rarerollingobject

Vietnamese for breakfast; banh cuon (fresh rice paper rolls with minced pork and woodear mushroom, a bitch to make but worth it); banh hoi rice vermicelli; nem nuong lemongrass pork, which I grilled on sticks made from pineapple core and brushed with honey while grilling; lettuce and mint.

Moscato and vanilla bean cupcakes (involving a whole bottle of moscato! Simmered down to an intense syrup so you can really taste it) with dried edible candy stripe rose petals, fuchsias and violas.

Roti paratha with egg, cheese, seeni sambol (a Sri Lankan onion chutney), green chilli and coriander.

Possibly one of the most rustic-looking things I’ve ever made, but also one of the most delicious; dark muscovado brown sugar pavlova, ginger mascarpone cream, almond and cashew praline toffee, and figs. Lots of figs.

I’m at work by 6am most days; breakfast for me is generally a protein shake, a coffee and regret.

Seville orange and olive oil tortas de aceite, with whipped vanilla yoghurt lightened with orange blossom water and sweetened with orange blossom honey, bergamot orange zest and cornflowers.

I made a pistachio layer cake, filled between each layer with mandarin curd, pistachios candied in yuzu syrup and crushed, and then iced with mandarin French buttercream frosting. Decorations will be freeze-dried mandarin segments and canded baby clementines. And then I made a cupcake version of the same, for the inevitable whingers at work who'll miss out on the main cake. But note to self; shutting your freshly-made cupcakes in the laundry so your dogs can’t get at them for the hour you’re out of the house isn’t very effective if you accidentally lock a dog in the laundry with them while you’re at it. She ate them all, cupcake liners included.

Toro (tuna belly), hotate (raw scallop), uni (sea urchin), sake (salmon) and ika (raw squid).

A beautiful thing; smoked kingfish, with orange and lime zest, cornflower petals and Sichuan pepper.

@jmacnaughtan - might even spread the rolled brioche dough with this as well

Having eaten my body weight of Maison Pralus Praluline in my time..believe me, that’s the plan.

I’ve never experienced cold like that, I would probably die of shock..the coldest weather I’ve ever been in is 0 Celsius or 32 F! I was freezing cold in Calgary and Golden in June! No, I’ll just stick to lying on the couch in my underwear drinking gin and tonics in the A/C, thanks.

Pralines roses, the pink pralines of Lyon; almonds and hazelnuts slowly caramelised and crystallized in sugar and orange blossom water. I’m going to crush them slightly and fold into buttery brioche dough to make Brioche Aux Pralines Roses. Not tomorrow though, it’s going to be 100F here..

Lemon verbena shortbread.

As a born and bred Hong Konger, if I’m cookie stamping a thing - I’m using my Chinese moon cake molds. I also added a fair kick of five spice to the glaze mix and a lick of the sweet syrup from a jar of Chinese stem ginger; these are soft gingerbread tiles with rum butter glaze; Europe via HK. (From ‘Sweet’, by Ottolenghi and Goh.

Gruyere, spinach and bread egg bake; maple syrup and black pepper bacon; salmon cured in beetroot, vodka, orange zest and dill; blintzes and wasabi sour cream; mango and pineapple with yuzu syrup, lime, mint and red chilli; and apricot, pistachio, honey and cardamom tart with homemade vanilla yoghurt.

Of the hundreds, thousands of Cantonese meals and millions and millions of dim sum dishes I’ve made in my time, the one thing I’ve never made is my own har gau/gow gee/prawn dumpling/蝦餃. The reason for that is that the wrapper dough is a giant pain in the arse; wheat starch AND tapioca starch AND potato starch and a bit of lard then boiling water at the exact right temperature to melt your hands off, but you have to knead it hot and then roll each wrapper individually and pleat them till you can barely feel your fingers. I think I’ve made every dim sum dish in existence, but never these. Did it today. Prawn, pork fat, bamboo shoot, Shaohsing wine, seasonings and the remnants of my scorched fingertips. Very good.

I made a blackberry and lemon vertical stripe cake with crystallised blackberries on top, adapted from the Ottolenghi and Goh ‘Sweet’ book; as you can tell from the video’s audio, my staff REALLY like a baked good..

My office had its Christmas Party today, and part of its organisational tradition is a Christmas decoration competition. I participated by constructing an entirely edible fireplace outside my office; everything edible, gingerbread fireplace bricks (detailed into further bricks with a flathead screwdriver of course), edible pulled sugar (isomalt) flames in the fireplace, edible photo frame, edible cookie ornaments, edible snow flakes, edible chocolate baubles and glitter. Was a hit. Am tired.

@Tri2Cook - Well, to my eye it’s because you have something as resolute and brutalist in form as a solid, tall cylinder of cold-looking concrete-like cake, you want to contrast it with something more organic and whimsical in form and colour. Otherwise you have a plain pylon of cake that calls for SOME decoration; flowers would look wrong, ribbons or sprinkles similarly incongruous, spiky chocolate shards too similarly cold. I think the height and drama and organic curves of a sail are just about the perfect decoration to contrast and set off the concrete-yness of the cake beneath it. Although, I was going to paint the whole sail in metallic copper lustre dust instead of marbling it, but changed my mind at the last minute.

Ornament cookies. For hanging as Christmas decorations in my office's Christmas decoration competition. And the other thing I made yesterday was a birthday cake for someone; it’s a four layer chocolate mud cake with raspberry meringue filling and freeze dried raspberries, but it was really just an excuse to replicate the concrete look I learned at a cake course I recently did. And a handpainted white chocolate sail for decoration.

He (or his social media manager, or his automated instabot) liked it anyway

Yep @jmacnaughtan, it’s the Cedric Grolet idea as you can see from the hashtags on my instagram post beneath the video. But no, I don’t have the book.

I wanted to make a lemon in the shape of a lemon, so I had a silicone mold in the shape of a lemon comissioned from a lemon silicone mold maker in China, and filled it with frozen lemon white chocolate mousse ice cream, with a core of frozen lemon curd, and sprayed the outside with lemon-flavored cocoa butter velvet spray and stuck a lemon leaf in the end, and my colleague who loves lemon said it was the lemoniest lemon that’s actually a faux lemon she’s ever tasted.

Playing with oil colours; marbled sugar cookies and white chocolate spheres.