cooking – IN IT FOR LOVE

Been thinking about this old favourite lately and finally found the recipe. MUST make this dude again. Spicy wingy goodness!

Ingredients

60ml (1/4 cup) maple syrup
6-8 chicken wings
60ml (1/4 cup) bourbon whiskey (a great alternative is to use a Honey Bourbon!)
2 teaspoons red Tabasco pepper sauce
2 garlic cloves, crushed
1 teaspoon ground cumin
Large pinch of cayenne pepper
Optional splash of your favourite hot chilli sauce to spice things up

Blue Cheese Sauce

75g (1/4 cup) light sour cream
65g (1/4 cup) mayonnaise
80g Castello blue cheese, coarsely chopped
1 teaspoon fresh lemon juice
1 small garlic clove, crushed

Discard the tips from each chicken wing. Cut the wings in half at the joint and place, in a single layer, in a shallow large glass or ovenproof dish.

Combine the maple syrup, bourbon, Tabasco sauce, garlic, cumin and cayenne pepper in a jug. Pour over the chicken and turn to coat. Cover with plastic wrap and place in the fridge for 6 hours to marinate.
Definitely needs a nice marinating period

Preheat oven to 200°C. Remove the wrap. Bake in oven, turning occasionally, for 45 minutes to 1 hour or until the chicken is golden and how you like it.

Meanwhile, to make the blue cheese sauce, place the sour cream, mayonnaise, blue cheese, lemon juice and garlic in the jug of a blender and blend until smooth.
I think it’s best with this to add in half of the blue cheese first to see how much you like and then keep adding to taste.

Transfer chicken to a serving platter and serve with the sauce.

Pinterest Recipe > Upside Down Banana Cake

However, this is now known in our house as “Delicious Edge Cake” – because the toffee crisp cake edges were better than the rest of the cake….sadly!

Photography just does wonders for food these days. Sometimes I find myself asking if the image I’m seeing is actually going to taste good, as of course we eat with our eyes first!

This Pinterest find of Upside Down Banana Cake, spoke to me with my eyes. I could already taste the sticky cake in my mouth – so I went head first Saturday afternoon, after an early start to the day, quite tired – but nonetheless, starving for such a gorgeous looking cake.

Now – I know my bananas were a little underripe, I’ve cooked many a banana cake and know the best time for banana cake is with overripe bananas. But alas, I had cake in my sights, so this didn’t even come into my mind!

To add to that, I didn’t really read the recipe UNTIL I started making it, which ended up being a total of nearly an hour of cake making, due to having to cook the toffee, the meringue and the cake mixture. Also add to that a tin that was too big and part of it sticking to the tin when it had finished cooking because I was too impatient to wait the extra 3 minutes for it to finish cooling!

However, I don’t think this was a complete fail – even though 3/4’s of the cake is still sitting in our fridge uneaten a few days later – but I also think its OKAY to fail at making something.

I am a huge food lover – I’m thinking about food sadly the second I wake up, but sometimes, I just have a poo of a cooking day. My patience fails me, I’m not in the mood and well, the cooking just fails!

But I think thats okay. Because a picture can make something look super tasty, so much so you have to try and perfectly replicate it, right down to that perfect no shadow/but totally natural shot! You never actually know what it tastes like until you make it – and we all know that depends on skill. So many can make the same thing and have it end up completely different from one another!

But right now – I’m proud of my sadface looking “Delicious Edge Cake’…because even though the cake part of it was lacklustre and the bananas were horribly underripe, the small victory was in the toffee edging!!! And that was pretty darn delicious!