Sunbeam Snack Heroes Cake Pop Maker

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Disclaimer: Sunbeam sent me the cake pop maker to trial.

Sunbeam has recently rereleased the Snack Heroes range. For not very much money at all (they’re all under the $40 mark) you can choose from an icecream maker, an egg cooker, a chocolate fountain, a popcorn maker or a cake pop maker.

It’s an interesting mix of products because some are definitely ‘novelty’ whereas others are pieces of kitchen kit serious cooks are likely to pick up – particularly the ice cream maker. The cake pop maker, which I tried out, falls somewhere between the two.

As you may have noticed, I’m a reasonably keen baker but one thing I’ve never tried to make is a cake pop. I daresay you need to buy some special tin for them or something. And, of course, you need to decorate them and I think we all know how lacking my decorating skills are …

Luckily for me, the cake pop maker comes with some pretty detailed instructions and helpful tips. For example, dipping the stick into a little melted chocolate before pushing into the cake pop to make it more secure, and chilling the cake pops for 15-20 minutes before decorating to make them more stable. Really obvious things, but ones I wouldn’t have thought of.

There’s also a selection of recipes which is incredibly useful because they’re all in cake pop friendly quantities and they give you a good idea about the different types of cooking times you need. I tried the plain vanilla recipe. As a trusty helper, I had one very interested toddler.

I melted 75g of unsalted butter in the microwave and mixed in ½ cup caster sugar, 1 egg, ¾ cup of self raising flour, ¼ cup of plain flour, 1 tsp vanilla essence and ⅓ cup of milk. For a change, I did all of this by hand! Give the mixture a good beating – and depending on your enthusiasm for beating it may be worth your time to sift the flours.

With the cake pop maker preheated, I gave it a quick spray with a neutrally flavoured oil. I then spooned 2 tsp (yes, that’s right!) of batter into each hole (there are 6) and cooked for 4 minutes.

The timing given in the recipe is spot on and the cake itself was nice (always a good start). I found myself to be pretty incompetent when it came to those 2 teaspoons of batter … I think this is one of those things where practice makes perfect. Some of my cake pops were perfect and others kind of did a bit of exploring and came out looking like odd shaped flying saucers. Tidying them up is easily done: I just trimmed off excess cake when they were cool and you’d have never known how wonky they were initially!

One thing I did notice was that the external surfaces of the maker got very hot. You do end up having it on for quite a while (most of the recipes make ~ 30 cake pops, so you’re doing to be doing 4 or 5 batches) and it started to get uncomfortable to open it. To be fair, the very first page of the manual notes “The temperature of surfaces may be high when the appliance is operating”. That is very accurate! It’s also a bit of a shame because this is very much the type of thing people are going to want to use with their kids (in fact, the first thing that Andy said was “oooh, that will be a great thing to do with the toddler”) and older children are going to want to be involved in the opening and shutting. So just make sure you read the instructions and exercise some commonsense!

Cake pops tidied up, cooled and refrigerated, I set about decorating. This wasn’t actually as painful as I expected. I used toothpicks (NOT recommended if you’re going to be serving these to children!), balanced my cake pops in a strawberry container that had holes in the lid (! I think egg cartons would do well here too) and made a very simple chocolate icing (butter, icing sugar, cocoa and hot water).

You need to make your icing pretty thick and I experimented with dipping the cake pops into the icing, but I found that spooning it around them worked a lot better. I wasn’t going for full coverage – just enough to top them and cover up the seams (and any less than awesome trimming).

For decoration, again I found that dipping wasn’t ideal. I put the iced cake pops back into the strawberry container and sprinkled on the decoration. Chocolate sprinkles, dessicated coconut and some silver cachous. Of course, if you’re less lazy than me, you could do fancy things like pipe over a different coloured icing or do faces on them … For me, sprinkling was good enough and also meant that decorating them was a lot quicker than I expected!

So overall, the Sunbeam cake pop maker gets a thumbs up. It is easy to use, does the job and the recipes (or at least the one I tried!) work. It’s also quick. The only drawback I see is how hot it gets.

However, I think the best recommendation is that when I posted on my personal Facebook page that it had arrived one of my relatives immediately posted: “I have one and it is very good. All even in size and no hot spots like one may have in an oven.”

I guess now I just need to learn to decorate!

Pork Belly Roast – In a Pan

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Pork Belly Roast - In a Panphoto:  Colin Gould

Today, a guest post from Colin Gould, who blogs (occasionally) at ColsRamble.

Given my inability to cook an oven roast without burning myself at least once, the last time I picked up a boneless leg of lamb I experimented with cooking it slowly in a frying pan like a giant steak and, to my surprise, got a great result.

Foolishly I posted this success on Facebook only to be challenged by Alex to do the same and end up with pork crackling… so here I am; challenge accepted and the result was, again quite surprisingly, really good.

As a cheap arse who hates using an electric oven when my solar panels could be cranking that power back into the grid, cooking a roast on my gas hob in an easy to clean frying pan makes a lot of sense and is dead easy (despite the wordy description that follows).

You’ll need ~700g pork belly, a heavy base frying pan with fitting lid – large enough to accommodate the pork belly, a couple of seasonal apples (I used Fujis), some fresh sage, salt and pepper.

