mexirish...nz

I must say jacqui's making excellent progress with the piñata.  The colours look great, and it's really starting to come together! She carefully cuts the tissue paper, and uses a spoon to make it curly. The coloured tissue paper gets glued to the base. And more colour gets added... I reckon it's looking great.  It's a bit of a shame that it's going to get smashed to bits come Saturday ;)

This month we're preparing for posada, the Mexican pre-Christmas party. We've decided somewhat rashly to invite "The Entire Mexican Population Of New Zealand" to our house on saturday. We're expecting anywhere from 10 to 600 people... Anyway, A big part of this is the piñata , and jacqui is hard at work making two excellent examples of the art. Here's the progress so far: This is the first step - papier mache over a balloon. At least 4 layers : allow each layer to dry c ompletely before applying the next. Pop the ballon, and pull it out! Make some cones from card. We used this shiney stuff. Stick the cones onto the balloon base at these sorts of angels. It's hanging in our garage here... That's a far as she's got up to now. The next steps will be to decorate it with coloured paper: This is the coloured paper we'll use. We'll post some more when there's more to post!

Turns out Conchas made properly are fan- bloody - tastic . The extra kneading takes it's toll on your fingers and hands, but the final result makes up for it. I guess this is true for all bread recipes, but it's cool to realise the fact through results. They turned out rounded, plump and were sweet and tasty. The sweet bread reminds me a little of a French Brioche, but the topping makes it less poncy. They contains lots of eggs and butter, so I guess this is why they taste so good. So we brought the second attempt to our Mexican friends for them to try, and the were very impressed, so I reckon that's pretty cool. I'm making some more tonight. I'll not bother posting any more about this mind you. I think you get the idea.

Well, the Rosca we made a few days ago went very well. We brought it to some friends (from Mexico) to let them try. They seemed to enjoy it! The tradition is to eat it with Hot Chocolate - we used a Mexican brand called abuelita . We dipped the bread into the chocolate. Extra delicious ! This is the baked Rosca. With baking in mind, we decide to try another well known Mexican sweet bread - Conchas . Conchas are sweet little rolls topped with a crunchy biscuity topping. They can be flavoured in various ways - chocolate, vanilla, cinnamon, or just plain. They contain mucho butter, mucho sugar, and mucho flavour! To be honest, you probably shouldn't eat them every day but once in a while, these beauties will do your soul good! I'll not bother typing the recipe here - that's not really what we do here at Mexican Irish. But it's basically a standard sweet bread - flour, butter, sugar, yeast, eggs and salt. The first attempt was... interesting. They came out quite ...

Well, tonight we're making Rosca de Reyes . Rosca de Reyes is a traditional Mexican bread cake that's typically made in January, but we're a bit seasonally maladjusted, so we're making it in August. We're getting ahead of ourselves. This is supposed to be the amazing first post : the great start to a remarkable new blog. Well, failing that, here's a brief rundown of who we are: We're a Mexican/Irish combination living in New Zealand. Most of the posts on this blog will be about food. Irish, Mexican or otherwise. We might also post the odd thing about whatever else interests us. Who knows! Anyway : back to the bread. We bought most of the ingredients for the bread months ago, and then proceeded to store them in our cupboard. There they've sat, potent and ready, just waiting for us to gather the will to make the cake. So : what's in it? Pretty normal bready mixture : flour, eggs, sugar, yeast, butter. But it's a bit special because it...