{"id":8518,"date":"2025-01-05T21:25:57","date_gmt":"2025-01-05T11:25:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.raining-chaos.net\/blog\/?p=8518"},"modified":"2026-04-12T11:58:13","modified_gmt":"2026-04-12T11:58:13","slug":"reines-kitchen-2024","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.raining-chaos.net\/blog\/2025\/01\/05\/reines-kitchen-2024\/","title":{"rendered":"Reine’s Kitchen 2024"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I think it’s been a while since I’ve posted any cooking adventures, but this Christmas I had plenty of time to really treat myself to some fancy food!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Ok, this cake was not something I made haha. This is my second ever whole cake purchase for just myself, a pistachio trifle cake from Teeter Bakery and it was amazing! I was worried it’d be too big for one person to finish, but I managed it over 3 days, which was pretty good! <\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

Christmas Eve spread included a trial of a caprese tower (which evolved to something way more epic on Christmas Day!), some sashimi, Big Don’s Smoked Meats ham, berries and cherries galore, and a prawn salad – originally I wanted to make a prawn roll as well but I didn’t manage to source brioche buns this time around and the salad was just as good! <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Also these fruit mince pies from Miller and Baker were great too! Turns out I am having a lot of trouble with my Japan Zero teapot; I can’t pour it cleanly if it’s got anymore than about 30% liquid in it, for some reason with my tilt it keeps coming out of the lid rather than just the spout? And if I tilt it less, nothing comes out. Still a conundrum! <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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And here is the epic caprese tower! It was a post by Poly that inspired me to try it, and I loved how ridiculous it looked, especially on my obnoxious plate!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Luckily my senses returned and my remaining tomatoes and burrata were plated normally!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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And then for New Year’s Eve and New Years I made my best chirashi yet! This time I got some sashimi, whereas previously I’d used just smoked salmon and some prawns as the seafood. Also, the tamagoyaki this year was really good too! I paid attention and used a brand new stainless steel pan which actually helped the egg glide smoothly! Who needs a non-stick pan dedicated to eggs XD<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Another fun experiment was to try and make einspanners while Giant Coffee was closed. I used whipping cream, and only lightly whipped it, but it still came out too heavy. I am wondering if it’s meant to be like half cream half milk as the secret? Who knows, I don’t really need to continue researching the topic of lightly whipped cream since I have a cafe that does it better already!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I also found some mugwort mochi powder at the Japanese shop so I tried my hand at tri-colour dango. The pink ones were made with a raspberry and strawberry syrup I’d prepared earlier. Turns out that dango requires a mix of rice flour and glutinous rice flour, but I only had the glutinous type, which actually still turned out good but I suspect that the mix makes the dango lighter; my ones were quite dense compared to how the green ones turned out since that was a pre-mix. I also need to reduce the wetness of the dough; the mugwort balls were the most deformed because they had the highest water content, even though I tried to fix it by adding a bit more glutinous rice flour, but I guess I didn’t add enough. This might be something I’ll try again, but not sure!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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New year’s chirashi which used up the last of my sashimi \ud83d\ude00<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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And lol, I had bought some sashimi grade scampi so I did some dumb things and made an abomination hand roll, which tasted really good!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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And a cheese plate for lols. King Island black label brie, King Island Roaring Forties blue, and a red cheddar I found. I was actually after reypanaer but the shops didn’t have any of the super aged stuff. I decided for the cheddar instead since I hadn’t had it before and to my (dumb) surprise, it wasn’t the flavour profile I was after haha. It tasted like cheddar when I was hoping for caramel and crystals! It was still good though, so I can’t fault the cheese, just my poor life choices. Oh also, the black stuff is Kangaroo Island dried sticky figs – they were so good I was temtped to go back and buy more, but they’re an expensive luxury item so I guess I can only search for and buy them once a year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Merry Christmas Happy New Year!!!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I think it’s been a while since I’ve posted any cooking adventures, but this Christmas I had plenty of time to really treat myself to some fancy food! Ok, this cake was not something I made haha. This is my second ever whole cake purchase for just myself, a pistachio trifle cake from Teeter Bakery […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[206,243,253,744,861,882,1624,1696,1893],"class_list":["post-8518","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-food","tag-cake","tag-cheese","tag-chirashi","tag-i-didnt-actually-cook-that-much-this-year-haha","tag-i-love-cooking","tag-i-love-food","tag-reines-kitchen","tag-sashimi","tag-tea"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.raining-chaos.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8518","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.raining-chaos.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.raining-chaos.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.raining-chaos.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.raining-chaos.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8518"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.raining-chaos.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8518\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8824,"href":"https:\/\/www.raining-chaos.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8518\/revisions\/8824"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.raining-chaos.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8518"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.raining-chaos.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8518"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.raining-chaos.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8518"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}