The not so yummy mummy

By: Mrs Robot

"I won't do a chocolate cake for Halloween this year," I thought. "I know I was planning to make a werewolf, but I bet everyone's fed up of chocolate cake*."

After lots of thinking about this year's Halloween cake, I decided to make a carrot cake and pipe the coating into 'bandages' to make a mummy. I got a lovely broad icing nozzle from Pitts, Trowbridge's specialist baking and sugarcraft shop, dragged out my trusty old copy of Mary Berry's Ultimate Cake Book (the same book that contains the always-reliable chocolate cake recipe) and got to work.

The cake worked brilliantly. It looks very tasty. This is despite our 'pick what you think will work' oven temperature dial, which has lost all its numbers. The cream cheese icing, however... I don't know what went wrong. I followed the recipe, yet instead of a nice fluffy mixture it was RUNNY. Properly liquid. I tried beating it, no joy. I gave in, put it in the fridge in the hope that the cool temperature would stiffen the two main non-sugar ingredients (cream cheese and butter), made a couple of eyeballs from marshmallow fondant and went to bed.

I left it in the fridge overnight. This morning it still wasn't pipeable. Have you ever seen the appalling horror film The Stuff**? That's what it looked like. Runny white goop***. It tasted great, but was no good for cakes. I desperately whipped up a batch of buttercream, but on starting to decorate realised I'd need enough sugary icing to send my entire office into a diabetic coma.

I'm feeding my workmates sweets from M&S instead, and will defeat the mummy myself later...

*Like that EVER happens.
**Which I remember mainly because in the film The Stuff came in pots and put my brother off Pot Noodles for years. You'd think given he was prepared to eat the contents, a mere horror film would have no effect, but it did.
***If you've any ideas what might have gone wrong with the cream cheese icing, I'd love to know. I traded the specified marge for butter, and did wonder if there was some chemical in margarine that was required. Or is modern soft cheese in tubs treated in some way to make it soft that also renders it unsuitable for turning into icing? I can't work it out.

FREE PIE!

Not actually a pie, but tasty.

By: Mrs Robot

No, not for you. Free 'pie' for me! Bristol-based pie company Pieminister decided to give everyone at my workplace a free pie pot today. They're not really pies, they're pie filling topped with potato, but they're jolly tasty anyway. Mr Robot would probably go into an extended rant at this point about the lack of pastry, and indeed there was some grumbling round the office about it (not that anyone refused to eat their Pie Pot owing to a lack of pastry).

Some of the range has slightly different fillings to the firm's range of proper pies, which I'm not sure are widely available outside the south-west, though Waitrose stocks them. You can get the chorizo and beef 'Matador' as both a pie and a pot, however. I make all our pies at home, but have enjoyed Pieminister pies with mash in the Raven in Bath over the years. A pint or three, big pile of carbs and meat, what's not to love?

We're pretty good at recycling at Casa Robot; even plastic tubs from the Chinese takeaway go on to have a new life as freezer containers, while foil trays get washed and recycled. I rarely eat things that come in plastic tubs because I picture vast piles of the things accumulating as landfill. However, I've checked online and it looks as though my local council (Wiltshire) accepts rigid plastics at its recycling centres, so I can ditch the guilty feelings. If I ever have to work on Saturdays I treat myself to something like an Innocent Veg Pot, something fast to heat and easy to eat at a desk but good-quality, and this would make an acceptable alternative. I could definitely see myself having one of these for an al desko lunch.

Anyway: pie, free, but I doubt Pieminister realised anyone would do a food blog post, I think they just hoped to get a bunch of hungry journos hooked. I thought I'd be upfront about the source just in case anyone accused me of being 'bought'. (Darling, it takes much more than a pie to buy me...)

Home-made bear pie. NB: does not contain actual bear.
And you can't beat an enamel pie dish - they banish soggy bottoms!

Tricky treat

Tasty, tasty Martians

By: Mrs Robot

When I first moved onto the publication I worked for, it was near Halloween, and I made a cake. Last year our holiday to Burma was quite late and I was ill when we got back, so there was no cake. This year, I decided, I'd do something special. Over the summer it had occurred to me to make a sea creature cake, but as the day drew close I kept the overall idea of tentacles but changed everything else. I was going to make Mars, complete with Martians poking out of craters (I know, I know, Mars has canals not craters!) and a three-legged walker.

