In 5 years of blogging (yes people, 5 years!), I have yet to do a Merdeka day post. (Merdeka Day is Malaysian independence day). I keep meaning too, but it keeps slipping my mind. By the time I realise it's 31st August it's too late to do anything special, and the Merdeka day post goes back on the To-Do list in my mind.

This year I was determined to do something, and even though it's almost a week late - here is my Merdeka Day post, about that great Malaysian tradition - kaya toast.

Kaya, in case you don't know, is a Malaysian coconut/egg jam, flavoured with pandan. It can be brown or green depending on how much colouring you add and how much you caramelise the mixture.

My mum used to make her own kaya, which was delightfully dark brown in colour, and slightly grainy, but it is quite a bit of work - and besides, what are you going to do with a massive vat of the stuff? These days we just buy jars of it from the Asian grocer. I used to love eating Mum's kaya spread between salty Ritz crackers (my amah's favourite!) when I was a kid. Absolutely compulsive stuff.

Anyhoo, to make proper kaya toast you need to start with white bread (don't even think about using artisan or grainy or sourdough). What you want is that super-fluffy, super-soft, super-Asian sweet white bread. The kind that would disintegrate if you got a drop of water on it.

I used the Japanese white loaf from Bread Top.
Toast it lightly...

... and spread with margarine (yes, margarine, NOT butter) and your kaya of choice. Serve with kopi o (black coffee) for the true Malaysian experience.

Flammkuchen

Small change of plans. I've scrapped the pissaladière as a canapé, and replaced it on the birthday menu with flammkuchen. I received the recipe via email this week (danke schoen!), and having loved it in Germany, had to try my hand at it. The dough is so easy to work with. I let my KitchenAid do the heavy kneading, and I was able to leave the dough overnight in the fridge before rolling it out, without it coming to harm. I topped them with sour cream, thyme and red onions. I added bacon pieces to half the flammkuchens, and diced cooked chicken to the others. It worked! It more than worked. It was amazing. Sour cream + onions = happy times. The whole flammkuchen was like a giant crunchy Arnott's shape. Hell yeah!

Although we loved the pissaladière, we loved the flammkuchen more. It's also a safer option, because lots of people, unfathomably, don't like anchovies.

So, with the flammkuchen decision made, let's go back to the party planning. If you're organising an event, it helps to be organised. Here's a small pic of this week's page in my Kikki.K Weekly Planner Pad.


Yesterday, I made a triple batch of shortcrust pastry (Nigella's recipe from How to Eat, naturally) and popped it in the freezer...

... baked those cheese stars I'd frozen... (The instruction: "DO NOT EAT!!" is more for me than for my family... they're so addictive!).


... and made more flammkuchen dough, letting it rise slowly overnight in the fridge.


Today, I kneaded and rolled out the flammkuchen dough. (I say "I kneaded", but in reality the KitchenAid dough hook kneaded, while I sat down and had a cup of tea and biscuit). It's really easy to roll the dough out very thinly. I think the buttermilk in the dough makes it extra pliable. I got 6 pieces out of the dough, and layered them between baking paper to stash in the freezer.


I also started preparing my paper cone mould for the croquembouche, following these instructions...

... and whipped up a triple batch of The Union Square Cafe's Bar Nuts (recipe from Nigella Bites).


I've just gotta buy some chilli olives from my fave Italian supermarket, and nibbles are sorted!

1. Ricotta and Chive Choux Puffs


More choux pastry! These little savoury choux puffs were inspired by a recipe posted on Foodbeam on Wednesday. Perfect timing! You add a mixture of ricotta and chives to a basic choux pastry recipe. Fanny deep-fries hers, which look incredibly delicious and crispy, but for the purposes of party planning, I wanted to see if oven-baking would work. In the above photo, they look great, but they weren't crispy, and deflated pretty much instantly. My mum said it was because the batter must have been too wet.

