Macarong

Schokoladenkuchen a la Vera Slawinski

2012-02-17T08:28:00.000+11:00

The Saucemaker presented me with the famous design-award-winning Konstantin Slawinski silicon cake form, which I have mentioned before, a year ago. It came with a card bearing Slawinski’s mother’s flourless chocolate cake recipe, which is magnificent, rich and darkly, Mittel-Europeanly adult, all eggs and chocolate.

The recipe is given in German with a shaky English translation underneath in paler font. I’ve never learnt German but have always wanted to and love the look and sound of it – mile-long capitalised nouns! umlauts! Die Zauberflöte! – so find it much more fun to follow. ‘Dark chocolate’, which could mean anything from Nestle Buttons down, becomes the much more specific and fabulous-sounding Zartbitter-Schokolade – who could resist getting out the 70% Callebaut Strong for that? So I’ll go with German as far as possible, if that’s okay with everyone. I would never make it too hard to follow, would I, meine Kinder?

250g Butter

250g Zartbitter-Schokolade

200g geriebene Mandeln (okay, that’s almond meal)

8 Eier

200g Zucker

2 tablespoons cornflour

Puderzucker

pinch salt and splash vanilla extract

Preheat oven auf 180C.

Separate Eier, beat Eigelb und Zucker until weiss und fluffy. Add die Mandeln. Soften Butter in microwave along with melting Schokolade in 10-second bursts, und add to mixture along with some vanilla extract und a pinch of salt. Sift over cornflour.

Get out die second KitchenAid bowl, beat Eiweiß until stiff und gently fold into Schokolade mixture. Pour into Konstantin Slawinski form (or a round cake tin of no less than 24cm) und backen 40 Minuten. Test with a bamboo skewer – when it withdraws clean, der Kuchen durchgebacken. Remove from form and sift over Puderzucker.

Black sesame yoghurt cake

2012-02-09T08:43:00.001+11:00

Here is where I get a bit never-apologise-never-explain about why it’s been so long and instead jump straight to cake.

So, I amassed a range of black sesame ingredients last year, which, being sesame, won’t last forever before succumbing to the scourge that is rancidness, which successive governments have failed to eradicate. A fridge-clearing agenda led me to google black sesame cakes NOT chiffon cake (been there, done that), and among the slim pickings was this promising recipe from Haw Berries & Kumquats featuring a very beautiful eggshell lacquer bowl.

The packaging of the black sesame powdery stuff provided no clues that I could translate, but it tasted as though heavily cut with white sugar, so I lessened the original sugar amount by a third and made it brown sugar for a dark note. I threw in extra black sesame paste in case the sesame quotient was already lacking due to its unknown sugar component, really drove the point home with a tablespoon of virgin sesame oil, and sprinkled over extra whole sesame seeds for good measure. So the last few of the above may be considered optional. Hell, the whole thing’s optional – do it, don’t do it, make it all eggwhites, who am I to say?

Adapted from HawBerries & Kumquats, who adapted from Chocolate & Zucchini’s gâteau au yaourt

1 cup plain flour
3/4 cup black sesame powder
2 tablespoons cocoa powder
½ tsp bicarb soda
1 tsp baking powder
¼ tsp salt

2 eggs
1/2 cup dark brown sugar

250ml yoghurt
60 ml peanut oil

20 ml untoasted sesame oil
1 tablespoon brandy
1 tsp vanilla extract

2 tablespoons black sesame paste

black sesame seeds

Preheat the oven to 180° C, and line a 22-cm springform tin. Sift together the flour, bicarb, baking powder, salt, and cocoa powder.

Beat together the eggs and sugar. Add the yoghurt, oils, brandy, vanilla extract and sesame paste. Mix well.

Gently fold the dry ingredients into wet ingredients; mix until just combined.

Pour into prepared cake pan, sprinkle with black sesame seeds, and bake for 45 minutes, until a skewer withdraws clean.

It was very moist and tender, with a tanginess to it from the yoghurt. I wasn’t overwhelmed by a sesame flavour, and nor was anyone else; people were making all sorts of guesses at it. The two tablespoons of cocoa emerged the most strongly, surprisingly enough. In a less charitable moment, I decided it just tasted like a slightly weird, second-rate chocolate cake, but recanted this as being a bit harsh when I found myself quite enjoying another slice at afternoon-tea time. The texture was fabulous, though, and I’ll be investigating the other flavour variations that have been imposed on this basic yoghurt cake.

Ginger brûlée tarts

2011-12-15T08:32:00.005+11:00

Photo credit: The Quiltmaker

The head notes to this recipe in Bourke Street Bakery cookbook says these tarts, especially their fillings, are one of the most challenging items in the book, so how could I resist? The challenges I faced were more to do with locating my tiny loose-bottomed tart tins (I found two, with several extra bases), remembering to replenish my stocks of cinnamon quills and achieving an evenly browned rather than spotted blackened crust with my blowtorch.

Given the lack of tart tins (the recipe provided quantities for 20), and the warning about their difficulty, I decided to treat this as a practice attempt and made only four. I also used leftover sweet shortcrust pastry rather than making the recipe in the book, which I’ll do for the real thing.

They were fabulous, even with their charred edges and acrid sugar. I do love a good masala chai, and these were inspired by chai on the author’s travels through the Himalayas.

Adapted from the larger quantity in Bourke Street Bakery, pp264–5

Note: don’t get up the morning of a dinner party expecting to whip these up for dessert! They need to be started two days ahead, or you might get away with one if you skimp on either or both the infusing and custard-chilling.

145mL pouring cream

2cm piece of ginger, finely sliced

1 cardamom pod, bruised

½ cinnamon stick

2 egg yolks

20g caster sugar, plus more for dredging and burning later

small chunk sweet shortcrust pastry, enough for lining 4 8cm tart tins

chopped pistachios for decorating

Heat the cream with the ginger, cardamom and cinnamon stick until it comes to the boil. Pour into a container, cover and refrigerate overnight.

