Cream Cheese Brownies

What's not to like? - Nigella Lawson

The verdict:
There's nothing to like about this recipe, except for one thing. The way the recipe is written is intriguing.

Nigella writes, in the instructions on how to melt the chocolate and butter, that you can leave it on the stove without heat for a while before it's finished melting because it will continue to 'deliquesce' if left. Gee, thanks Nigella. You help me enhance my vocabulary, even when your recipes suck.

There will be no photos for this post. What you'll get is essentially a rant. If anyone else has made these with success, speak up! So far, my test audience of one (George) agrees with me. Nigella let us down on this one.

Unusual or substituted ingredients: Cream cheese. I thought it sounded weird to put cream cheese cubes in the mixture, but I must have liked the idea at least a little or I wouldn't have ventured down this track. Basically you cut up fridge cold cream cheese and plonk the cubes into the part-poured mixture, before covering it over with the remaining mixture. It's supposed to be like a chocolate cheesecake.

Special utensils or cookware: None.

Repeatability: Never. I was making these for an afternoon tea at George's house and I had to turn up empty handed because they failed abysmally. Why did they fail? First of all, she says to cook them for 20 minutes. The mixture has hardly warmed up in that time. Forty minutes later I really had to get them out of the oven so I could let them cool before I went out and they still weren't set.

I let them cool totally and inside, they were still runny. The cream cheese was the problem, I think. Nigella says to use 200g of cheese but once I'd put about 50g worth of cubes in the mixture, there was no room left so I think it was overcrowded and seriously impeded the cooking process.

Sauciness: Zero. I was just angry. We threw the lot out.

Overall pleasure level: I got no pleasure from this recipe at all! I felt like less of a failure though when George declared it hadn't worked for her either.

If anyone else wants to have a go to give this recipe a chance in perhaps more competent hands, go right ahead. If you don't have the book, I'll send you the recipe. Let's get a challenge happening!

Oh and the reason there are no photos is that I was in rather a rush and forgot to take any during the making of them. By the time they were supposedly done, I was so disgusted I wanted to remove all evidence of them.

These get a big fat zero out of ten from me. Nice idea, pity about the result.

Pistachio Macaroons

These are the world's most elegant macaroons - Nigella Lawson

Maybe they are in your world, Nigella. Not in mine. As hinted in RoseRed's last post, some discussion on the issue of macaroons took place before I cooked these. I know she'd had, shall we say, issues with her chocolate macaroons. I told her I was making mine for a special morning tea so it was important they worked out. I can't say I wasn't warned.

The morning tea was scheduled for Sunday morning. The following is a faithful account of my Saturday afternoon Macaroon Experience. Take note of the following photo. It demonstrates how the fiasco macaroons were supposed to look. Pretty good looking, huh? It's safe to say I was entranced by them.

The Verdict
Unusual or substituted ingredients - I took Rose Red's advice on this. She shared with me a tale of woe that involved her once shelling bucketloads of pistachios and ending up with blisters to show for it. I bought them already shelled. You grind them up with icing sugar to make a dust, as Nigella says. Then you mix them with the eggwhites. Sounds good so far, doesn't it?

The thing is, meringue-style things are not my forte. I've kept a wide berth between me and them before now. So I did approach these with some anxiety.

Special Utensils or cookware - None. But I do think I could do with some lessons in meringue making. I'm sure I've read that you should whip eggwhites in a metal bowl. Anyone know if this is true?

I should add that Nigella says to pipe the mixture onto the tray. Like RoseRed, I found it wasn't really necessary to pipe, although I did cut a hole in a zip lock bag because I have studiously avoided needing to pipe for most of my life and have, I must say, been quite happy without the experience.


Sauciness - I was ready to kill someone by the end of the afternoon. So no, not a lot of sauciness in these. Why was I ready to kill someone because of fancy biscuits? Look at this.

I had two sheets of these things, one on baking paper, one on a silicone sheet. Both stuck to buggery. They crumbled and broke and shattered. What a waste of $10 worth of pistachios!

Not one of these macaroons came away from the sheet in one piece. Not ONE!

Repeatability - You know what? I may actually try making them again one day. I love pistachios. I love meringue. If I can get these right, they'll be a dream come true for me. But not yet. I'm not ready. I was so bummed by these. I ended up making snickerdoodles on Sunday morning at the crack of dawn, just so I had something to take.

Overall Pleasure Level - It would be a lie to say I hate these entirely. We ended up crumbling them over chocolate mousse that night and they were fantastic shards of sweet, light, nutty goodness. Can't complain about that.

So, I will rate them as a failure, because they were, even if they did taste good. Tasting good is not enough. I want ones like the pretty picture.

