Tag: home made

Magnificent Mother’s Day and Its many Mishaps

This is a longer than normal post, because I wanted to be vulnerable and share the mishaps I made and lessons I learnt along the way- you have been warned!

Most people seem to believe that their Mother is the best Mother in the world- all of them are right! I am one of the people who believe this about my Mom! In the past few years she has been through everything you can think of, from divorce to retrenchment to cancer to most recently losing her father, but through all of this she still made sure her kids had everything we needed.

So you can understand that a thoughtful gift and a small meal doesn’t feel like enough to honour this amazing woman I have the privilege of calling my mother (even though she would be perfectly happy with that).

I decided to honour and thank her with a three course meal! The intended menu was as follows:

Starter: Butternut Soup with Homemade Garlic and Cheese Pot Bread

Main: Shepherd’s Pie, Homemade Feta and Tuna Puffs, Filled Gem Squash and Pumpkin Fritters with a Caramel Sauce.

Dessert: A cappuccino whicky whacky cake with a milo icing.

Please note that this was the intended menu but circumstance had to come and edit some of the dishes.

I don’t pretend to be a professional chef, I just love cooking but for this particular meal I think I was a tad overconfident. Thinking that I could cook a 3 course meal start to finish from the time I got back from church (after 11 a.m.) and be done by 13:30 was my first very big mistake.

I picked up my sister after church and stopped at the shop for the last ingredients I still needed, hence only getting home close to 12:00. I realised that day why my guests usually only arrive after the meals are already cooked – but you can draw your own conclusions on our family “fun”.

I started with the butternut soup – my first mishap. The recipe for this dish is in one of my previous posts (My Fav Winter Creature Comforts), however my soup came out as mush. I couldn’t understand why. Also, my supermarket was completely out of stock of every brand of fresh cream so I ended up buying canned cream. It tasted to me like the canned cream was trying too hard to be fresh cream and ended up having a very overpowering taste. To combat the overpowering taste of the canned cream I added some chilli powder instead of cayenne pepper, this was much to my personal regret later.  It seemed like the chilli powder decided to be extremely concentrated in one particular spot of the soup/mush. This spot of soup ended up in my bowl. I took two bites (I don’t do very spicy things) and gave my leftovers to my mom. She said her soup was fine but could taste the bite in mine. It was only the next day that I realised how come my soup was mush and not the nice smooth soup it usually is – in my rush to finish the three course meal in way less time than it actually takes – I added too little water to the soup! I felt so silly!!

My next mishap came also in the first course! The pot bread…my first attempt at making this delicious treat. I wanted to make it over the top so I decided to add garlic butter to the top and the middle of the dough that I threw into the pot. I spoke to a friend about the menu and she suggested that I add garlic butter to the bottom of the dough too. Needless to say it burnt! So as the dough wasn’t cooked thoroughly yet, I cut the raw dough loose from the burnt dough, added some oil to another pot and put the dough in there. Still failed though- I ended up with a giant vetkoek (fried dough). I must say I believe that if I still had my trusty cast iron pot my pot bread would have been perfect besides all of this!

The next course went relatively well, except for the fact that I had done no prep prior to getting home. So making homemade feta in the time frame I had was definitely not going to happen. So sadly the homemade feta and tuna puffs wait for another day to be made. The pumpkin fritters were amazing, with the most delicious and super easy sauce! You melt butter and sugar in a sauce pan, add some milk and custard powder (I just realised I forgot the custard powder – still tasted good though) and stir. It tastes very similar to condensed milk and goes really well with the pumpkin fritters. My last small mishap with the main course was buying cottage cheese instead of cream cheese – but adding cottage cheese to the filled gem squashes still tasted good though!

Lastly the dessert!

I was googling a bunch of recipes for cappuccino cake but none of them were similar enough to the idea I had in my head. So I decided to take a classic recipe and modify it to be what I want. The whicky whacky cake is also known as the no flop cake. It doesn’t take eggs or milk, so if you’re sensitive to milk or eggs this might be a good recipe to try – before my edits though since the sachet has the allergens in again.

