Honey Panda Cotta?

March 16th is Panda Day. It’s a day to celebrate giant pandas and to raise awareness about the important part pandas play in the ecosystem and in our lives. For those of us who love pandas, every day is Panda Day!

One of my greatest panda experiences was seeing pandas at the Bifengxia Panda Base and the Chengdu Panda Base. At the Bifengxia Base we were treated to panda cubbies doing activities we had previously seen only in panda cams – pandas riding toy horses, pandas playing on swings, pandas climbing trees, pandas sleeping in a kindergarten and pandas drinking milk from bowls! At the Chengdu base we actually got to hold a baby panda named Miao Miao. She accepted our rapt adoration and happily munched on bamboo dipped in honey!

When I started to think of what recipe I wanted to make for Panda Day, I put honey and milk together and got Panda Cotta!

Honey Panda Cotta

Ingredients
2 titanium gelatine leaves (or your choice of gelatine to set 1 + 3/4 cups liquid)
3/4 cup milk
3/4 cup thickened cream
1/4 cup honey
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract

Instructions
Soak the gelatine leaves in cold water for 5 minutes to soften. 
Put the milk, cream, honey and vanilla extract into a saucepan and bring to a simmer over medium-low heat, stirring to make sure the honey has melted.
Remove from heat.
Squeeze the gelatine leaves to remove any excess water then stir into the cream mixture until dissolved.
Pour into serving bowls or glasses.
Cover and refrigerate for at least 4 hours or overnight.
Panna cotta is often unmolded onto a serving plate but you can just dig in with a spoon!
If you’d like to unmold, here are a few tips that can help do it neatly:
* Slide a knife down the side of the set panda cotta to break the air seal.
* Rest the bottom of the mold (about half way up the side) in hot tap water for about 5 seconds. Dry the outside and then invert onto a serving plate. 
* If the panda cotta doesn’t slide out on its own, a couple of vigorous downward shakes (making sure to hold both plate and mold) should convince it to unmold. 

Happy Panda Day!

Coffee Brew

January 18th is National Gourmet Coffee Day and January 19th is Brew A Potion Day, so I thought I would combine the two and make a magical coffee brew!

National Gourmet Coffee Day is a day to explore the complex history and processes that bring great coffee to us and celebrate the simple pleasure of having a good cup of coffee.

To get into the spirit of Brew A Potion Day, just make a concoction that feels magical to you. Mulled, spiced cider was a drink we often had at our witchy celebrations, so I couldn’t wait to make a version using apple and blackcurrant juice and finishing with a shot of coffee. I’m pleased as punch with the results! 

Mulled Coffee

Ingredients
1/2 cup apple and blackcurrant juice
1/2 cup water
2 tablespoons dark brown sugar
2 cloves
1 cinnamon stick
1 star anise
1 shot freshly brewed espresso coffee

Instructions
Place all the ingredients, except the coffee, into a saucepan.
Bring to a boil.
Give a good stir to make sure the sugar has dissolved.
Cover and simmer on low heat for 10 minutes.
Strain into a heat-proof glass or mug.
Top with a shot of hot coffee.

A Tale Of Chocolate Fairy Bread

November 24th is Fairy Bread Day. Fairy Bread is an Australian sweet treat, usually served at birthday parties. The recipe is very simple – white, buttered bread is sprinkled with hundreds and thousands (nonpareils sprinkles) and sliced into triangles with the crust left on. So simple, so tasty!

As a child I made my own version of fairy bread by spooning chocolate sprinkles, or cocoa powder, onto buttered bread resulting in a chocolatey, buttery delight. I thought this was my own dark and gothic invention, and then I discovered chocolate hagelslag!

Hagelslag, meaning hail, are oblong shaped sprinkles which the Dutch like to have on buttered bread for breakfast. Hagelslag were originally aniseed flavoured but now come in many different flavours and colours. Not surprisingly chocolate is one of the most popular. Chocolate hagelslag are similar to chocolate sprinkles except they have a higher amount of cocoa. Instead of chocolate sprinkles you can use chocolate flakes called chocoladevlokken.

To celebrate both Fairy Bread Day, and my discovery of hagelslag, I’ve made a version of chocoladevlokken using grated chocolate. There’s no real recipe. I simply buttered my slice of white bread and then used a vegetable peeler to grate good quality chocolate with a high cocoa content over it. I then made another slice and couldn’t resist using a cookie cutter to make bat shapes. 🙂 Easy!