Reheat to simmering point, then set aside.

Whisk egg yolks, then add sugar and keep whisking until the sugar has dissolved. Strain the spices out of the warmed cream, which is then whisked with the yolks and sugar to combine. Put the bowl over a saucepan of simmering water (which mustn’t touch the base of the bowl), and keep whisking until your arm protests bitterly and the mixture is thick enough for tracks to be left in the wake of the whisk.

This’ll be the most boring ten minutes of your life, so keep a companion handy to talk to and don’t be tempted to leave the whisking for even a few seconds. It’s okay to quickly change arms, but that’s all. Take the bowl off the heat and keep whisking for another minute or two to take some of the heat out of the mixture. Over the next hour, keep whisking every ten minutes until the mixture is totally cool. Press cling wrap to the surface to prevent a skin forming, and refrigerate overnight to set.

Line tart tins, freeze for 20 minutes, then blind bake at 200C for 20–25 minutes until golden. Allow to cool. Pipe the chilled custard into them, slightly overfilling, then scrape the custard flush with the top of the tart shell with a palette knife. Set in the fridge for 4 hours.

Sprinkle a teaspoon of caster sugar over the top of each tart and caramelise it with a blowtorch, somehow not blackening the tart crust edges as you do so. My caster sugar kept blowing itself into little balls that then became black blobs, but here and there were patches of perfect goldenness like an encouragement. Sprinkle a few pistachio fragments on top to serve, which I didn’t. Sprinkle pistachios, that is; I did serve, if marching into the Quiltmaker’s office and plonking it before her with a demand to sample and assess counts as serving. I think it does, and she didn’t seem to mind – she kindly took a photo in order to tweet about it, which I am now stealing as I neglected to take one of the finished item, as I am wont to do. Forget to take final pic, that is. And steal those of others to make up for my neglectfulness. But I consider the making of these tarts over several days penance enough.

So I shall make these again, probably in a quantity of ten, and serve with ice-cream. What ice-cream, I don’t know. Maybe a raspberry, as different enough to the custard and pretty besides, both advantages over a plain vanilla.

Fresh ginger cake

2011-12-13T07:25:00.000+11:00

David Lebovitz seems to have been making this cake for decades – it’s online at Epicurious from 1999, and also in his Ready for Dessert (p42) – and for good reason.

This had a better reception than my made-up ginger brownies and Maida’s gingerful biscotti put together. It was rich and light, and pleasantly hot and bitey, and each crumb glowed golden. That may sound as if I’ve taken leave of my senses and am seeing miracles, but it’s true. I put it down to the workings-together of the oil and treacle and ginger. I’m sure it was also this combination that gave the cake its gloriously sticky shiny surface.

115g piece fresh ginger
250ml mild molasses (?? I used half-and-half Lyle’s golden syrup and black treacle)
200g sugar
250ml vegetable oil (I used peanut)
350g plain flour
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
½ teaspoon ground cloves
½ teaspoon ground black pepper
250ml water
2 teaspoons bicarb soda
2 large eggs

Preheat the oven to 180C. Line a not-shallow 20-cm square (or 22cm round springform) cake tin with baking paper.

Scrape the skin off the ginger with a teaspoon (that way you don’t waste any, as you do with a peeler or knife) and chop a bit. I blitzed my ginger in the small food-processor attachment that came with my stick blender and that I love and use daily, or you can be tough and do this by hand until very fine.

In a large bowl (the KitchenAid for me, but see issue with sifting over flour below), mix the molasses or substitute, sugar and oil – perhaps because I wilfully insist on using raw sugar, I ended up with an incredibly gluggy mixture where the sugar kept sinking to the bottom. Separately whisk together the flour, cinnamon, cloves, and pepper.

Bring the water to boil in a small saucepan (or I boiled the kettle), then stir in the bicarb soda. Beat the hot water into the golden syrup mixture, then add the chopped ginger.

Gradually sift the flour mixture over the golden syrup mixture, beating gently and in fits and starts to combine (since I haven’t been able to get around the problem of how to sift flour over while the thing’s running – perhaps a case for going the manually-mixing route for this one). Add the eggs and beat until thoroughly blended.

Pour the batter into the prepared tin and bake for about an hour, until a bamboo skewer inserted into the centre comes out clean. Leave to cool completely.

David suggests serving it with a fruit compote, or a lemon curd whipped with cream, which would have been my choice if I’d had cream. I felt that it needed something.

Just one other good thing about this cake is that, as it’s so moist, it keeps well for up to 5 days at room temperature. This baby could go through the post for a Xmas present. And it can be frozen for up to a month.

Gingerful biscotti

2011-12-11T12:27:00.005+11:00

It’s nearly Xmas, which I am very bah-humbuggy about, but I admit that it allows great scope for the foodish aspect of life. I’m not sure why ginger-related things are very often also Xmas-related, but as I’ve had a bag of crystallised ginger taking up precious cupboard space for some months, I’m prepared to take this opportunity to use it up as a nod towards the season. After all, I like ginger, and I’m looking for recipes that take it beyond a spoonful of bland dry ground stuff and into the chewier, sharper crystallised realm.

I had the idea that chocolate and ginger would play well together, which led me on a search for ginger brownies. Dorie Greenspan has Ginger-Jazzed Brownies in Baking, but they only have ground and raw in them – appealing, but not of much relief to my cupboard-space issue, so I’ll do those another day. I was amazed that I found so few brownie recipes involving crystallised ginger – there were only a couple on obscure websites such as this one, and packet mix was involved. So I imposed ginger on a basic good brownie recipe as a replacement for walnuts. Since I’m not recommending it to anyone, I’m not even recounting the method here. And I didn’t take any photos – the bits of translucent golden ginger failed to stand up to the dark chocolate brownie in cross-section.

