Architect of Sugarcraft:

It’s no cakewalk

Lankan Stella Abraham enjoys stellar success in Melbourne

A freshly baked cake sits on the kitchen bench. It smells of butter and good dried fruit. The next step will fill up the dips and holes with marzipan. Then goes a layer of marzipan and a layer of pettini (the smooth icing that covers wedding cakes).

Among the tense cooks vying for the ultimate blue ribbon- the crown of the winner of the Melbourne based cake show, she stands with confidence as her innovative designs blended with skill have already sealed the top place.

Sri Lankan-born Stella Abraham’s cake decorations stood out of the 202 decorated cakes which fill the glass showcases in an empty pavilion at the Royal Melbourne Show. They have been baked and decorated by cooks throughout the State who may have spent up to 100 hours meticulously transforming their work into sugar-covered art.

The Show concluded rewarding the Lankan talent with a coveted blue ribbon, in which she secured the first prize in both the Masters section and the Modern Wedding cake section .

The cake makers who participated in the Show are a special breed of cook.

Their collective work amounts to thousands of hours spent baking, handling notoriously tricky marzipan and pettini and using a mixture of sugar and glucose to fashion delicate floral embellishments.

Their cakes are judged on presentation, technique and colour scheme with bonus points for difficulty. However, unlike almost every other cookery competition in the world, their work will not be judged on taste.

Some cakes are covered in an elaborate baroque architecture of thinly piped icing, a tradition handed down over centuries from the great kitchens of Europe. Others are vibrantly coloured scenes from Hollywood-inspired comic epics. Then there are the fantasies of neo-gothic fairytales or pure domestic whims.

The impassioned cooks have different motives. It might be ambition, a wish to preserve an archaic form of cookery or an expression of joyful creativity.

”That Royal Show Blue Ribbon puts you right at the top,” says the coordinator of the event Judy Barnes. During the past 20 years, she has seen thousands of hopefuls drop off their cakes at the Showgrounds for judging.

“A first prize from the Royal Melbourne Show means something in a professional sense,” says Barnes. “ It’s a very coveted award.”

“I had one piece in the kitchen and the other in the living room and I worked a little by little on each piece every day,” a joyful Abraham recalled.

Abraham learned cake decorating from her mother, trained further in England and taught the skill in Africa before coming to Melbourne where she saw her first Royal Show in 1987.

Abraham was born in Kotehena, Colombo and educated at Good Shepherd Convent, Kotehena. She followed a diploma course in home science at Holy Family Convent, Bambalapitiya out of which she developed a love for sugar coated flowers. She learnt the art of cake decorating from her mother and other teachers in Colombo.

“I returned to my school to join the staff as a home science teacher and taught the subject to students of Grade Six to 10,” she recollects.

Abraham got married to Samuel , a Chartered Mechanical Engineer in 1976. After marriage they spent the next 10 years in England and Zambia before migrating to Australia in 1987.

“In Sri Lanka we followed the British way of decorating,” says Abraham, who now tours Australia teaching cake decorating. “Here, the tradition is more European-influenced with much finer piping work.” She is known in decorating circles for her life-like flowers. After a break of several years, Abraham returned to the show this year because she believes there is a feeling in the cake decorating world that the standards may have slipped.

Describing the work on her two entries, she compares her art to sculpture. “I also won the second prize in Sugar Flower Arrangement and in the Piece of Sugarcraft sections,” says the quiet master who has gathered over 35 years experience in the art.

Apart from the experience in cake decorating around the globe Abraham has established an innovative line of cake decorating tools and accessories.

She is invited by various organisations around Australia to give demonstrations and conduct workshops on cake decoration and sugar flower making. “I design and manufacture various metal cutters, veiners and tools used in sugar craft work. These I sell through my Company Floral Art and Sugarcraft, Melbourne, “ she added. As a winner of many cake shows and competitions she is committed to passing on her talents through live demonstrations, instructional videos and workshops.

“The skills we learnt in Sri Lanka are as good as the best you find anywhere in the world,” Abraham assures. “My ambition is to come to Sri Lanka and conduct a workshop on sugar flower making.”

(The Age)

Know your moisturiser

When looking for the right kind of moisturiser for your skin you should consider many things before just going and buying any product off the shelves. These things should be skin type, time of year, as well as cost of the product you are looking at.

Home made moisturisers

Mix 3/4 cup of rose water, 1/4 cup glycerine, one tsp. of vinegar and 1/4 tsp. of honey and keep it in a bottle. Use it regularly after cleansing.

Milk moisturiser Mix honey, milk and any vegetable oil. This mixture is a good moisturiser for dry skin. Apply this mask for 10 minutes, then wash off with cold water.

