Saturday, September 14, 2013

What's not to like?

Premise 1: Pork is the best of meats. Premise 2: Roast is the best of pork. Argument: Cheese makes everything better. Inescapable conclusion: Stuffing roast pork with cheese will blow your mind.



Here we everything we need here to put that theory to the test. Purely for academic research purposes, of course. One beautiful organic pork loin, one head of garlic, fresh herbs, a block of manchego with its salty nutty goodness, some quince jam as a delightfully upperclass substitute for applesauce, and sherry to make gravy, because why not?



This. This is what a pork sandwich should look like. Who needs bread? (Just kidding bread, you know I love you the most.)



No, your eyes do not deceive. That rolled up cylinder of deliciousness is indeed sitting on a pillow made of an entire head of garlic sliced in two. Thus is the genius of Ramsay manifested.



I'm ready to make this all over again just looking at that one picture. It just doesn't seem right that all you have to do to attain this is to put cheese and jam inside meat and throw it in an oven for an hour. It should be harder!



Gravy, sadly, is not nearly so photogenic. But trust me, it was delicious. Imagine, if you will, how soft and aromatic those garlic cloves were after an hour in the oven. Allow yourself to conceive a notion of that flavour commingling with sherry and thyme, and drippings from the roast that were not just pork but also the cheese and jam, with the merest hint of sage. This was a good day to be in our kitchen.



The moment of truth. Will it, in fact, be cooked?



Why yes, yes it will.



I think we can safely say that the results of our test have borne out our hypothesis. Note: greens were added as a preventative measure, since we could feel our arteries clogging just looking at the pork. Also, we really need to take a course on presentation.

Sunday, September 1, 2013

Don't make this cake!

Prepare yourselves for the worst blog ever.



Sure, those ingredients look delicious, and ginger cake with chocolate sauce sounds tasty. But trust me when I say that this cake is bad news.

This was definitely the highlight:



I will admit that our cake pan was too big for the amount of batter we made, which made it really difficult to slice the baked cake sideways to make two layers.



Getting creative, we decided to slice it downwards and stack one side on top of the other so that we were left with a half moon shaped cake; some might simply call this half of a cake.





That white stuff between the layers is the ginger cream filling. Robin says that part was alright, but I couldn't tell you because I tried to block the whole thing from my memory.

Wait, okay, yeah. I do remember this part. The chocolate sauce was super yummy and we saved the extra hoping to use it for something else, but never got around to it.





We got pretty careless with the chocolate. This is my favorite picture:



Chocolate sauce notwithstanding, this was seriously the worst dessert I have ever eaten. It was really dry (again, probably because of the cake pan) and there was just way too much ginger flavor. We barely choked down one piece each before throwing the rest away. I'm not even exaggerating.



Epic fail.