I can’t quite figure out why it wasn’t on the money. Was the chewy texture of the ginger not enough of a contrast to the fudginess of the brownie? Did the ginger and the chocolate remain two separate parts in terms of taste that didn’t form a pleasing whole? (The poor Saucemaker would concur with this – she was nibbling on her piece and getting along with it okay until she came to an unexpected bit of ginger and was deeply disconcerted.) I love bits of crystallised ginger enrobed in dark chocolate and sold in fancy shops, but clearly this doesn’t translate to a cakier context.

Anyway, so I moved on to Maida Heatter, whose Gingerful Biscotti (Maida Heatter's Brand-New Book of Great Cookies, p20) are the Xmas favourites of many on Egullet and Chowhound. These were more like it. Pleasantly bitey with the extra kick of white pepper; not overly sweet, not overly rich or luxurious, but that’s probably all for the best and allows for the less-guilty grabbing of handfuls.

120g crystallised ginger

200g raw almonds

375g plain flour

3/4 teaspoon bicarb soda

3/4 teaspoon baking powder

1/4 teaspoon salt

1 1/4 teaspoons freshly ground white pepper

1 teaspoon ground ginger

1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon

1/2 teaspoon ground mustard powder

1/4 teaspoon ground cloves

100g sugar

3 eggs

1/2 cup honey

Cut up ginger into bits the size of peas; set aside. (Maida comments rather acidly and uncharacteristically that ‘Yes, cutting ginger is boring.’ This seemed curious, as I can think of many tasks I find much more boring and onerous than spending about 30 seconds chopping up soft ginger.)

Toast the almonds in the oven at about 180C oven for 15 minutes, until lightly coloured, shaking once during toasting. Don’t forget about them, as I almost always do in an out-of-sight-out-of-mind fashion until the reek of charring almonds breaks through my haze of preoccupation. Even slightly burnt almonds taste ghastly, second only to hazelnuts, which one often thinks one has escaped with as one rubs off their burnt skins and exposes the pale nut beneath – but alas, they burn to acridness deep in their hollow middles. Anyway, set your perfectly toasted almonds aside to cool.

Into the Kitchen Aid bowl sift the flour, bicarb soda, baking powder, salt, pepper, ground ginger, cinnamon, mustard, cloves and sugar, and beat together. Stir in the crystallised ginger, then the almonds. Separately beat the eggs with a fork and add the honey, then add to the dry ingredients. Stir until the dry ingredients are completely moistened.

Place two 40cm lengths of cling wrap on a work surface and form two strips of dough down the middle of each. Spoon half of the dough by heaping tablespoonfuls in the middle – down the length – of each piece of plastic wrap, to form strips about 30cm long. Flatten the tops slightly by wetting a large spoon into water and pressing down on the dough with its back.

Wrap the dough, and press on the plastic wrap to smooth and shape it into an even strip about 35cm long, 5cm wide and 1.5cm thick. Place the wrapped strips strips of dough in the freezer for at least an hour or until firm enough to unwrap (or as much longer as you wish, like days and days until the craziness abates long enough to allow you to be home and available to the oven for a few hours while frantically tidying the worksite midden that was once your house because people are coming over. By the way, this is currently and seemingly eternally the outside of said house).

To bake, adjust two racks to divide the oven into thirds and preheat oven to 160C. Line two large baking trays with silicon liners or baking paper, and place the unwrapped strips diagonally across them, or however they fit. If your trays are big enough you might be able to lay the two strips side by side on only the one, but remember they’ll spread a bit. Bake for 50 minutes, reversing the trays top to bottom and front to back once during the baking to ensure even baking. They’ll turn quite dark.

Reduce the temperature to 150C and remove the tray/s from the oven. Although hot, carefully and gently peel the paper away from the backs of the strips and place them on a large cutting board. Slice into 1cm strips with a serrated knife while they’re still hot, using a tea-towel to save your steadying hand if you like. Slice on an angle; the sharper the angle, the longer the cookies, and the more difficult it will be to slice them very thin without the ends breaking away – happy days. At least this makes a lot, though: 70-something.

Place the slices on a cut side down on the trays and bake for about 25 minutes until the cut side is golden. Reverse the sheets top to bottom and front to back once during baking. Bake just until dry. (You have to cool one to know if it’s crisp.)

When done, cool and then store in an airtight container. They’ll keep for weeks. Pretty please, either dunk them or prepare to face your dentist – they’re seriously as hard as rocks, and I can’t imagine why they never come with a warning in recipe books. As a long-time bruxist who must now wear a mouthguard (I know, hawt) to bed for the rest of my days or at least until I get dentures, I’ve got sensitive incisors with edges described by my dentist as ‘like glass’, but still.

Heston’s red cabbage gazpacho with mustard ice-cream

2011-11-29T20:07:00.002+11:00

I’ve mentioned before that I do love a Heston Blumenthal book, even if more for their food-porn with-a-twist aspect than actually using the recipes therein. Well, now I have Heston at Home, in which he’s made a sterling effort to offer recipes more within the reach of the average home cook.

They’re still enough of a challenge, and they have the Heston quality that sets every recipe apart from anything likely to be encountered in any other book. There are echoes of his Fantastical Feasts in the whisky gums, raspberry sherbert and salted butter caramels with edible wrappers. There’s a sequence of re-imagined classic beverages, such as gin & tonic with cucumber ice. There are banana and bacon cookies, but then what appears to be a totally straightforward lemon tart. There’s a delightful playfulness in really humble dishes or toe-curlingly tacky recipes from the eighties being given the Heston treatment – the process of making a ham-and-cheese toastie involves an initial stage with a wettex filling the space where the cheese will go, so that it doesn’t get overcooked in the time it takes the outside to brown.

