Pastitsio

Tonights dinner was yet another recipe from 100 Pasta Favourites - I really love this book. It's essentially a layered pasta bake. The bottom layer is macaroni, with a little egg and parmesan. The middle is a beef sauce, kind of like a bolognese but with a hint of cinnamon. And the top layer is a bechamel cheese sauce.

I didn't have any beef stock cubes, so I substituted chicken stock. And I only used one onion, instead of the two the recipe asked for. And I ended up adding a dash of flour to the meat sauce to thicken it, because it was just taking forever.

This recipe involved a lot of everything - a lot of ingredients, a lot of time, and a lot of dirty dishes. And the end result was a lot of food. Far more than hubby and I could finish. Now that Little Princess is three months and can sit in her bumbo and watch me cook for short stretches of time, it was a little bit easier to cook it because I wasn't as limited to her nap time. But it's certainly not a recipe for the average working mum.

Thoughts - it was ok, but not great. Very edible, it had good flavour and was filling. A bit too much bechamel, but otherwise alright. But I just felt it wasn't worth the two hours it took me to make it, nor was it worth the two hours it took me to clean up afterwards. I certainly won't be making it again.

Chocolate Sponge Cake

There are many things I despise about Christmas, and many things I love. And one of the parts I love is food! I actually really love the traditional desserts like fruit cake with fondant icing and pudding with custard, but I know this makes me rather strange. So I like to use Christmas as great opportunity for me to spread my wings a little and make a really yummy dessert that I'd normally never get away with making. There's always a large crowd at the three family Christmas parties we attend, which means my cooking is always going to get eaten, and hubby and I aren't left trying to finish two thirds of some obscenely fattening dish.

This year for our traditional boxing day lunch I decided to try something I'd never ever attempted before. Sponge cake. It's something I've often avoided, because you hear so many horror stories about sponge cakes. But the recipe in the Epicure Chocolate book said it never failed, and it looked simple enough, so armed with my new mix-master, I gave it a whirl.

To be honest I found the recipe extremely offputting. It's an old family recipe that was submitted to Epicure by a reader, so some of the directions are a tad vague. For example, it asked for a heaped dessert spoon full of cocoa. I'm used to much more precise measurements than that. Also, there was so little in the mixture. I'm used to putting masses of flour into my cupcakes, so the idea of making a double-layer cake with only half a cup of cornflour really threw me.

Thoughts - end result was FANTASTIC! I am so proud of my chocolate sponge. It tasted fantastic, it was cooked just right the whole way through, it didn't collapse or taste like rubber like the horror stories say can happen. The family lapped it up too. My dad did comment there was too much icing, but he always says that, and I thought I put the icing on very thinly. My biggest concern was that the whipped cream might make the cake soggy if I left it in the fridge overnight, but that didn't happen. I'll definitely be making this again and again!

Gnocchi with caramelised pumpkin and sage sauce

Another recipe from 100 Pasta Favorites. I love pasta, and I love gnocchi as well, but I sometimes get frustrated that for the most part pasta means either a creamy, cheesy sauce or a tomato-based one. So when I spotted this one, which is mainly made of pumpkin, I just had to give it a go.

The recipe asked for fresh sage, but sadly the supermarket had none, and I had the little princess with me so going into the big shopping centre just for herbs wasn't on the cards. So instead I used ground, dried sage. Also the recipe called for 1/4 cup of chicken stock, and opening a carton of real stock to only use a sixth of it seemed really wasteful, so instead I dissolved a stock cube in 1/4 cup of water. Aside from that I used all the right ingredients - butternut pumpkin, brown sugar, a leek, and evaporated milk. Though I did accidentally buy full cream instead of low fat, it was still good.

Thoughts - this was basically like eating pumpkin soup with gnocchi in it. The recipe made way more sauce than was needed to coat 500g of potato gnocchi, so by the end I was scooping it out of the bowl, and hubby was sopping it with bread. But none of that was a bad thing. It was really yummy, and it will definitely be cooked again. And with the texture, I can probably feed the sauce to the little princess when she turns one and can handle those sorts of solids.

Chocolate Royal Torte

I had some friends over for dinner on friday, so they could meet the little princess. And I knew they would be expecting something sweet, since sweets are kind of my thing. But I was determined to prove I can make something other than cupcakes, and I wanted something that I could serve cold because of the heat, so I went for the dessert section of a book rather than the baking section.

This recipe comes from the Epicure Chocolate book, which I bought ages ago from one of those book club things we have at work. It's the first recipe I've made from that book. It's basically a cinnamon meringue nest filled with a layer of whipped cinnamon cream and a layer of chocolate mousse. And the best part was I could make it a day ahead. So I was able to do each bit during Little Princess's naps.

Thoughts - this was lush. The mousse was so good I had to restrain myself from licking the plate. I was a bit concerned about how the cinnamon would taste in the meringue but it was really quite tasty. Hubby liked it too. I came back from work the next day to find he'd polished off the leftovers. I'll be making this again for the family this Christmas.