Eclair ecstasy

I'm really giving my horn a good ol' toot today, aren't I? But I can't take all the credit for these suckers. The grand ol' dame of Australian cookery, Margaret Fulton, is responsible for the choux recipe. And Shannon Bennett, chef from Vue De Monde (do yourself an expensive favour), created the creme patisserie (I've modified it here). Pretty reliable stuff.

I had planned on posting about these a few months ago, but my piping technique was a little, shall we say, phallic. Bulbous on one end and peaked on the other, I had managed to whip up some crisp golden doodles for dessert. Not really suitable for the office.

It reminded me of a time growing up when we were served sausages and mash. As soon as Mum's back was turned, my brothers were plastering their food into an exact replica of David's most valuable assets. Bennetto's are a classy bunch.

On this occasion I managed to make a far less offensive dish. The eclairs are fairly uniform in shape and there'll be no awkwardness polishing them off in front of your colleagues.

The shining star of this is honestly the pastry cream. This is a new level of richness that just won't quit. The vanilla is so pronounced: it doesn't play second fiddle to the chocolate. It's a good idea to fill these as close to serving as possible. Sog reduction is key.

I've probably made about a thousand different chocolate sauces on this blog before, so at the risk of repeating myself, I've linked back to the crazy old baked cheesecake from a few months ago. You won't be sorry.

So I promise my next post will be far less bawdy. No more references to anatomy, puerile humour or titter-worthy gags. This is a once-off. I don't usually do this.

That's what she said...

Ingredients

1 cup water
125g butter
1 cup flour
4 eggs
1 tsp sugar
1 pinch salt

Preheat oven to 200ºC. Line a baking sheet with baking paper.

Bring the water and butter to the boil slowly, melting butter. Reduce heat and add flour, stirring until the mixture comes together in a ball. Remove from heat and add the mixture to the bowl of your electric mixer. Mix on high, adding eggs one at a time. Make sure you mix thoroughly to ensure the dough does not split. Add the sugar and salt and mix until incorporated.

Place the dough in a piping bag. Pipe onto a lined baking sheet in 10cm lengths. Bake for 20 minutes, then reduce heat to 180ºC and bake for a further 10-15 minutes, or until golden.

Creme patisserie

1 cup milk
1 cup cream
1 tsp vanilla paste
6 egg yolks
1/2 cup sugar
4 tbsp cornflour

In a medium saucepan, combine the milk, cream and vanilla and bring to the boi slowly. In the meantime, whisk together the sugar and egg yolks until pale and fluffy. Add the cornflour and whisk to combine.

Add 1/2 cup of warmed milk to the yolk mixture and stir to combine. Add to the remaining milk in the saucepan and return to a low heat. Stir constantly until the mixture thickens. You may wish to whisk the mix if it thickens to quickly. Once the creme has thickened and just boiled, remove from heat and strain into a bowl. Cover with plastic wrap and cool in the refrigerator.

To fill the eclairs, fill a piping bag with the creme patisserie. Poke a small hole in the ends of the eclairs and pipe in the creme.

Top with chocolate sauce.

Chocolate cupcakes with salted caramel centres and peanut praline

Life is one big test. A test I've been getting straight 50s on for most of my life. That's not a cue for the violins. At least I've been passing (though, had I lived in the States, I may not have been so lucky. Isn't a 60 a pass mark there? That's about as much as I learnt from Beverley Hills 90210. Morale lessons be damned).

I do alright, don't get me wrong. Job, boyf, buddies and fam are all A-OK. But I've never really looked after myself. I cook the heck out of a cupcake and for a good while, ate the heck out of them as well. I'm trying to lift my pass mark to a credit. So life's big test at the moment is trying to stay away from baked goods. That's a test pretty much destined for failure in my kitchen.

It's RSPCA Cupcake Day today. I promised to bring a dozen of my oven's finest to work. I baked cupcakes, stirred salted caramel, beat together some buttercream and dissolved sugar for a praline I'm pretty sure you'd sell your grandmother for. And I didn't eat one. single. crumb. High fives for my inner fat kid.

