Savoury cake - Rachel Khoo

My darling bf recently returned from a 2 week trip to England for some family weddings, and tucked away in his bag was a couple of bits and pieces for me! England is SO MUCH cheaper than Australia, and so I managed to snag some great workout clothes, an awesome union jack cushion for the couch and most importantly, Little Paris Kitchen, by Rachel Khoo. What a man! How is this... he knew I didn't have many French cookbooks and so he thought it would make my collection more complete - he also remembered me watching her episodes on YouTube, and knew I liked her. I have found a keeper here ladies!!

Flicking through the book, I loved it. Bookmarking recipes, well, there are A LOT I plan on making. In fact this week is pretty much only recipes from her book - some are involved and fiddly, for a Sunday bake up when you have the time (and will) to potter in the kitchen. Others are so easy they're perfect for a week night meal, which are the ones I'll use this week. Will write more about this book as I use it, as I'm sure I'll use it a fair bit!

So the recipe that popped out for me was the cured sausage, pistachio and prune cake. It's a really unique combination of flavours and it sounded delicious - however I don't have prunes or pistachios in the house, but I do have a jumbo smoked chorizo sausage from Mondos that I got in my Urban Locavore box. Perfect. Rachel mentions that the combo that goes into these savoury cakes can be whatever takes your fancy, or whatever is in your fridge! Serve them with a lightly dressed salad or take them on a picnic. Super versatile.

Heres the recipe - adapted from Rachel Khoo's Little Paris Kitchen.

Smoked chorizo, fetta, and spring onion cake

Ingredients

2 cups plain flour 
15g baking powder
1 smoked chorizo (Mondos was delicious!), diced into rounds and quartered
2 or 3 fat spring onions,  chopped roughly
100g fetta (about half the block, I used danish fetta)
4 eggs
100ml milk
150ml olive oil
3 tbsp plain yoghurt
pinch of salt to taste 
pepper

Method

1) Preheat the oven to 180C and line a square brownie tray with baking paper (a few drops of oil will help the paper stick).

2) In a bowl, mix together the flour, baking powder, sausage, and spring onions.

3) In a seperate bowl, whisk the eggs until they are thick and pale in colour.

4) Gradually whisk in the oil, milk, and yoghurt, then add the salt and pepper.

5) Add the crumbled fetta, and fold the mixture together gently, bit by bit. Don't over mix, better to undermix it (you don't want to develop the gluten like you would in a bread recipe, you want a light cake, not a tough one!).

6) Pour the batter into the prepared tin and cook for 25-30minutes or until a skewer inserted into the middle comes out clean. Leave in the tin to cool.

NB; If you'd rather use a loaf tin (as Rachael's recipe calls for), then bake for 30-40 minutes.

Check out Eating Those Words for another delicious looking take on this recipe!

Weekend Heat

Finally... The weather warmed right up to be a in the mid 30s somewhere, and everyone decided to go out!!

Friday night we went out to Shilla Korean BBQ restaurant in East Perth which was brilliant - thats another blog post! It ended up being a big night out, so saturday was spent on the couch recovering... that night we decided to head out for a curry and a movie. We went to Anghiti, on Scarborough Beach Road for a pre movie curry. We had no troubles booking in, and found the place fine. The sign outside looked weathered and old, which doesnt do the place any favours. However going inside it appeared that people didnt care much about the sign as it was pretty busy, and got busier over the evening. The place had a pretty chain restaurant feel to it, as it was pretty big, and it was the first place Id been to where most of the staff werent Indian (I dont know about the kitchen though).

We ordered the sharing platter thats all cooked in the tandoor and had fish, chicken, chicken wings and kofta. It came out surprisingly fast, I dont know about the kitchen secrets about how much things are cooked in advance, but our sharing platter certainly wasnt cooked from scratch in the tandoor. In any case it tasted good. Pretty generous serve, but for $30 it would wanna be generous...

Our curries came out looking pretty much the same... Mine was ok, S didnt really like his because it had coconut milk in it, and he hates that stuff. It wasnt mentioned on the menu either - we ended up swapping. We both found our curries a bit too sweet and just a bit too "Australian". It didnt strike us as authentic at all really, and when we got the bill, for 1 starter, 2 curries, a serve of rice and naan, costing over $80 we decided for sure that this wasnt a place we'd come back to. It was by no means unpleasant, but there are certainly much better places in the area for indian food...

We went and saw The Hunter and found it not a complete chore to sit through but it was confused, lacking in any psychological thrillings as the descriptions said, and pretty actionless. That cost us $50 as well. It was an expensive saturday night really for average results...

Sunday was a bit different! I had a boxing class in the morning which nearly killed me - theyre outdoors and sunday was pretty warm already at 9:30am when the class started! It was with Live Fit Box, who hold their classes outdoors at a bunch of different locations, mine was at a North Perth park. I was knackered, seriously. All this eating out and restaurant reviewing as taken its toll, and this class revealed it to me! My next class is tomorrow so we'll see how that goes! I had bought a Groupon which entitled me to 3 months of unlimited boxing classes, and a set of boxing gloves, which was a good deal! Theyre going to kill me though...

After I got home and recovered a bit, it was picnic time! I was starving, so after we grabbed the frisbee and picnic rug, we headed to our local shops and bought up a bunch of picnic friendly foods! We got there early and made up a bit of a platter, salad, cheese, cold meats, dips, flatbreads... We ate loads but it was all good for us!

Some friends showed up with platters of berries and cut up veges, there was salmon sashimi, bagel crisps, turkish bread... yum... we ate for 2 hours, just laying in the shade chatting, it was such a fab afternoon! It was perfect weather with great friends :) Bring on the summer!!