Evan's Notes

Author: Evan Cottle

  • Vegan Cheese and Mushroom Cob Loaf

    When you’re keen to take a cob to the barbeque, but it’s a vegan affair, this recipe is sure to impress!

    Ingredients

    • 500g white cob loaf (shop around for the best ones)
    • 1 medium onion, minced (or grated, but I use a stick blender with a chopper pot)
    • 500g white mushrooms (or a variety of mushroom to your liking), peeled and finely chopped
    • 2 teaspoons smoked paprika
    • 2 tablespoons chopped chives, plus some extra for garnish
    • 1/2 tablespoon chopped dill
    • 500mL plant-based cream (I use the Flora brand one, which is lentil-based)
    • 1 tablespoon sodium citrate (available on Amazon or from a cooking supplier with molecular gastronomy supplies, or some supplement suppliers)
    • Grated vegan cheeses:
      • 500g cheddar-style (the Made With Plants brand from Woolworths is what I used)
      • 100g sharp vegan cheese such as Vegusto Piquant
    • 1/2 tablespoon lemon juice
    • A few generous dashes of a vinegar-based hot sauce like Frank’s Red Hot or Tabasco
    • Large bread stick or other crusty bread, broken or sliced for extra dippers

    Method

    Make the dip

    1. Heat a generous splash of olive oil in a large pot over medium heat. Add the onion, stirring constantly until slightly softened.
    2. Add the mushroom and cook, stirring, to allow it to give up its moisture. As it cooks, add the paprika, and season with salt, pepper, and MSG (if you have it). It’s done once the onion has some colour and the mushroom sizzles (about 10 minutes). Cooking longer will give a deeper flavour, but be careful not to burn it. Turn the heat to low when done.
    3. Warm the cream slightly in the microwave, then add the sodium citrate. Whisk until dissolved, add to the mushroom and onion mixture, and stir to combine.
    4. Add the grated cheeses, and stir/whisk continuously until the cheese has melted and emulsified.
    5. Add the chives, dill, lemon juice, and hot sauce. Combine, then taste for seasoning. Extra hot sauce goes really well if your guests don’t mind the spice.

    Build the cob

    1. Cut a lid out of the top of the cob loaf – I like to make a ring a few cm down the loaf, and plunge toward the core of the loaf.
    2. Scoop the bread out of the core of the loaf, leaving a shell of 1-2cm. Tear or roughly chop the core bread into pieces for dipping.

    Bake the cob

    I like to do the steps above before hand, and put everything into containers to take to the party, then complete the following there.

    1. Heat oven to 160° fan-forced (180°C conventional) and line a couple of trays with baking paper
    2. Heat dip mixture in microwave until warm (but not necessarily hot) – if not still warm from cooking. Whisk thoroughly to re-emulsify if it’s split.
    3. Pour dip into loaf.
    4. Bake for 20 minutes or until the dip is bubbling a little and the bread is toasted. Put the lid on the loaf for the first 10 minutes, then take it off and place it upside down on the tray for the rest of the time to let everything brown nicely.
    5. While the cob is baking, place all the dipping bits on a tray and drizzle with a little oil. Place in the oven to toast with the cob for the second 10 minutes – more if you want it toastier.
    6. Sprinkle the cob with the extra chives and serve.

    Notes

    • This is an original recipe inspired by my decidedly non-vegan Cheese and Bacon Cob recipe.
    • Sodium citrate is used in this recipe because we need lots of emulsifying power. It creates a nacho cheese style sauce, which will be incredibly smooth when properly comibined.
    • Grate your cheeses fresh from blocks! Pre-grated/shredded cheeses have a powdery coating (usually a mixture of cornstarch and a few other things) to prevent them clumping up and going mouldy, but this can make it hard to get the dip to come together, and even make it gluggy.
    • Baking the dip really brings out its flavour, so don’t skip that if you can help it. Even on a BBQ would be better than nothing. A giant air fryer is even better than an oven if you have one big enough.
  • S/PDIF Cables and Signal Quality

    S/PDIF Cables and Signal Quality

    I got a new set of computer speakers recently and decided to hook them up using the digital audio input. Because my computer doesn’t have an optical output, coax was the way (in fact, I had to make my own flylead to break out the motherboard’s S/PDIF header to an RCA plug – more on that another time).

