Tuesday 13 November 2007

Food Bloggers' Banquet

Food Bloggers' Banquet
Monday 12th November, from 7pm
Veg Out Community Gardens St Kilda (map)
cnr Shakespeare Grove & Chaucer Street (behind Acland St, near Luna Park)



Photo (obviously taken prior to water restrictions) courtesy of the Veg Out website


It was really nice* to meet so many of Melbourne's food bloggers face-to-face last night at the banquet that Ed organised! (* My mother read over my blog entries for the first time last week and told me that she liked parts of it, but that I use the word "nice" too often. Thanks Mum.)

Lots of other bloggers have already written up the banquet so I won't thrash it all out again, but will say that I had a lovely evening: everyone was very friendly, and I enjoyed meeting new people with similar culinary/gastronomic interests. Thanks to everyone for bringing such delicious food!

The best way for those of you who'd like to see all the fabulous dishes that we ate (many of them cooked in the on-site pizza oven!) is to check out the banquet photos on flickr. I felt guilty that my contribution (coconut and lime syrup muffins) was much less fancy than a lot of the other dishes on offer, but it was very very easy to prepare the night before and then pack in a plastic container for a full day in the office.

Coconut and Lime Syrup Muffin

Here's the recipe:

2 and a half cups self-raising flour
1 cup (90 g) desiccated coconut
1 cup caster sugar
Finely grated rind from 2 limes
1 cup buttermilk
125 g melted butter
2 eggs

Lime syrup:
Half cup caster sugar
Quarter cup water
Juice from 2 limes

Making muffins

Make the muffins by combining the dry ingredients in a bowl, then stirring in the combined wet ingredients (having lightly beaten the eggs). Spoon mixture into muffin tray then bake in a moderately hot oven for just under 20 minutes.

While the muffins are baking, make the lime syrup by combining the syrup ingredients in a small saucepan and stirring over heat (without boiling) until the liquid thickens slightly (about two minutes after the sugar has dissolved). When the muffins are ready, get them out of the muffin tray and bunched up close together on a wire rack. Place an oven tray under the wire rack. While the muffins are still hot, drizzle the hot lime syrup over the muffins, catching the surplus syrup in the oven tray. Drain the surplus syrup back into the saucepan and repeat the process until all the syrup has been absorbed into the muffins, then allow to cool... but best eaten when still a little warm! :)

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

They were delish Claire! Great meeting you.

Ed Charles said...

Claire, good to meet you. I'm so sorry I didn't try your muffins especially as you went out of your way to try my slightly dubious chocolate/banana pizza (which I now remember should have been made as a calzone). Here's to the next one.

Josh said...

Hiya Claire,
Nice to meet you. As promised, here is that lawyer blog.
http://lawyertrix.blogspot.com/
All the best,
Josh.

Vida said...

Hey Claire, I missed out on these but I will try the recipe to make up for it... Honestly I think we really need to repeat the whole exercise so that we can try everything again or try what we missed out on and give Ed a chance to repeat that yummy pizza as a calzone this time because I would happily eat that again!!! Lovely to meet you... Vida x x x

stickyfingers said...

I love the word Nice, even if it's not "noice, unusual and different".

I'm with Vida - I got too full to eat one of those yummy looking wonders, thought I'd doggy bag instead, got caught up in a conversation and forgot to actually wrap one up - kinda like Thanh with the chocolate cake.

I think the buzz of meeting everyone got mixed up in cooking and we probably needed a whole day to graze all those goodies AND gasbag.

claire said...

Thanks for the comments everyone!

Josh, thanks for the link to the lawyer blog, I'm now subscribing to updates. But I dunno... it smells pretty fake to me. Maybe it's the (in my opinion) Sex and the City derivative writing style that's clouding my judgement, or maybe she's actually a lawyer and just embellishing, but it reads like a movie script. Life in a big law firm just isn't like that!

Doesn't mean I'll stop reading it, though... :)

grocer said...

guilt is an overated emotion.
you made a beautiful contribution to the banquet.

I didn't get to try most of the sweets i had my eye on! I blame jane and the barra for the distraction!