Cooking the meat and rendering the fat

I took the pork belly, scored the skin with a sharp knife and then scorched it with a jug of boiling water. I don’t know if the scorching bit is really necessary, I’ve just always done it when doing normal roast pork.

The belly is then patted dry with paper towel and rubbed with olive oil. The skin side is then well salted.

To cook the meat, heat the frying pan over a medium heat with a little more olive oil until hot, but not smoking, then place the pork belly in skin side down. It should sizzle.

Now you can season the exposed flesh side of the belly in the pan with more salt and some ground black pepper, and pile on a good handful of fresh sage leaves.

Once done, place the lid on the pan and turn the heat down to low, then go and find something else to do for an hour or so*. The meat is essentially being part roasted and part steamed in its own juices so avoid removing the lid. You’ll know if the pan is at about the right temperature if a) there is a gorgeous smell of sage and pork filling the house with no hint of burning, and b) the lid is too hot to touch.

Apple and Sage medley

Remove the cooked meat from the pan and set aside. The pan should have a healthy layer of rendered pork fat and juices in it. Turn the heat up again to a medium/high and throw in some diced apple and the chopped sage leaves from the meat. Cook until the apple softens – there should be enough seasoning in the pan juices but add more if you think it’s needed. A splash of apple cider vinegar might go well at this point.

Remove the cooked apple and sage, avoiding as much of the oil as possible, and set aside for serving.

Crackling

Drain any remaining oil/juice in the pan and, like a giant slab of bacon, stick the pork belly back in the hot pan skin side down and let it sizzle. It should only take a few minutes to develop a nice even crackling. If it’s spitting and popping then it’s probably too hot. A better result is achieved with a lower heat over a longer time.

Once an even crackling is achieved, flip the belly over with tongs and sear quickly on the other sides so they also get a little colour.

That’s it. Slice the pork belly along the scoring lines, or remove the crackling to cut the flesh and break it up separately. Then serve on warm plates with the apple and what ever else floats your boat. The night I cooked this I served it with a quick cannellini bean mash and some (microwave) steamed carrots. If you’re looking for an accompanying drink on a warm spring evening, then we’ve just been trying Oxenberry White Grapple Cider from McLaren Vale, which, although a little sweet for my taste, might just fit the bill.

Enjoy!

*I think I cooked for about 1 hour and 15 minutes, but only really know that I ignored the 45 minute timer. The good thing about this meat is it’s got a high fat content and using this method keeps moisture in the pan so chances of overcooking and drying out are pretty slim.

Chicken Quesadilla Recipe

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Quesadillas

I watch a lot of cooking tv. I’m not a huge fan of the ‘reality’ programs but pretty much anything else I’ll watch – no matter how old school the production values (the really quite awful Four Burners and a Grill) or how much the chef irritates me (er, no names, because that would be just mean).

The other morning we were watching Good Chef Bad Chef. This is one show that irritates me because it kind of ‘works’ under the assumption that the chef using the meat, cream, butter and salt is the ‘bad’ chef, while the nutritionist, whose food is predominantly vegetarian (she uses a lot of seafood) and who uses dairy alternatives, is the ‘good’ chef. Andy always grumpily points out that Adrian usually looks a lot healthier than Janella …

Philosophical issues aside, lots of the food that Adrian Richardson cooks on this show looks really good. On Saturday morning he cooked quesadillas with a prawn filling. Show over, Andy says “we should have quesadillas for dinner”. Wow, I thought, that is going to be one serious pain in the butt to put together.

As we have prawns coming for Christmas, we didn’t want to do seafood so we opted for chicken. I found a recipe on taste which we used as a rough guide.

We began with one onion, finely chopped and sautéed in the wok. We added just one clove of garlic and then half a red capsicum finely chopped.

I finely (super super finely) sliced one chicken breast and the meat was tossed with some ground cumin and ground coriander. The meat was added to the wok and quickly fried.

While the meat was cooking I made a variation on the avocado cream in the taste recipe: half an avocado mashed, mixed with a couple of tablespoons of natural yoghurt and then seasoned.

I also made a quick salsa: one tomato, quartered, deseeded and finely diced (deseeding, while wasteful, does make it a LOT easier to dice the flesh), a quarter of a red onion finely chopped, some chopped coriander, and a good squeeze of lime juice. The following evening I made some more salsa, which I jazzed up with some finely sliced jalapeño peppers and some finely chopped red capsicum. If you use the juice from the peppers you don’t need the lime juice.

To wrap up the quesadillas, we heated a non stick pan, gave it a very light spray with some oil and popped in a wrap. Andy topped half the wrap with some of the chicken mix and a good handful of grated cheddar. Fold the wrap in half and you can add a second wrap to the pan. When the wraps start to become golden, flip them over (not as hard as it sounds if you’re careful). Just pay attention to the heat of the pan as you want the cheese to melt but not at the expense of burning the wrap.

Quesadillas

Serve piping hot with the avocado cream and salsa.

With two of us on the case, this meal took less than 30 minutes to put together. With just the one chicken breast used it’s very economical and it’s also pretty healthy (look at all those vegetables!). Without a doubt it’s something we’ll be making again … especially as we reckon we could manage it on the BBQ during summer!