Jaffa cakes!

So, this isn’t a recipe. This is my ‘bored at work and having an idea that might be interesting and then actually following through on it’ experiment. I generally don’t get beyond the ‘have an idea’ stage, so yay me. Progress!

That idea was basically: ‘I bet I could make Jaffa Cakes’. All it is is sponge base, orange jelly, and chocolate. How hard can it be?

I gave it a try. I made a sponge cake mix, but rather than baking it in cake tins, I smoothed it onto a cookie sheet, kind of like you would a Swiss roll. (Although this would never have worked as a Swiss roll; way too stiff.) Once it was cooked, which was barely any time at all, I cut out a bunch of cookie cutter circles – I guess 1.5 inch. That obviously left me with a whole load of non-circle cake mix, but that’s hardly the end of the world. ‘Oh no, I have to eat cake!’

Then I needed to make the jelly. So I got some orange juice (with bits, in case that matters), and some agar flakes. I was undecided between gelatine and agar, but vegetarian friends demanded agar, I guess in the misguided belief they’d get to eat some, which: lol no. I think agar is better, really, because I get a bit grossed out about ground-up bones if I think about gelatine too much. Also, it’s not like you an easily get hold of free-range gelatine, and I get weird visions about industrial farmed animals and all that stuff, because my brain likes to take unpleasant ideas and run with them. So agar it was, but that stuff is expensive. £5, compared with about 70p for the same amount of gelatine. Oh well, it just means I’ll have to make lots of jelly, and I’ve already got ideas for that (green tea, maybe Pimm’s in the summer, ooh, maybe coconut milk).

I’d literally never made a jelly other than from blocks before, and I’d certainly never used agar. But I just had to boil up the orange juice with the agar flakes (1 tablespoon per cup/240 ml, fact fans) and then let it set. I used the cookie sheet again, because I needed it to be flat and thin. It worked better than I had hoped. It didn’t want to cool down at first, but I lost patience and shoved it in the fridge, and then it set within like ten minutes.

I took the cookie cutter one size down and cut out circles of jelly. It took a little while to work out how best to remove them, but in the end I worked out a method: slide the jelly circle onto a pallete knife, place the sponge circle on top of that, and then flip them over. A couple were a bit misshapen, but it was pretty successful.

Again, there was a lot of non-circle leftovers, and I confess that in this instance I just threw it away. Bad Joel. Wasteful.

Then I just melted down some pain chocolate in a bain marie. Well, I say bain marie. A cereal bowl over a pan of water, obviously. I didn’t want to try dipping two-part biscuits into hot chocolate, because they’d probably slide apart or melt or otherwise collapse, so I just painted it on with a pastry brush. They didn’t look the most delicate or anything, but it did work. They looked like this:

Kind of clumsy, but lookit! There’s a layer of orange jelly and everything! They tasted pretty good. The fresh orange worked against the richness of the chocolate to keep them from being too rich, and the sponge was light. Cooking it in the tray made it a bit crisper, which worked well; I was a bit worried they’d be too soft and collapse, but they didn’t.

I definitely need to work on my Presentation Skills, as India Fisher would undoubtedly say on Masterchef, but as a complete wild idea experiment, they were really successful. I know that I can cook from recipes, but it’s reassuring to know that I can try stuff from my own brain and it can work. It makes me think I can go further with baking, which is kind of cool.

 

Christening the stand mixer

I’ve been a bit lax, haven’t I?

Not at baking, so much, but at writing about it. I’ve been applying for jobs, and playing lots of Mass Effect 3, and also being really ill, so that accounts for most of it.

I’ve been making more stuff, though. I made some lavender shortbread. I made the New Zealand delicacy Lolly Cake (cut up foam sweets, crushed up biscuits, melted butter and condensed milk, rolled in coconut).

And the, for my birthday, I got a stand mixer from my flatmate. Hurrah!

