Pictures

Pictures of food I have made recently...

Chocolate Cake with Fresh Strawberries 

 Raspberry Friands

 A Rainbow of Macarons ready for Sandwiching

 S'mores Macarons

 Two Tone Oreo Macaron

 Shortbread, Macarons and Friands

Black Forest Cake

 Vanilla Berry Mini Bundt Cakes

 Caramel Chocolate Mini Bundt Cakes

 Homemade Caramels

 Honeycomb Chocolate Blocks

 Marshmallow Filled Chocolates

Ice Cream Accident Cake

 Tuxedo Strawberries

 Chocolate Tim Tam Cake

 Pink Marble Cake with Nerds

 Chocolate Molten Pudding with Homemade Vanilla Ice Cream and Raspberry Coulis

 Mini Donuts

 Caramel Mud Cake with White Icing and Gold Macarons

 Mini Vanilla Cakes

 Hazelnut Cake

 Caramel Mud Cake with Honeycomb

 Caramel Mud Cake

 Dog Cupcakes

 White Chocolate Raspberry Mini Cake

 Chocolate Cupcakes for World Teachers Day

 Watercolour Fondant Cookies

An Abundance of Cakes

Lately I have made many different cakes for many different occasions. Well actually only 3 but its still a good start right?
Anyway to start with, I was asked to make a dairy free cake and I was certainly up to the challenge. I want people to be able to enjoy what I cook even if they can't eat certain things. So I kept it simple by making a vanilla cake with a dairy free butter cream style icing. I decorated it with sprinkles and piped borders.

The second cake was for a bake-off between my friend and I, the theme was red velvet so I made a two layer red velvet cake with cream cheese filling, raspberries and chocolate and then covered in cream cheese frosting with shaved chocolate decoration. 

The last one I made was for my Nanna's birthday, it was a black forest cake. It had layers of chocolate cake with either chocolate cream filling or fresh cream and cherries. The whole thing was iced with fresh cream and decorated with chocolate shavings on the sides and fresh cherries on top.

Week of Wonders

This week as I was in my school holidays, I spent 3 of the 5 days cooking and managed to knock over a fair amount of food while making a little bit of money on the way. My new business is getting off to a great start and I completed a few orders during the week, you can see the facebook page here or the instagram account here. I began the week by making a trial version of some blue blueberry macarons which I have been asked to make for a Jeans for Genes day fundraiser next month. I packaged them up into some small gift bags and gave them to family and friends, you can see the pictures on my last blog post. On Tuesday and Wednesday I baked and iced some cakes:

4-inch vanilla and Oreo cake

8-inch blueberry and vanilla cake

mini vanilla and Oreo cupcakes

4-inch vanilla cake
no photo :(

On the Wednesday, I used up the egg yolks which were left over from making the swiss meringue buttercream icing by making some vanilla bean ice cream which I was going to use on Friday.
On Friday I completed an order of macaron gift packs and the flavour was pink marshmallow.

Later in the day I made dessert of poached pears. I had been contemplating the concept for some time now and thought that when plated, looked very good, so I got to creating a dish for dessert and this was the final product.

It was raspberry poached pears along with shortbread crumble, homemade vanilla ice cream, almond praline and freeze dried raspberries. I was really pleased with the way the flavours came together because I had used components from many different recipes and brought them together to create a dessert which wasn't too bad. I was however disappointed with my ice cream quenelle but I suppose I will just have to keep practicing...

Blueberry

Today I trialed some blue macarons which I have been asked to make for Jeans for Genes Day morning tea next month. I thought I would try a new flavour and that was blueberry. I got the recipe from my Adriano Zumbo cookbook. The recipe was for Blueberry and Lavender however I chose to leave the lavender out and adapt the recipe that way because I haven't found anywhere that sells culinary lavender yet (although I must admit I haven't really looked). I was really pleased with the way they turned out and can't wait to make them again for such a good cause.

New Adventures

Over the past few weeks, I have made many developments in the cooking world and I am excited to say that I have now started up my own small business - Sweet Treats by Tannah. I also tried baking some exciting new things that I'm happy to showcase to everyone. I was really excited after my large package turned up from the Melbourne Food Depot recently and I decided to use some of my new ingredients to get baking. I started by using some yellow pectin to make Raspberry Pâte de Fruit. I found the recipe while browsing the wonderful web on a website called Cannelle Vanille and was so pleased with the outcome that I now need to buy some more pectin so that I can try countless new flavours. Pâte de Fruit are similar to jubes in that they are sweet, bite sized jellies coated in sugar.

Next I made some shortbread as I had an idea of what I wanted to do with the jellies. Finally I made some homemade marshmallow and I piped it on top of each of the biscuits with a jelly on them. You might know where I'm going with this or maybe not... Anyway I finished by coating the whole thing in chocolate. I was really excited about the chocolate because I had also bought that from the Melbourne Food Depot and it was Callebaut brand (if you don't know what it is, don't worry I will be doing a post about it soon). Before using the chocolate I had to temper it, and with it being my first real attempt, I was rather pleased with how it turned out. The finished product is based on the Arnotts Royals that are available from supermarkets.

As well as these, I made a chocolate bar out of the left over chocolate and my new chocolate mould. I topped to bar with freeze dried raspberries (another new purchase). 

Yesterday I changed the look of my blog and I also now have a Facebook page and Instagram account for my new business (links on the blog).

50th Cake

Recently I was asked to create a 50th birthday cake for my Uncle. I was given a few simple rules to stick to - chocolate, rectangle, with tim tams - and this is what I came up with...

Here are some recent food snaps...