The photo of Heston’s red cabbage gazpacho was so sumptuous I couldn’t go past it, and central to the fascination was the mustard ice-cream he suggested should go with it. So I made them both.

The soup is basically red cabbage juice, with a little pink mayonnaise based on red wine and red wine vinegar blended in.

The flavours are clear and raw and somehow earthy, with a peppery edge that loooves the mustard ice-cream. The strangest thing is that the sweetness that the ice-cream has when tasted by itself dramatically recedes when accompanied by this soup, and it becomes all about the hot affair between the pepperiness and the mustardiness. Such goings-on.

Nectarine frangipane tart

2011-11-28T21:37:00.001+11:00

Too easy for words, not least with the pastry already made and frozen. I’m not sure who to attribute this to – I didn’t consult a book, but I wanted to put nectarines with amaretto. I like amaretto with just about anything, but especially nectarines. The tart formed itself around this from half-remembered bits and pieces, such as the cream from Dorie’s Chocolate Amaretto Torte.

4 nectarines, stoned and quartered

¼ cup sugar

a handful of amaretti biscuits, roughly crushed

splash of Amaretto

Combine in a bowl and set aside.

Allow the pastry to defrost at room temperature for about three hours. I left mine a bit long to roll out without sticking to everything, and it had to be sort of Play-Doughed into place in the tin. I then refrigerated it for half an hour before blind baking at 190C for about 20 minutes, for another ten without the beads, and then cooled it slightly. Meanwhile, on with the frangipane, which can be used for a multitude of tarts constructed along this line: pears, berries, apples, anything juicy best kept separate from the pastry base.

40g unsalted butter

50g sugar

50g almond meal

1 tablespoon plain flour

1 egg

½ teaspoon vanilla extract

pinch salt

Beat the butter into pale submission, add the sugar for a bit more beating, then mix in the rest of the ingredients.

Spread this over the base, then overlap the nectarine quarters – this could equally be carefully arranged apple slices, or roughly strewn raspberries. For these amaretto-doused nectarines, I added even more freshly crushed amaretti biscuits I had handy.

Bake for about 45 minutes until the frangipane is golden and puffed up around the nectarines.

Whip about a cup of pouring cream with ¼ cup icing sugar, adding a splash of amaretto to taste or ¼ teaspoon almond extract for more intensity.

Marjolaine

2011-11-21T20:40:00.003+11:00

I’ve been meaning to make marjolaine for ages, ever since I first noticed it in David Lebovitz’s Ready for Dessert. Marjolaine is famously elaborate and fiddly, but with the dearth of baking lately I was due for a challenge. And I got one.

I lacked the size of baking tray called for in David’s recipe, or the oven to fit such a tray, so turned to the internet to find a workaround and found there widely varied methods, most of all in whether the compulsory three flavours of filling were based on crème fraîche or a pastry cream.

I found an article waxing lyrical about a Patricia Wells recipe from the ’80s, which had a lot in common with David’s but used a meringue quantity for two trays almost as small as mine, so I combined the best of both worlds – going as far as a half-crème fraîche, half-pastry cream approach (a mistake – the pastry cream layers remained creamy, while the crème fraîche layer solidified, too stark a contrast). And Patricia called for rum, but I stuck with David’s brandy.

The various elements can be prepared ahead of time – indeed must be. A weekend wasn’t quite enough – I had to shortchange the maturation of the crème fraîche by quite a lot, which may be why it had a grainy texture that didn’t quite disappear when the 420g of chocolate was incorporated into it.

Adapted from David Lebovitz’s Ready for Dessert and Patricia Wells’ ‘Marjolaine Multilayered Chocolate Cake’

Meringue
75g hazelnuts

75g almonds
10 egg whites at room temperature
3/4 cup caster sugar
1 tablespoon cornflour

Preheat oven to 150 degrees. Spread nuts on baking tray and roast 5–10 minutes, until fragrant. Cool, rub hazelnuts in a tea-towel to flake off skins, then blitz to medium-fine powder in food processor.

Heavily butter two 10x14" baking trays and line with baking paper. (As I only had one tray, and an oven that treats its lower shelf very differently to its upper, I divided all the ingredients in half and made the meringues in two batches.)

Beat egg whites, adding sugar gradually, just until stiff. Fold in cornflour and ground nuts. Divide mixture in half, spreading evenly on baking trays. Bake for 20 minutes in a 150C oven, or until just beginning to brown. Mine were in for 40 minutes, and still hopelessly undercooked at that. Remove from oven, turn onto rack, paper side up. Cover with damp tea-towel for several minutes, then carefully remove paper while still warm.

Cut meringue in half lengthwise.

Accept that they’re not going to dry out or stop weeping caramel beads on cooling, perhaps due to the conditions of 100% humidity at the time, and replace them in the oven at 150C for another half hour to crisp up.

Crème fraîche
1 cup sour cream
1 cup pure cream

Pour sour cream into bowl and stir in cream until smoothly blended. Cover and allow to sit at room temperature for 8 to 12 hours. Stir again and refrigerate overnight before using.

Chocolate cream
2 cups crème fraîche, bought, or prepared earlier as above
420g bittersweet chocolate

Bring crème fraîche to a boil. Remove from heat and add chocolate, bit by bit, stirring until well incorporated. Set aside until cool and thickened. For assembly, it’ll need to be thick but spreadable. This can be made as much as 3 days in advance and refrigerated – warm slightly over a sink of hot tap water for a minute and bash with the fork to return it to a useable consistency.