Mix one medium sized apple (grated), one tablespoon lemon juice and two tsp honey. Apply this paste to face and wait for10 minutes, and then wash off with lukewarm water. This mixture is a good moisturiser for oily, acne-prone skin.

Lemon juice or orange juice blended with olive oil is a time-tested keep-it-supple skin moisturiser.

Glycerin and honey (Natural moisturiser for all skin)

Three tablespoons glycerin to one teaspoon honey, is recommended by modern skin-care experts as a wear all day or leave on night moisturiser.

www.naturalbeautycareguide.com









 

Coconut oil for a healthy heart

Most households in Sri Lanka fry their delicacies in coconut oil as from ancient days the ingredient is locally produced and readily available.

However, due to recent contradictions it was thrown aside for sometime but the latest research has again oiled up the issue leaving room for cooks once again to fry food in coconut oil.

It will be heartening news for the users of coconut oil to learn that it reduces the risk of heart diseases.

Protect your heart with coconut oil ? Yes, believe it or not, coconut oil may be one of the best foods for your heart.

Once mistakenly believed to be bad for the heart because of its saturated fat content, coconut oil is now known to contain a unique form of saturated fat that actually helps prevent heart disease, stroke, and hardening of the arteries as well as provide many other health benefits, Bruce Fife, a certified nutritionist and naturopathic physician says.

Asian and Polynesian people who rely on coconut and coconut oil as a major part of their daily diet have the lowest heart disease rates in the world. Some of these people get as much as 50 percent of their total daily calories as saturated fat, primarily from coconut oil.

If coconut oil caused heart disease, as some people used to believe, these islanders would have all died off centuries ago. Those populations who consume large quantities of coconut oil have remarkably good cardiovascular health. Absent are the heart attacks and strokes characteristic in Western countries where coconut oil is rarely used.

In Sri Lanka, coconut has been the primary source of dietary fat for thousands of years. In 1978 every man, woman, and child consumed the equivalent to 120 coconuts per year. That’s a lot of coconut and a lot of coconut oil. At that time the country had one of the lowest heart disease rates in the world.

Only one out of every 100,000 deaths was attributed to heart disease. By comparison, in the United States where very little coconut is eaten and people rely more on polyunsaturated oils, the heart disease death rate is over 800 times higher.

Due to warnings to reduce saturated fat consumption, since 1978 coconut consumption in Sri Lanka has declined dramatically. In place of coconut oil the people have begun to eat more corn and other polyunsaturated vegetable oils. As a consequence, an interesting thing has happened. As coconut consumption has decreased, heart disease rates have increased! If coconut oil really did caused heart disease then heart disease rates should have decreased as people consumed less coconut oil, but just the opposite has happened.

Replacing coconut oil with polyunsaturated vegetable oil increased heart disease rates.

Another interesting fact is that heart disease occurs almost entirely in the urban population that eats the least amount of coconut oil and the most imported polyunsaturated oil. In populations that live outside of the cities and continue to depend on coconut oil as their major source of dietary fat, heart disease is essentially nonexistent.

In these populations signs of heart disease are completely absent even in the oldest who live to be near 100 years of age. They do not have high cholesterol,high blood pressure, hardening of the arteries, or any other signs of heart disease. These individuals have been consuming coconuts and coconut oil every single day of their lives for nearly 100 years without any ill effect.

When you examine all the evidence, it becomes obvious that coconut oil does not cause or contribute to heart disease in any way.

American Chronicle

Vegetable Spring Rolls

Ingredients

- 2 large carrots, julienned
- 2-3 julienned leek
- 1/2 sweet red pepper, julienned
- 1/3 cup thinly sliced cabbage
- 1/2 cup mushroom
- 1 tsp. grated ginger
- 1 tablespoon oil
- 1/4 cup minced fresh coriander leaves
- 1/4 teaspoon fresh ground black pepper
- 1 pinch salt
- 16 spring roll sheets

Directions

In a large bowl, combine the carrots, leek, cabbage, mushrooms, red pepper, oil, ginger, coriander leaves, salt and pepper: toss well. Let it marinate for 10 minutes, stirring frequently. Heat a wok or a large fry pan. Fry the mixture for a minute.

Take a sheet of spring roll, spread 1 1/2 teaspoons of the mixture on each sheet, moisten all the sides with beaten egg or milk. Fold the two side edges and roll the sheet. Heat oil for deep frying and fry rolls until golden brown. Drain them on paper tissues.

Dip for spring rolls:

In a small fry pan fry one to two cloves of garlic with 1/2 teaspoon sesame oil (don’t burn the garlic). Pour in soy sauce (amount depends on how many spring rolls you make). When the soy sauce is warm, remove from heat. Dip the spring rolls in.