The first thing I made with it was a sponge cake. Well, the first thing I made was a failure, because even a stand mixer can’t apparently handle chilled butter like I thought it could. So after I scraped out the bowl and cleaned it all off and started again with some softened butter, I made a sponge cake. It was … well, it made a huge difference. The butter and sugar mix really did get fluffy, and stayed thus once the flour was in. So there was just *more* cake. The mixer was also great for the buttercream icing.

I tried to be a bit inventive and wasn’t entirely successful. I was going for a green tea frosting, but I just brewed some very strong tea and mixed it in once it was cool. It didn’t really work, becase it made it way too liquidy, which I then had to compensate for with more butter and sugar. It stiffened, but it wasn’t really ideal. The maple frosting from the other week worked a lot better. Also, in the bowl it had a definite green tea taste that wasn’t really present in the cake.

It was still tasty. And the sponge was super-light. It looked like this:

Not my finest hour, I’m sure we can all agree.

Then I made some bread. I thought I’d be adventurous, (well, for a given value of adventurous) so I went for half white flour, half wholemeal. I love making bread, but confess I’m just not good at pulling the dough together in the first place. It ends up bitty, or too wet, or ragged. The dough hook took care of that for me in about six seconds. At that point I wasn’t too sure if I should then keep the hook going or grab the dough and knead. I ended up doing a bit of both, which probably wasn’t ideal.

My flat suffers from a glaring absence of suitable places to prove dough. So my bread’s never as good as I feel it could be if I had an airing cupboard or some other cozy little nook. Anyway. The bread was decent enough. It looked like this.

 

Because for some reason I thought I’d be ‘rustic’ rather than just use a loaf tin like a normal person.

I did, however, use the loaf tin to make banana bread. There are obviously a thousand thousand recipes for banana bread, but I found a pretty simple one that was low on butter and sugar, and fairly high on flour. And REALLY high on bananas. Like, 500 g of bananas. That’s more than all the other dry ingredients combined. I did half and half with the flour again, because why not. And threw in some vanilla extract, because why not. And threw some sliced almonds on top, because why not. But I also learned that even when using over-ripe bananas deliberately, there are some bananas that you do NOT want to use. A banana should not be of feathery consistency.

The stand mixer was a total boon, because the recipes are all ‘mashed bananas’ and I’m all ‘screw that, the machine can deal with it’. And it did. It got a far more thorough mix than I could have done by hand.

And it looked like this:

It was very well received. And it’s nice to have something to make that’s ‘puddingy’ but not obscenely bad for you, because the stuff I’ve mostly been making tends towards the ‘butter, sugar, butter, flour, butter and MOAR BUTTER’ end of the spectrum.

So yes, that’s what I’ve been up to. Nothing too adventurous, but keeping my hand in.

 

Rosemary shortbread

Yup. Time to delve into the Flour cookbook again. I swear one day I’ll make something that isn’t by Joanne Chang..

The Book
Flour: Spectacular Recipes from Boston’s Flour Bakery + Cafe | Joanne Chang
(Chronicle Books, 2010)

The Recipe
Rosemary shortbread

The Reason
It was my mum’s birthday, so I wanted to bake something for her. She likes shortbread, and these seemed fun and interesting. Also, logistically, it’s hella easier to transport some biscuits than it is an iced cake. Or indeed any cake. Plus it was something I’d never tried before, and the whole point of this project i to get myself doing new things.

The Cooking
I have to say, in the absence of an electric mixer, I’m seriously glad that I had my little brainwave of microwaving the butter before trying to blend it in with the sugar. It’s hardly revolutionary and it’s not exactly got Heston Blumenthal quaking in his boots, but compared with beating and beating and beating to soften the butter, it’s amazing. Yes, I’m amazed that I can walk and chew gum at the same time, too. I’m learning.

Because they’re so buttery (obviously, being shortbread) you’ve got to chill the dough before you roll it out. It wasn’t really firming up though, so I whacked it in the freezer for a few minutes, which seemed to be a mistake, as the dough kept cracking and was still very sticky. But with a bit of reworking and a bit more flour thrown in, it got back to the right texture.