A Brew For The Rabbit And The Cat

January 19 is Brew a Potion Day. It is a fun day celebrating the magical and mystical mythology of potions. The word potion comes from the Latin “potio” which means to drink. Potions are thought to have magical properties, which can be used for healing or cursing, and are usually brewed by witches, wizards and other magical creatures. To celebrate Brew a Potion Day, concoct a potion of your own. It can be magical or non-magical, alcoholic or non-alcoholic, hot or cold. There are no rules, so have fun!

This is my first year of celebrating Brew a Potion Day and I’ve chosen to make a Bunny Mary, also called a Bloody Rabbit. A Bunny Mary is a fun version of a Bloody Mary where you replace the tomato juice with carrot juice. The spicy seasonings of a Bloody Mary can also be played around with. For my Bunny Mary I’m using Chinese five spice and garnishing it with a spring of mint.

My Bunny Mary concoction is inspired by the upcoming Lunar New Year on January 22. This year is a special one as it is the Chinese Year of the Rabbit and also the Vietnamese Year of the Cat. This means we have two animals to celebrate instead of just one! The element for this year is Water which is most appropriate for brewing up potions. The carrot juice pays tribute to the Rabbit while the mint pays tribute to the Cat as catnip is part of the mint family. To honour the Lunar New Year I’ve added Chinese five spice, as the five spices symbolise the five elements (Metal, Water, Wood, Fire, and Earth).

Bunny Mary

Ingredients (makes one drink)
50ml vodka
1 teaspoon Chinese five spice
1 cup carrot juice
good squeeze of lemon juice
mint sprig for garnish

Instructions
Pour the vodka into a tall glass.
Add the spice mix.
Pour in the carrot juice.
Add a squeeze of lemon juice.
Give a good stir.
Garnish with a sprig of mint.

If you can’t find Chinese five spice mix you can make your own. There is no specific recipe so you make one that suits your taste. This is my recipe:

Chinese Five Spice
1 tablespoon ground cinnamon
1 tablespoon ground fennel seeds
3 teaspoons ground star anise
2 teaspoons ground Szechuan pepper*
1 teaspoon ground cloves
Mix all the ingredients together.
Store in an air-tight glass container for up to 6 months.
*You can use ground black pepper but it won’t have the same numbing effect that Szechuan pepper has.

Happy Brew a Potion Day!
Happy Year of the Rabbit!
Happy Year of the Cat!

Sweet Tea For A Bloody Countess

August 21st is Elizabeth Bathory’s deathiversary. It’s also National Sweet Tea Day. When I realised this, I couldn’t help picturing Elizabeth sipping a sweet tea. Seeing as two of her epithets are the “Blood Countess” and “Countess Dracula”, maybe it isn’t sweet tea she is sipping.

Countess Elizabeth Bathory (born 7 August 1560 – died 21 August 1614) was a Hungarian noblewoman who was accused of torturing and murdering young girls. Bathory was eventually tried and convicted as a serial killer. She was imprisoned in her castle until her death. There is ongoing debate as to whether Elizabeth Bathory was a blood thirsty murderer or the victim of a witch hunt.

As a wealthy and influential landowner, there were many reasons to discredit her and take her land and power. This has led to questioning how the evidence brought against Bathory was gathered. Some testified that they had not seen her commit crimes but had heard stories about her while the eyewitness accounts from Bathory’s servants were mostly gained through torture. The enduring tales of her drinking and bathing in the blood of virgins to retain her youth appear to have been written after her death. Whether guilty or innocent of these crimes, Elizabeth Bathory has lived on in folklore, especially in vampire mythology.

And now onto something sweeter than blood – Sweet Tea!
National Sweet Tea Day is a day to enjoy the pleasures of a refreshing glass of iced sweet tea. The difference between sweet tea and iced tea is that sweetener is added to the tea at the time of brewing. National Iced Tea Day is celebrated on June 10.

To celebrate National Sweet Tea Day, I’ll be enjoying a sweetened Earl Grey tea. To pay tribute to the contribution Elizabeth Bathory has made to vampire mythology, I’ll be adding a slice of blood orange. It won’t be chilled either as I believe that tea, like blood, should be served warm.

Happy Drinking!

Some Assembly Required

National Cream Tea Day is a British food day that is celebrated on the last Friday in June. This year it was celebrated on June 24th. I didn’t get to celebrate on Friday, but any day is a great day to celebrate the delight that is a cream tea!

National Cream Tea Day was created by two companies, one that specialises in cream – Rodda’s Clotted Cream and one that specialise in jams and preserves – Wilkin and Sons Tiptree. National Cream Tea Day is a fun day that encourages people to get together over a cream tea and raise money for charities. Both companies donate cream and jam for events through their joint organisation, The Cream Tea Society.

