Chicken Sweetcorn Soup

One of our favourite take-out meals is Chicken Sweetcorn Soup!  And soup is always a winner on rainy days like we're having here across South Africa the last couple of days!  So why not make Chicken Sweetcorn Soup?  I have made this soup before when I still lived with my brother and before I got married.  It was a winner with nothing left over in the pot afterwards!

Ingredients:

• 1 Tablespoon vegetable oil
• 1 chicken breast per person
• 1 clove of garlic, chopped.  I like to mash my garlic with the back of my serrated Victorianox knife - I feel that I can extract more flavour out of the garlic in this way.
• 1 Tablespoon cornflour
• 600ml chicken stock
• 1 tin sweetcorn
• 1 egg
• 1 Tablespoon lemon juice

Recipe:

1. Heat the oil and cook the chicken and garlic.
2. Blend the cornflour and some stock and add this with the remaining stock to the chicken and garlic mixture.
3. Bring this to the boil and add the sweetcorn.  Stir continuously.
4. Beat the egg and lemon juice and add this slowly to the soup whilst stirring (this will give you the tendrils you find in the take-out soups).
5. Season to taste with salt and pepper.

Paper piping bags and Nozzles

So I recently "inherited" my dads cake decorating goodies, and boy was I excited!  Imagine all the cakes and cupcakes I could now start "decorating"!  But then I realised I didn't know what most nozzles were used for!  So I turned to trusty Google and found Wilton's page full of nozzles and their uses...!

Round Tips:

Leaf Tips:

Flower Tips:

Basket Weave Tips:

Rose and Specialty Tips:

Star Tips:

Multi-Opening Tips:

Ruffle Tips:

But now comes the problem of having accessible piping bags!  I remember my dad folding his own out of brown paper (the same kind used to cover school books).

How to fold a paper piping bag:

 

Okay, so great now I could get started with icing my cake with Butter Cream icing!  What a disaster it turned out to be!  Turns out paper piping bags are ideal for Royal Icing and not Butter Cream...  So I did some research and apparently a disposable plastic sandwich bag will do the trick, as well as any disposable or reusable shop bought piping bags!  So bring on the cupcakes and cakes!  Will definitely be trying these and other techniques...

The next challenge is to figure out how to make gum-paste and sugar flowers...  But lets stick to mastering the technique of icing first :)

I have no idea what I'm doing...