Medieval Feast - So much baking, party, food! So much food.

Whew! It's been a busy as all get out couple of days for me! And first of all I would like to give this disclaimer; I am not a baker. So when I offer you baked stuff (like cakes, tarts, bread) and it's -not- messed up? It's awesome! And to all people who bake for a hobby and enjoy the chemistry that is cake, I am sorry for doing things the wrong way and likely making you cringe. On that note, look at this masterpiece of a cake, that I demand people get messy eating.

Also, advice; get yourself one or two people to help you! It will be a -godsend-.

Sweet Cake Glory! It's almost Pinterest worthy!

Let's get started, shall we? Now I made this prep with the expectation of 16+ people showing up. As of this post (The meat is cooking even as we speak!) there is a grand total of 7. I'm gonna have a lot of leftovers. Ahem. Anyways, to make this somewhat easily digestable, I'll be splitting the ingredients and method to you know, the corresponding things.

First up is...

Day 2:

Coleslaw:

1 cup of finely shredded red cabbage

1 1/2 cup of fine shredded white cabbage

2 grated carrots

Small handful of sultanas

1 1/2 small red apples, cored and diced. 

The sauce:

1 teaspoon of mild american mustard

3 teaspoons of mayonaise

1/2 teaspoon of sriracha hot sauce

1 teaspoon of white vinegar

This is really simple. Slice up the cabbages, dice the apple, grate the carrot and toss in the sultanas all into a moderately sized bowl. In a smaller bowl, put in the materials for your sauce (You can use less sriracha, but we like a bit of zing!) and when it looks like a diseases pile of blech, stir it in together until it's all nice and smooth.

You then dollop your sauce ontop of your coleslaw. Whoo! An explosion of colour!

Stir it through your coleslaw, and glad wrap it, so it doesn't go bad (or get infested by bugs). Now red cabbage is sweeter than white cabbage, and the apples I put in add another layer of sweetness to my coleslaws, it can be quite surprising and taste 'wrong' if you mess up the balance of other ingredients. Which is often, fairly easily corrected with the dressing I showed you :) 

Bam. One side down. 

Peel 5 or 6 large potatoes, peel and top and tail 4 carrots. Cut the potatoes into quarters lengthways (people think they're getting more!) and cut each carrot in half horizontally, and each of those halves into halves again, vertically. That is, along the length of the carrot. For storage, put your vegetables in a bowl of water and into the fridge overnight.  

Now you'll also want to prepare the meat. The butcher deboned the mutton shoulder (mutton = old sheep. It shrinks less than lamb and is delicious), and pork shoulder for me. So you just stab the mutton with a pointy knife to make holes. Put cloves of garlic in those holes. You can do the same with the pork too. While you're at it, rub the pork with some salt. Cover them and put them in the fridge. 

There was also a beef roast, the blade cut (we asked for rump. It shrinks less in cooking than blade). This got rubbed in a generous layer of chinese 5 spice, covered and put in the fridge for the next day. 

Now I managed to cook the cornbread and carrot cake on friday, but I'll put it here for ease of whatever. 

Cornbread: 

Spray oil + flour for greasing and dusting.

1 Cup of plain flour

1 cup of cornmeal (polenta)

1 teaspoon salt

1/4 cup caster sugar

1 cup of milk

1/4 cup oil 

1 egg, lightly whisked.

Cornbread is so insanely easy. My goodness. Okay, preheat your oven to 220 degrees celcius (Or whatever 'hot' is in farenheit) spray the inside of your tin. Sprinkle some flour over the bottom and make like you're playing one of those hand-held-tilt-a-maze games. Tap until you've got a layer of flour on the bottom (thin!) and no more loose. If you have a layer of flour -and- some loose, tip out the excess.

In bowl a) Sift flour, backing powder, salt and sugar. (Or put the sugar in the oil like 'normal' people) In bowl b) Milk, Oil, egg and polenta. 

Realise that you put all the dry ingredients into one bowl, and all the wet in another. Stare at the yellow powder ha was apparently supposed to be in your oil bowl. Shrug, and carry on. 

Using a whisk (hand whisk, not an eggbeater!) combine oil and whatever else you actually managed to put -in- that bowl until well combined and opaque and kinda yellow-y. 

Pour your liquid mix into your dry mix and combine with a spoon. It'll have a rather sloppy consistency and if you taste the raw mix it'll taste kinda -bad-. This is normal. 

Put bater into prepared pan. Put pan into the oven and bake for 25-30 minutes or until it stops screaming when you stab it with a skewer. ..Okay, when it stops -bleeding-. ...What? Bah. Fine. When the skewer goes into the bread and comes out clean. Happy?

Spoil all my fun.

Ahem. You leave your bread in the pan to cool down for five minutes (possibly while you put cold water on your burnt hand because I didn't warn you that the pan would be hot and you should use oven mits) before turning it out onto a wire rack to finish cooling (Did you remember the oven mitts this time? It's still hot). 

