April | 2011 |

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So what with the egg, just leave the chocolate behind!

April 20, 2011 in Baking, desserts & sweets

Gimmicks have, since I can recall, irritated me. Sorry for saying this at this time of the year, but eggs and bunnies and chickens made from poor quality chocolate are (to my mind) nothing more than consumer gimmicks. And the price we pay for these odd-tasting odd-looking things! Calling those garish goods gimmicks does not make me a choco-phobe, no! On the contrary! I could marry Willy Wonky tomorrow for his factory. And I do celebrate all the eggs that the Easter bunny can deliver! As long as they are not those pre-fab bunnies and eggs…

So I am opening the real chocolate factory today and the grandkids and I will spend the next few afternoons making our own chocolate fare for Easter using real chocolate. Two of the grandkids are teens anyway, so they know the low-down on the bunnies and eggs and the little one does not care who drops the eggs as long as they’re sweet and brown and edible.

When my kids grew up and knew for sure that there is an Easter bunny, we melted chocolate in the microwave (only because it was a brand-new oddity in kitchens then!) and mixed it with various delicacies like nuts, dates, raisins, chopped shortbread biscuits and so on. These mixes would be dropped delicious spoonsful at a time on trays lined with baking paper and set aside for the chocolate to return to its former glory. We experimented with combinations of (say) dark chocolate and dates, milk chocolate with glace ginger, and good ole Nestle milk chocolate with nuts or raisins or both. We made masses and they lasted the entire Good Friday. Bliss! By Easter Saturday we had to visit the local cafe for more slabs of chocolate so that we could make some more Easter clusters …. a legit excuse to eat lots of chocolate! Nowadays we do the same and I still add my ultimate luxury chocolate cake that looks like ten million Dollars.

Click below to get the recipe and watch the video. We made our videos with you in mind who has not yet got uncapped ADSL, Bokkie! Our videos do not use cap yet load fast and properly.

For the Best-ever Chocolate Ganache Cake recipe, click:

http://www.ilovecooking.co.za/recipes.php?categorie=13&section=detail&recipe=85

And while you’re on the website, also take a look at the recipe for the Crispiest Blini’s Ever – perfect for Easter Sunday brunch! I am 100% sure you will love them and so will your family.

For Crispiest Blini recipe, click here:

http://www.ilovecooking.co.za/recipes.php?categorie=1&section=detail&recipe=107

Until next week, if you’re travelling this weekend: please get there and back safely. Happy Easter! xxx

by Michéle

See food24 bloggers in action – first blogger video!

April 18, 2011 in Salads

2 Comments »

Because blogging so instantly became my great passion of all times, we (my daughter and partner in our business called 2 blonds and a redhead filming) assumed that every blogger must surely feel the same about food and blogging. So we asked food24 if we could feature their bloggers on our website and they agreed (definitely soul sisters when it comes to food and blogging).

So tadaaa!! Our first blogger video – Aletta of Forage. Click here to check her out!! http://ilovecooking.co.za

Aletta’s Caesar Salad … with extra’s to come!

In this video clip, Aletta prepares my all-time favourite salad: Caesar Salad. Without fail, when cos lettuce is available as it is now (at Pick ‘n Pay) we overdose on this unique salad. When Ya Ya Sister ate it the other day (I suspected it was for the first time in her life), she asked with a demure smile, foot making little circles in the air, toes curling: “There has to be a very interesting history about this salad…?” I could see she was hoping for a bit of Roman culture but her timing was off. At that precise moment I was putting a whole baby cos leaf in my mouth and literally swooned at the incredible combination of textures. So I finished swooning and slurping and then said: “Ja, it was invented by a Mexican chef in San Diego. He named the salad after himself.” She stared at me for a moment, almost shocked. Then she relaxed, picked some dressing-soaked croutons out of the salad bowl and started wiping her plate, smiling while she tucked in further, also using her fingers …

Anyway, back to the salad. Why we love this salad is that it can be made as simply as you wish or, with the addition of extra ingredients, it can be a light main course. Needless to say, I often chuck in the entire fridge contents but never less than soft-poached eggs and crisp bacon batons. Yum!

Now, as soon as you’ve watched the video (if you do not yet have uncapped ADSL, darling, you can relax as it uses very little bandwidth, we made sure of that!) go and get the ingredients – soon it’s too chilly for salad and there is no such thing as a Caesar Soup!

In a future blog, I will tell you all about the jolly delightful shoot we had at the wonderful Istitute of Culinery Arts studio and kitchens in Stellenbosch and the day Aletta and Sam Wilson of food24 were with us … and perhaps Sam and Aletta will want to add their bit of uhm … extras!

Click here for more about Aletta, her recipes and videos: http://www.ilovecooking.co.za/brands.php?brand=5

by Michéle

Back with a Bang!

April 11, 2011 in Baking, desserts & sweets

8 Comments »

Orange-Butter Cupcakes

Helloooo! It’s up and running and we’re back with a bang! And I solemly promise to do at least one post per week from now! But darlings! It will take me three years to detail the frustrations, the highs, the lows and the in-between emotions we’ve experienced with the I Love Cooking website. It was a bit like being pregnant and birthing: if you look at a gorgeous picture of a mother and child, you will never know what it took the mother (and her body and her relationships!) to get there unless you’ve done it yourself!

And ‘our baby’ is still in her teething stage: there are many little glitches to sort out and add and tweak and program. If we could, we would have done the programming ourselves but we are chefs, cooks, writers and television program directors and producers. So we need to rely on programmers to do it and apparently, they tell us, it takes a very, very, very long time. So we are patient and pray that by the end of this week, we can tell the rest of the world we have a website that we are proud of. Right now, the website viewing is just between you’re and me on this blog. So if you stumble across a glitch, consider it a preview … We have advertisers and we cannot afford to indulge the programming any longer before going live. So amidst chest pains and palpitations, I took the decision to do what is not usually done: go live with the website while they finalize the building of the site.

These technical delays aside, we are thrilled to see the birth of what-is-destined-to- be the biggest privately-owned cookery website in SA in terms of instruction videos and recipe content. And that is just the beginning. We intend to bring you much, much more. Our mantra is: if you can eat or enjoy it, we will feature it.

For us, the best part of this website is the cooking video clips. Here we have the chefs of the institute of Culinary Arts in Stellenbosch demonstrating some delicious, basic cooking principles like how really to poach an egg easily and how to the bake the ultimate crispy pastry shell. And big news! Soon we will feature SA’s and food24’s top bloggers showing us how to do it!

But let’s start sweet and small: buttery orange cupcakes. I love cupcakes (they are sooo easy to prepare) and tangy, zesty orange is popping up in stores all over the place. And of course, orange with any kind of food is just sublime.

One last thing … if you’ve been following my blog before, here is the latest: Ya Ya Sister has had to cook for the last three months otherwise she would not have been fed since yours truly was too preoccupied with you-know-what to cook! And so, I can thank also Woollies, the local farmer’s market and the local sort-of deli!

Please click here http://www.ilovecooking.co.za/recipes.php?categorie=§ion=detail&recipe=101 to test-drive the website and to get the recipe for the easiest and most delicious Orange-Butter Cupcakes. You can also check out the chef’s video how to prepare it!

Until later,

Happy hugs

oxo