Even though they didn't look great, the upside is that they tasted good, especially sprinkled with generous amounts of good salt. I've frozen the remaining deflated puffs, and will probably bring them out to go with soup or another gravy-rich meal.

I'm going to have a go of some simpler gruyère gougères this week. They can be kept for 3 days in an airtight container, and only contain grated cheese rather than a large amount of deflating ricotta.


2. Festive Fusilli


This pasta salad is my cheap trial-run version of Nigella's festive fusilli, from Nigella Express. In the original recipe, you mix together vodka-steeped sun-dried tomatoes with cooked pasta and mascarpone. Finally, you sprinkle parmesan cheese and parsley over the top. For my trial, I greatly decreased quantities and replaced mascarpone with cream cheese. You see, I'm more likely to eat leftover cream cheese (on toast or whatever), whereas a remaining half-tub mascarpone is likely to grow mould and go feral in my fridge.

On my initial taste, I found it a bit bland, but after the first few mouthfuls it became addictive. Very nice at a warmish room temperature. The next day the dressing had congealed unattractively, but I think this wouldn't have happened with mascarpone instead of budget cream cheese. I think it will make a good, filling addition to the buffet. Of course, I'm not going to call it Festive Fusili, but will rename it "pasta salad with mascarpone and vodka dressing". Much more descriptive. And I'll serve it at room temperature!


3. Cheese Stars

Cheese stars rock! (Remember?). For ease, I'm making them in rounds instead of stars. I made up a quadruple batch of dough, wrapped it well and stashed it in the freezer. Later on in the week, I'll slice and bake them! These are going to be nibbles with drinks.


4. Coq au Riesling


I want something warm and substantial for the hungry hordes once the canapés are done. If we're standing around, we'll need an easy-to-eat stew or hot-pot, preferably boneless. This is where Nigella's coq au riesling comes in. From Nigella Express, it's very, very simple. It's just a matter of cooking together leeks, boneless and skinless chicken thighs, mushrooms and bacon in riesling for about 40 minutes. Ta-dah! I made a trial half-batch, and thought it was delicious. In fact, I found it similar to many of the long-simmered, preparation-intensive stews from How to Eat. The only problem is that it looks quite unattractive... even a good scattering of parsley couldn't disguise that murky grey colour. I'll be considering other stews over the next week, but may very well come back to this one.

My first homemade pissaladière

When we started our planning last week, and I realised we had a definite French theme to the desserts, I started looking through my collection of cookbooks for appropriate snacky finger food. The first recipe that caught my eye was Tyler Florence's caramelized onion toast, in Tyler's Ultimate. In effect, it's a simplified version of pissaladière. Instead of pastry or bread dough, he uses a sliced baguette as a base for the caramelised onions (although he'd say carrrr-melized), anchovies and olives.

Later that night, I was chatting with my fabulous Francophile foodie friend Clarice. When I told her that I was thinking of making pissaladière for the party, she responded with an enthusiastic, "OMG YUM pissaladière!!!!! Ina's recipe is amazing!!!!!!!!!" Well! That was all the encouragement I needed! The recipe is available online, here.

The next day when I went shopping for the ingredients, I happened to see that pissaladière is this month's featured "classic dish" in Gourmet Traveller. This reassured me that I am very much on the pulse of current culinary trends. (I know, how could I have slept at night otherwise?)


1. The Onions

A shitload of onions are sliced thinly (you'll need a good knife, or a mandolin), and then sautéed in olive oil with garlic and thyme until nice and soft and sweet.



2. The Bread Dough

I can categorically say that I have never had as great a success with yeasted dough as I had with this one. Mix and knead (with a dough hook), and that was all there was to it.
It didn't seem to rise that much (it was freezing that day!), but the dough was wonderfully soft and elastic, and stretched out easily to fit my baking sheet.


3. The topping

You should be more generous with the topping than I was. I couldn't get a criss-cross (will make you jump) pattern happening with the anchovies, as I only had a small jar. I also had to spread the onions more thinly than is desirable because I decided at the last minute to test the recipe on bread dough, and on puff pastry.