When you're trying to look after your health in this way, you expect a few challenges here and there. What you don't expect is your partner to wave it in front of your face. In the last two days he's eaten a bag of Clinkers, two Eskimo Pies (the remaining four are in the freezer practically wailing at me to be eaten) and a milkshake.

When we were driving home from a night out (I was that fun one abstaining from booze) Matt's eyes lit up at the sign of the Colonel in the distance. "KFC", he started whispering. "Let's stop for KFC", he said breathlessly. These were my kind of sweet nothings. He knows that salty, oily business is my achilles heel. "No", I said firmly, speeding up past the beady-eyed saboteur. I looked at Matty's face in the dark and he's got that evil grin on his face. He's not only willing me to fail, but having fun doing it.

For all the crap I'm missing out on, I actually feel a thousand times better than I have before. I'm exercising most days and it's beginning to feel like I'm not being punished for crimes committed in past life. Better than that, I'm actually enjoying it. Don't you just want to vomit? And just the other day, I saw a pile of chips in the bottom of the pantry (another of Matty's cruel traps, I presume), and didn't even consider cracking open a packet.

So the cupcakes will be taken to work without so much of a taste test to verify their deliciousness. But look, I've made the cupcakes, the caramel and the buttercream before. The praline's new, but really, how can you stuff up praline? (When you crystallise your sugar three times, pretty easily).

The thing I'm looking forward to most? Seeing the salted caramel ooze from the chocolatey crumb - a pleasant surprise for even the most hardened cupcake connoisseur. I'll just have to live vicariously through their joy, smug in my little land of whole foods.

Ingredients

1 1/3 cups plain flour
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
110g butter
2 eggs
1/2 tsp vanilla paste
1/2 cup milk
2 tbsp cocoa
50g chocolate

Preheat the oven to 180ºC. Line a baking tray with cupcake wrappers.

In an electric mixer, cream the butter until light and fluffy. With the mixer going, add the sugar one tablespoon at a time until it is all incorporated. Add the eggs one at a time, mixing thoroughly between additions.

Sift together the flour, baking powder and the cocoa. Add half to the butter and mix on low until just incorporated. Add some milk and vanilla, then the remaining flour and finally the last of the milk, mixing between each addition. Melt the chocolate in the microwave for 1 minute and add to the cake batter.

Spoon the batter into the cake wrappers until around 3/4 full. Bake for approximately 25 minutes or until a skewer leaves the cake clean. Leave to cool on the tray until ready for assembly.

Salted caramel

200ml thickened cream
120g caster sugar
75g liquid glucose
1/2 tsp vanilla paste
50g butter
3g gelatine soaked in 2 tbsp water
1/2 tsp sea salt

Preheat a heavy based frypan over medium-high heat. Bring the glucose, vanilla and cream to the simmer together in a small saucepan. In the heated frypan, sprinkle over the sugar and allow to melt, stirring occasionally to stop it from burning. Once all the sugar has dissolved and the cream is simmering, add the cream to the sugar. Whisk quickly to mix thoroughly - be very careful as the mixture will spit. Cube the butter and add to the caramel, followed by the gelatine, whisking continuously. Remove from heat, add the salt, strain and cool.

Chocolate buttercream

110g butter
3 1/2 cups pure icing sugar
1/4 cup milk
2 tbsp cocoa
50g chocolate

In an electric mixer, cream butter for around 5 minutes until light and creamy. Add half of the sifted icing sugar, cocoa and the milk and beat for a further 3 minutes or until all the lumps have disappeared. Add the remaining icing sugar and beat for 2 minutes. Melt the chocolate in the microwave and add to the mixture, mixing thoroughly to incorporate all the chocolate.

Peanut praline

120g caster sugar
70g water
50g salted peanuts

Combine the water and sugar in a saucepan over low heat. Stir continuously until the sugar melts completely. Bring to the boil and stop stirring. Once the sugar colours to a golden brown, remove from heat and pour over the peanuts. Once the praline has cooled enough to handle, stretch the toffee into long strands with a couple of peanuts at the base.

To assemble

Using a melon baller, scoop a hole out of the top of the cupcake. Fill the cupcake hole with the caramel and top with a tiny sprinkle of salt. Fill a piping bag with the chocolate buttercream and pipe on top of the cupcake. Top with a strand of peanut praline and serve.