Pastry cream
8 egg yolks
1 cup sugar
1/2 cup flour (I used cornflour)
2 1/2 cups milk
280g unsalted butter, at room temperature

Beat egg yolks with sugar until thick and light. Incorporate flour. Bring milk just to boil in a large saucepan (not one only big enough for the milk or you’ll run into difficulties when it comes to add the egg mixture to it – it was late at night for me, and I found this out the hard way). Whisk half the hot milk into the egg mixture, then pour this egg and milk mixture back into remaining hot milk. Whisk over medium heat until thickening and bubbling. Let boil lightly for 2 minutes, whisking constantly until thickened and your arm is almost falling off.

While the mixture cools, beat chopped butter until creamy and spreadable. When the egg mixture is completely cool, add it to the butter and beat thoroughly until incorporated. This pastry cream can also be made days in advance and refrigerated, if you’re organised and have plenty of time on your hands midweek.

Praline powder
1 cup whole, unblanched almonds
1 cup sugar

Preheat oven to 150 degrees. Spread almonds on baking sheet and roast 5 to 10 minutes, until fragrant and lightly browned. Cool.

In a heavy-bottomed pan, combine nuts and sugar and heat gently, stirring constantly, until sugar starts to melt. Stir constantly, until mixture turns dark brown and syrupy and the almonds make a popping sound. The whole process should take about 5 minutes.

Pour mixture onto a silicon sheet and cool.

Break into pieces and blend to a fine powder in a food processor. This praline can be made as far in advance as you like. It’s by no means a terrible idea to do a double quantity to keep on hand for sprinkling over ice-cream.

When ready to assemble the marjolaine (which should be at least 1 day before serving), divide the pastry cream into two equal parts.

Brandy cream
Blend one half of the pastry cream with 1 tablespoon vanilla extract and 3 tablespoons brandy, and chill.

Praline cream
Blend the remaining half of the pastry cream with the praline powder (it seemed a lot to me, so I kept some back to cover the sides with), and chill.

Final assembly
With the chocolate cream and pastry cream on hand and chilled but spreadable, place 1 layer of meringue on whatever you can find to fit it, surrounded by some strips of baking paper to protect the plate from drips (drips! – ha!). Spread half of the chocolate cream on cake – I did a bit less, cleverly intending to use the extra for coating the sides as well as top later on. Keep it nice and even, paying especial attention to the corners so it doesn’t become rounded as the levels progress upwards. (I was so full of fine, worthy intentions at this point, so heartbreakingly innocent and naïve.) Refrigerate for 15 minutes to firm it up.

Cover chocolate cream with second meringue layer, lining it up carefully with the first. Spread with all of the brandy cream. Refrigerate 15 minutes. This is where things began to come unstuck for me.

Scrape the excess brandy layer back up where it belongs as best you can, then top that layer with the third meringue layer, and spread all the praline cream over it, reasoning that it was merely the brandy content that caused a teensy bit of instability and that all would come up Millhouse (I think this is correct use of one of the The Quiltmaker’s more obscure sayings) in the chilling.

Not so. I’ve neglected to take a spirit level to the fridge shelf, but clearly it has the slightest lean that caused the entire praline layer and its supporting meringue to slide off and one side come to rest on the fridge shelf at a steep angle. Gravity dictated that the praline gently pooled in the margin of the serving plate and thence made its gooey, sticky way over the whole shelf. I suppose I should be grateful it’s a solid shelf, not one constructed along the lines of a cake rack.

At this point the chef (yes, it needs to be third person; plus, the reader may keep his or her quibbles about tense and mode shifts herein to him or herself. Thank you) goes into survival mode and throws any desperate remedy into the situation that can be found, thinking all the while of the ten eggs and half kilo each of chocolate and cream and the birthday to be celebrated the following day. Head and shoulders in the fridge, and in need of a spare set of hands strictly of one’s own and no one else’s, the chef manoeuvres the softening, reluctant meringue back roughly where it should be, and then hauls the whole mess out of the fridge, leaving an unspeakable chaos of sticky jars to be dealt with later.

A lot of the praline can be piled back up – no thought of evenness now – but meanwhile the brandy cream is oozing out the other side! and must be scraped back up with an icing spatula! To the accompaniment of a thousand screeching violins a la Psycho, the third meringue layer is dumped on the top with more haste than accuracy, and bamboo skewers rammed through the whole disaster to secure the layers. It was all like a particularly fraught episode of Grand Designs.

Finally, working around the skewers with the icing spatula rather than sweeping it from one end to the other, the top of the meringue is spread with remaining chocolate cream. The sides are bound in the turned-up remnants of the baking-paper plate shields and then bandaged mummylike in GladWrap to keep in what remains of their filling. And into the freezer with it all for the rest of the day.

At this point, the chef collapses on the couch with a giant bag of chips and a beer, eventually recovering enough to thickly apply the rest of the chocolate all over it, which thankfully sets like so much cement. And because it was less sleek than intended, the leftover praline was patted on the sides.

And bandaged again, and chilled again, until no more than five minutes before its cutting-open.

Breath was bated, but the pastry cream didn't pour out and all over the table. It was no last word in French elegance, though.

Here's what it should've been.

Here's what it was.

A-marketing and a-pickling and a-quiche-making

2011-10-30T10:22:00.000+11:00

I hadn’t been to the Victoria Market for a while, but when E mentioned the sudden appearance of mangos about town I was down there like a shot. And what a transformation had taken place! There were verily mangoes, for like a dollar each, but also huge smooth eggplants at $2 a kilo instead of the shrivelled seedy $7/kilo offerings of a few weeks ago. Lebanese cucumbers were $1.50/kg, and so were delicate little zucchinis. I also loaded up with $1 strawberries, $5/kg swiss mushrooms, $1 bunches of baby asparagus, $2 silverbeet and loads of other stuff, and was back on the train to Parliament without even needing to go to the bank. Amazing what can be managed when spring has sprung and the Meat Hall and Deli is left for another more prosperous week – one that hasn’t seen expenditure on tax bills and flights to Europe, don’t you know. (It’s the one week of the year I can sound this sick-makingly yuppieish, and I’m trying it on for size.)