The chances of anything coming from Mars are a million to one, eh?

My fallback cake is the Sunday Best Chocolate Fudge Cake from Mary Berry's Ultimate Cake Book. It always goes down an absolute storm. However, I didn't want to do that yet again. As a variation I made two cake mixtures, a chocolate one and an orange one, and marbled them together. They planned to sandwich them with chocolate fudge icing and the cover the whole thing in orange-flavoured buttercream, dyed a deeper colour to make the surface of the red planet.

The cake worked perfectly, and the fudge filling is always reliable. Before covering the cake roughly with the orange icing, I made two rings of orange fondant to support the craters. After that, I dotted it with extra red food colouring (applied with the dryish tips of a pastry brush) and sprinkled over metallic 'rocks'. I got those in a tub in Tesco.

How could you resist that little face?

Halloween is the only time I make decorated cakes, so although I'm pretty good with my hands, I'm not great at making edible decorations. I hadn't been sure whether to make the rest of the decorations with fondant or marzipan, but the fondant went really sloppy when I made the craters, so I went for marzipan for the rest of the decorations. The tentacles were easy: roll a sausage from green marzipan, make it thinner at one end, then make graduated balls of red marzipan and press them into shape on the tentacle with a cake decorator's ball tool.

The walker was a disaster. I'd planned to make three legs, supported internally with cocktail sticks, then put a saucer on top. All would be made of grey fondant sprayed with edible iridescence. It just didn't work. The pieces had too much texture to look like real metal but not enough detail to be interesting, and they didn't hold together well. On top of that, next to the tentacles it just looked inty and puny. In the end I made extra tentacles. Something was missing though... there was a gaping hole at the centre of the tentacles... Eyeballs! And, you know, once I'd made a couple of marzipan eyeballs and added those, it all looked fine.

That's foiled your plans for global domination!

The workmates seemed to enjoy the cake, though there was a little to bring home. I would say that was a shame, but it kept Mr Robot happy. And I really loved sharing it with everyone and seeing their reactions. I love Halloween!

Bun cha bonanza!

By: Mrs Robot

MiMi Aye's bun cha - so good I had to copy them!

From this blog it probably looks like I don’t do as much cooking as Mr Robot. I actually cook quite a lot, but it’s usually the sort of thing where I look at what ingredients we have in the kitchen and work out what I can turn them into. A sort of day-in, day-out invention test, if you like. Today, though, I did make something from a cookbook. At the launch for MiMi Aye’s book Noodle!, she served little Vietnamese pork patties (bun cha; excuse my lack of accents), and they were so good I decided to make some to treat our workmates. I made the patties yesterday and refrigerated them overnight, and assembled the food before work today.

I copied MiMi Aye’s serving method from the book launch. She’d balanced the patties and some rice noodles on a lettuce leaf so they could be eaten as finger food. I didn’t make any pickles, because it seemed likely to get all jumbled up when I transported the things to work, and I jammed each little leaf-noodle-patty pile together with a cocktail stick. I made the dipping sauce, but put it in a little squeezy bottle for practicality. It’d be a bit embarrassing having to get a new keyboard from computer services because someone had dropped fish sauce in the old one! Also it allowed people to have as much or as little sauce as they liked.

Le Creuset grillpans are honestly worth every penny. Fab results.

Feedback from both teams was excellent – mine were very taken with the look of the patties, while Mr Robot’s workmates loved the sauce. If you have access to your fridge at work, this would make an outstanding packed lunch dish.

I really like these patties. I’m tempted to experiment further with them. After all, if you’ve got lettuce and a patty, you’re nearly into burger territory. Add a sesame seed bun, make up some garlic and chili mayo with a dash of fish sauce in it to replace the dipping sauce, and it could be a winner. The patties would also be great done on skewers on the barbecue, as a sort of Vietnamese kofte, served up with a green leaf salad, and with the dipping sauce minus the water as a salad dressing.

As usual, we don’t give out the recipes, but if you mosey on over to MiMi Aye’s website, Meemalee, she’ll direct you to places where you can buy the book.

Nice dish of grilled patties. I ate some at this stage - quality control, you understand.

All images (c) PP Gettins