Baked cheesecake with chocolate sauce and poached pear

We lived across the road from a lake in our early childhood. Any opportunity and we were in the water, flicking mud in each other's eyes and painting "dork" on our sister's back in sunscreen. OK, so maybe that was Police Academy, but we did spend far too long in that lake.

Mum spent a lot of her time bribing us to get our homework done or keep up with our chores. Ha! Chores! I make it sound like we were four little chimney-sweeps, toiling away in the hot Mallee sun with cardboard sandals and newspaper for bedsheets. Really all we had to do was pick up our clothes and do the dishes every so often. Do you think we could wrap our feeble brains around that?

So the bribes that worked in our house were pretty simple: television, food or the lake. No swims until all homework was done. That way if Mark was faffing about with his Matchbox cars, he knew he'd cop it from the rest of us for lake-blocking (a more age-appropriate and less sexy version of cock-blocking). No dessert until your dinner plate was clean, which instilled a healthy appetite (read: crazy overeating) from that point on. And of course, no telly until the dishes are done. Pretty effective, that one.

So I've pulled a few tricks from the Pauline Bennetto Playbook of Discipline and Motivation. I knew we had a big couple of days at work and needed something to get the team going, and reward them for their hard work. The team nominated cheesecake as their motivator of choice. Bless their cotton socks.

I raced home Wednesday night and whipped up this treat for the guys. It took most of the night but wasn't really too much of an effort. All the effort was expended getting it to work. First up it was hanging in a plastic bag from my handlebars. It sailed through the air and was kicked a few times by my nobbly knees. I ended up balancing it on top of my basket around 6km to work before disaster struck.

I told the story to my colleagues: "Gee, I feel like I've lost loads of weight, I can feel the road beneath my seat." I look down and realise my back tire is flat. Still plenty of padding on my backside, though.

Once I served up the cheesecake, I made the demand. No cake until at least one piece of work was completed by each person. I can't say I was disappointed when they each chose the simplest pieces of work and knocked them over in 5 minutes. Very Bennetto-esque indeed.

Ingredients

200g butter
100g caster sugar
1 egg yolk
1 tbsp cream
250g flour

500g cream cheese
200g sugar
1 tbsp cornflour
3 eggs
juice of half a lemon
1/2 tsp vanilla paste
400g sour cream

1 green pear
1 stick cinnamon
2 star anise
1 cup sugar
2 cups water

1 cup chocolate pieces
1/2 cup cream
2 tbsp glucose
2 tbsp caster sugar

To make the pastry base, preheat the oven to 180ºC. Place the butter and sugar into the bowl of a food processor. Pulse until combined well and add the egg yolk and cream. Mix until the yolk is incorporated and add the flour. Pulse briefly until just combined. Turn out onto a floured bench. Knead briefly to bring together. Roll until around 4mm thick. Cut around the base of a springform pan and roll across. Bake for around 10-15 minutes or until golden brown.

To make the cheese filling, reduce the heat in the oven to 170ºC. Mix the cream cheese and sugar on high until light and creamy. Add the cornflour and mix again until combined. Add the eggs one at a time until each is incorporated well. Add the lemon juice and vanilla and mix briefly. Add the sour cream and whip until combined. Pour into the springform pan on top of the pastry base and bake for around 1 hour or until just wobbly in the centre. Turn off oven and leave for around 30 minutes.

To poach the pear, combine the cinnamon, sugar, water and star anise in a saucepan and bring to the boil. Add the pear and cover with lid. Poach for around 20 minutes or until pear is cooked through.

To make the chocolate sauce, combine all the remaining ingredients in a saucepan. Cook over a low heat, stirring regularly. Sauce is complete when chocolate has just melted.

To serve, remove the cheesecake from the springform pan. Top with lukewarm chocolate sauce and sliver of poached pear.

Chocolate rhubarb tart

Winter always seems so depressing: it goes on forever, dark and gloomy, and I can never seem to get warm. The other night, I hopped into bed and it was so freezing, the one side of my body not touching the electric blanket ached the whole night through. It didn't help I'd been krumping half the night and left the window open in our bedroom for the midnight chill to settle in.

