Tiny Oven Adventures

According to the internet, Melkkos is a “milk-based South African dessert”. Pfft. Anyone who has eaten Melkkos knows that this description falls miles short in describing the creamy, milky, comforting, cinnamony (is that even a word?) dish that is Melkkos. 

Melkkos is a milk based dish which is either thickened with flour & butter crumbs or or with a dough which has been cut into strips. It is served with a generous helping of cinnamon sugar sprinkled over the top. The version with the dough strips is apparently the traditional way of preparing Melkkos, but the only recipes I’ve found have been the crumb version. Personally I’ve never eaten it as a dessert, but rather a light evening meal.

Most people have fond childhood memories of Melkkos, I managed to make it all the way to university without even knowing it exists! I can clearly remember booking my meals for the week at the eetsaal (dining room/cafeteria) one week and seeing this Melkkos thing on the menu and being utterly perplexed. It was love at first bite, after that I never missed a meal where Melkkos would be served, even if the accompanying food was of a more questionable nature… (eetsaal food isn’t known for it’s outstanding culinary accolades!)

After several years at university, I walked away with lots of life experience, great memories, a degree or two, many huisdans glasses and an eetsaal bowl that accidentally (*cough*) got packed in with the rest of my things. The portions we got were never as generous as in the photographs, and the Melkkos was never as good as a homemade batch, but I still love making Melkkos at home, taking out my borrowed bowl and reminiscing about the cold winter evenings back at res where I was first introduced to Melkkos.

Click here to go to the recipe…

Blueberry macarons. Tasty tasty blueberry macarons.

If there is one thing that I learned at the 2010 Food Bloggers Conference, it is that you should always start your posts with a sentence relevant to the subject matter. Fortunately I learned more than one thing, and you can too! Colleen aka browniegirl has taken the momentous task upon herself again this year to organize the2011 Food Bloggers Indaba! Please go check it out if you have a blog, or intend to start one, or if you just want to go have a ball for a day!

Continue reading about these tasty morsels here.

As you might have noticed, it’s been pretty quiet here on the blog since August. I have been neglecting my blog for the past few months, but I promise that it was for a good reason! Yesterday I finally handed in my Master’s thesis! Yay! Unfortunately that means that I have to start job hunting, but I’ll just forget about that for a little while while I’m still enjoying this new freedom from thesising…

These photos are of a baby shower cake that Grethe and I made. We made a two-layer sponge cake that was wrapped in fondant and covered with multiple pink fondant flowers.

For more photos, check out my blog here.

Fairview has recently launched a competition for food bloggers to create a recipe with Fairview Camembert; this is my entry!

The final product was pretty damn tasty if I say so myself. The sweetness of the baked apricots go well with the creaminess of the cheese, the ginger biscuits add a nice spicy crunch while the honey just brings all the flavours together. The tart would make a nice sweet addition to a cheese platter and I am proud to present it for the Fairview Camembert Competition!

If you would like to vote for my recipe, head over to the competition page over here and select number 6 in the poll on the right hand side of the page. You can view the recipe for this tart here.

The first time I heard of Verlaque was at the South African Food Bloggers Conference earlier this year where I received one of their products in my goody bag. I’ve posted about using Verlaque products on my blog before(Rasberry Balsamic Roasted Butternut) and I will probably post again, but today is a special post. Verlaque is having a competition to see who can come up with the tastiest original recipe using one of the products from the “Balsamic Reduction” range.

I came up with this tomato relish just a few days before the challenge was posted (just in time). I was having dinner at my mother’s house, we planned on making salad but when we got home from the shop the baby tomatoes we bought were so bland and flavourless that they just wouldn’t cut it in a salad. And so my recipe was born…

My mother was very sceptical when she saw how much balsamic vinegar I added to the tomatoes but after she tasted it she was an instant fan! She even got all enthusiastic about buying salad stuff for when I made the relish again with the Verlaque Balsamic Reduction!

To see what Verlaque flavour I used and what the recipe is for my tomato relish, head over to my other blog.