Honestly, I think both RoseRed and i probably went wrong in the whipping phase. According to some comments we got on the chocolate macaroons, I think we didn't let the mixture dry out out enough - but Nigella gives clear instructions not to let it dry out when whipping (ie to not overwhip). I will try again one day and whip them like there's no tomorrow.

Bells

Chocolate Macaroons

the utter gorgeousness of just one mouthful of these...reveals the rank inadequacy of language - Nigella Lawson


And that's probably true, because out of this recipe, which should have made at least 18-20 macaroons, I managed to get 10. Just one bite is all you'll get!


When Bells and I were discussing what we planned to make on the weekend, she mentioned she was going to try the pistachio macaroons, which sound fabulous. But to sound a note of warning, I had to mention the disaster that was my experience with Chocolate Macaroons - pretty much same recipe but different nuts.


The verdict:
Unusual or substituted ingredients: Not really. The recipe calls for ground almonds. I've no idea if you can buy ground almonds (I expect you can, I just couldn't see them in the supermarket) and assuming they are different to almond meal (which I think they must be, as Nigella uses almond meal elsewhere in HTBADG), I just bought whole almonds, and ground them in the food processor - that sounds right doesn't it?!
Special utensils or cookware: The macaroon mix is supposed to be piped onto the baking tray. So I got out my fab-o tupperware icing ball and used that. I needn't have bothered. The painstakingly piped macaroon mix just blurbed into a dollop sized blob on the tray. So don't worry about the piping, just use a spoon.

Sauciness: Nigella suggests using baking paper lined trays. As I always do with biscuits, I use my tupperware silicone sheets (have I mentioned how much I love Tupperware??!!). Well, that was a mistake. These little suckers were so saucy they stuck to the sheet. So for round two, I thought, well, maybe Nigella's right, maybe I should use baking paper. Heh. Big mistake. Stuck even worse.

Of the 20 macaroon rounds on the sheet, I could use none of them. None. See the white rounds on the bottom of each one. That's the baking paper. Completely stuck. Thanks a bunch, Nigella!
Repeatability: I am not going to bother. I do accept that maybe I did something wrong with this recipe - maybe I should have just used almond meal. Maybe I used the wrong baking paper. I did think I might give the pistachio version a try, but I'll leave that to Bells.
Overall pleasure level: This was a rare Nigella failure. I did get 10 usuable macaroons, and they did taste pretty good sandwiched with the chocolate patissiere stuff (which is basically cream, chocolate and a little bit of butter), but a failure all the same. So it's a 4.

Stayed tuned for the next exciting episode of Macaroon. Will Bells shell eleventybillion pistachios by hand? Or will she buy them pre-shelled? Will she pipe or just dollop? And how many pistachios will she eat before putting them into the mix? And the real cliff-hanger - will they end up in the bin?

Store Cupboard Chocolate Orange Cake

Even if you don't like marmalade, you should try this: all you taste is orange - Nigella Lawson

I'm going to declare my hearty disagreement with Nigella on this one.

I actually made it a long time ago and blogged it then, so what you're getting here is a re-hashing of old material, but in the new format of this blog. I always annotate my recipes and all i wrote in the corner of the page on this one was a bold horrible. Let's see why.

The Verdict
I am neither a fan of marmalade, nor of fruit cakes (my mum makes a good one though), so what possessed me to make a cake that contains a whole jar of marmalade, I don't know. Look at the photo. It doesn't even look nice. The thing sank in the middle and burned around the edges and was just disgusting. You're lucky I'm even posting this. My husband laughs at me the way I hide all evidence, usually, of culinary failures. If I think something is truly awful, the whole lot will be binned before you can say 'I feel slightly ill.'


Special Utensils or Cookware
None. Just cake stuff. Whatever you have.


Repeatability
Not a chance in hell. I'm not even prepared to take Rose Red's verdict on this one that it was great. I think she should do a post of her version of the cake that worked out, just in the interests of balance, because I ain't making this pile of poo again.

Sauciness
Sorry Nigella. Not even you waxing lyrical about it being gorgeously aromatic is going to convince me this cake was a good idea. I think it's fair to say that Page 170 in this book will never be looked at again.

Overall pleasure level
This was a definite low point in my culinary experience. Heavy, burned orange flavour and an hour or so of my life I'll never get back. Disgusting.

I am happy to report though that in my years of cooking Nigella recipes (since about 2001) this is the only failure I've experienced. Given the number of snooty foodies I know who bang on about how none of her recipes work (she's not a real chef, you know), I don't think that's too bad. So I'm just going to write this one off as momentary glitch. Let us never speak of it again (except for in the comments).

I've also included a new label for 'failures' just so we can easily keep track of what worked and what didn't. It'll be interesting to see how many we have!

Bells