    It may come as a surprise to some, but there is absolutely no difference in audio quality between optical and coax – use whichever you have the I/O and cable for. Digital is digital, and even the highest bitrate multichannel audio is not that demanding (though recent home theatre HD audio formats like DTS-HD and Dolby Atmos don’t support S/PDIF coax or optical – I suspect this is likely a copy protection/DRM requirement rather than a technical one).

    S/PDIF is designed to use 75 ohm coax, as used for video (composite, component, SDI, etc), TV antennas, cable TV, HFC internet, etc. It generally uses RCA connectors for convenience, unlike the professional version (AES-EBU), which uses the much more appropriate and impedance-matched BNC connector.

    So anyway, I hooked up the speakers using a cheap cable I had lying around, and they didn’t work. Spoiler – it’s because I had selected the wrong input – but that didn’t stop me from actually investigating the impact of the cable – which was almost certainly not 75 ohm coax!

    S/PDIF signal at RCA output of computer
    S/PDIF signal through 1m of cheap RCA cable

    So it certainly appears that sending the signal through even a short length of poor cable has a significant impact on the signal. I don’t know a lot about electronics operating at these frequencies, but I’m pretty sure blurry = bad. It wasn’t long after this I realised I had my speakers set to optical input rather than coax, and it turned out they work perfectly even with such a distorted signal.

    I’ll have to do some more investigation with a better quality cable, but I find it quite interesting that the decoder doesn’t seem bothered as it is! It certainly explains why “any old cable” is such a common option for S/PDIF. A great question to be answered is “what’s the limit?”. To be continued…

  • Cheese and Bacon Cob Loaf

    Revision 3

    An absolute winner for get togethers and BBQs with family and friends.

    Original recipe: https://www.taste.com.au/recipes/cheese-bacon-cob-loaf/4f21cd3e-5cc0-4d80-bcb6-8a2f322987c0

    Vegan alternative: https://evancottle.net/2025/12/26/vegan-cheese-and-mushroom-cob-loaf/

    Ingredients

    • 500g white cob loaf – in Australia I’ve found Woolworths usually have bigger ones than Coles, Bakers Delight, or my local bakery – this may or may not be important to you
    • 1 medium onion, minced (or grated, but I use a stick blender with a chopper pot)
    • 200g fatty streaky bacon rashers (the fattiest you can find), finely chopped
    • 2 tablespoons chopped chives, plus some extra for garnish
    • 250g block cream cheese, softened
    • 300mL cooking cream (this stuff; it has emulsifiers and other things that prevent it from breaking or curdling when using it to deglaze the pan, and help to emulsify our dip)
    • 160mL sour cream
    • Grated cheeses:
      • 200g moderately aged cheddar (“vintage tasty” or “extra tasty” in Australia, I like the Great Ocean Road Extra Tasty)
      • 100g colby cheese
      • 100g mozzarella (the lower moisture kind, not the fresh kind which will be too watery for this)
      • 30g parmesan
    • Large bread stick or other crusty bread, broken or sliced for extra dippers

    Method

    Make the dip

    1. Put the bacon in a large frying pan or skillet (preferably stainless steel) or dutch oven, then place over medium-low heat. Allow the bacon to give up most of its fat – it shouldn’t brown, just render away (covering can help with this).
    2. Increase the heat, and add the onion, stirring through so that it can cook in the bacon fat. Cook, stirring, for 5 minutes or until bacon is browned and onion has cooked. Because the onion is so fine it will form a lot of delicious sticky brown bits (commonly known as fond) which will amp up the flavour a lot.
    3. Remove from heat. Slowly drizzle in the cream, stirring vigorously. The cream should allow you to scrape up (“deglaze”) the brown fond from the pan, and incorporate it into the dip.
    4. Add chives, cream cheese, sour cream and grated cheeses, stirring gently to loosely combine between each ingredient.
    5. Return to a low-medium heat and stir continuously to allow the cheeses to melt and emulsify.
    6. Taste and season with salt (nah probably no salt) and pepper. Add a dash of your favourite spices if you feel like it.

