Am I making you hungry???

I couldn’t resist posting another creme brulee picture. This time its wattleseed creme brulee (while I’m on a wattleseed frenzy):

Still trying to perfect the texture…I have a couple of ideas so hopefully more to come on this.

Wattleseed and blueberry friands

Wattleseeds are my iron chefesque ingredient of late. I’m constantly thinking about ways to incorporate it into my breakfast, lunche, dinner and baking. I fully intend to make an extensive blog post about these lovely seeds, but for now my work hours are getting crazy and I don’t usually feel motivated between the hours of 1am and 6am to cook anything beyond pasta or rice. So that will come later…possibly quite far into the future!

Anyway, wattleseeds are, in my opinion, an under-utilised ingredient in Australian kitchens. They have a taste that is a hybrid of hazelnut, coffee and chocolate with a slight liquor after taste. In ground form (the form that I purchased from my health food store and is from the Vic Cherikoff range of aussie ingredients) is probably the easiest form to include in cooking. In the friands* below I included 1/8 C of ground wattleseeds to an adapted VCTOTW vanilla cupcake recipe, used homemade vanilla extract and also used 1tsp of homemade wattleseed extract that has been curing away in the depths of my pantry for three months**. As a finishing touch, after pouring the batter into my pretty friand tin, I added ~1tsp blueberry conserve to the centre of the batter.

You can just see the jumper of my friend from work as she was impatiently waiting for me to take a picture so she could eat one. She and the rest of my lab seemed to really like them, but I’m thinking they need a bit of work, especially as they didn’t contain nut meal of any kind* and really are just muffins in friand- shaped moulds. One of my work friends suggested using hazelnut meal, which I think would be a perfect way of complementing the wattleseeds.

*Friands, or financiers as they are known in France, are usually golden buttery tea cakes. They’re a popular type of morning tea here in Australia.

** I recently made several extracts (lavender, vanilla, hazelnut, wattleseed and coffee) using a handful of the product I wanted to extract flavour from, 2 cups of vodka, a glass jar and 1 TBSP of agave nectar. They take two months to cure and need to be kept in a dark place and shaken for a couple of seconds every day. The two month wait certainly pays off, as the extracts tend to be stronger than store bought and significantly cheaper per mL

Banana bread with a sugar-crumb topping

I had 5 medium-sized bananas that were leaving a less than desired aroma in my dorm room, and the best way to use them up is surely banana bread. In reality, the end product was more of a cake, but if you call it banana bread then its guilt-free – right? I used a double batch of this recipe and made a crumb topping by generally using the crumb topping from this recipe.

Slightly burnt on the sides but it was incredibly light in colour and banana flavour and had a really nice cake texture. It was also one of the easiest banana breads to make, so I’d definitely recommend trying it if you have bananas that are starting to gross you out.

Polenta and herb crusted tofu…

This meal was based on a recipe from Delicious magazine (I think August, 2007 ), in which fish was crusted with a mix of uncooked polenta and herbs. I simply made up a mix of polenta, sage, rosemary and thyme with some cracked pepper, in one bowl and a corn flour and warm water mix in another. I double dipped a 3/4 inch thick tofu ’steak’ in both mixes then fried lightly in some vegetable oil until the polenta had turned a golden brown colour:

Served on some pappardelle pasta with a side of roasted asparagus and snow peas. I’d recommend marinading the tofu for a while before hand, but can’t really think what would be best – any ideas?