But I actually love winter. By the time summer has petered out in Melbourne, I'm well and truly ready for a bit of cool relief. Our summers are a slow burn, and culminate to a three to four week stint of stupidly hot weather that is just unrelenting. Autumn rolls in and we're instantly drinking red wine and making stews.

I love getting home, turning up the heater full bore and snuggling under the blanket until Matty gets home. Dinner is baked (often accompanied by a healthy glass of red) and we watch telly or read. (Who am I kidding? The only thing I'm reading after dinner is celebrity gossip websites. Britney's daily grocery shops won't perve on themselves.) Then it's time to make the made dash to the cold half of the house and warm up all over again.

A Ritzy chocolate tart

You fool. You thought you'd had a chocolate tart before, didn't you? Well, I'm here to tell you you're wrong. This is the chocolate tart.

While planning our European adventure, I spent a little time (read: weeks and weeks) planning cooking classes. As it turns out, I only booked this one, but that's all I needed when this is the result.

We were in a rush on the day. We'd been to see Monet's garden and the bus ride took a little longer than we'd expected. It didn't help that I can't read a map to save myself and became hopelessly lost finding the venue.

Sponge cake with creme patisserie and chocolate glaze

I'm sorry. Yesterday did not happen well for me. No major disasters, mind. Just an intense tiredness that I could not shake all day. I busted out my longest (albeit slowest) run ever on Sunday and I'm pretty sure I didn't drink enough water. A late night watching Eurovision today made for an exceptionally achy day.

So today's post is a cheat post. All I want to do is climb into bed, close my eyes and nod off. I haven't felt like this in months. Months, I tells ya.

When I get tired like this, all I can do is whinge, breathe loudly and eat. Today I managed to scoff about six pieces of fruit, a bag of popcorn intended for five people, a chocolate frog, vegetable soup and takeaway curry for dinner. None of these servings were small either. No matter: run in the morning and all will be right in the world.

But fear not - the recipe's still a corker. It's just some old components re-imagined into a new concoction. Look, even my words are vaguely making sense. I said vaguely, right? It's a three way you'll be totally into: creme patisserie, chocolate glaze and sponge cake. Ain't nuthin wrong with that combo, amiright?

I whipped up this cake for a workmate's birthday recently. My one hint? Make this on the day you intend to serve it and do not leave it out of the fridge for too long. Oh and don't ride a bike with it in your basket. That was like three hints, right there. You're welcome.

Short. Sweet. Recipe below:

Ingredients

2 blowaway sponges
Creme patisserie
1 tsp gelatine, soaked in 2 tbsp cold water
1/4 cup cream
300ml cream, extra
Chocolate glaze

Slice both sponges in half horizontally. Heat the 1/4 cup of cream and add to the gelatine. Stir until dissolved. Whip the 300ml cream until soft peaks form and add the gelatine. Fold through the creme patisserie. Refrigerate overnight.

Spoon 1/3 of the creme patisserie in between the bottom two layers of sponge. Repeat for the next two layers of sponge.

Top with the chocolate glaze, drizzling over the top and sides.

Doughnuts with chocolate sauce

There are two generations in this world. Those that remember life before the Simpsons, and those that cannot. I fall into the former category (just). I can remember the first episode screening in Australia. My Mum was being released from hospital from a long stay for a fairly decent back injury.

The drive home was excruciating. For us kids. Though I'm sure it wasn't fun for Mum either, slipped disk and all. I'm certain, to this day, that Dad was driving as slow as possible to avoid the possibility of another cartoon being worked into our viewing schedule. Losing battle if I ever saw one.

Hazelnut espresso cakes

I consider myself incredibly fortunate. I've got a job I love, a fiance who rocks my world, sweet friends and a super cool family. I'm healthy and happy. I've got a bike I love to ride, I run a few mornings a week, I bake up a storm on weekends and my buddies are always keen to check out new bars and restaurants. Lucky, lucky duck.

