father's day breakfast

Hello readers. Yes I am back, for now.

Seeing as it was father's day today, I thought I might as well document the obligatory father's day breakfast that I make yearly. Felt like making something both sweet and savoury so this is going to be a double post.

I'm just going to jump straight into it because I have nothing to rant about today.


baked eggs in tomato with basil and prosciutto
recipe from almost bourdain

Pictured above, this was the savoury part of the breakfast and it was incredibly easy to make and highly recommend it to lazy people who feel like a warm breakfast. I've never baked eggs before but after this I think I'll try out some other baked eggs recipes. One thing though, while the recipe said to only bake the eggs for 5 minutes, mine needed much longer than that, more like 10-15 minutes.

Anyway, photos.

And every breakfast needs sugar so...

lemon souffle cakes [serves 4]
(from Bill Granger's 'Sydney Food')

3/4 cup buttermilk
2 egg yolks
2 tablespoons lemon juice
3 teaspoon grated lemon juice
[I used one large lemon for this]
1 teaspoon vanilla essence
25 g unsalted butter, melted
3/4 cup plain flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
3 tablespoon caster sugar
pinch of salt
2 egg whites

200g strawberries. halved
1 tablespoon honey
icing sugar

1. Place buttermilk, egg yolks, lemon juice and zest and vanilla in a bowl and stir. Add butter and mix  well.
2. Sift flour, baking powder, sugar and salt into a large bowl. Make a well in the centre and stir in the butter milk mixture. Be careful not to overmix.
3. Whip egg whites into soft peaks and gently fold egg whites into batter using a large metal spoon.
4. Melt a bit of butter into a non-stick frypan on medium heat and drop 2 tablespoons of batter per cake.
5. Cook till golden brown and turn to cook the other side.
6. Keep warm while you cook the rest.
7. Toss the strawberries with the honey.
8. Dust lemon souffle cakes with icing sugar and top with strawberries to serve.

Some tips, for the strawberries, I added a little bit of water to thin out the honey a little and I also used more than 200g since we had so many at home. Often recipes macerate strawberries in sugar but this turns them brown and mushy so use honey as this makes them appear even more red. To keep pancakes warm, I often just put them all on a plate and cover them with a clean tea towel. Alternatively, like I have done, use a mini oven that is just warm and leave the pancakes in there.

These souffle cakes are super light and fluffy and should be fantastic for summer. They are a bit more effort than stock standard pancakes but if you have the time, they are worth it. Plus I just wanted to make the most of the beginning of strawberry season. Seriously, I swear we have like, five punnets of strawberries in the fridge right now. Not that I'm complaining.

Food porn starts here.

Served with croissants and coffee and some freshly whipped cream, breakfast is served.

I'll probably be posting a bit more in the next couple weeks until the end of school (17 DAYS!). With the upcoming birthdays and possible parties, I'll most likely be baking a lot so hooray! I miss this.

Well that's it from me, until next time.

caramelised banana pancakes

I don't even remember how to start a blog post.

Oh whatever, that'll do.

Got roped into making pancakes for my mum this morning. Yesterday I fell in love with this pink bowl which I thought would be perfect for pouring pancake batter and my mum only bought it on the condition that I would make her pancakes today. Thus the caramelised banana pancakes.

And behold my precious bowl along with a whole lot of other junk.

Also, it actually took me four treks up the stairs to even manage to get these photos taken. Since the weather was oh-so-lovely today and light was almost non-existent, I needed to my flash to take thses photos. But it was out of battery and since AA batteries in our household are an extremely limited commodity, I had to spend a good 15 minutes hunting. I have now learnt that all of our remotes use AAA batteries and the X-box controllers that use AA are all empty. Oh hey! Random segway for the day which has absolutely nothing to do with baking.

I used a basic pancake batter recipe which I found online so it seems a bit redundant to post it up but since I need to take up space in this post and feel as though I am actually a good food blogger, I will.

basic pancake recipe
[serves four but I can eat half myself because pancakes are delicious and don't you dare try to stop me]

1 cup self-raising flour
1 1/4 cup buttermilk
1/4 cup caster sugar
1/4 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
1 egg
cooking spray

1. Sift flour into a bowl and mix in the sugar and bicarb soda
2. Whisk buttermilk and egg.
3. Stir/whisk into the flour mixture
4. Heat frying pan over medium heat and spray with oil.
5. Pour batter into pan and cook until bubbles appear on the surface. (2 minutesish)
6. Flip and continue until cooked. (1-2 minutes)

Oh that last picture is awful. Action shots are so difficult to take.

And oh, if you are worried about not having any buttermilk at home it's okay! Cos I never do! I just use a substitute because I'm cheap and lazy and I use this instead.

buttermilk substitute

1 cup of milk
1 tablespoon of lemon juice or vinegar

1. Combine.
2. Stir.
3. Wait for 5 minutes.

DONE.

It looks pretty gross though, like curdled milk. Buttermilk is traditionally just leftover sour liquid from churned butter. Nowadays they just add lactic acid to milk and let it ferment for a couple hours so it's sort of what we are doing here. I used about half a lemon because one lemon yields 2-3 tablespoons of lemon juice and I used 1 1/4 milk because that's what the recipe asked for.

And now the bananas!

caramelised bananas

4 bananas
40g butter
1/4 cup sugar

1. Slice bananas diagonally
2. Melt butter and sugar in a pan.
3. Add bananas and let them cook until soft (5 minutesish)

To serve, you can add some maple syrup (though it should be sweet enough) and I dusted mine with cinnamon and added cream because I felt it was too healthy.

And that's pretty much it from me so see you in a couple months.

Oh and coffee.



And more pictures.