I made this bean soup for a challenge at the Kleine Zalze For The Love Of Wine website. The soup is very economical, the beans and the eisbein cost me about R40 and the soup was enough for 8 hungry students!

I baked some fresh bread rolls with butter to serve with the soup. I have to admit though that I have a secret for quick bread rolls; I buy ready made dough at the local supermarket bakery to bake at home. The yeasted dough smells amazing when baking and tastes just as good out of the oven! All that you need to do is take the ready made dough, form into balls (about 5cm diameter) and place them into an oiled dish. Leave the balls to rise in a warm place for 30 minutes then bake at 180 degrees for approximately 40 minutes.

You can find the recipe here.

Homemade cheese! And it tastes good! I feel so chuffed with myself! Okay, enough exclamation marks already. Making cheese sounds hard, people look at you in awe upon hearing that the tasty cheese is your own creation but really the process is quite simple; all that you need is a little bit of patience and something heavy. (The patience is for waiting while the milk boils and the curds drain and the heavy object is to compress the curds to get all the whey out.) The cheese has the texture of cream cheese, it is tasty spread on bread and a great conversation topic in a crowd!

For the non-Afrikaans readers, “kaas” is Afrikaans for “cheese”, and my name is Jessica so I cleverly combined the two to create JessiKaas! (Creative genius am I right? Right? Yes I’m here all week folks. *ba da dum*)

Find the recipe for this tasty cheese here.

In my opinion condensed milk is just about the best thing that comes out of a can. If you need some to disappear I’m the person you should go to… So when Marissa from The Creative Pot tweeted about condensed milk cupcakes the cogs started rolling and I came up with this icing. Let me tell you, if you don’t like sweet things you should stay away from this icing, it’s sticky and sweet with the creamy taste of condensed milk and the light taste of vanilla to break the hold that the sugar has on you. The icing sets to a beautiful silky matt covering with the vanilla seeds dotted throughout the surface.

Read the rest of the post here for the recipe, more photos and how I photographed them.

My friend and I have a thing, a cake baking and decorating thing. We studied engineering together and we both love baking. Every once in a while (usually around birthdays) we give in to our urges and bake themed cakes. We started with decorating cakes with buttercream icing with props and sweets and things on top then moved on to experimenting with fondant cake covering and fondant decorations.

Recently one of our friends that got engaged asked us to make their wedding cake! First thoughts were “Yay, they asked us, wow!”, second thoughts were “Oh crap, can we realy make a cake worthy of being called a wedding cake?”. A trail run for wedding cake designs was in order. The color scheme for the wedding is white, blue and silver, we tried out a few things but the cake and cupcakes pictured won in the end. We also tried our hand at wrapping a cake with chocolate. The cake came out pretty well, just have to spread the chocolate a bit thinner next time! (the canned fruit was a last minute substitute as we realized we didn’t have any fresh fruits…)

More images of the cake decorating efforts of Grethe and Jessica are here!

At the South African Food Blogging Conference in March Jeanne Horak-Druiff from Cooksister spoke about finding your blogging voice. The point that really stood out for me was that there are two types of food bloggers; a writer that likes to cook or a cook that likes to write. The more I blog the more apparent it is that I am definitely the latter (pfft, not like I didn’t know that already..!).

I started blogging in the first place because I wanted all my recipes in one place, blogging made more sense in terms of data security (my laptop can fail or get stolen; blogger.com has backup servers to prevent content loss). Also, if the recipes are on the internet they are easily accessible from almost anywhere.

The second reason why I started blogging is completely unrelated to food or cooking; I am currently busy with a Masters degree which means that thesis writing looms on the immediate horizon. The main focus of Engineering really isn’t on stimulating creative writing skills; I’ve found that a 4 year degree is really effective in undoing a lot of writing experience gained at school. In writing just like any other skill, practice makes perfect. Writing does not come easy to me so the blog is my way of practicing making the words flow easier.

Phew, enough of super long personal exposé! This is what happens when I wake up inexplicably at 1am…

My inspiration for making hummus came from the Beetroot Hummus post by Nina from My-Easy-Cooking. I never realised that it is so easy to make this super tasty spread/dip!

Find the recipe here.