You’re meant to cut out regular shapes with a knife but I have zero confidence in my ability to get things consistent, so I just used a cookie cutter. The advantage was the regular size achieved; the disadvantage was the leftover dough after cutting out. I ended up throwing a bit away, because I’d already filled up three baking sheets with cookies and I didn’t want to do another batch, especially as I’d have to rechill the dough.

I needed to use a pallete knife to slide them off the counter onto the baking sheet. I’m not sure how I ever even tried to do baking without a pallete knife to be honest.

The Cooking
They look like this:

Yes, yes, I did put them on tissue paper and toss about some sprigs of rosemary in an attempt to get all food stylist in the hizzay. And what? In my defence, the tissue paper was to wrap them in to go into a gift bag for my mum. (Seriously. So much easier than a cake.)

Tastewise, the rosemary wasn’t really detectable. There was only a teaspoon in the whole mix, so I think I’d up that a bit in future. I was paranoid about undercooking, and as a result they got a wee bit overcooked, but not to the extent that it affected the taste.

I hate ‘melt in the mouth’, as a phrase, because it’s a cliche, and always sounds kind of gross and pervy. Nonetheless, that’s what they did. Which is perhaps unsurprising given that they’re about 75% butter. My mum liked them, so yay for that.

What I’m really liking about this whole project, though, is that it’s giving me a basis of solid recipes that I can experiment from. I’m probably going to do some lavender ones (to use up the lavender sugar that will otherwise sit there forever). And some coconut ones because coconut. Any other suggestions?

 

Maple sponge cake

Hooray! I decided to be inventive and it wasn’t a desperate failure.

I’d entered the ‘I want to make something and I don’t know what’ phase again, but then I had thought. I’d got almost a whole bottle of maple syrup left over from Shrove Tuesday (because maple syrup and bacon is the best thing to have on pancakes and I’ll cut anyone who says otherwise) and no real means of using it up.

So I made a basic sponge, and added a bit of maple syrup to the mix, just for ease of spreading in the tins, really. Then for the icing I made a buttercream and thinned it out with maple syrup. So yes, that’s butter, sugar, and then liquid tree-sugar basically. I ended up with so much icing that I managed to do a middle layer, and a crumb coat, and then fully ice it, sides included. I was only aiming for enough to keep the pecans on top.

Of course, I salted the cake batter and the icing, which was definitely a good thing. The salt, along with the slight smokiness in maple syrup means that it’s not too cloyingly sweet. Which is not to say that I can’t feel my arteries slamming shut after eating a piece, or that the sugar rush I’m feeling right now isn’t making me dizzy, or that I’m not fairly sure that I’m seeing unicorns. Because I can and it is and I am. Just that it doesn’t TASTE too sweet.

It looks like this:

I’m pretty pleased with it, to be honest. It’s not the wildest creation ever, but it’s something that I did without a recipe and it worked. I work without recipes all the time for savoury cooking, making sauces and what have you, but experimenting with baking is still pretty new. It gives me confidence to try more inventive stuff in future.

 

Please shut up about Adele

So. Adele, then. What an obnoxious twunt.

First off, let me stem any accusations of backlash, which is the favourite accusation of bleating morons who can’t comprehend that you might just not like somebody. While somebody being extremely popular and thus extremely media-present might bring your dislike to the fore because you can’t turn around without being exposed to them, but if you can’t see how that isn’t the same as disliking them because they’re popular I don’t know what to tell you. It’s second only to ‘you’re just jealous’ in the ranks of stupid cud-chewing internet defences that mean you don’t have to engage with the matter at hand. The political equivalent, of course, is ‘that would have happened anyway’, which allows you to deny your least favourite party credit for actions you agree with.

Anyway. Not backlash. Even when Chasing Pavements came out, I was singularly unimpressed. Bland Radio 2 pap with all the rough edges filed off. Well-produced, smooth and utterly soulless. Even the names of her albums – 19 and 21 – hint at the lack of real fire. That’s the bestthing you can think to say about your album? That you were a certain age when you recorded it?

