Tanzanie Odyssey...

So, the family spoke and the chocolate won out.  So I cooked.  And cooked.  And cooked.

First off, the cast of characters.  It was actually not that varied a shopping list.

Chocolate, cream, eggs, cocoa and sugar were the main ingredients.  In very large quantities.  A few novelty items - gelatine and glucose syrup.  And a few things I didn't bother with (inverted sugar and pectin - more on this later).

Now, as you read the Adriano Zumbo book you will notice it is very precise.  69g of cold water precise. Heat to 103 C precise.  My task was made a little more difficult by one of the more... interesting features of our oven.

See that knob?  That's the temperature control knob.  See what's missing?

Yup.   Temperatures.

To be fair, it *did* have markings when we moved in.  But about a year ago, the fact that we actually clean our oven (sporadically) meant we no longer have markings.   I can guesstimate well enough for every day cooking, but I doubt Zumbo would approve.

Anyway, off we started with chocolate meringue.

I'm pretty good with meringue, so it didn't present too much of a challenge, except I didn't pipe it as instructed.  (My inability to follow instructions forms somewhat of an ongoing theme, you'll see.)

The chocolate jelly was next - I'm a fairly new convert to leaf gelatine, but I love it, baby!  I also liked the Zumbo tip of chopping the leaves up before adding the cold water.  Sensible, yes, but it didn't occur to me last time and I ended up dripping water all over the kitchen.

At this stage, vanilla creme brulee was also made, baked and popped into the freezer, but I forgot to take a photo.  Then I gave it a rest for the night, and started Saturday morning with the chocolate madness again.

First off was what Zumbo calls a 'chocolate flourless biscuit' but which is in fact a sponge.   I made two of them, coated one with melted chocolate, let it dry and popped it chocolate side down on the bottom of my square(ish) springform pan. 

 That got topped with the ganache I'd made.   The ganache was meant to be made with 75% cocoa tanzanie chocolate.  My local Coles didn't have tanzanie chocolate (quelle surprise!) so I substituted a mix of Green and Black's organic 55% cocoa mayan spice, beefed up with bit of Lindt extra dark (80%) to up the cocoa content.   I also made chocolate sea salt flakes (as directed), which were folded through the ganache.  A second piece of sponge then covered the ganache layer. 

Then came out the chocolate jelly (came out pretty well, except a slight cling wrap issue - but we overcame), which was topped with the meringue.

The meringue that cracked.  I then decided it was too thick anyway (ignoring the fact that if I had piped as instructed it probably would not have been too thick), so I tried to shave it down.   When it imploded. So then the meringue layer became a meringue crumb layer.  Topped with deconstructed vanilla creme brulee, because it refused to come out of the tin.

This, I might add, was the vanilla creme brulee I painstakingly prepared to Adriano Zumbo's exact (and I do mean exact) directions.  I weighed the egg yolks and cream.  I greased the pan.  I froze it the way he directed.  And yet it would not come out of the pan.  I ignored the concept that perhaps my oven temperature wasn't exactly right in the baking, and became increasingly cavalier with exactness in the next process.

Chocolate saboyan mousse.  Well!  I ignored my thermometer.   Melt chocolate and then cool to 45 C? I scoffed!  Forget it Zumbo.  I can tell if chocolate is too hot (it will melt the cream) or too cold (it will set too quickly).  Whisk sabayon until exactly 82C?  In your dreams!  I've made saboyan before without a thermometer.  I can do it this time.

So was I courting disaster?  Were the cooking gods going to teach me the importance of following instructions?  Was Adriano Zumbo going to descend into my kitchen in a fit of pastry pique?

Nope.  It worked perfectly.

So I topped off the whole shebang with the saboyan, put it in the freezer, and sat down for a cup of tea.

Then I lost a toddler,  (Bliss! No, I'm not that careless.  My mother took him.), had another cup of tea and made the chocolate mirror glaze.  No pictures of the glaze in progress or the state of my kitchen when I'd finished.

Emboldened by my success with saboyan, I strayed even more off the beaten path.  I couldn't find inverted sugar, so I used honey!  I couldn't find pure pectin, so I used Jamsetta!  (I did google extensively to find out the pectin-sugar proportions in Jamsetta and adjusted the recipe accordingly.  For the record, 50g of Jamsetta contains ~ 10g of pectin and 40g of sugar.)  When I accidentally measured out 3 g of water too much, I shrugged my shoulders and carried on.  I was living on the wild side.