The ingredients are:

3 cups Flour

5 tablespoons Cocoa

1 teaspoon Bicarb

2 cups Sugar

½ teaspoon salt

12 tablespoons oil

2 tablespoons vinegar

3 teaspoons vanilla essence

2 cups water

You mix all the dry ingredients and then make 3 holes in the dry mixtures where you add the wet ingredients except for the water. Once the wet ingredients have been added you add the water evenly over the batter and then mix it all together. If it is too dry still add another half a cup of water.

I edited this recipe a little bit by replacing the cocoa with sachets of cappuccino. I also decided to make the cake moister- I would pour half a cup of cappuccino over the cake once it was baked. This was all good and well until it came to the icing. I left the cake to cool down and then added the cappuccino.

I then proceeded to make the milo icing, butter, castor sugar and some milo powder- mix them together to a nice stiff consistency and ice the cake. You need to make sure the cake is cool before you ice the take…I might have left the cake to cool before I iced the cake but I didn’t take the cup of cappuccino into account and ended up melting the icing!

 

All in all we still had a delicious meal and good time as a family but next time I will know my limitations!

Love, Jo xo

Jo’s Take Away’s

  1. Appreciate your mom
  2. Know your limitations
  3. Let the cake cool

ps follow @imjoxo on instagram for more!

 

Home Made Magic

Sometimes in life you get the privilege of choosing your own family where the connection feels magical. I was blessed enough to be able to choose my own brother (from another mother). We shared a house for more than a year and he now stays one town away and I miss him and having him around terribly.

He came to my town for a day and we spent it at a friend’s mother’s coffee shop. Living in a place like South Africa with our economy on a constant downward spiral, one needs to get creative! This brother of mine has always had a very unique mind and been very creative, don’t ask me how he got the idea in his head but he decided to make home-made crème liquor.

I am always very skeptical of my brother’s hair brained ideas and even asked the owner of the coffee shop is she trusted what the boys were doing.

It started with making our own ideal milk (one again South Africa’s economy made us decide to make our own). How does one make ideal milk, you might ask? Well I did at least. The answer = you boil milk!!! Okay, it is slightly more complicated than just leaving a pot of milk on the stove for an hour- that would just be a disaster!

So you start off by measuring the amount of milk you would like to use, and add half of it to a thick-based sauce pan. You then take a sosatie stick (kebab skewer) place it in the milk and mark where the milk is against the sosatie stick. You add the rest of the milk and slowly bring to a boil.

There is one annoying thing about making ideal milk yourself and that would be constantly removing and discarding the layer of skin that forms on top of the milk. Once the amount of milk once again reaches the level it was when it was marked on the sosatie stick, you have ideal milk, also known as evaporated milk. The process can take quite a while though as you don’t want to have the sauce pan become too hot and burn the milk.

So while the boys were making ideal milk and getting to business on the liquor, I got roped into helping cover chocolate coated truffles in chocolate. One would think that it’s an easy task…nope! I think with a lot of practice and some skill you could manage to always have them come out perfect. However on a first try my hands and feet- yes my feet too- were covered in chocolate and my truffles were definitely not all perfectly covered in chocolate. Luckily they were to be saved by having white chocolate drizzled over them the following day.

I have a new respect for bakers- tasks that appear to be seemingly easy take a lot more time, effort and skill than we realise! I won’t be complaining about the price of a treat any time soon!

So back to the boys and what seemed like their Dexter’s Laboratory experiment… Once the milk had boiled down to half of what it was (500 ml), they added a tin of condensed milk (sadly I don’t know how to make this at home yet) and three tablespoons of coffee. They then waited for this mixture to cool down, and according to them it already tasted sublime!

Once the mixture was at about room temperature, they added the alcohol, 300 ml of Brandy. They mixed it well and gave each of us a taste (in improvised shot glasses of course)! Indeed their creative flair and mad scientist ideas paid off and they had accomplished making a magical cost effective crème coffee liquor!

There is a magic about spending time with those who are like family to you, and to create something together in that time just melts it into your memory! My brother has inspired me to try many more home made things, first up being homemade feta cheese (goat’s cheese). You’ll have to wait for my next post to see whether I succeed and if I’ll be making tuna & feta puffs or just tuna puffs!

Love Jo xo

Jo’s 3 Take Aways:

  1. Creativity is key
  2. Respect your baker
  3. Find people who love like family