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Oshizushi (pressed sushi)

Thick slices of brioche, soaked in eggs and raw milk and yuzu syrup, cooked till crisp in clarified butter and then topped with matcha crumble, mascarpone cut with a little whipped white chocolate ganache and more yuzu, freeze dried raspberries, mint and passionfruit curd and freeze dried mandarin segments on the side.

Pretty before, less pretty but more delicious after; apple puff pastry roses. It's just slices of macerated apple, wound through puff pastry cups. Baked with innards of apricot jam and cinnamon/clove/nutmeg/chilli and ground rose petal sugar.

I've been feeling like I've lost my cooking mojo of late. So I woke up this morning and decided that the best way to truly feel like I'm getting back on my feet was to cook an unnecessarily complicated dinner-breakfast; highly-marbled wagyu, that I par froze, sliced thinly and rolled around enoki mushrooms, blanched asparagus and green onions, pan fried in a reduced glaze of sake, mirin, soy and sugar, on rice, with crispy lotus chips, ohitashi spinach (ground toasted sesame seeds, sesame oil, mirin and soy) and a couple kinds of homemade Japanese pickles (cucumber, ginger and sour plum fermented in honey.)

I did miss it, sorry! The roses are roses, the orange-y one was meant to be a chrysanthemum, the pink puffy one was a "I don't know, I'll just play with the shapes I can make with this piping tip" flower, and the small pinky yellow ones with leaves were MEANT to be mini tulips, but came out a bit messily so I could pretend they're either lantana, or yes, a Desert Pea.

It's just buttercream (but butter only, no Crisco sold in Australia). Couple techniques to the colouring: 1. On the white rose with pink tip - use a long skewer dipped in food colouring to paint a line of pink along the seam of the piping bag, fill the bag with white buttercream, and voila 2. On the purple with pinky orange edge - used a skinny palette knife to smear a line of pinky orange buttercream along the seam of the piping bag, fill the rest with purple 3. On the pink flowers with yellow centres - for that one, I smeared an even rectangle of fuchsia frosting over a sheet of cling film, and then set a thick line of yellow down the centre of the rectangle. Then, you use the cling film to wrap it into a sausage, folding each edge of the pink over the yellow. Twist the ends of the cling film, snip off one end, and put the whole thing (still film-wrapped) into the piping bag so that the buttercream squeezes through the tip like that.

Interesting. I did actually try it both ways - sprinkling the pistachios, cocoa and freeze-dried raspberry on the meringues before and after cooking - and the pistachio and cocoa held up just fine during the bake, but the raspberries came out shrivelled and overly dark. So I re-made the raspberry batch and sprinkled them on after cooking and they held just fine. I can see how the bake would liven up spices like cinnamon though..I might try that, thanks for the idea!

Uh...thanks?

More infernal cupcakes. I do believe I definitively now have the cupcake-piping urge out of my system for awhile.

Cupcakes, with which to practice ma piping skills.

And this was Weekend Cooking Project #2; giant, colossal, freaking stupid-huge meringues; pistachio, chocolate chunk, pomegranate syrup and freeze-dried raspberry. Each the size of a baby's head, but tastier! I have all my work team hopped on sugar.

This was a Concorde cake I made a little while ago for a colleague's farewell, reminded of it by @kriz6912's beautiful example. It's really such a stunner of a cake, and easy enough too, once you get the hang of your oven's treatment of meringue.

ICYMI, over on the Dinner thread, I made a Sichuanese 'ma la' (hot and numbing) hotpot base with a zillion spices, a billion chillies, and whole pack of butter, to boil yabbies (Australian crawfish) in. So this is more of last night's precious, wonderful, unthrowawayable ma la hotpot butter, redolent with spices and essence de yabby. Turned into fridge-clearing-out leftovers breakfast of champions; the hotpot butter spread on toasted brioche rolls, topped with grilled short rib that's been caramelised in fish sauce and black pepper, a smear of hoi sin sauce for sweetness, sriracha and shredded green onion.

