I’m a Total Food Geek

By on November 28, 2011 in Delicious, Snacking

Recently I have joined the new and existing food blogging collaboration that is Total Food Geeks Edinburgh; a collection of local foody fanatics that get together once a month for a themed meal (The theme for November is ‘From the tree’, and for December:’Eating Standing Up’), and then go off afterwards and write an article along a similar theme from their own food and baking experience.

It’s an experience-packed group of people who take a food concept and show it to the world in a dozen different perspectives. You can Meet the Geeks on the site and read their profiles (including mine, erk!).

My dismal attempt at baking my first lemon tarte is now charted in all it’s terrible glory, go and have a look! :)

 

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Pimp That Pacman

By on October 30, 2011 in Comedy

Yesterday I went to an awesome halloween party. A few friends of mine got together a couple of weeks ago to try to decide what costumes to wear. As the purveyor of giant snacks with a healthy appetite, there was really only one choice:

It took us a good 10 hours over two weekends, but we went as Pacman and his ghosts. Somehow I was nominated (and therefore obligated to make the costume for) Pacman, the results of which you can see!


And let’s not forget those ghosts….

A great, great night was had! :)

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Gourmet Gaming

By on October 28, 2011 in Delicious, Pimped Snack

The delightful Gourmet Gaming blog is one I stumbled across recently, and I love its concept. The author, while playing games both modern and retro, identifies tasty looking examples of food from each game, and then makes them!

Examples include the Cake from Portal:

Portal cake And a faithful recreation of a cake block from Minecraft:

Minecraft CakeAll complete with recipes and instructions. So if you ever played the original Golden Axe and thought the meaty health-restoring food looked tasty, look no further! We greatly approve :)

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Triple-layered Cake

By on October 20, 2011 in Delicious, Snacking

On my way home from a trip, I passed through a little called town called Pitlochry and stopped for some tea and cake at Hettie’s Tearooms.  I spotted this on the menu:

Hettie's TearoomsHettie's Tearooms Signature cake

It had to be done!

Triple-Layered Cake

Strawberry Sponge, followed by chocolate sponge, followed by vanilla sponge. It was awesome!

 

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The Milkybar Cakes are on me!

By on October 14, 2011 in Delicious, Pimped Snack, Snacking

A little while ago I was sent this fabulous pimp of a giant Milkybar Cake, although only the final image of the final cake was taken. Nevertheless, full credit to Sam Farrow for this spectacularly authentic effort!

Milky Bar Cake

Sam’s tale of how they made a cake fit for twenty Milkybar kids:

  • In preparation, I measured a milky bar wrapper and using my best high school maths, I multiplied the size up.  Then I painstakingly drew a stencil with all the different elements of the wrapper design
  • I took 2 8in sandwich tins (that’s all I had) and baked 4 white chocolate flavoured cakes.
  • I painted a board with blue paint as the background then had the other half cut me a smaller board which I covered with tin foil to put the actual cake on so it wasn’t touching the painted board.
  • Using the stencil as a guide I cut the cakes to size.
  • Next I covered the cakes in white chocolate ganache made with white chocolate and single cream
  • After the chocolate had set, I covered the cake in shop bought yellow icing
  • Then again using the stencil, I cut out the red part of the wrapper in shop bought red icing and stuck that on.
  • Then I used the stencil to cut out the writing and stuck the letters on (with a dab of water).
  • I carried on with the stencil building up the different elements of the milkybar and then used a brush and gel colours to paint the small details and used royal icing to stencil the small nutrition information writing at the bottom.
  • Hey presto, one milky bar cake!!

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Snacks that don’t expire

By on October 10, 2011 in Calorie Cost, Snacking

This morning’s ill-advised snack:

As well as being a pretty lazy purchase in lieu of making my own chocolate cornflake cakes, it’s given me the idea to start classifying my snacks in terms of their calorie cost per pound. This strikes me as a handy way of seeing how much calorific bang I’m getting for my buck.

That makes today’s snack have a Calorie Cost of 376kcal per £1.

The second, slightly disturbing thing I noticed is that the before before date on these is the 17th December, more than two months from the date of purchase.

I find that pretty amazing, as I’m sure homemade crispie cakes don’t last like this. What the heck am I eating that keeps this humble snack viable for so long?

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Lemons, Almonds, and Poppy Seeds

By on October 7, 2011 in Delicious

Possibly due to a not-so-subliminal suggestion from my Loaf Slice last week, my eye was caught by Jamie Oliver’s recipe for an Almond Cake with Lemon and Poppy Seeds while browsing for recipes this week. It had to be tried!

It does call for a food processor to mix the butter and egg yolks, and since I don’t have one a bit of enthusiastic arm power was required to get the job done. Surprisingly just 60g of flour is added to the mix, and when in the oven it rises very little.

We added a little more lemon juice than strictly necessary which made the almond quite hard to detect in the final cake (it was still good!), and as is usual the recommended cooking time of 45 minutes was actually just 30 in my oven and browned the top quite substantially! Never blindly leave a cake in for the time the recipe indicates, always keep an eye on it and use the clean knife testing method!

What I will say is that 75g of poppy seeds is way, way too much. You’ll be picking them out of your teeth for hours afterwards and makes the rest of the cake very crunchy. If I make this again I’ll only be using half as many.

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Can Kate Really Bake?

By on September 29, 2011 in Calorie Cost, Delicious, Snacking

Somewhat unashamedly on mornings when I run to work (another 544 Fitocracy points in the bag!), I had this in lieu of a healthy, sensible breakfast.