I’m not trying to say she’s not talented. She can certainly sing, and as I’ve suggested, she’s got some brilliant producers working with her to make her records. Rumour Has It and Set Fire To The Rain, in particular, sound amazing. Rich. Layered. They sound expensive.

Then of course, we come to Someone LIke You. The song that makes everyone cry, apparently. Now, make no mistake, I’m a crier. I’ve cried at Futurama. I’ve cried at Law and Order: Sexy Victims Unit. Once, when I was very ill, I cried at an episode of Pokemon. I can safely say that the overwrought histrionics of a creepy stalker who turns up on the door step of her MARRIED ex and yells in his face about how happy for him she is, but she’ll find someone even better so fuck you buddy, have never brought me to tears. No matter how much appoggiatura she uses.

Lest we forget, she’s young. She’s prbably wrote that song when she was 20 about a relationship she had when she was 18. Even my dry crusted-over heart doesn’t deny young people the right to Feel. Things. Deeply. What’s worrying is the amount of seemingly mature and intelligent adults who’ve taken this song to heart, apparently finding that the rage-filled wailings of a rejected teenager capture their feelings about their ex like nothing else does.

This leads us to her sucess in America, where singing Someone Like You on Saturday Night Live apparently made the whole country grind to a weeping shuddering halt or something. She’s sold like a billion records the, and then won all Grammies. As if Grammies matter. When they have about 87,000 categories and try to draw a line between, like, ‘song’ and ‘record’ and ‘vocal performance’ and goodness knows what else, and give out awards for best cover art and best use of punctuation the sleeves notes, winning a lot of them isn’t so big a deal. The Simpsons had the right take on it.

Homer: I wish I had an award.
Lisa: You’ve got a Grammy!
Homer: I mean an award that counts!
(Note: Mr Simpson’s views do not reflect those of the producers, who do not consider the Grammy an award at all.)

Nonetheless, her wins led to much calloo callay. The UK Press, tabloid and broadsheet alike, lives in a weird double-standard of a world where they like to sneer at America, but equally want nothing more than its approval and validation. You see it every Oscar season with all the ‘The British Are Coming!’ bullcrap just because Judi Dench or Helen Mirren got a nod. America loves Adele! She’s one of us! Therefore they love us! It’s like the Mr Hankey song except with singers instead of anthropomorphic faeces. It’s not necessarily made explicit, but it’s there, lurking.

Selling lots of records means that Adele made lots of money. Which led to bemoaning the fact she had to pay taxes. The link summarises pretty well why that’s so objectionable, but suffice to say bitching about taxes, then saying everything is shit even though you don’t use it, then complaining about paying the taxes that are used to improve the sservices you think are shit is … inconsistent at best.

All this leads us to the Brits, where she sang a song and won some awards. Then, because the show was running late, she got cut off during her acceptance speech. The way people are reacting, you’d think she was punched in the tit and then pushed off the stage to be attacked by rabid dogs. Graceless as ever, she ‘made a rude gesture’. ‘”I flung the middle finger. That was for the suits at the Brit Awards, not my fans. I’m sorry if I offended anyone but the suits offended me,” she said.’ Yeah. Those bastards. Giving you awards. What rude fuckers. People get cut off at awards ceremonies ALL the time. The Oscars are constantly cueing the orchestra to make Gwyneth Paltrow stop crying or make Susan Saradon shut up about poor people. But apparently because it was Saint Adele, this was headline news, rather than the act of keeping a live show on schedule and making time for Blur to perform. Blur who also won an award, but apparently an Adele Award is more important than a Normal Person Award. James Corden had to act all sad and apologetic. ITV and the Brits both had to apologise. For keeping their show on time and giing her awards.

