‘Get Your Jelly On’ 30-day challenge – Reader’s competition winner announced!

The Royal Selangor jelly mould for a good cause

The Royal Selangor jelly mould for a good cause

This post is part of  the Royal Selangor Jellyriffic Competition where ten bloggers from around the world compete by posting recipes each day for 30 days in the month of October 2011 to raise awareness and support for breast cancer. *

Follow our progress and download our recipes in the “Cuisines of the World” by clicking the image below:

We have come to the end of the 30-day ‘Get Your Jelly On’ challenge and it’s time to announce the winner for our Readers’ contest.

Over the course of the month, you have given us encouragement with all your comments and suggestions which have really spurred us on.

Olympus VG-110 camera

Olympus VG-110 camera

Winner of the Readers’ contest for our 30-day challenge

The winner of the Olympus VG-110 camera is Shabina Mehra of Hillsdale in Sydney, New South Wales who correctly named 9 out of the 10 international cuisines in our Cuisines of the World journey. Congratulations Shabina !!

We also like to acknowledge and commend the efforts of our fellow food bloggers. Without your creative and beautiful recipes challenging us each day, we would never have strived as hard to create our own recipes. Thank you to all of you and it was an honour to compete against such formidable talent!

Our nine fellow bloggers:

We also like to acknowledge the support of Chopinand’s sister Alice who gave us great ideas and cooked up some wonderful nasi lemak and bolognaise during early stages of the competition. Despite the pressure of coming up with a recipe each day, we did have a lot of fun and it was great involving our friends and family. Thanks also to Jamie and Alistar for spending a beautiful day with us at Cremorne Point last Sunday. We’re glad you enjoyed our creation of kuih Malaysia among all the other goodies at the picnic. Here’s to more picnics to come!!

Lastly we like to also acknowledge each and every one of our dear readers. Your kind words of encouragement, emails and support is inspiring and moving. Without all of you egging us along each day, we could never have come up with all our recipes and creations.

Our dear readers, fellow foodies and bloggers who spurred us on during the competition – you were as much a part of this competition as we were! A big thank you from the bottom of our hearts:

We have double checked the comments listing on our blog and hope we have not missed out anyone. Please contact us in the unlikely event that we did as we want to acknowledge all your efforts in helping us get through this challenge and to spread the awareness and support for breast cancer.

Finally, we want to share with you some of our bloopers during the challenge.

As you can see, it wasn’t all smooth sailing for us as we attempted each recipe in trying to make it ‘smile’ for the camera.

Jellies that did not make the cut

Throughout the entire 30-day, we had a lot of fun experimenting with new recipes, trying out different cooking styles as well as getting ourselves familiar with how the mould works.

The fact that it is not oven proof provides a constraint that we needed to overcome. Therefore, in coming up with all our recipes, we experienced a few disasters or jellies that “did not rise” to the occasion.

Here are just a few of them:

Pinot noir beetroot jelly.

Pinot noir beetroot jelly

This was on Day 3 of the challenge where we needed to test how beetroot would react to being jellified.

It is not easy to work with beetroot and cutting it into small cubes did not make things any easier because they kept releasing its intense red colour into the vegetable stock that we were working with.

Spaghetti Bolognaise

Spaghetti Bolognaise

On Day 4 of the challenge, we encountered more difficulty with trying to get the spaghetti bolognaise to ‘stand up’. In the end, we decided to make fusilli bolognaise instead and the curly strands of the fusilli pasta held together in a beautiful and intricate pattern.

Cheesecake with apricot nectar tip

Cheesecake with apricot nectar tip

Day 5 of the challenge saw us trying to mould a cheesecake with an apricot nectar tip that my sister Alice made.

Conceptually a great idea but physically, it became a bit of a lame duck as you can see. Nevertheless, I did not let that beautiful apricot nectar tip go to a waste though.

Tired looking kuih lapis with solitary grain of white rice that refused to budge

Tired looking kuih lapis with solitary grain of white rice that refused to budge

On the last day of the challenge, you would have thought that we have mastered the use of the mould.

Far from it, we tried to make our own concoction of a kuih Malaysia and again, it was a poor looking jelly that refused to give us a smile when the camera came out.

To us, the greatest challenge in working with the Royal Selangor jelly mould was developing all the recipes and making them ‘work’. At the same time, we needed to think about the way each and every ingredient used would combine to give a good balance of taste and flavours. Finally, the entire dish needs to be tastefully presentable from a photography perspective.

Here is a summary of our 30 recipes in this Jellyriffic 30-day challenge:

  • Thirty recipes which make up ten international 3-course meals consisting an entreemain and dessert.
  • Five 3-course Asian cuisines – Chinese, Thai, Japanese, Indian and Malaysian.
  • Five 3-course Western cuisines – Italian, Spanish, Australian, English and French.
  • Both hot and cold entrees which are steamed, baked, chilled, roasted and jellied.
  • Main courses that cover popular rice and pasta favourites, a burger, pie and duck dish.
  • Ten vastly different and contrasting style of desserts which include a rice pudding, steamed cake, mousse, ice-cream, pannacotta, jelly, pavlova, kulfi, trifle and mille feuille.
  • A surprising revelation is that we have used gelatin in only 8 out of the 30 recipes
  • We have used over 140 different types of ingredients over the 30 days. For ease of reference and note for food allergies, we have compiled a list of key ingredients used and these include 23 types of vegetables, 18 herbs and spices, 15 types of fruit, 9 types of seafood, 7 types of red meat, 35 different food supplements, 10 diary products, red wine and white wine, 4 types of nuts and 8 types sauces.
  • All recipes are halal or kosher except for the fusilli bolognaise, Spanish paella and Shepherd’s pie with blowtorch mashed potatos. These three recipes can be adapted to be halal by substituting pork mince and chorizo sausage. We suggest chicken mince and beef sausage substitute respectively.