The final texture will be sort of gritty, but it will taste rather nice. And cornbread is -supposed- to taste gritty. Repeat the recipe if you want more than one loaf!

Wrap your cornbread in clingfilm after it is cool, and put in the fridge. 

While your cornbread(s) is/are cooling you can start on the carrot cake (This sucker takes an HOUR to bake). 

Carrot Cake: 

4 med-large carrots, grated

1 cup self-raising flour

1/2 cup plain flour

1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon

1 teaspoon bicarb soda/baking powder

1/2 cup brown (or raw) sugar

3/4 cup of oil

1/2 cup of golden syrup

3 eggs

1 teaspoon vanilla essence.

Icing:

250g cream cheese (the block type, like Philadelphia)

1/2 cup icing sugar

1/2 teaspoon vanilla essense. 

This one turned out rather nice as well! It is a very heavy cake (as in weight! It weighs a lot! and is pretty dense) so don't be alarmed if you discovered that you baked a spongey, fragrant, carrot brick. 

Preheat your oven to 170 degrees celcius Grease cake pan, lightly dust with flour.

Peel, top and tail, and grate the carrots. Set them aside. 

Sift flours, bicarb, cinnamon, sugar into a bowl. 

Mix sugar, oil, egg, golden syrup and vanilla in a separate bowl until well combined and lightly fluffy. 

Pour the oil mix into the dry mix. Stir with spoon until just combined. Add carrot and stir through. Remember, this is a CARROT cake, so having visible bits of carrot in the mix is a good idea. 

Bake your cake in the pan for 1 hour. Let cool in the pan for 5 minutes (or while you turn off the oven) before you turn it out onto a wire rack to cool down. It should just slip easily out of the pan and into your oven-mitted hand. Or onto the rack, whatever. 

Once your cake is nice and cool you can ice it! Or like, wrap it up and put it in the fridge so that it'll still look good for serving.

The icing is SUPER complicated. Put all stuff in bowl. Combine. Spread over cake. Tada!

Baked Lemon Cheesecake;

For the full ingredient list and method go here and read that post. It's the exact same thing! 

This post will be long enough without me repeating myself on complex things :D

To compensate, here are some progress shots (We haven't eaten it yet! I'm being terribly unsociable and talking to you wonderful people).

And here we pack the biscuitcrumb+butter base into our prepared springform tin..

(The gap helps to ensure you don't have super thick corners!)

 Ahh, there we go. All nice and even.

 Tin is full sir! I actually had leftover cheesecake mix, the two lemons I chose were tree ripened and -really- well watered, I think I ended up with 1/2 to 3/4ths of a cup of lemon juice. You have no idea how confused I was at having 'extra' cheesecake mix.

 I think I may have overcooked it slightly, but ... it rose. Since when do cheesecakes -rise-?! I couldn't get a sponge to rise (true story. First one was a disappointment all around) and my cheesecake neeearly overflowed! Now, as the cheesecake takes 1 hour to cool in the oven, and you have to leave it in the fridge for 4 hours to set, do this baby just before you go to bed, and leave it rest overnight.

I also did 18 chicken legs, so you'll want to crumb these tonight as well. Really simple.

3 bowls
2 cups flour
2 cups breadcrumbs
Grated parmesan
Thyme
4 eggs
1/2 cup milk.

FLour in one bowl. Eggs and milk in the middle, the breadcrumbs, parmesan and thyme in the third.
Grab the chicken leg by the end (not the meaty part, the other end) dip in flour. Rub the flour in firmly. Dip floured leg into the egg-mix. Make sure you cover all the flour with egg-mix. Lift leg out of egg mix. Let excess drain. Put -chicken- leg in breadcrumbs. Cover with breadcrumbs. Lay in cooking tray for the next day. Repeat until all the legs are done.

Cover the legs in clingwrap. Realise that clingwrap doesn't cling to an alfoil tray (aluminium foil). Get out the alfoil, cover the chicken with two strips laid at opposites. Put the excess from the lower layer over the top and crimp around the edges. Then put the top layer excess up and crimp the edges. Tada. Instant side-clasps.

Put them in the fridge. Go 'fuck't I'm tired' and go to bed.


Day 3: Party is todaaaay aaah.

Ah, and now we get to the deliciousness of the Vanilla Sponge Cake. I had to make this multiple times (which drastically increased my work load and stress) because the damn thing wouldn't rise.

Vanilla Sponge Cake

4 eggs

2/3 cup of caster sugar

1 tsp vanilla essense

1 cup self-raising flour

1tsp baking powder (or bicarb soda)

Icing:

450 mL of cream, whipped!

2-3 heaped dessert spoons of icing sugar (The ovoid tablespoons that you eat with?)