Bake it at a very high heat for 15 minutes, and Bob's your oncle.


The Verdict:
- They were très delicieux, but a bit too salty for our taste. I think that this is because I got the anchovies from the bottom of the jar, covered in the oil and salt of their departed brothers. I'll buy a new jar for next time, and give the anchovies a little soak in water first.
- Puff pastry was good, but only hot out of the oven. This makes things difficult for timing purposes. It also crumbles everywhere, which is not a sexy look for people or carpets.
- Ina's bread dough rocks. It was nice and crispy, and the slightly sweet taste from the honey in the dough was great. As a bonus, the bread-pissaladière is edible at room temperature too. I'm making Ina's version!
- I'll probably do 4 loaves (freezing the dough, making the topping in advance, and assembling and baking them on the day). I'll bake 2 at a time, cut them when they come out and pass them around.

Das ist ein Schokoladenbrötchen. Schokoladen = chocolate, brötchen = little bread roll. It's an odd idea, but no less good for that. In fact, I think they're GREAT! I developed a taste for these whilst in Germany - my host father would eat these often, for dessert or a little snack.

To make a Schokoladenbrötchen, you start with a Brötchen. In Australia the equivalent would be a white dinner roll. I got mine for 50c from Baker's Delight. You want something white and soft.


Then, you need the Schokoladen. In Germany I found they had a larger range of thin, brötchen-sized chocolates, but my local Coles had these funky little Furry Friends chocolates, which were just the right size. And, if you head over to the Furry Friends' website, you can learn about Australian animals! Learning and deliciousness.



If Cadbury's too frightfully common for you, I guess you could use a few pieces of Lindt Excellence, which are the right thickness, but then I think you'd be missing out on the point of this snack. So, chocolate-snobbery thrown to the wind, slice your Brötchen lengthwise, place your chocolate inside, and eat. I had the above Schokoladenbrötchen this afternoon with a cup of tea.

At first, I thought it was odd my host father never heated his Schokoladenbrötchen. Melting chocolate in crispy bread sounds like a winner, no? Below we have a toasted Schokoladenbrötchen that I made in Germany. Check out the oozing chocolate...

... which, upon being eaten, proceeded to ooze over my face, my hands, my arms... it was not a good look! And in fact, I realised that I rather like the contrast of soft bread against solid chocolate.

Another variation:

We ran out of Brötchen one night, but still had heaps of regular old Brot leftover from a cold-cut based dinner... and I thought it might be a good idea...
Brot mit Milka Schokoladen. A chocolate sandwich on brown bread. Not the same as the original, but surprisingly still lecker! (Delicious).

I feel that I should just add here that Schokoladenbrötchens - with their high-GI white bread and fattening, sugary chocolate centre - are almost totally bereft of any nutrition. In the interest of health they should not be consumed every day.

Hmmm... this blog has been a bit quiet lately, hasn't it? All the action’s on my How To Eat Blog . Also, I haven’t been working the past couple of weeks to prepare for exams, and we haven't been going out to eat much.

But look what I ate for an afternoon snack today! I had a very small lunch (leftover quails with cabbage), so by 4:00pm, was starving again.

I was just gonna eat the excess grilled eggplant for tonight's dinner, but then I saw the remaining Steak Mirabeau from Wednesday's dinner and decided a steak sandwich was in order. So, 2 slices of olive bread, the eggplant, the sliced up steak and some thin slices of black-pepper cheddah went into the toaster oven and then into my eagerly awaiting mouth.


Steak sandwich


With cheese - ready for toaster

Mmm... this was so incredibly satisfying! By the way, it's not a super-huge sandwich, it was like half a sirloin, and that plate isn't even a full-sized dinner plate, but one of those side-dish bread plate things.

But I still think there must be something wrong with me when my "quick afternoon snack" requires the use of a steak knife...