Glaze made but not set, we packed the cake and glaze into a freezer bag and headed across to Mum's, to be greeted by this year's iteration of the Valentine's angel.

Unlike last year, when February was actually summer in the capital, it was a more clothed angel this time around.

People arrived, champagne was opened, and I had glazed the cake.  (Actually, I glazed the cake before the champagne.  I was taking no chances.)  Then it got cut up, and left to defrost for two hours.

It was, in the end, all ok.

Incredibly rich, incredibly good, and I don't think I'm going to need chocolate for the next 6 months.  The colour of my kitchen right now - brown.  Glossy, thick, shiny brown.

Roses are red...

We're having a Valentines' Day dinner with the extended family on Saturday night.  When we did this last year, the cousins were newly arrived from Hong Kong, and the boylet looked like this.

Now the kids have had a year of Australian school, weather and backyards and Toby is much bigger.  Bet we can still get him to wear the wings though.

I've volunteered to cook, because I like to, and because something fell into my trolley at Costco last week.  (Costco is dangerous that way.)

So the only question remains, what dessert to make?

I'm tossing up between a duo of pink desserts (the valentine theme is obvious):

paired with (because one Zumbo dessert isn't enough of a challenge...)

Or, if I want to go the also traditional chocolate for Valentines route, there's this little number.

Don't let the picture fool you.  This baby has 6 different layers and textures of chocolate in it - a flourless biscuit sandwiching a chocolate tanzanie ganache with salted chocolate flakes, a layer of chocolate meringue, vanilla creme brulee, chocolate jelly and a chocolate saboyan mousse.  All finished off with a chocolate mirror glaze and tempered chocolate.

(Yes, I am considering making this for 12 people.  I get kind of insane in the dinner party planning phase.  Luckily my husband accepts it as an adorable quirk.)

Or, to go non traditional and just because it looks delicious, there's always the more exotic barbados...

What to chose?

Many cultures, food on sticks

What else could this be then the National Multicultural Festival?  The first of our February fairs (the Canberra show is coming up soon - vegetable sculptures and all...), and it was fantastic.

Unlike the Lucky Dragon, the day didn't start with a toddler tantrum.  Rather, I got out of the shower to find a very happy toddler and a very patient dog.  It's amazing how she can look long suffering even when blindfolded.

She forgave him for the indignity.  At least, I think that's what the kiss was for.

After dress ups was over, we headed off to the festival.  Although we've lived in Canberra for 5 years now (I still can't quite believe that), we've never managed to get to the festival before.  And we have been missing out.  The festival takes over the city centre, and stalls from pretty much every country, each organised by region, more or less.  The embassies had their own tents, with information and displays.  But the food tents - oh, my, the food tents.  All kinds of community groups from many cultures have their own stalls (my end gozleme count was 6 stalls), all offering bits and bites at really very reasonable prices.

 We got into civic early(ish) - half an hour after we planned, so on toddler time that's a win.  It wasn't too crowded when we started, so we got right to the eating.  We had Cambodian beef satay - very lemongrassy, very good.  Then we continued the food on a stick with Thai chicken satay.  Very peanuty, very good.

Then a quick trip by the Iranian stall, to sample saffron and blackcurrant juices.  The saffron in particular was amazing.

Unfortunately the lamb spit roasting over charcoal wasn't quite done when we went by one of the Greek stalls.

But then Toby decided to get into the action with Chips on a Stick - a whole potato, spiral cut, battered and deep fried.  Tragically good.

When I say the whole of the city centre was taken over, I meant all.  Public art doubled as dumpling price holders:

Not pictured: the nepalese momo and the cannoli we also took on board.  If we had wanted to (and perhaps if it had been a little later in the day), there was also beer from many countries and vodka from the Russian tent.  It wasn't all food and drink though.  Toby got up close with a police motorcycle.

We also sat in on a Bollywood dance workshop.

The audience (including me) gamely tried to follow the instructions.  Toby wasn't too impressed.

By about 12:30 the crowds really started to increase, and moving about with a stroller became challenging.  Toby decided this was the time for his tantrum (like we were going to escape without one!) and although there were still many, many things I wanted to see (eat), we decided to call it a day. Lesson learned for next year:  go early, go hard.  Or leave the kid with his grandmother and go in the evening - the festival was open until midnight Friday and Saturday nights, and I think it would be great fun.  Overall, good fun, cheap (everything free except the food, which was very nicely priced) and the potential for educational.