    Build the cob

    1. Cut a lid out of the top of the cob loaf – I like to make a ring a few cm down the loaf, and plunge toward the core of the loaf.
    2. Scoop the bread out of the core of the loaf, leaving a shell of 1-2cm. Tear or roughly chop the core bread into pieces for dipping.

    Bake the cob

    I like to do the steps above before hand, and put everything into containers to take to the party, then complete the following there.

    1. Heat oven to 160° fan-forced (180°C conventional) and line a couple of trays with baking paper
    2. Heat dip mixture in microwave until warm (but not necessarily hot) – if not still warm from cooking
    3. Pour dip into loaf and top with a little extra grated cheese.
    4. Bake for 20 minutes or until the dip is bubbling a little and the bread is toasted. Put the lid on the loaf for the first 10 minutes, then take it off and place it upside down on the tray for the rest of the time to let everything brown nicely.
    5. While the cob is baking, place all the dipping bits on a tray and drizzle with a little oil. Place in the oven to toast with the cob for the second 10 minutes – more if you want it toastier.
    6. Sprinkle the cob with the extra chives and serve.

    Notes

    • An earlier revision of this used processed cheese instead of Colby. Using processed cheese borrows an idea from Adam Ragusea – we want something to help emulsify our dip, and emulsifying salts like sodium citrate (essentially the salt version of citric acid) are ideal for that. But sodium citrate can be a little bit of a pain to get (it’s available online but not in supermarkets in Australia). So it turns out that processed cheese has plenty in it – more than it needs – so if we use it in our dip, we can get a little help from the emulsifiers it brings. The result is a much smoother, more consistent dip. As it turns out, the cooking cream also includes these emulsifiers, so by using plenty of it we get the same effect, and are able to use the tastier unprocessed colby.
    • Grate your cheeses fresh from blocks! Or cut from slices in the case of the processed cheese. Pre-grated/shredded cheeses have a powdery coating (usually a mixture of cornstarch and a few other things) to prevent them clumping up and going mouldy, but this can make it hard to get the dip to come together, and even make it gluggy
    • Baking the dip really brings out its flavour, so don’t skip that if you can help it. Even on a BBQ would be better than nothing.
    • The original recipe is great too, so if you can’t justify so many different kinds of cheese it’s worth trying – but more is better in my book!

    Revisions

    1. As revised from original source
    2. Increased cheese quantities; replaced colby with processed cheese; add cream earlier
    3. Increased cream quantity, back to colby

  • Chocolate Ganache

    A delicious, silky – yet dead simple – ganache that’s great for decorating cakes, dipping strawberries, or in any dessert you like.

    Original recipe: https://www.bestrecipes.com.au/recipes/chocolate-ganache/7gzr5egn

    Ingredients

    • 225g good quality eating chocolate – either dark chocolate, or a 50/50 mix of milk and dark
    • 180g double cream
    • 30mL liqueur of your choice, or vanilla essence (I use and recommend Frangelico hazelnut liqueur)

    Method

    1. Chop the chocolate up as fine as you can manage, and place into a mixing bowl (ideally heatproof)
    2. Heat the cream while gently stirring in a saucepan over low-medium heat, until it starts bubbling consistently but not too vigorously
    3. Remove from the heat, and pour the hot cream over the chocolate
    4. Begin gently mixing the cream and chocolate either by hand or with a mixer on its lowest setting – you don’t really want air in it unless you’re going for a whipped ganache
    5. Mix in the liqueur or vanilla

    Notes

    • The original recipe calls for butter, but I find I get a better result by using double cream and omitting the butter
    • DO NOT CHEAP OUT ON THE CHOCOLATE! The deliciousness of the ganache is entirely dependent on the deliciousness of the chocolate! I love the chocolate the Yarra Valley Chocolaterie sells, and their giant 1kg blocks are great value if you’re cooking with it
    • I’ve found this method to be basically foolproof – I’ve never found the chocolate splits or anything
    • Adjust the ratio of cream to chocolate to get different consistencies – this is reasonably thick (ideal for shaping cakes), but you could use less cream for little enrobed ganache balls, or more (double, maybe triple) for a glaze like consistency. Once it’s made you can always simmer more cream and mix it in, but you can’t really add more chocolate easily.
    • By introducing freshly simmered cream to high quality chocolate directly, any pathogens that might be in the cream are killed and the ability of more to grow is severely hampered. Combined with the alcohol, that means this ganache is actually safe at room temperature for a couple of days. Keep it in the fridge if you can though, it’ll be good for much longer that way.

