MOVING SITES

:) a new year

a new change

http://theonehypocrite.wordpress.com/

POLL!

SUP!

I've put a new poll on the Noob Connoisseur

Favourite form of potato.

I know that most of my friends love potatoes.

French fries of course.

What about you?

Do you like your potatoes mashed, fried, roasted, baked or boiled?

~

Feel free to give suggestions to anything that I should try

or anything that I should cook?

Macarons: Green Tea | Chocolate

My apologies. :) It's been a long month since I've last posted, but a combination of exams, Christmas and the beginning of holidays have put me out of blogging.

I've been 'experimenting' with macarons and so far I've ticked off chocolate, green tea and lemon.

Note that macaroons are meringue-like cookies usually made from coconut,

whereas macarons are the french biscuits made of almond meal, which usually have a filling inside.

Recipes can be found all over the internet for countless flavours.

From bakeries and patisseries, macarons cost around $2.20 each

So its much cheaper to make them yourself.

Above: Green Tea Filling

Below: Chocolate Filling

For both fillings I made a ganache, which is a fancy term for melting chocolate with boiling cream. The melted mixture is then cooled and sets to a spread-able consistency.

The chocolate filling is simply made of dark chocolate and cream.

The green tea filling is made of white chocolate and cream. Green tea powder is then added to this mixture.

Green tea powder or matcha is quite rare now and can only be found in a few specialty stores. If you require some, I can buy it for you. It's $6.50 for 100 grams.

Macaron Batter

For the green tea macaron, I just added a teaspoon of vanilla extract or essence to a basic batter of almond meal, egg whites and loads of sugar.

The chocolate macaron followed the same recipe, except that an additional 25 grams of cocoa powder was added.

Tips

1. Don't bother buying piping bags. Simply use a snap-lock plastic bag.

Get all the batter in and cut a medium-sized hole (about 1.5cm diameter)

2. The batter should flow like lava. Otherwise it won't bake properly.

3. Incorporate the dry ingredients into the egg whites and use quick swift movements with a spatula to mix them together. Stop straight after streaks of egg white disappear and if you over-mix the macarons won't rise properly.

4. When you've piped all the macarons make sure you rap the baking sheet on the kitchen bench a few times. This gives the macaron a footing to rise from and gets rid of any large air bubbles.

Despite the cracks, the macarons turned out alright. A nice and crispy outer shell and a chewy inside. I still haven't found the perfect amount of time and the perfect temperature to bake them at. But, it varies from oven to oven.

I've found that the higher the baking tray is put in the oven, the more cracked it gets.

Trial and error. Trial and error.

MY CRACKED MACARONS. :)

They tasted really nice.

Of course, make sure you cool the biscuits before you add in the filling.

Macarons are great as a gift.

Nom Nom Nom

-WB

Ajisen Ramen

Ajisen Ramen

Located at 130 Bourke Street, Melbourne VIC 3000

Getting there, simple catch a train to Parliament Station and it's a 5-10 minute walk from there.

Date: Friday, 12th November

Cuisine: Japanese

Catching up with Shannon over dinner, we decided to go to Ajisen Ramen.

We've both been there 4 or 5 times.

Here's Shannon!! :D

It's a nice, warm place - the furniture and setting is sort of like modern meets Japanese traditional.

Entree- Gyoza, which is like a Japanese Dumpling with dipping sauce.

Quite average, the filling is nothing special - pork mince and a bit of ginger and spring onion

The chewy Gyoza skin should have been more crisp - it was pan fried

The dipping sauce was nice- balancing sweet, sour and salty.

$7.00

Main- I had the Hiyashi Chuuka, which is a Japanese Cold Noodle.

It was nice, the noodles were of a good texture- they had a bit of bite to them

The vegetables worked well with the dish.. and there was a lump of horseradish ==' (which is like wasabi) and I thought it was tofu. My mouth burned.

There wasn't enough of the meat, though the noodle dressing was nice - sweet, sour and salty, with a bit of chilli.

$10.00

Shannon had the Sashimi Bento- which comprised of slices of raw salmon, rice, seaweed salad, fruit, salad and a chicken skewer. Looked quite nice.

$13.50

Dessert- Black sesame icecream for me and Green Tea Icecream for Shannon

Strong Sesame flavour, quite creamy, but it still can't top Green Tea Icecream. Presentation was nice and simple.

$4.00/Each

Drink- Green Tea Spider.

It was rather strange. It was a scoop of green tea icecream in lemonade.

The lemonade was flat- not fizzy and the green tea gave it a weird powdery-ness.

$4.50

Lemon and Lime Bitters for Shannon - $4.00

Next time, I'd definitely stick to the ramen, bento boxes, seaweed salad and yakitori (the delicious chicken skewer)

Cost: $47 - Relatively Cheap

Worth a visit :)

Photography

Writing, cooking and now presenting: photography.

I really am quite a noob at photography, only started a few days ago.

So, bear with me

I'm using my dad's old camera - FujiFilm FinePix S6500

and I'm slowly getting used to it.

My camera has a dial on it with letters S, A, M and a whole lot of icons.

Being the noob I am, I had to get out the manual and read about them.

Auto- This one was in red and basically sets everything for you, such as focus, brightness, contrast and all those other factors.

Auto would be used for ordinary photography and it's the easiest and simplest mode

(S) Shutter Priority- This mode makes everything automatic except for the shutter speed.

A fast shutter speed would be used for freezing something in motion (eg: a sprinter)

and a slow shutter speed would be used to create movement in the photo (ever seen those photos that are created with sparklers)

In my camera, the faster the shutter speed (such as 1/4000 sec) the darker the photograph, as less light is captured.

(A) Aperture Priority- Another automatic mode, this changes the focus

A large aperture (which has a small number) results in the subject being clear, but the area in front and behind it being out of focus and blurred. Photographers use this to draw the viewers attention to the subject.

A small aperture (which has a large number) results in both the subject and the areas around it being in focus and this would be used in photographs of landscapes or even family photos

(M) Manual- As the name suggests, this is the mode where you control all the factors, such as shutter speed, aperture and various other functions.

Well, that's a part of the basics and there's also a vital rule to follow.

The Rule of Thirds.

Basically this is just dividing a photograph into thirds (much like a noughts&crosses or tic-tac-toe grid)

Where the lines intersect are the strongest focal points and the lines themselves are the second strongest focal points.

Photo Editing

There are a lot of programs that edit photos, online there are websites such as Picnik or Fotofunia and of course, everyone knows about Photoshop.

Apparently photoshops costs a lot, so I downloaded a trial version of a program similar to photoshop and it's called Serif PhotoPlus Starter Edition

With it you can change lighting, exposure, remove blemishes, crop photos, add effects or fix any mistakes you may have made whilst taking the photo.

A few days ago, I went for a walk around my suburb with my family and took a few photos

I've also added effects on them. Enjoy :P

I used 'CrossProcessing' on the photograph above- see how it compares to the original below.

I used 'Boost' on this photo and it makes all the colours in the photo much more vibrant

Above, I used 'Focal Black and White' and this makes everything black and white, except for a small area called the focal point. This effect makes things stand out.

With these two photos, I used vingette (above) and matte (below). The two effects are quite similar except that vingette makes the edge of the photo darker, whereas matte makes it lighter.

I used 'Sepia' on the photography above, with a little bit of fade to show green.

Above I used the picnik effect 'HDR-ish), which gives the photograph an interesting... almost grainy effect

Above, I used 'Holgarish' which makes the photograph black and white and makes the contrast between the white and black even greater.