So because all this largesse wouldn’t fit into my narrow fridge, I had to think like a frugal pre-war housewife and preserve it and generally use it up some other way. I’ve never pickled anything before, but Alida Irwin’s all over it and has been known to ask for Fowler's Vacola sealing rings for Xmas. And so, unlike a pre-war housewife, I googled cucumber pickles and zucchini pickles and was rewarded with the Zuni Café’s zucchini. No sterilising, too easy with the food processor slicing attachment, and at last an opportunity to get out the Japanese pickle press.

The small pickle press could barely handle half a kilo of zucchini...

...but lo, it gave up its juices and reduced by half.

And then I made Dr Ben’s Cucumber Kimchi, scaling it down to three cucumbers.

To use up some ingredients to eat sooner, I took a leaf out of Martha Stewart’s website, and another out of Dorie Greenspan’s Around My French Table, which I’ve done before, and sort of made up a leek and asparagus quiche. For the pastry case, I followed Martha Stewart’s Favourite Pie Crust just because it was there, with the addition of 15 minutes’ blind-baking in a 180C oven.

a bit of butter

a clove or two of garlic, finely chopped

1 large leek or 2 small, sliced

2 bunches asparagus, sliced into 2cm bits

4 eggs

a cup of milk and cream, proportions as desired – I went half & half, then to the gym

2 tablespoons seedy mustard

some thyme leaves

Saute garlic in the butter until fragrant, add the leeks for a few minutes, then the asparagus for about 8 minutes until reaching tenderness but still bright green. Allow to cool slightly before adding to the waiting blind-baked pastry case.

Briefly whisk together with a fork the eggs, mustard, thyme, and milk/cream, and salt and pepper. Pour over the leek and asparagus, and put in the still-on 180C oven for about an hour or until it’s golden on top and only moves slightly when jiggled.

Meanwhile, the rest is earmarked for later – there will be Ottolenghi’s Mango Soba Noodles with Aubergine and Mango, a recipe beloved of the Quiltmaker, and Roasted Cauliflower with Dill from the same book, Plenty, and spanakopita, and an actual cooked breakfast of mushroom and spinach. And by Cup Day it will all be gone.

Chocolate walnut salted-caramel tart

2011-10-29T07:16:00.000+11:00

Let’s Go Bowling, my ex-boss, no less dashing now he has given up his pinstripes and adopted a Vespa, had a birthday last Saturday that involved a brace of Peking ducks at Old Kingdom. Because I am wise, and no Old Kingdom virgin, I knew this meant no dessert beyond the traditional fried ice-cream, so I leapt into the breach. His bachelor pad with its babe graffitied on the door and bikes hung alongside his artworks would admit no round, fluffy, girly confection, so it had to be something as severe-yet-sumptuous as a version of George Calombaris’s Walnut Salty-Caramel Chocolate Tart.

I have a narrow rectangular fluted tart tin that rarely sees the light of day, so few recipes there are scaled to it. By dusting off pi and hurting my brain a lot and getting frustrated – the study of research design and analysis this semester isn’t sticking at all – I worked out that a tart recipe catering to the usual round 25mm tin would be too much for this tin by about 40%. So then I made my life even harder by adapting two recipes for a caramel tart to fit – and to allow for the addition of praline and salt.

Adapted from George Calomabris in Your Place or Mine? p54 and Gourmet Traveller

First up, I turned to George for his sweet pastry, which didn’t have the equal measures of butter and icing sugar that the GT version did.

300g unsalted butter, at room temperature

150g caster sugar vanilla bean, split lengthways, seeds scraped

450g plain flour

1 egg

salt

1 tbsp thickened cream

Beat butter, sugar and vanilla seeds on low until smooth and creamy – but not light and fluffy. Add flour, egg, salt and cream and mix until the dough forms a ball. George says at this point to divide the dough in half, freezing one portion for later use, but for my rectangular tin I divided it into thirds, formed oblongs to Gladwrap, and put two away in the freezer against the coming fruit season, while the dough to be used went in the fridge for an hour.

Meanwhile, I got George’s walnut praline ready by toasting 100g walnuts at 180C for about 8 minutes until lightly toasted, then rubbed in a tea towel to try to remove a bit of the skin, though it wasn’t entirely successful, and spread them over baking paper.

Heat 110g caster sugar over a low flame, tilting pan occasionally but not stirring, for about 10 minutes, until sugar melts and dissolves into itself and a dark caramel forms – it helps to crush any lumps first, as they take longer to break down while the rest of it merrily burns. Pour over walnuts and leave to cool.

Cover a tea towel with baking paper. Fold over to enclose and pound with a rolling pin until roughly crushed. Set aside in such a place that it’s possible to refrain from eating most of it while getting back to the pastry.

Roll out the chilled dough between two sheets of baking paper until about 3mm thick, and line a greased 11x34cm rectangular loose-based tart pan with it, trimming and patching up where necessary – this is a very malleable and forgiving pastry. Stab all over with a fork and back into the fridge with it for half an hour.

Line the chilled pastry shell with baking paper and fill with pastry weights to blind bake for 15 minutes. Reduce oven to 180C, remove paper and weights and bake for another 15 minutes, until golden, and let it cool down a bit while moving on to the caramel sauce, for which I returned to GT rather than get involved in the 180g glucose and candy thermometers George suggests, but retained his addition of salt.

