rice you retard). Put the stove on high and bring the water to a boil (with a pinch of salt) and then pour the rice in after and cook for 8 min.
*I should point out that if you have a kettle, use that to boil the water and then put it into the saucepan saving a small about (like a cup) in the kettle for later. I'll explain that in a sec.
- Here is the tricky part, when you are done, grab a sieve and quickly pour the rice in it and catch the water that is dripping from the bottom back into the saucepan (about an inch of water). Sounds tricky but luckily you boiled the water in a kettle first. So pour the rice into the sieve, then pour the leftover water from the kettle into the saucepan and put the sieve on top.


theres a sieve just in case lolol

 - Finally, put a lid on the saucepan (it won't fit on to properly but that's ok) or cover the saucepan in tin foil and put the stove on Med-High to High and let the water evaporate and steam cook the rice for 5 to 10 min. Righteous!

Thanks again for the present gais!