  • Frangelico Chocolate Mud Cake

    A rich, fudgy mud cake that’s amazing decorated, carved, or just on its own, and keeps weeks.

    Original Recipe: https://web.archive.org/web/20190228182813/https://www.bestrecipes.com.au/recipe/chocolate-mud-cake-L1217.html

    Ingredients

    • 250g unsalted butter, chopped
    • 200g good quality eating milk chocolate, chopped (I get mine in delicious 1kg blocks from the Yarra Valley Chocolaterie; use half dark chocolate if you would like it even richer)
    • 450g caster sugar
    • 250mL water
    • 125mL Frangelico hazelnut liqueur
    • 1tsp instant coffee, or half a shot espresso (doesn’t make it taste like coffee, just oomphs up the chocolate flavour)
    • 115g plain flour
    • 115g self raising flour
    • 30g cocoa (replace half with flour if you would like it less rich)
    • 3 eggs

    Method

    1. In a large saucepan (don’t go too small – I use a soup pot!), add the first 6 ingredients (butter, chocolate, water, Frangelico, sugar, coffee).
    2. Melt together over a low heat until sugar is dissolved and butter and chocolate are melted. Allow to cool for 10 minutes.
    3. Sift plain flour, self raising flour and cocoa into a large mixing bowl.
    4. Add the cooled liquid and beat gently.
    5. Add the eggs and mix gently.
    6. Pour mixture into a greased cake tin and bake at 150°C for 1¾ hours or more – aim for 90°-95°C internal temperature.
    7. Allow to cool in the tin thoroughly before removing and decorating.

    Decorating Ideas

    I always pair this with ganache, usually with Frangelico in it too. Coat the outside for a Woollies style mudcake. Layer with ganache to go one further. It takes a mirror glaze or pretty much any icing you might like reasonably well too, if you want something more impressive looking. It carves really well when frozen for shaped cakes, and is dense enough to hold any shape that doesn’t have any sort of cantilevering.

    Notes

    • One quantity is good for a 15-20cm round tin
    • Divide a 1.5 quantity across two tins for a basic 2-layer party cake – more cakes, more fun!
    • Avoid baking more than one quantity per tin – it’s pretty dense so it will be hard to get to cook well
    • This cake to some extent just sets in the middle, rather than fully developing crumb (it’s not raw – 90°C is plenty high enough to pasteurise the eggs so it’s entirely safe)
    • This stuff is RICH – you won’t need much… but it keeps so well you may as well go all out ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
    • The lowish baking temperature means I wouldn’t guarantee the alcohol cooks off, but the amount per slice would be minute
    • Don’t skip the cooling after it’s done – the cake needs the time to set up properly, and will almost certainly sag if you don’t let it
    • Keep in the freezer to aid decorating, but be sure to let it sit in the fridge up to a few days to develop its flavour, and allow to come to room temperature over a few hours before serving
    • Hard to say for sure how long it will last, but I’ve left a container of this cake on the bench, unrefrigerated, for 6 weeks and it was still amazing
    • Microwave in the days following for a delicious rich warm pudding with custard, cream, ice cream, etc

    Updates

    I’m working on some improvements to this recipe, which I will post here if they go well.

  • Passionfruit Pink Gin Mixer

    Passionfruit Pink Gin Mixer

    A super refreshing, simple, tasty drink for summer. Just mix and serve!

    Ingredients

    • 60mL Strawberry Pink Gin (or any gin with a nice berry flavour to it)
    • Half a 375mL bottle of Bundaberg Passionfruit Sparkling Drink
    • Ice
    • Top with ~40mL of Schweppes Zero Sugar Lemonade

    Notes

    • If you like sweeter, use more passionfruit drink, or a full sugar lemonade
    • If you like less sweet, top with soda water or just more ice
    • Will probably taste great with any gin you like, but the strawberry is a great combination
    • Don’t substitute cheap passionfruit drinks like Pasito or Passiona – the Bundaberg stuff has the flavour needed to carry the drink
    • Be careful not to burn the gin over the ice – mix it with the passionfruit mixer