And if that wasn’t enough, it’s even been raised in Parliament. In amid a discussion about the value of exports and why music is good for that (and now desperately, wonderfully Tory to rate something as good only in terms of the money it brings, and how desperately wonderfully Tory to go on about the importance of music as an export while gutting the funding that’s available for allocation to music lessons), Sir George Young talked about how he was ‘disappointed’ that her speech was cut short. While NHS changes are rushed through because there’s allegedly no time to debate them, apparently time can be found to discuss why making money is good and why Adele being interrupted is bad. And then it becomes NEWS (at time of writing, number 5 most read on BBC news) that the Minister thought it was bad, because unless the press is All Adele, All The Time, they’re going to lose a reader or two.

I’m honestly not sure whether it being mentioned in Parliament or it being considered newsworthy makes me more worried.

I’m fully aware that I’ve just contributed to the thousands of column-miles about Adele bouncing around the internet, but can we please have some perspective? She’s a competent pop star with a good voice and talented producers, and she’s also kind of a dick. She’s not the kid from the Twilight Zone and she won’t turn us all into like lizard-dog spiderbabies with the power of thought if we stop saying she’s brilliant for thirty seconds. Let’s just take a few deep breaths and let her go and swim in her money like Scrooge McDuck while feeling sorry for herself for the double hardship of being incredibly rich and being interrupted at Brit Awards.

 

Just when you thought …

… that I couldn’t possibly be more unbearably middle-class, this happens. This being:

I am sorely disappointed in the quality of Waitrose own brand sushi rice.

 

Yayoi Kusama at Tate Modern

Most of the time, I get the idea into my head that I’d like to see an exhibition, or a film, or a play, or whatever and then procrastinate so much that it closes. It was fortunate, then, that a trip to recover a lost mobile phone (which, serendipitously, was retrieved by someone who just happened to still be in the cab where the phone was when I phoned them, whose number I’d only got that evening; a whole passel of good coincidences) ended up being a trip to see the Yayoi Kusama retrospective at the Tate Modern. I wanted to go, but almost inevitably would have ended up delaying all the way to the closing date in June.

For someone as prolific as Kusama, it would have never been possible to do anything except a highlights package, so to speak, and the exhibition succeeded admirably at that. For someone who’s probably best known for large-scale installations, they gave ample space to her small-scale work. It can be hard to ‘review’ an exhibition and separate the exhibition as an entity from the art being displayed. Certainly I’ve been to ones in the past where the layout was poorly considered, or there was a disappoitning selection, or there were other problems with the set-up that distracted from what you were looking at.

Not the case here. It was terribly crowded, but that’s to be expected.. Less expected was the sheer amount of children and babies being dragged around. Get a babysitter. Just because she’s the polka dot lady, don’t bring your children and expose them to thousands of stuffed phalluses and the disturbing hallucinatory full-room installations and collages of insects being birthed from ladies’ chests. I mean, maybe your kids are into that, but when they’re crawling on the floor wearing a Dora the Explorer jumper, there’s a bit of a mental disconnect there.

Volume of people aside, though, it was brilliantly put together. I guess a chronological approach isn’t the most adventurous, but it allowed you to follow her progression and see her taking new approaches, and then, ultmately, doubling back on herself and returning to motifs and techniques she’d used before.

Her early inks and watercolours are stunning. ‘Flower Bud’ really drew you into its depths and nearly gave you a sense of falling. Without wanting to sound too pseudy, some of them practically throbbed with menace. Some of them  I couldn’t watch the video installation for long. Disturbing groaning noises with silent footage of a robed woman riding a horse, both of them covered in polka dots was all a bit too J-Horror for me.  The ultraviolet living room was disturbing in the best way; an entire living room set up covered in neon polka dot stickers – the dots seemed to float in your vision. The theory that it’s Kusama’s way of representing hallucinations and visual distortions definitely seems to hold true. Unsurprisingly, the highlight was the new infinity room that Kusama set up specifically for the exhibition. A whole mirrored room with colour-changing lights hanging at different heights. Like the best of her work, it’s simultaneously beautiful and hugely disconcerting. This was where the crowds were really problematic,  because you kind of have to keep moving and don’t really get to appreciate the room for what it is, but it’s still visually stunning.

