I made these using a recipe from my Primrose Bakery book. They were a bit dry and not light. Also, I took them out of the oven when they were still ever so slightly undercooked. They’d cooled by the time I realised and put them back in the oven and when I took them out that second time, the tops of the cakes had browned more but the insides hadn’t cooked anymore. The lemon buttercream was very sweet, too sweet in fact.

I think one of the things I did wrong with this was not to beat it much by hand and try to do the majority of the mixing in the food processor (blade attachment). Also I usually put an extra half or one tsp baking powder to give more lift but this time I forgot.

The next time I fancy a lemony cake I’ll make the Nigel Slater lemon and thyme cake!

I love Waitrose. It’s God’s own supermarket. In the main I like Heston Blumenthal too. But WTF is this year’s Waitrose Christmas advert about? Are people really so lazy that they can’t measure out the ingredients for a cake? Worst of all, why is Heston kissing Mad Delia’s hand at the end? Makes me sick.

I’ll still shop at Waitrose after witnessing this monstrosity but I won’t be buying any of the Heston branded stuff, unless it’s on seriously special offer.

Made some potsticker dumplings and they turned out well although they were twice the size they were supposed to be:

The recipe came from my Ken Hom book:

EDIT 21 Jan 2012

I have been making these with twice the filling specified in the recipe but the same amount of dough. So whether this means I need to roll out the wrapping to half the thickness I have been I’m not sure. It would be very fiddly though. Also I substituted lamb mince instead of pork and it didn’t work as well.

Last Friday I made a big pot of dahl (red lentils) for when my uni friends visit next weekend.

My secret ingredients are chipotle chilli (smoky and hot) and pulverised Indian pickle (hot, salty and tangy).

Yesterday I made oxtail stew using the Hairy Bikers oxtail stew recipe Was quite impressed with the result. I’ve made oxtail stew a few times but this is the best recipe yet. The only alteration I made was that I doubled the amount of red wine. But they don’t take all the bones and jellyish stuff out before serving. It’s time consuming to do that but well worth it for ease of eating. Also, they refer to it as an economical cut of meat but I paid £14 for approximately 2.4kg of oxtail (in Waitrose admittedly) and I reckon you lose about 60% in the form of visible fat, bone and jellyish stuff so it’s not that cheap.

3 Oct 2012
I used this stew recipe but substituted ox cheek for oxtail. I also added 1 tbsp mushroom ketchup. It was very good, in fact probably better than oxtail. Not only is the texture better, but you only have to cut off some tendon-y bits at the start; you don’t have to separate the meat from the bones etc after cooking.

7 Dec 2012
I made the oxtail stew but took the temperature down to 125C and cooked for 3.5 hours. Also, the HB recipe is ok for 2 oxtail rather than one.

I’ve found it hard to accurately recreate the food we learned how to cook at the Chiang Mai Thai Cookery School, mainly because it’s difficult and expensive to get hold of galangal, holy basil and the right types of aubergine. I have bought shop bought curry pastes but even the most expensive seem out of balance compared to those we made in Thailand. When I use them I tend to add more garlic and ginger, add less salty flavouring such as soy sauce and I toast and grind some fennel seeds to add aniseed flavour.

Got some free range pork ribs (more please Waitrose) out of the freezer today and am marinading them overnight according to Mark Hix’s barbeque pork ribs recipe. For the marinade I made some five spice powder using this recipe. Verdict: Very good, but the ribs need a bit more of a chilli kick.

Update (9 Dec 11):

Yesterday I made Nigel Slater’s honey roast ribs. It wasn’t as good as Mark Hix’s recipe and was a bit too sweet.

Celebrated with dinner at Opus:

The food was good but the highlight was the petit fours with coffee:

Made this tonight from a Ken Hom recipe as part of Chinese meal. Really very good.

Tonight I tried to make duck teriyaki using Nigella’s recipe. I made a few adaptations to the sauce as I had to use what I already had in the cupboards so that meant mild rice vinegar instead of sake, pale cream sherry instead of mirin and 4 tsp of garlic and ginger paste instead of just 2 tsp ginger. I also fried a bit of spring onion in the groundnut oil and at the end I threw in one sliced yellow pepper and 2 handfuls of mangetout and sugar snaps. All these adaptations were fine. I failed only in the duck area. Sigh.

I had a whole duck you see. A lovely free range bird on special offer from Waitrose. Mr W kindly jointed it for me and I put the breasts back in the fridge for another meal. All the rest of the meat was to be used in the teriyaki. I thought that if I scored the legs quite deeply I wouldn’t need to bone them. Let me tell you, I was wrong. The juices next to the bone were still not running clear even though the smaller pieces of duck were way way overdone. Panicking, I fished out the smaller pieces and set them aside and scored the legs even deeper and threw them back in. I also added some water to the sauce to try to poach the legs a bit rather than just frying them. But somehow I overcooked the legs too and by the time the rice was ready I hadn’t reduced the sauce back down again after the addition of the water, well not enough anyway. So I killed all the duck and my sauce wasn’t syrupy enough either. Argh. On the upside though the sauce was quite tasty. This is what was left; I was too distraught to take photos of what we actually ate:

Moral of the story: no bones means NO BONES.