Quick And Dirty Cake Post

There's been quite a bit of upheaval going on here at Casa De Panda (yes, Panda is my nickname, or Miss Panda if you're feelin' all curtsy-ish and formal).  The Supreme Overlord Of All He Surveys aka Manic The Cat got ill and died quite suddenly, and frankly I've been quite exhausted and unwell too.
All my food intolerance seem to have acted up and I am currently surviving on rice, natto, scrambled eggs and black tea.  I could kid myself and say I'm on a detox regime, but the truth is far more depressingly monastic.  Tea is wonderful, but what would be even more wonderful would be a creamy hot chocolate laced with Baileys and cream.

So this post is just mainly photos of cakes I baked last month.  While I've provided links for the recipe and icing for the tres leches cake, I absolutely promise I'll provide the recipe for the Alladin Sane-iced gâteau aux noisettes in my next post.  As for the black forest cake - it tasted delicious, but the recipe for it is quite temperamental and needs quite a bit of tweaking.
May I suggest we just enjoy it with our eyes?

Tres leches cake for Miss Izbit's 1st Birthday.

An Offall-y Big Adventure Part 1 - Kidneys

{This adventure is in two parts, documenting my experiences with types of offal I'd never cooked before.  We start with kidneys, then move onto brains.  Let's go!}

The blonde behind the counter is grumpy.  Kidneys were clearly an 'out-the-back' item, not in easy reach within the gleaming display cases of steaks, fillets and other more familiar, muscle-centric parts.
"How many do you want?" she asks curtly.
"Umm... 250 grams?" I reply.
"How many would that be?"
"I'm not sure... um... how big are they? They're lambs' kidneys, right?"
She nods, making a vague motion with her hands indicating they're sized anywhere between a 20-cent coin and a char siu bao*.
"I'll just, umm... just a good handful, thanks".

She yells something to a chap out the back, he yells something back.  I stand quietly, waiting for the kidneys, trying not to die of awkwardness.  Eventually, a large brown parcel is proffered to me, feeling a lot more like 500 grams than the asked-for 250 grams.  The price is $2.40.  I hand over the money and skulk away, feeling confused and a little foolish.

Greed, Inadequacy... And A Recipe For One Mad, Bad Chocolate Pavlova

A lone blueberry flops to the left of the pavlova, a criminal fleeing the scene.  The raspberries are studded unevenly across the surface.  Some are huddled together like hostages, while others lie solitary and stranded, lost and away from the herd. The strawberries are leaking their dark balsamic syrup, sullying the white skirts of cream with rusty drips.

As I poke another errant blueberry into the Sorry Heap it dawns on me that I possess the plating skills of a toddler drunk on laudanum.

Plating is like sex.  If you think about it too hard, too much, or generally obsess about it, it's probably going to be awful.  Or perhaps I've just conjured up this platitude to comfort myself;  the correct placement of fruit eludes me so thoroughly and I am very, very bad at it.  Either way the facts are unassailable - I cannot make food look pretty.