140g caster sugar

85mL water

50mL pouring cream

70g unsalted butter, coarsely chopped

a teaspoon Maldon sea salt (if I’d been using a regular non-flaky salt, I’d have reduced this by a third or half)

Combine sugar and water and stir over medium-high heat until sugar dissolves. Bring to the boil and cook for 10 minutes or until dark caramel; remove from heat, carefully add cream, butter and salt (be prepared for the molten mixture to spit) and stir. Return to heat and cook for 3 minutes or until smooth, then let cool slightly while scattering the walnut praline over the baked tart shell.

Pour the salted caramel over that, and back in the fridge for an hour or two until such time as you make the chocolate ganache.

110g dark couverture chocolate, chopped

40g cold unsalted butter, chopped

125ml thickened cream

2 tsp liquid glucose

Place chocolate and butter in a heatproof bowl. Bring cream and glucose to boil over medium heat. Pour over chocolate mixture and stand for 5 minutes. Stir until the chocolate melts and the mixture becomes smooth. Pour this velvety delightfulness over the caramel, tilt to even out, and chill for at least an hour, until firm. Serve at room temperature.

Pandan chiffon cake

2011-10-25T19:12:00.000+11:00

Lately there has been a dearth of sweet things to take into work. I didn’t think anyone had noticed, although the biscuit jar with nothing but crumbs of biscotti left in it was found with a card taped inside. (That card’s been doing the rounds from coffee machine to fridge shelves, gathering penned additions as it goes, so maybe I’m reading too much into it.)

Anyway, I had anything but a dearth of eggs, due to a shopping double-up between me and The Guitar Teacher, so an eight-egg Pandan Chiffon Cake seemed called for. In my continuing quest for a chiffon cake that stands tall and strong instead of puffy and sagging, I turned online to Life Is Great, which indeed looked to be the goods, even if the name of the blog is more optimistic than I am wont to be.

I love the smell of pandan, and add frozen strips of it to rice wherever possible. Minh Phat had bright green fresh stuff, so I followed the instruction to blend it with 4 tablespoons of water and push it through a sieve to make half a cup. It didn’t quite make it, for me, so I topped it up with water – I baulked at opening a can of coconut milk for a teaspoon or two. It smelled like wondrous wheatgrass.

Otherwise, my only tweak was to use olive oil in place of corn oil, and to add just a tiny bit of green food-colouring gel.

Like Life Is Great, I don’t keep self-raising flour around the house, but I was bemused by the recipe to make it up with 2 tablespoons of baking powder for 180g flour, plus the half teaspoon of bicarb in the main recipe. She seemed to know what she was talking about, though, so I went ahead with that. The batter turned out frothy and heaving, and perilously close to the top of the chiffon-cake pan, but still I went stolidly ahead.

And surprise surprise, it kept rising. That it didn’t overflow all over the oven I considered a win, but the centre hole was compromised and the top was very uneven.

Turned out, it quickly attempted to find its level and succumbed to gravity. It puffed out around the bottom, had nothing in common with Life Is Good’s elegant green cake, and seemed to have a sticky layer that wasn’t quite cooked – and oddly salty.

But the flavour was deemed 'WEIRD BUT GOOD!!!!!!!!’ by Misslice, the texture was chiffon-cake fantastique, and the aroma of pandan pervaded the work kitchen – a good thing, I thought.

Despite all that, it was not polished off with the usual enthusiasm – was it the green?

Lemon quaresimali

2011-10-13T18:09:00.001+11:00

I had no idea what these would turn out like, given the rare lack of accompanying picture in this shiny book – I was drawn to the name, so Italian and operatic-like, and I had lemons to the rafters; the double-baking technique wasn’t something I’d done before, so there was the curiosity factor. As it turned out, they’re just big, lemony, nutty cantucci biscotti.

And not for those with sensitive teeth until they’ve had a good dunking in a beverage of choice – not for nothing are they Lenten biscuits of penance.

Adapted from David Lebovitz’s Ready for Dessert, p219

245g plain flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
2 large eggs, plus 1 egg for brushing
265g sugar
3/4 teaspoon vanilla extract
Fine zest of 2 lemons
1 1/2 tablespoons lemon juice
250g whole almonds, toasted – I used half hazelnuts

Preheat the oven to 180C. Line a tray with baking paper.

In a small bowl, combine the flour, baking powder, salt and cinnamon. In a medium-sized bowl, whisk together the eggs, sugar, vanilla, lemon zest and juice. Stir the dry ingredients into the egg mixture until well blended, then mix in the whole almonds.

With wet hands, shape the dough into two logs about 30cm long and 6cm in diameter and place on a tray lined with baking paper. Stir the remaining egg in a small bowl and brush each log generously with it, then give them a second coat. Don’t feel compelled to use up all the egg – it’ll be much too much and will run everywhere, take it from me. Better to toss the remainder into a handy omelette or give it to the cat.

Bake the logs for 25–30 minutes until golden-brown and firm; they’ll expand and flatten while baking. (I baked two side-by side on the one square tray, and feared they’d run into each other, but they missed that by a whisker – still, if you have a fancy Italian oven that accommodates two trays on the upper rack, probably best to separate them.) When done, remove the tray from the oven and reduce the heat to 150C.

Allow the much-expanded golden shiny logs to cool for 10 minutes before slicing them crosswise 2cm apart with a sharp serrated knife. Arrange the slices cut-side-down on the tray and return to the oven for 20 minutes, after which they’ll cool to a hard lemony crunchiness, excellent for coffee-dunking.

Rosemary Blondies – a guest post from The Labyris Bearer

2011-10-11T10:12:00.002+11:00

The Labyris Bearer is a woman who relishes a challenge. (This may be why she was earliest of us all to adopt the Bourke Street Bakery Cookbook, not to mention trap possums and go to Iceland during Eyjafjallajökull and many, many other challenges.) So when I washed my hands of a baking failure which happened to taste fabulous, The Labyris Bearer thought it worth resurrecting the flavours for another shot and, thanks to her tenacity and analytic approach, transformed them into something all her own, something fabulous and rich and caramelly and just right. I might have had four.

