plate 47: germany

And back to cake. You know I love cake, but lately I've also been blown away by the Charm City Cakes crew on Ace of Cakes on Lifestyle Food. Have you seen these geniuses in action?! Most recently I saw them create a scrabble cake, complete with score card, dictionary and the bag with tiles spilling out. Incredible. Inspiring. Impossible (for this humble home cook).

For German week, I wanted to make a Black Forest cake, known in German as a schwarzwalderkirschtorte (dare you to say that five times without getting tongue tied), which was made famous by a German confectioner in 1915. Josef Keller developed this packed-with-all-the-good-stuff dessert: a multi-layered chocolate sponge filled with whipped cream kissed with kirsch (cherry brandy), cherries and chocolate shavings. Um, yum.

 I wish.

Apparently inspiration for Josef's cake came from the clothes worn by women in the Black Forest region in Germany: a black dress, represented by the chocolate; a white shirt, the cream; and a hat with red pompoms, the cherries.

What I cooked, however, was a crazy twist on the traditional. This black forest dessert from Lemonpi is not made in a cake tin, it's made in a frying pan. Yep, a frying pan. It's called the Black Forest Skillet Cookie. It didn't feature cream, kirsch or a multitude of layers, but it did possess massive amounts of intensely rich and satisfying flavour. It was simple to put together - just fold flour, a bit of baking powder, and a teensy showering of sea salt through a mixture of beaten sugar, eggs and melted chocolate with butter. Then, just when you thought there was enough chocolate, stir in some milk chocolate and dark chocolate chips for good measure, and some dried cherries. Spoon into a skillet and bake as you would a cake.

It didn't take that long to cook - about 40 minutes was all it needed. I had to look out for a top that was set and an edge that was darkened. As I've mentioned many times on this journey, my oven is a little temperamental, so I wasn't completely sure it was done, but I pulled it out anyway after about 45 minutes a) for fear of burning it and b) to make the dinner date we had at Kenso Peking.

A few hours later, no amount of noodles, peking duck pancakes, drunken chicken and fried fish with ginger and shallots could stop me from devouring this Black Forest in a Frying Pan. Best described as a smiling assassin, seducing me with its brownie-like looks and attempting to kill me with its sinful amount of sweetness.

As I inserted the knife to make the necessary incisions, it glided through with ease. Uh oh - undercooked? No even slices emerged. While I was disappointed at serving a sloppy, muddy mound onto my pretty floral plates, the taste was actually pretty good. Everyone agreed. (Family support is unwavering and extremely generous.) Very gooey, but upon reflection I don't think it was supposed to come out cake like anyway. It just wasn't the most attractive-looking dessert.

The triple chocolatiness was magically decadent. The cherry popped up every now and then to say a juicy hello, and the flaky, cakey top danced cheek-to-cheek with the slightly sticky centre in what was quite pleasing really. Overnight in the fridge, then a few hours out if it and you'll get a nice firmer texture that I think tastes a little better.

I'd love to make a classic Black Forest cake though, so if anyone has a good recipe for it, please let me know.

plate 46: japan

Whenever I go out for Japanese, gyoza are one of my three starter staples (along with edamame and agadashi tofu), so they were an obvious choice for this week's culinary adventure. Not dissimilar from the Chinese wontons I made in week 6, gyoza are actually traditionally Chinese, so that would explain it! But these little parcels were adopted many moons ago by the Japanese. The lovely Al Pal, who has recently returned from Japan, said they were all over the country, even more so than sushi.

I upped the challenge by making the dough from scratch, rather than buying pre-made gyoza wrappers. It all went fine apart from a sticky start and being showered in flour (I know, I know, I need to embrace mess if I'm going to become a better cook), which I needed a lot of it to keep things soft and smooth...as an ear lobe as my recipe instructed. The other problem was that I didn't really leave myself enough time. I'd planned a whole gyoza-making Sunday afternoon, but shoe shopping beckoned so that plan was foiled. (Success on the shoe front though.)

Given the lack of time, I was slightly impatient and rushing to get the gyoza done so we wouldn't be eating at midnight. Being squiriferously* mannered, AJ did some wrapping and rolling too to speed things up a little. Thanks babe.

Making the mixture was of course super easy. Just mush up some minced pork, ginger, garlic, soy sauce, sesame oil, shallot and cabbage in a bowl and spoon a teeny bit into the middle of a little circle (or in our case, hearts, maps of Australia and other unidentifiable shapes) of dough, then fold over. Given our "creativity", the gyoza weren't the neatest looking little things, so I wasn't feeling overly optimistic about the flavour.

