today's cooking bonanza

i was out of the house for most of the afternoon today, helping josh to pack and move a load of stuff to his new place in Birmingham so i didnt see much of Lynn since i was busy revising in my room when she left the house for church this morning, and she hadnt come back when i had left for Birmingham. thus it was a pleasant surprise to walk into the house at 5pm and smell chocolate cake. i shrieked "CAKE!" and she and Michael popped their heads out of the kitchen and she replied, "i also made curry puffs. come have one."

now these are not conventional curry puffs (because she did baked them rather than fry them, and the casing is made of puff pastry instead of dough) but they are soooooo delicious! the spicy filling is a mixture of potatoes, onions and chicken sauteed in curry powder and cumin, and a slice of boiled egg, and because it isnt fried, it tastes nice and fluffy and not saturated in oil. mmmmmmm...on to the cake - last monday she made a chocolate ganache cake which i didnt get to try even though i helped to make it because she took it to the weekly church student cell meeting (and i didnt go) and she has been promising she would make another cake for me to devour. this cake is really rich but not the sort that makes you feel like you've had enough after 2 bites.as you can see, the cake is very moist on the inside and the layers have a chewy, brownie-like texture. the ganache is also flavoured with coffee which adds another layer of flavour to the cake and breaks up the chocolate-y-ness of an otherwise overwhelming cake. today's cake is also a lot more decorative (like Lynn pointed out, it looks similar to what Marcus Wareing did for his crab and tea-smoked mackerel tarts with duck egg mayonnaise starter on the Northern Heats of the Great British Menu) because she was going to drizzle white chocolate across the top (to make a grid-like decoration) but she ended up burning the chocolate because the fire was too strong when she was melting it in a steam bath.
she must have worked herself into a baking frenzy because after i came back from the evening church service she announced that she had made peanut cookies as well but wasnt very satisfied with them because she was testing a recipe sans green bean flour so she used ASDA peanut butter instead of Skippy.
i really like them though - very crumbly (the type that melt in your mouth!) and had a nice peanut aroma that burst in your mouth. but definitely the sort you can only have about 5 before you cant have any more for an hour. i cant wait to try the Skippy ones she's making tomorrow!