Bali travels #1 - Ubud!

I'm home! Finally. I've been away for about 3 weeks and it's great to be home. I love travelling and I had a great time, but I'm stoked to be home to get back into a routine and home cooking again!

I'm not going to waffle on about the trip to Bali, I'll just let the photos do the talking!

We booked into Mozaic, Ubud for Christmas evening. We wanted to do something special, and this was it! It was a decadent meal full of fois gras (which I don't eat, but some do!), truffles and lobster. It was a lovely evening.

Ubud is a fabulous place to eat and we found some real gems. Naughty Nuri's Warung made some amazing ribs and chicken on a gnarly old grill. We ate there twice, and ate A LOT! They have a menu on the wall and that is it - if you ask for a menu, they just point to the wall. Don't go expecting amazing service, but DO go expecting awesome grilled stuff. We didn't bother ordering anything from the kitchen, we got our fill from the grill! Anthony Bourdain has been here and decided that the martinis are the best he's had outside of NYC. We tried one, they are ROCKET FUEL! I felt hammered after one. 

Ubud is also home to an amazing coffee house called Senimen - they have a massive range of coffee, and scientific methods of getting it from bean to cup! It's a fabulous brew. You can't miss this place if you enjoy coffee!! We had an iced latte on trip, and then an iced coffee the next time. Iced coffee is just that - cold coffee. They used the Sumatra Gayo Mountain beans, and it was gorgeous. There was so much more to it than it just being a cold black coffee. Try it.

Another spot to visit in Ubud is Ibu Oka, the warung made famous for its babi guling aka sucking pig. It came in a variety of forms, all tasty. We sat on the floor, ate pork, drank beer. It was good. A little tough, but the flavour was great. We'd eaten babi guling somewhere else previously and this was MUCH better, so the rumours are true.

Ubud is definitely a place for the food lover. Read up on where you'd like to go and go find them, if the word is out about them, it's likely that its worth the search.

Next post?

Casa Luna Cooking School.

Long time between posts!

Argh - I've been really bad at posting recently. I've been super busy, with applying for jobs, then getting school reports done, and then just being busy with friends and going out and shopping and and and.... Yeah it's been busy. 

I cooked up a big roast dinner for some of the teachers from my school - that was a messy night! I discovered Madhur Jaffrey's method of cooking a whole chicken, Durban style and it's become my staple method of cooking a whole chook! I don't always slash it, or spice it, or take the skin off (so I totally change it really), but I end up with a juicy delicious chicken no matter what I do! Try it for yourself, it's so easy and awesome. I chucked 2 chickens in the oven with a leg of lamb and cooked them the same way (lamb was studded with garlic and rosemary) and they were both gorgeous. Teachers are hungry and they polished off most of the food (and the wine!).

Anyway, I'm back - for now! 

On the 21st S and I are headed off to Bali for 17 days! Being a teacher I get a lot of holidays, however it's not negotiable when I take them, so S and I don't often get time off together often. This year though, were packing up and heading to Bali - neither of us have been before! I'm really keen to avoid all the drunken, Bintang singlet wearing, obnoxious bogan Aussies that flock there, and so we're avoiding some areas and are heading around the island a little bit!

One of the things I'm really looking forward to, is Christmas dinner at Mozaic, Ubud. This restaurant headed up by Chris Salans has won a number of awards, including being listed #12 in the Miele Top Asian Restaurants in 2011/12, as well as the being in the top #50 of the San Pellegrino Best Restaurants in the World in 2009. Check out the Christmas menu HERE. Would love to hear from anyone who has been here before! 

We also got a tip to head to the Gili islands as well, and upon researching decided that we were definitely going! A bit of island paradise is definitely what we need after this hectic year!

Any Bali tips that we need to know about!? We're staying in Sanur, Ubud, Gili Trawangan, Padang Bai and Seminyak!

Healthy foods, Ottolenghi style

I haven't really been on much of a health kick recently, the exercise has really fallen by the wayside, mostly due to a case of bung legs. Turns out after a couple of expensive trips to the osteopath (including $120 parking fine - City of Perth better spend that well, wankers), it turns out my gluteal muscles aka arse muscles, are not firing {insert fart joke here}. This has caused all kinds of problems from achilles pain, tight and aching calves, and now my lower back is totally rooted. I went to school hopped up on codeine today, and let me tell you, my speech in front of the school about a sports carnival was just gushingly lovely, as was my health class afterwards. I talked. A lot. 

Anyway, without the exercise, I've turned into a bit of a apex predator - eating everything in sight with reckless abandon. This included bowling club priced booze and masses of cake at the Beaufort Bake and Bowls.

But all is not totally lost (the weight sure isn't anyway). I did cook SOME healthy things. I have more healthy things planned too. But not rabbit food, not look-how-alternative-I-can-be-with-my-weird-grains-that-taste-like-wet-cardboard kinda healthy.  

YUMMY healthy food.

Ottolenghi healthy. Plenty.

One night we had Mushroom Ragout with Yoghurt Flatbreads, which was fuggin amazing. Those flatbreads are soft, the dough is easy to make, even easier to work with and when cooked up, but the easiest thing is scooping up bits of tasty grilled mushroom and wine, with swirls of tangy yoghurt and fresh bursts of parsley. Leftover mushies were piled up on buttered toast in the morning and devoured - they kept me going all day (well, until about 10:30 when I went apex predator on some cake I forgot I had).

I also tried the herb stuffed tomatoes, which were Mediterranean in their flavours, salty olives, capers with a bite and surprisingly hearty from the breadcrumbs. I really enjoyed them, and would be great as a starter or as a side to something else - I used some local Gingin Beef mince and cooked it up very simply with basic seasoning and olives in the same pan I  made the stuffing in - it was gorgeous. The best mince I've ever had. 