Personally, I didn’t enjoy all the pieces. The accumulation pieces – shoes and bags and sofas and even a rowboat covered in stuffed cloth phalluses -  seem kind of crude and obvious. But given that she started making them in 1950, I think you have to appreciate them for what they would have been at the time. And given that she produces so much, in so many different mediums, it’s perhaps inevitable that not everything will hit home for everybody.

The exhibition is absolutely worth seeing. Kusama’s made some amazing pieces. Because they’re full-room installations, they really have to be experienced to be properly appreciated, and seeing the progression of Kusama’s work (and thought processes) is fascinating.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Project Runway and Top Chef: Worst. Challenges. Ever.

Oh, I just don’t have the energy to write about these shows in any detail.

Look, I get it. The challenges have to be fun and unusual. A whole series of ‘make your best thing’ would be stupid, and boring. But you can easily have challenges along the lines of ‘make your best thing under these very strict criteria’ as opposed to ‘make your best thing out of materials gathered that you skimmed from a canal while guest judges Itchy and Scratchy fire bees at you’. The difficulties should come from meeting the brief, not the execution of the brief.

I’m all in favour of PeeWee Herman, but Paul Reubens clearly didn’t want to be doing it and felt weird about ‘comedy’ judging something that was serious. Making them cycle around and use other people’s kitchens was just stupid. Not at this stage of the contest. The ‘street muse’ thing for Project Runway was a good idea, but the idea of making people give up their clothes was beyond stupid. Even if we did get a ‘hot’ dude in tiny underpants out of it. That’s an awful lot of air quotes for one paragraph, but they’ve brought it on themselves.

Two of the most obvious boots in the history of these shows. Tom cutting off Grayson at the knees the second he gets the chance. Whatever, totally worth it for the chance to have told him to suck an egg. I still don’t know how Sarah’s making it through. Two bad risottos and now underseasoning. These are big sins on this show. I hope Bev comes back and it’s an Ed, Paul, Bev final three and Ogre Heather and all the rest of them choke on the ASIAN FLAVOURS.

Anthony going home was absurd. It was obvious from about five minutes in when 90% of the episode was him talking to camera or getting strangers to undress. Clearly getting their monthey’s worth from how ‘funny’ he is. His outfit was fine. Little bit 70s loungewear, but fine. He mostly seemed to get ousted on a misunderstanding. He said he made ‘everything from the waist up’ from fabric from strangers, and they seemed to think he just made the turban and the purse. Regardless, he shouldn’t have gone when Jerell’s … Jerell’s whatever that was was in contention. I think that’s overtaken Ramon’s neoprene toilet dress, but not quite beaten Emilio’s washers and string bikini, as the worst garments EVER made on this show. It isn’t a unique vision. It’s just bad taste.

Oh, and Mondo? Wearing a T-shirt with your own face on it as tacky as all hell. Don’t do it.

 

Back to basics

I’ve been cooking for a good twenty years, now, to one degree or another. Baking for less than that, and never really to the extent that I’m doing it now. But the fact remains that I’ve never made a basic sponge cake. I can make/have made polenta cake, meringues, pineapple upsidedown cake, red velvet cake, and then all the things I’ve blogged about – the creme brulee and the Oreos and so forth. But in the same way that I’ll happily put together Christmas dinner for six people but wouldn’t be that confident about boiling an egg (because ew, why would I want to do that?), I’ve run before I walked in terms of baking.

So, given that I hadn’t selected a recipe to make, and that I’m requiring myself to make at least one new thing a week, it seemed like a good idea to go back to the starting blocks. I used the BBC’s recipe because none of the books I have tell you something as basic as a sponge cake and I didn’t quite trust myself to just work it out.