Apart from cream and jam, a cream tea needs scones to dollop the cream and jam onto, and lots of tea to wash them down with. The scone recipe I’ve chosen is not a classic British recipe but one from an Ikea cookbook called Hey Flavours! Children’s First Cookbook. Luckily you won’t need an Allen key to assemble these scones! If you’d like to know more about cream teas, and what order you should put the cream and jam on your scone, you can go to my previous post, The Battle Of The Cream Tea.

Scones
I was drawn to these scones as they are made with yoghurt instead of milk, which sounds delicious! I’ve tested them thoroughly and they do also taste delicious.

Ingredients
1 + 1/2 cups plain flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/4 teaspoon sea salt
50g unsalted butter, cut into small pieces
3/4 cup yoghurt

for serving
jam
cream
tea

Instructions
Preheat oven to 200C / 400F.
Line a baking tray with baking paper.
Mix the flour, baking powder and salt in a bowl.
Add the butter and, using your fingers, rub it into the flour.
Add the yoghurt and mix into a dough.
Place dough onto a floured surface and flatten until approximately 2cm thick.
Use a glass or cookie cutter to cut into round shapes.
Place onto prepared tray and sprinkle with a little flour.
Bake for 10 – 12 minutes.

A Day For Pancakes

This year we begin the month of March with Pancake Day!

Pancake Day, also know as Shrove Tuesday, is part of Easter observances so it doesn’t have a fixed date. It is followed by Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent. Shrove Tuesday is the last day to eat rich, sweet and fatty foods before a period of fasting begins. Thankfully I don’t celebrate Easter (so no fasting) but I do celebrate pancakes!

This year I am indulging in mini pancakes called pikelets. Pikelets are an Aussie and New Zealand treat and are enjoyed any time of the day. They can be eaten hot or cold and can be served with sweet or savoury toppings.

I’ve tweaked a traditional pikelet recipe to make an overnight version that also has oats. You’ll need to start preparing these the night before, as the oats and milk need to soak overnight.

Overnight Oat Pikelets

Ingredients
1/2 cup rolled oats
1/2 cup milk
1 egg, lightly beaten
1/4 cup plain flour
1/4 teaspoon baking powder
pinch of sea salt
1/2 teaspoon sugar
butter for frying

Instructions
Mix the oatmeal and milk together in a large bowl. Cover and refrigerate overnight.
The next morning remove the oat mix from the refrigerator.
Stir in the beaten egg until combined.
Whisk together the flour, baking powder, salt and sugar in a small bowl.
Add to the oat mix and stir until combined. (You want a thick batter so add more milk or flour to get the right consistency).
Melt some butter in a frying pan.
Drop tablespoons of batter into the pan, allowing room for spreading.
Cook for 2 minutes or until bubbles appear on the surface and the bottom is lightly browned.
Turn them over with a spatula and cook for 30 – 60 seconds or until lightly brown on the bottom.
Remove from the pan.
Eat them hot or cold with sweet or savoury toppings.

Make It A Double!

Did you know that there are two days a year dedicated to honouring bartenders?

World Bartender Appreciation Day is an international celebration for bartenders and is held on the 24th of February, while Bartender Appreciation Day is a US national celebration held on the 1st Friday in December. Bartender Appreciation Day was founded by Sailor Jerry Rum in 2011. This year it will be celebrated on Friday the 3rd.

As the name suggests, Bartender Appreciation Day is a day to honour those who tend our drinks, and often our emotions. As someone who has spent a lot of time in bars, I’d like to say thank you to all those bartenders who mixed me awesome drinks, listened to my drunken stories, commiserated with me when I was sad, and celebrated my happy times.

A great way to celebrate a day dedicated to mixologists is to experiment with your favourite cocktail recipes. I like playing around with the ratio of ingredients, so I was happily surprised when I discovered reverse cocktails! To make one, you simply reverse the proportions of the main alcohol ingredients. For example, a Lone Tree Cocktail (one of my favourites) is 2 parts gin to 1 part sweet vermouth. To reverse it you’d do 1 part gin to 2 parts sweet vermouth. Reversing a cocktail can have a dramatic effect on the flavour, and sometimes on the alcohol content as well.

An extension of this concept is to play around with the ingredients themselves. So with the Lone Tree example you could do 1 part gin, 1 part sweet vermouth, 1 part dry vermouth. You could also use a blood orange gin to add an orange flavour. With all the different gins and vermouths available, your combinations could be endless!