But how wrong I was! To cook them, fry them off in some oil (you need quite a bit otherwise they'll stick and split a little, as I learned) then add cold water to the pan to come halfway up the side of the gyoza to let them cook for a few minutes. Easy peasy.

Hot off the pan and dipped into a mixture of soy sauce and vinegar, they were dinner deliciousness. Very moreish and tasted all the better for having handmade the dough.

Next course came a few nights later. I cooked a soba noodle recipe from a cute little blog I stumbled across called Sumo Kitchen by a Japanese girl living in Sydney. She lavished so much praise on soba, including its A-mazing health benefits, that I couldn't ignore it.

This dish had a few elements. You make a broth first with mirin, soy sauce, shiitake mushrooms and dried fish flakes (that you need to, ahem, fish out with a slotted spoon - a bit of a laborious task, just use fish stock), which once simmered is poured over chicken cooked with diced shallot and carrot so all the flavours jumble together. Quickly cook the noodles, then artfully present on a platter and top with strips of seaweed. Pop the chicken mixture in a separate bowl, then to serve, dish up some soba into a small bowl and top with a bit of chicken mixture. Silky-soft soba, slippery slimy shiitake and salty soy made sweet, sweet music in my mouth.

Speaking of music, coincidentally I heard an interview on Triple J the other morning with Japanese sound artist Mamoru Okuno. He makes music from noises created by foodstuffs - noodle slurping, plastic wrap unfurling and other such quirky tunes. And I quote him when I say making noise while eating in Japan is a sign of respect and enjoyment. Happy slurping everyone! x

*Don't worry, I didn't know what squiriferous meant until yesterday either. It's an adjective, meaning having the characteristics or qualities of a gentleman. I found it out through a cool campaign The Oxford Dictionary is running about sponsoring words to save them. Sponsor your very own here, and promise to love it and nurture it.

plate 45: indonesia

It was the challenge that saw series two MasterChef favourite, Marion, bow out of the competition: sambal kacang - Indonesian peanut sauce. Would it eliminate me from my own kitchen? I vowed to find out.

Sambal kacang - pronounced "sum-baal kuh-chang" - is made from ground peanuts, fresh chillies, spices, sauces, salt and sugar. A delicious mingling of spicy and salty flavours. It's most famously used to smother chargrilled skewered meat and spoon over gado gado, which is how I served it.

Gado gado, which apparently means "mixed mixed" is a, you guessed it, mixed vegetable salad topped with hard-boiled egg and sometimes prawn crackers. I never knew what prawn crackers looked like pre-frying. They're like little plastic discs (in the pack we bought they were multicoloured - the blue ones freaked me out a bit) - that become puffy and airy when they connect with bubbling oil. They only have 5% prawn meat, though. Tapioca starch and wheat starch make up the majority of the ingredients. As for cooking them, exercise caution when deep-frying, and heed your mother's warning: it's all fun and games until someone loses an eye - seriously, AJ almost did as the smoking-hot oil splashed into his eye.

Sri Owen - Indonesian foodie and cookbook author - labels gado gado as classic Javanese food and one of the country's national dishes. It was super fresh, colourful and had a fantastic mixture of textures from the different vegetables.

Easy to make, but lots on the go at once. In her recipe, Sri instructs to boil each vegetable, separately, for about 4 minutes each. I really should've done my mise en place because I was madly tailing beans while the cabbage was boiling and peeling carrots while cooking the cauliflower, all the while watching my single potato and egg boil in separate saucepans, and occasionally stirring the sambal that was simmering away - with its plumes of delicious spice-scented smoke circling me.

Dipping my finger in the sauce every now and then for a cheeky taste confirmed that this sauce was gooood. No "clegginess" (said with George Colombaris' strong Melburnian accent) that led to Marion's eviction. But then again I was judging my own work, not a professional chef, so I'm sure there were problems with my peanut sauce that I wouldn't have even been able to detect. What I did notice, in my humble amateurness, was a lovely thick texture and generous hit of heat that wasn't too overpowering. I left the peanuts quite coarse, which gave a nice extra nuttiness and crunch.

It was addictive, too. I couldn't stop drizzling more of it over the vegies and, when they were all gone, licking the spoon as I scooped the leftovers into a container. Yum. Hopefully I've secured my place in the Kenso kitchen.