It was mostly fine, but god damn do I need a hand mixer at bare minimum, if not a proper Magimix-style upright mixer. Creaming butter by hand gets tiring, and I’m going to end up with one enormous gross bicep, like some third-tier Marvel mutant, or Rafael Nadal. Of course, I thought it was a good idea to make a buttercream for the filling, rather than just whipped cream, because, well, I don’t really like cream. I used the same one from the the Oreos because it was simple, and tasty. Obviously I didn’t blend any peanut butter into this one. However, it did involve more creaming of butter and sugar, although that’s hella easier with icing sugar than caster.

Second problem was that the BBC recipe called for 7-inch cake tins and mine are 8-inch. There’s no way I’m traipsing about buying cake tins just for the purpose of one recipe at the best of times, let alone when London has been hit by APOCALYPTIC HORROR SNOW FROM THE DEPTHS OF SIBERIA as we apparently have. Obviously this meant that the cakes were wider and shallower than intended, which isn’t great, but isn’t the end of the world either. It does look a bit sad and flat, but in a way I prefer that to gigantic foot-high cake that you need to unhinge your jaw to eat.

Taste-wise, it’s good. Even though the sponge didn’t rise a lot, it’s still very light, and there’s a crispness at the edges that I really like. I’m not going to immortalise my flat-sponge shame with a photograph. I think next time I’ll do half as much again for everything, to make a deeper cake. Anyway, I’m glad to have the basic recipe under my belt for future reference. Hopefully I’ll eventually be one of those unbearable people who just ‘whips up a cake’ because they feel like it. Dare to dream.

 

What’s not to like about deep-fried chilli bread?

The Book
Red Hot Chilli Pepper| Jenni Fleetwood (ed)
(Anness Publishing, 2001)

The Recipe
Chilli Pooris

The Reason
I’ve had this book for like a decade. Like most of my cookbooks, it’s just sat in the cupboard, but as it is, I think, the first cookbook I bought of my own accord, it’s worth another look. I got it when my old housemate was a member of one of those weird book clubs that make you buy more books or they’ll steal your children. Considering its provenance, it’s not bad. Actually, that’s not fair; it’s a great book in its own right.

It’s got what I love in cookbooks, which is loads of background information. The origin of chillis, how to grow and store them, explanation of the Scoville scale, and so on and so on. Not all of it was new information to me, but it’s still nice to have it there. And to say the book is generously illustrated would be an understatement. Every recipe (140+) has colour photos, not just of the end result, but of the cooking stages as well. It’s the sort of book that makes me want to be a food photographer. (That is TOTALLY a job. Stop looking at me like that.)

I went for the chilli pooris because, well, they look good, and also because I wanted to make something savoury. Also, I figured just making a stir-fry or something was a bit lazy, so I should branch out. Also: it’s deep-fried chilli bread. What more recommendation do you need?

The Cooking
Yeah, I say that stir-fry is lazy and then make something that just involves making dough. I’m not exactly stretching myself to the culinary limit here. It seemed a remarkably small amount of chilli – half a teaspoon of chilli powder in half a pound of flour – but I guess they’re going for warmth without overpowering the flavour. The diced chilli fresh chilli should add a little kick, I guess.

I’m not good at deep-frying it turns out. It’s hard to keep the oil at an even temperature, for one. I was excited that I got to use my slotted spoon that I bought for the sole purpose of deep-frying. Such is what passes for excitement in my life. They all cooked well enough, although some got more done than others, as the oil get hotter despite my best efforts at moderating it. (I don’t know how anybody cooks on electric hobs. It was hard enough doing this with the instantly adjustable gas, doing it on a hob that retains the heat would be a pain in the arse. I guess the newest electric hobs are a lot better about that, but still. Gas all the way.

The result
They’re … fine. They don’t really deserve a photo. They’re just kind of little bread nuggets. They taste not bad. I think they need a bit more chilli powder, or some more herbs and spices, or something, if they’re going to be used as snacks. Oregano might be good. For an accompaniment to curry or even stews and stuff, I think they’d be really good.

And it’s occuring to me that they’re incredibly moreish, because I’m going to go and now stuff them in my mouth like a pig.