The highlight though I think was the Quesadillas. These were awesome, and I am planning on making a bunch of these in advance when we go for a bbq, because once they're assembled, all you have to do is grill them. We added chicken to ours, but it's not really necessary. Next time I'm going to amp up the flavours in the beans, and maybe add a tangy, crunchy coleslaw for a bit of a tex mex vibe. Either way, we scoffed them. I made a toasty the next day with the leftovers, and they were still awesome.

You have to have a go at this book. If you're feeling like you're eating yourself outta house and home, the least you can do is eat healthier food. 

I will be eating more outta this book. 

Chocolate Chilli Cupcakes with Cinnamon Cream Cheese Icing

Chocolate and chilli is a combination that people either love, or are really skeptical about. I am a lover of this combo, but am so often disappointed that you can't taste any chilli or get any heat. So when I decided to try this combination for myself, I made sure the flavours and heat were there!

I used the chocolate red wine cake recipe, which is an absolute winner, I use that ALL the time now, it's my go to recipe. It's so versatile - if you don't want the red wine in there, use full cream milk instead. You can add all kinds of flavourings to make this batter into whatever kind of cake you like. It works as a cake, or as cupcakes. This time I used mini cupcake tray, which gives me 24 cupcakes (the mix actually yields more than that, I also filled a 12 hole cupcake tray as well!). This is a great recipe for parties because you get so many cupcakes out of it!

Make sure you try the batter before you cook it - if you can get a hint of chilli, then it's perfect. When the cupcakes bake, the cayenne pepper becomes more pronounced - you can taste it, and it's hotter! Don't worry - the icing balances it out perfectly!

Ingredients
6 tablespoons unsalted butter, at room temperature
3/4 cup brown sugar
1/4 cup caster sugar
2 eggs
3/4 cup red wine
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 generous cup plain flour
1/2 cup cocoa powder
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon cayenne pepper

Method

1) Preheat the oven to 160°C, and non stick your tray/prepare patty pans.

2) In a large bowl, cream the butter and sugar until it forms ribbons. Add the egg and yolk and beat well, then the red wine and vanilla. At this point, the cake will look a little split, but it's all good, it'll come together!

3) Sift the flour, cocoa, baking powder, and cayenne together, and add to the wet ingredients. Mix gently until combined, then use a teaspoon to fill the cupcake holes about 2/3 to the top.

4) Place the trays in the middle of the oven for 15 minutes (depends on the size of your trays though!) or until a skewer comes out clean. Allow to cool before icing.

Now, the cream cheese icing... This isn't a recipe. It's just a guideline. I often find cream cheese icing gets really runny. I decided not to follow a recipe and just wing it. It worked.

I used a whole packet of cream cheese, and used my KitchenAid to beat it with about a 2/3 cup of icing sugar until it was sweet enough for me, double cream to take the savoury tang off the cheese, and some full cream milk just to loosen it up a bit (because the double cream was REALLY thick!). I added a heaped tsp of cinnamon as well. Just add these ingredients until you get to a consistency you can work with, whether you're piping or just using a palette knife. Use your instinct. 

I experimented with how I wanted the piping to look, though I'm really not much of a piper. I found out that I pipe slightly to the left! I actually quite like the look of having the stars and swirls mixed up on the stand.

These little cupcakes are perfect for high tea as well, which is handy as that is this months Sweet Adventures Blog Hop theme! Have a look at Delicieux, the host blog for this month!

Secret Cake Club Perth - Pumpkin cake

We had our last Clandestine Cake Club meeting on Saturday, but there is no need to be sad! Because while this is the end of Clandestine, we have branched out and created the Secret Cake Club Perth! We found that while there is nothing wrong with cake, people were starting to to want to bake more than just cake... as one of our members said, she got a new cookbook recently, and was flicking through it looking for something to bake for a meeting and page after page of gorgeous bakes she still had nothing, because it MUST be cake. Our members are fabulous bakers, and we wanted to give them the opportunity to show off their creativity, and bake the things they like! Coming into summer, having the oven on for 90 minutes does not suit us here in Perth, it's simply too hot. So being able to create other dishes, which require less oven time, or even having things set in the fridge instead is what will work for us! We have a nice new webpage (www.secretcakeclubperth.com), facebook page (www.facebook.com/secretcakeclubperth) AND twitter account (@SCCPerth). So come and have a look at the new thing in Perth!!

After the last meeting, which was retro/childhood cakes, we all needed the month between meetings to get over the sugar coma, which was made worse by the food colouring! The cakes looked amazing, but it's no surprise kids go nuts at parties! So this time we tried to even it out a bit, and we chose vegetables/savoury cakes as the theme! It was probably the best meeting we've had so far, there was such variety, and with the announcement of the NEW cake club, everyone was buzzing with excitement, it was such a social meeting.

I chose to make a pumpkin cake with a chai drizzle. I used the recipe from Delishhh, changed a few things, but not really enough to warrant the recipe being written out again, I just added more ginger and used treacle rather than molasses. I got a perfect looking cake, which was moist and really nice. I really liked it! I would definitely make it again!!

Tha chai drizzle was really easy - I just put a teaspoon of loose chai tea into about a cup of full cream milk, and warmed it up. I then added it slowly to a cup of icing sugar until I got a thick, pouring consistency. Poke some holes in your cake and drizzle it over!

If you'd like to come along to the Secret Cake Club Perth then check our website or Facebook page for the next meeting, or email me on secretcakeclubperth{at}gmail{dot}com, we'd love to have you!