Kate's Zesty Lemon Loaf SliceThis was a tidy 88p from Tesco. I was a little suspicious about the ‘Kate’s Cakes’ name, as I don’t trust big, lumbering supermarkets not to come up with a fake and fun brand that tries to convince you that your mass-produced snack was genuinely made in a kitchen by a lady called Kate.

I was pretty surprised to find that Kate’s Cakes are in fact an independent supplier that serves many clients, and they even have a rather cute website. In addition to four flavours of loaf slice (all of which I will now have to try), it seems they also do snack bars, full-sized cakes and muffins. My only criticism is that nowhere on the packaging is there a calorie breakdown (something I always look for), and checking on the website I see my inconspicuous little cake slice is an eye-popping 376 kcals! Definitely something I’d prefer to know as my usual cut-off is about 250. Also quite a fatty, sugary content, so a healthy snack this is not.

Cake slice nommed

Nearly 94 calories in that bite!

Pretty tasty on the whole, and I do like cakes with poppy seeds as it adds a little bit of crunch to the bite and makes me pause to savour it a little longer.

All in all, worth a try, but only if you’re prepared to exercise it off afterwards! Another snack chosen entirely at random next time :)

Calorie Cost: 427kcal per £1

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A Ferrero Rocher Cake that’ll truly spoil you

By on September 14, 2011 in Delicious

For no other reason than it being a Tuesday, a few friends came around last night and we knocked together a Ferrero Rocher Cake. We didn’t have the foresight to take any pictures of it as we went, so all I can show you is this final pic.

Click to enlarge (or bake to engorge)

It was delicious, but an eye-poppingly calorific snack. I thought you may appreciate a receipe for this, so here you go:

Ingredients:

  • 200g Butter (unsalted)
  • 200g Caster Sugar
  • 400g Plain Flour
  • 2 tsbp Baking Powder
  • 4 Medium Eggs
  • 100g of Milk/Dark chocolate
  • 12 pack of Ferrero Rochers
  • An enormous jar of Nutella

Method:

  1. Whisk 4 eggs together in a mixing bowl until nice and frothy.
  2. Melt butter over a gentle heat (or throw it in the microwave for 30 seconds like I did), and mix with egg, sugar, and baking powder.
  3. Melt the chocolate using a Bain-marie until nice and viscous, and add to mixture.
  4. Sift flour and fold into the mixture until nice and, erm, cake-mixturey.
  5. Grease a cake tin (we used a nice 21cm one), and pour in the mixture.
  6. Bake at about 160 degrees centigrade (320F) for 30-40 minutes. Keep poking it with a knife and stop baking it when the knife comes away clean.
  7. Leave cake to cool, remove from tin. Cut cake in half horizontally, spread a fat filling of Nutella across the lower half, then replace.
  8. Smear even more Nutella along the top of the cake and decorate it with any Ferro Rocher you didn’t eat while the cake was cooking.

If the Ambassador still held receptions, this cake would captivate the life out of his guests. Exchellente!

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Getting fit can be a game

By on September 9, 2011 in Fitness

Recently I’ve become rather obsessed with Fitocracy, a website that allows you to log almost every type of fitness activity known to man, and awards you points depending on the intensity and duration of your exercise. For example, yesterday I ran the 4 miles from my flat to work, and got a little over 500 points (taking my current total to 2210). But why would anyone care about acquiring seemingly arbitrary points?

It seeks to make fitness a kind of role-playing game, where the player is incentivised to complete quests and continuously ‘level up’ in order to boast the highest score amongst their peers. You can create or become a member of various groups and see yourself ranked against a leaderboard. It’s surprisingly motivating to know that I just need a couple of hundred points to conquer the guy above me on the board, and recently I’ve been powerwalking around as much as possible. Just for the points!

Quests take the form of fitness goals, such as running a mile in less than 12 minutes. Once a quest has been conquered, it is replaced with another, slightly harder quest (in this case, run a mile in less than 10 minutes), each time giving you a little points boost for reaching the goal. Very often it’ll offer a lot of easy points for just getting started on a new type of activity for the first time. I am a terrible swimmer, but the knowledge that doing 100 metres would bag me another 20 points had me searching google for my nearest swimming pools yesterday.

The excellent emphasis of the website is purely on fitness, with absolutely no consideration for whatever your diet is. Clearly, a healthy diet would be a bonus for you, but I found it refreshing to see a system that entirely rewards activity, because this is much better for you than sitting sedentary at a desk nibbling on a salad. I’d much rather tuck into a hearty sandwich knowing that I’m going to more than walk it off on the way home, and earn myself points in the process.

The site is still in beta however, and subject to constant refinement. The calculations that awards points seem very well weighted to the activity, and you can even log general ‘walking around the office’, although it will award you a proportionally feeble number of points comensurate with your effort. Critically, what the site really needs is some kind of ‘points decay’ mechanic that penalises long periods of inactivity, so that if you run for a couple of weeks but then sit down for 6 months, you shouldn’t expect to log back on at the same level you left off. Apparently this particular feature is a work in progress and will be implemented in future revisions of the site.

Occasionally flapping your legs around at work will not get you fit

It makes me think of how many hours I’ve spent sitting at my desk, playing a game purely to get my game character levelled up. Even before this website it occured to me that if I’d spent all that time exercising instead, I’d now be a powerhouse of muscular fitness, rather than a wheezing wreck that can just about stumble into work without dying.

Access to the site is currently invite-only, meaning you either have to request an invite, or find a friend who got there first and get one off them. At the time of writing I still have 3 invites remaining, so if you’d like one email pimpdaddy@pimpthatsnack.com :)

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