The downside? I feel like I haven't had a moment to exhale in the last few months. I had four days off last week, with grand plans to sit, watch TV and catch up on some sleep. Instead, they were spent running, cooking, riding and typing. I feel energised, but just need a moment to unlock my jaw.

Ginger fluff layer cake with salted caramel mousse and chocolate glaze

I love a cakey project. My favourite kinds is a free reign request: the go-for-your-life attitude really gets me going. Equal parts excitement and pressure. Their reaction could be "I never expected that!" Or "I never expected that...."

The hardest thing about my latest cake request? Making a 'masculine' cake. I don't mean a sponge with two tickets to the gun show or even a layer cake with a pair of bosoms on top. Nope, I mean a nice, classy-looking cake with limited frou-frou. You see, I'm big on girly-looking desserts. I love pink, fairy floss, delicate icing sugar and love hearts. When it came to baking for a guy, I was stumped.

Enter salted caramel.

Chocolate custard in pink egg shells

Good morning my pretties. If you feel like making a labour intensive, cutesy, impractical Easter gift, have I got the dish for you. These took a little over two days to make. They took around six minutes to devour. But in terms of sheer cute-factor (it's real measure. Disney invented it), they're the gift that keeps on giving.

I've been seeing countless images on Pinterest recently of dyed eggs. I knew they were all hardboiled, but that seemed like such a waste. I remembered my second visit to Vue de Monde - I'd been served little flavoured custards in eggs shells, sitting inside a carton. It's just the thing you expect (but totally didn't see coming) from the restaurant.

Chocolate molasses self saucing pudding

I don't know why, but I always consider desserts more of a female's domain. Maybe it's because Matt is just not interested. I'll dish up a grand dessert that will have all our guests oohing and aahing for hours, but Matt will normally pass. That said, my Dad used to buy 'heart attacks', otherwise known as a raspberry cream puffs whenever he had to go into town to pay the bills. But still, desserts seem more ladylike than anything else.

Not this recipe. This pudding is sufficiently sturdy, punchy and any other blokey adjective you might care to use. I think it's the molasses that adds the kick. You might also use some bourbon but I felt that, as we were enjoying it with a small nip of scotch (Glenlivet. Oh yeah!), bourbon might be a little excessive. News flash! Emma has declared something excessive! It MUST be over the top.

Vegan hazelnut cookies

A guy in my team at work celebrated his seventh year with the organisation recently. When I remember to cook, I normally bake a little treat to acknowledge their hard work. This occasion represented a new challenge. When I first started at my new job, he joked that he was the 'V' word. Being the most inappropriate supervisor around, I automatically asked if he was a virgin. No Emma, not a virgin, but a vegan. Phew.

Peanut butter chocolate chip cookies

These. These are classics. I know I'll be preaching to the choir when I tell you these are some of the best biscuits going 'round. And if you haven't yet discovered the joy that is peanut butter and chocolate chips combined, you're welcome/I'm sorry.

Matt and I were in Ballarat on the weekend with Mum. He was meeting the Burke side of the family for the first time. We managed to go a whole meal without an someone poking someone else in the boob (a genetic trait for all Mum's side of the family, one I seem to have inherited in spades). We enjoyed Nanna's ginger fluff sponge (by way of Aunty Margaret), cheese puffs, sandwiches, Mum's sausage rolls and a date loaf that wouldn't quit. Amazing.

The three Cs: cherry, coconut, chocolate

Do you remember when the icecream-version of chocolate bars came out? In Australia, two of the most celebrated chocolate bars are the Crunchie and the Cherry Ripe bar. I distinctly remember the day Sarah and I stumbled upon the Icecream Crunchie in the local milk bar. She declared it the best icecream ever made. To this day, it ranks up there with Light and Tangy chips as a game-changing snack food (there's such a thing in the Bennetto household. We also have a deal-breaking spag bol, if you must know.)

The Cherry Ripe icecream was not met with such adulation. It was good - don't get me wrong. But the key to a good icecream crossover is to be better than the original. That's a big ask with the Cherry Ripe. This chocolate is hard to top. Even though the chocolate was dark (a big no-no to our teenaged tastes), the cherry and the coconut was such a cracker combination we couldn't pass it up.