1 tsp vanilla essense

250g strawberries. (1 punnet... whatever)

Preheat oven to 180 degrees celcius or 160 degrees celcius if fan forced (Mine is), also, make sure if you have a fan-forced one, that you keep your food well away from the door. It's hotter there for some reason (or it is in mine). 

Grease cake tin, lightly dust with flour.

Separate egg whites from yolk. This is fun. You crack the eggs, let the white drip through your fingers and catch the yolk. Swap the egg yolk from one hand to the other until you've got -just- the yolk in your hand. Put the egg yolk in a glass you got -before- your hands were all eggy. 

Once you've done that, wash your hands. 

Now, using an electric egg beater, whisk the egg whites, adding the caster sugar to them SLOWLY, one little shake of sugar at  a time. Now, here's a key point; if, at this point, you have any egg yolk in with your whites, they won't get fluffy enough in the right method. And you want/need them to be thick, white, fluffy and form soft peaks when you lift the beaters out, that slooooowly subside back into the general mass. This can take a good 10 minutes, so don't be discouraged! 

Once your egg whites are what they need to be, use a fork and beat the egg yolks in the jar a little bit. (If you're extra clever, you can do this while you're beating the eggs). Drip the egg yolk back into the egg whites, again, slowly, beating them on high the whole time. Add the vanilla. 

Sift the flour into the batter, one little shake at a time, and mix the flour in -thoroughly- before you add the next bit. Now sponges are supposed to be light and fluffy and aerated, so we are going to put that poor beater through it's paces!

When you've put all the flour in, and your eggmixer is panting and begging for mercy, tip the mix into the pan. Bake for 15-20 minutes until the top of the cake 'sproings' back into place after touching (or you know, a skewer comes out clean). Leave to cool in the pan for 5 minutes before turning out onto the wire rack. 

Now do a happy dance because the sponge ROSE.

Icing:

Cream (The reason I have 450mL is because that's the leftover from making the cheesecake, but really, can you have too much cream?), icing sugar and vanilla essense all partied in a bowl. You whipped them and whipped them and made them cry before you whipped them some more!

You bully.

Seriously, get out your trusty egg-beater, and whip them on medium to high, until the cream is thick and fluffy and stands up all on its own. Now. You can be fancy with the cake (I was!) and cut a divot out the length of the cake (I chose a 'long' tin for this purpose' and smear the inside layer with cream. Oh, while you're being a bully to helpless, innocent cream, have one of your Trusty Helpers picking out good strawberries, and cutting the tops off of them. Cut all but say, 5, strawberries into quarters. That is. chop the top off, cut it in half lengthwise, then cut each -half- in half lengthways too. There we go. now we can go back to the cake.

Now, you have a generous dollop or two of cream smeared along the centre divot-line-thing in your cake. make sure you have some on the edges too! Press strawberries, cut side to cream, into this divot, the pointy end down. Take the cut out piece of cake, cut it in half lengthways, and invert into the gap, so the fluffy cake parts are pointing out and the 'top' of the cake is making another gully for cream. 

And put the cream in there. And over here. And along the top of the cake. And over the cake 'wings'. And... 

Yeah. Put the cream everywhere. Place the five whole strawberries in a line down your filled cream-gully. Decorate the rest of the cake with the remainder of the cut strawberries as you desire. Stand back and marvel at how pretty it is. And how delicious that cream is. Mnn. Yep. It's sweet whipped cream. 

Put the cake on a plate, and put the plate in the fridge. 

Realise that it's now 3pm and you haven't done the pastry, panic, attempt to make the pastry dishes, give up because it's now 4pm and the meat needs to go on and cook. Sigh. 

Receive notification from the vegetarian diet-people that they won't be coming. Swear at them in your head because you'd just finished making a nut roast that they won't be eating. Fine. (I'll recipe this later!)

Have wonderful support people who put the beef and mutton in pans out in the webber (kinda like a bbq but not. You use heatbeads  in it, not gas) and they're halfway done while you're in mid-panic because ah the food!

Crank the oven up to 220 degrees celcius, put the pork in the oven for 30 minutes. Turn the oven down to 180 celcius and cook for another 2 hours. Usually this makes a lot of crackling, but... for some reason it didn't today. 

Oh, and I also made a pumpkin soup... and cut up corn... and had a garden salad too. Well, shredded garden salad. It's where you finely slice the lettuce, grate cheese and carrot, and dice the tomato and stir it through. It's really quite nice, and you get a bit of everything with every mouthful. 

Roasted vegetables were also done, they turned out nice. 

So in short, remember to get help, enjoy serving up your meals, that people will wish to eat dinner in the intervening days, and to have fun with your party :)

Of course, you've just spent the past 3 days doing next to nothing but cooking and stressing about cooking. I'll forgive you if you take a nap instead. I am very, very tempted by it. :) I'd also meant to make gravy, and apple sauce and and and ... it didn't end up happening. People are very happy, and well fed, and noisy, which is the important thing. Happy, well fed people enjoying themselves :)

Deliciousness, Delivered :D