The other day; chocolate rocks. White chocolate ganache, shaped in a polymer pebble mould, dipped in more white chocolate and then into 30 Celsius water mixed through with droplets of black oil-based food colouring. Today; cupcakes. I'm getting into piping!

Da yabbies - Sichuanese ma la (‘hot and numbing’) butter fire; first you make a seasoning spice mix with chilli flakes, dried chillies, white peppercorns, Sichuan peppercorns, bay leaves, black cardamom, cumin, ground coriander, fennel seeds, five spice powder, and curry powder. Then you stir together doubanjan chilli broad bean paste, Shaohsing rice wine, 17 cloves of garlic, green onions, ginger, brown sugar, a whole pack of butter, chicken stock and two more cups of dried chillis. Then you braise that all together into fiery, peppery, buttery goodness and simmer the yabbies in it (after par freezing them in an ice bath slurry to put them to sleep and then spiking them through the head to kill them quickly), before pouring the lot over blanched e-fu noodles and digging in.

Just the good old Aussie yabby! And no comment on the second bit.. (Though I HAVE already declined two requests to hold a "Friday afternoon office yabby race"..!)

Dinner PLANS. Currently chillaxing in a cooler under my desk in the office, freaking out my staff immeasurably.

How's this for a lopsided meal; green beans, and chocolate. Steamed green beans dressed with walnut oil, lemon, smoked salt and a good grating of bottarga: And then I made chocolate rocks; white chocolate ganache, shaped in a polymer pebble mould, dipped in more white chocolate and then into 30 Celsius water mixed through with droplets of black oil-based food colouring. Chocolate rocks. Video here.

Definitely the best part of a prawn; this is a favourite snack of mine; roast the heads, suck em dry! And all for me..I'm a very shellfish zombie.

And when I vegan, I vegan hard; lettuce, perilla leaf, witlof, zucchini flower and apple kimchi wraps. Bundle it all up into one tasty mouthful, and down the hatch in lovely shades of green.

In my spare time - I work. All I do is work. When I'm not at work, I'm still working anyway. And I work in child protection, so I like finicky cooking projects to take my mind to a completely different place for a few hours. But on a happier note: prawn rolls. Steamed prawns, chopped and mixed with (too much) mayo, celery, spring onions, lemon zest and celery salt and piled into a buttery brioche roll, brushed in more butter and toasted in a pan. And topped with some of the delicate inner-most celery leaves I love so much. Now, I realize lobster rolls are a dime a dozen to much of America but they're not really a thing in Australia at all, so this was a real treat.

Dessert for dinner, in miniature; first, I made a proper custard, with tempered eggs and hot cream and a whole vanilla bean and all that palaver. Then, I shaved rhubarb stalks into paper-thin lengths with my mandoline (screaming in terror the entire time, as my usual habit when I use a mandoline) and then poached them in a syrup made of sugar, water, lemon juice and star anise, and carefully dried each one individually with a paper towel. Then I braided those lengths into a lattice (as you do) and layered gingersnap crumbs, the vanilla bean custard and the rhubarb lattice on top, glazed it with some of the deeply rhubarby poaching syrup and sat back and ate it and pondered the debt to pleasures.

Dak gangjeong, or Korean crispy popcorn chicken in a sweet soy sauce and garlic glaze. Not shown: a huge salad.

Yukhoe, Korean beef tartare; beef, sesame oil, honey, maesil sour plum syrup, soy sauce, black pepper, octopus, nashi pear, black sesame seeds, gochugaru chilli flakes, crispy deep-fried garlic chips, spring onion and a duck egg yolk.

The entirety of my dinner..a s'mores parfait, with gingersnap crumbs at the bottom, a layer of that very interesting Heston Blumenthal chocolate-and-water mousse recipe, and Italian meringue on top, lightly blowtorched. #cleaneating