We hope you will give our recipes a try as they are not too difficult to replicate. We have done all the hard work for you already! Best of all, you can use these recipes to plan a 3-course dinner party using the jelly mould.

Happy cooking!!

Chopinand & Mysaucepan

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22 Responses to ‘Get Your Jelly On’ 30-day challenge – Reader’s competition winner announced!

  1. babe_kl says:

    awwww you guys are just sooo sweeet! well done again 😀

  2. Congratulations Shabina!! I love the bloopers and thank you for the mention. :)

  3. sophia says:

    That was fun to see the “blooper” part of the competition. I really really loved everything you did though. Everyone really outdid themselves. So proud of all of you!

  4. You guys have been seriously amazing! So much time and effort put into your creations which have been so cool and inspiring to observe over the course of the competition. Well played!

  5. Thank you for the acknowledgement. Very sweet of you. No wonder I am enjoying discovering your work through this month of excellent creativity and charity promotion. I look forward to experimenting with your ideas.

  6. Fiona Novak says:

    Thank you for the kind mention. You guys did all the fantastic work and as readers, we were so thrilled to be a part of your adventure. So.. Thank YOU for doing a great job entertaining and educating us on this wonderful culinary journey.

  7. Sissi says:

    It was a great pleasure to follow your exciting adventures. It is so kind of you to mention all of your visitors.
    Thank you for the not–so-perfect photos. The dishes still look delicious!

  8. You’re amazing and love all your creations for this challenge. I love those bloogers too. Well Done!! :)
    Thank you very much for the mention and congratulations on the winner!

  9. Well done! And the blooper reel just goes to show how much hard work you put into it!

  10. Sarah says:

    What a great job you did with the competition – your entries were so creative. I love seeing the little mishaps – they happen to all of us but we don’t talk about them often!

    Thank you for the mention! It made my day. 😀

  11. Tammy says:

    I love that you showed us what didn’t work and that this was all for breast cancer.

  12. heidi says:

    Congratulations, Shabina!
    Chopin- this has been such a wonderful adventure in cookery!
    You aced this challenge- coming up with amazing foods and marvelous shapes! Each plate was garnished so beautifully and each country menu was well balanced and tasty.
    I have made several of your recipes (sans the cool mould!) and intend to make more!
    Thanks so much for the mention, for the dedication to your task, and for the great work of raising awareness for Breast Cancer research.
    I loved the bloopers- they may not be pleasing to the eye- but I’m sure not of them went to waste!

  13. Well done!!! Ya’ll did an amazing job to raise awareness :) I love that you guys included some bloopers. Definitely challenging :)

    Thanks for the mention :)

  14. I enjoyed blooper section! I didn’t expect to see it and so that was a surprise. I realized it was indeed a lot of your hard work and creativeness involved. Thank you for mentioning my name and blog. I was very happy to be your audience!

  15. Winston says:

    I seriously just love looking at the final, completed 30 Day Jelly Calendar… Each creation on their own, beautiful. Altogether, nothing short of a masterpiece. Nice work, guys! Also, it’s really nice and thoughtful of you guys to show appreciate towards every single one of your readers who’s come and commented like that… Very, very sweet =)

  16. Kimby says:

    Dear ChopinandMysaucepan,
    I did not let on just how much your efforts meant to me in October — or why I didn’t comment as often as I intended to… The first week in October, my daughter called to say: “Mom, I found a lump…”

    I’ve been sweating out the results of sonograms and MRI’s all month (only yesterday to REJOICE that medical testing, research, and efforts at “awareness” such as yours led to a RELIEVED conclusion — no malignancy.)

    You can’t know how PERSONAL this was to me, or how UPLIFTING it was to know that “food friends” from half-way around the globe thought it was important enough to join a worthy, world-wide cause to share the importance of “breast cancer awareness” — AND to subject themselves to 30 DAY/30 RECIPES — bloopers included!!! My GOODNESS, how thankful I am — and smiling — and proud of you — and wishing you many more picnics at the harbour! :) Thanks again for your sincere, concerted efforts (yes, you can take that as a “concert-ed” effort :) — I loved your musical contributions to this, with thanks and gratitude! (Now, please, go sit down!)

    • Chopinand says:

      Hi Kimby,

      Thank you so much for your kind words and we are so glad that your daughter is fine. It has not been an easy month but as each week passed, we found ourselves getting more organised to tackle a few recipes during the weekend. As we grew more confident in using the mould, we started to experiment with recipes which we would otherwise never have thought about. We hope this challenge and our recipes would raise more awareness about breast cancer around the world and more women will receive the benefit of better medical research and treatment.

  17. Carolyn Jung says:

    I have enjoyed these jelly posts enormously. So creative and for such a wonderful cause!

  18. Hahaha, I love this! Especially the cheesecake and the rainbow blob! 😀

    You’ve made the past month an awesome one, friend! :)

  19. Thanks guys! It has been a great pleasure following your creations during the challenge too, you had created some mouthwatering dishes!

  20. Thanks for the shout out :) its been such an awesome ride with you guys and I’ve loved seeing what you have come up with. I did have a little “nawwww” moment when I saw the cheesecake lol. It looks so delicious though, I would have totally devoured it haha

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