Reverse Lone Tree Cocktail

Cheers!

A Day For Fairy Bread

November 24th is Fairy Bread Day!

Fairy Bread is an Australian treat, comprised of buttered white bread sprinkled with hundreds and thousands. There is no real recipe for this sweet but there are a few non-binding rules. The bread should be sliced white bread, the spread can be butter or margarine, and the sprinkles must be round, coloured hundreds and thousands and not the rod shaped ones. (Hundreds and thousands are also known as nonpareils sprinkles). Fairy Bread is usually sliced into triangles with the crust left on.

classic fairy bread

Fairy Bread was first mentioned in a 1920’s Hobart newspaper article which reported children eating it at a party. The creation of Fairy Bread may have been inspired by a Robert Louis Stevenson’s poem called “Fairy Bread” published in A Child’s Garden of Verses in 1885.

“Fairy Bread”
Come up here, O dusty feet!
Here is fairy bread to eat.
Here in my retiring room,
Children, you may dine
On the golden smell of broom
And the shade of pine;
And when you have eaten well,
Fairy stories hear and tell.

Normally I’m a bit of a rebel and love to play around with recipes, but in the case of Fairy Bread, I’m a traditionalist! If you really don’t like crusts, I think cutting them off is fine. I also think cutting or rolling the bread into creative shapes is an acceptable tweak and a way to get creative with a basic, but very tasty, recipe. 🙂

puffin & scroll

I’ve recently discovered a less messy way to get the hundreds and thousands onto the bread. Instead of covering the buttered bread with the hundreds and thousands, which usually leads to the round, sugary balls sliding off the bread and rolling all over the kitchen, pour the hundreds and thousands onto a plate and press the bread butter side down into the hundreds and thousands. This is particularly helpful if you’ve cut your bread into unusual shapes.

starry bread

Happy Fairy Bread Day!

A Day For Mead

August 1st is Imbolc – the midway point between the Winter Solstice and the Spring Equinox. It is a time of hope, a time to remember that Winter is ending and Spring is on its way. Imbolc celebrates the return of Persephone as she takes leave from her role as Queen of the Underworld and returns to the Earth as a Goddess of Spring. Foods and drinks that are associated with Spring and the Sun are traditional Imbolc fare.

This year Imbolc coincides with Mead Day, which is celebrated on the first Saturday in August. Mead Day was created as way to forge friendships within the mead making community and to introduce (or reintroduce) the rest of us to the joy that is mead. 🙂 Mead is made by combining honey with water and yeast. Additional flavourings can be added such as fruits , herbs and spices. It can be served straight, in cocktails or as a warmed mulled wine.

I was first introduced to mead at a Pagan festival many years ago and immediately fell in love with its sweet and spicy honey flavour. I love drinking mead, but I also love cooking with it. Mead is a great addition to both savoury and sweet dishes, but especially to sweet ones.

To celebrate Imbolc and Mead Day I’ve made a mead cupcake with mead cream cheese frosting. If you can’t find mead, you can try substituting it with a sweet wine – the sweeter and stickier the better. The recipe can be scaled up and you can use the leftover egg yolk to make custard – with or without mead!

Mead Cupcake with Mead Cream Cheese Frosting
(serves one)

Special instructions:
You will need 1 Texas muffin size silicone liner or a Texas muffin pan and paper liner.

Ingredients
for the mead cupcake
2 tablespoons sugar
2 tablespoons (30g) unsalted butter, room temperature
1 egg white
1/4 cup flour
1/4 teaspoon baking powder
pinch of sea salt
1 tablespoon shredded coconut
2 tablespoons mead

for the mead cream cheese frosting
1/4 cup (60g) cream cheese, room temperature
2 tablespoons icing sugar
2 tablespoons mead

Instructions
Preheat the oven to 180C / 350F.
In a mixing bowl, cream together the butter and sugar until pale and combined.
Beat in the egg white.
Sift in the flour, baking powder and salt.
Stir in the coconut and mix until just combined.
Add the mead and stir until just combined.
Spoon the batter into a silicone liner or a Texas muffin pan lined with a paper case.
Bake for 20 – 25 minutes or until a toothpick inserted into the centre comes out clean.
Allow to cool for 5 minutes before transferring to a wire rack to cool completely.
Make the frosting by mixing together the cream cheese and icing sugar until combined.
Add the mead and mix until smooth and combined.
Dollop or pipe onto cupcake.
If the frosting needs to thicken before piping, place in the refrigerator for a sort time.