In a special guest appearance, I give you ... The Labyris Bearer!

Macarong recently produced the most delicious…cookie-things. Unfortunately their texture and appearance were not perfect. One co-worker unkindly but accurately described them as ‘like pools of cat vomit’ [Macarong: Take a bow, Quiltmaker!]. So we decided to try to improve the recipe. My first attempt was more floury, so stood up instead of pooling, but it also fell apart; at this point I gave up on biscuits, and decided to transfer the pleasing flavours into something better suited to such a texture.

At about this time, I discovered that my culinary hero, Anthony Telford, author of the wonderful The Kitchen Hand, had done a cookbook: The Basics: A really useful cookbook. This is truly ‘the only cookbook you will ever need’. I found his chocolate brownie recipe (p.346), which, of course, in the ‘Hints and Tips’ that accompany every recipe, gave directions for the white chocolate version, the Blondie. Simply adding the finely chopped leaves of four sprigs of rosemary produced the richest, most delicious, perfectly slightly-gooey-inside slice.

250 g white cooking chocolate

250 g unsalted butter

5 eggs

500 g castor sugar (I used half light brown sugar/half castor)

1 tablespoon vanilla essence

200 g plain flour (wholemeal or wholewheat works well)

½ teaspoon salt

1. Preheat oven to 170^oC. Lightly grease and line a large slice tray with baking paper.

2. Place the butter and 200 g of the chocolate in a heatproof bowl over a saucepan of simmering water. Reduce the heat to the lowest setting. When melted, set aside to cool slightly. (Not too long: it kind of coagulates and cannot be made to mix together again. Doesn’t seem to affect the cooking, but it just looks less pleasing as you’re making your blondies.)

3. Beat the eggs, sugar and vanilla with an electric mixer for about 10 minutes or until light and fluffy.

4. Beat in the cooled chocolate mixture, sift in the flour and salt, add rosemary and stir until well combined.

5. Beat in the remaining 50 g white chocolate, chopped into small pieces.

6. Pour into the prepared tin, place in the oven and bake for about 35 minutes. A skewer inserted in the centre should come out with some mixture still on it. Remove from the oven and cool on a wire rack; if it drops in the centre and forms a cracked crust, then you have just made the perfect blondie.

Due to the white chocolate, these are not only totally delicious and more-ish, but also sickeningly – wickedly – sweet and rich. Only the addition of rosemary makes them into something that can be served to adults! Most people have difficulty guessing this mystery ingredient.

But to return to Mr Telford’s The Basics: as you can tell from the recipe above, these really are basic straightforward recipes of everyday foods that anyone will have encountered growing up in Australia. There is not a single picture in the book. There are 471 pages of recipes, followed by almost 100 pages of the A–Z ‘Really Useful Information’ that first appeared in The Kitchen Hand (e.g. three pages about salt; four pages about rice and its cooking). Then info on food allergies and intolerances, with tips on substitutions; complete list of food additive codes; cooking techniques explained (such as BBQing, microwaving, steaming); preserving; conversion and equivalency tables – THE LOT for anyone who wants to learn to cook.

Rather like an updated and greatly expanded CWA/Presbyterian Women’s Cookbook, this really is a book that beginner and experienced cooks will use and enjoy browsing through. The PERFECT moving-out-of-home present for young people.

White Pepper and Ginger Lemon Cake

2011-10-07T09:44:00.003+11:00

‘This is a brand-new version of an early American buttermilk cake – white pepper and ginger are “hot” right now.’ p49, Maida Heatter's Cakes

Maybe Maida was writing this some decades ago, but I think this cake is still pretty hot – and a lot more interesting than the famous East 62^nd Lemon Cake.

Letting it age one or two days allows the flavours to mellow. I put this first up lest you, like me, would otherwise get through the whole process and find out you should have made the cake for today’s meeting yesterday.

breadcrumbs for dusting

finely grated zest of 2 large lemons

2 tablespoons lemon juice

2cm x 4cm piece fresh ginger

375g plain flour

3/4 teaspoons bicarb soda

3/4 teaspoons baking powder

1/2 teaspoon salt

2 teaspoon finely ground white pepper

230g unsalted butter

350g sugar

3 eggs

1 cup buttermilk

Glaze:

1/3 cup lemon juice

1/2 cup sugar

Preheat oven to 170C.

As Maida always suggests, and as I have never done before, butter a bundt tube pan, not forgetting the centre tube. Sprinkle in breadcrumbs, tilt to cover the whole inside surface, and shake out excess. I have not had a trouble-free relationship with my silicon bundt tin, which should transcend the need for this process, but doesn’t, so I returned to the tin tin with a humbled mien.

In a cup, combine the zest and juice. Grate the fresh ginger and add to the cup. Sift together the flour, baking soda, baking powder, salt and pepper and set aside.

Beat the butter until soft, add sugar and beat for a minute before adding the eggs one at a time. On a low speed, add the sifted dry ingredients alternating with the buttermilk. Stir in lemon and ginger mixture.

Turn into prepared pan and smooth the top. Place in the bottom third of the oven and bake for 1 hour and 15–20 minutes until it tests done with a bamboo skewer. Don’t hold the blunt end of the used bamboo skewer in your mouth while sliding the oven rack back in carefully with both hands so as not to disturb the risen cake, and then bump the sharp end of the skewer while hastily withdrawing the oven mitt, driving the blunt-yet-still-sharpish end painfully into the back of your throat – this won’t help matters and may make you angry and lead to bitterness about having nowhere to put things when you’re in a hurry and your hands are full.

Cool the cake in the tin for 10 minutes, then invert (with the greatest of ease, thanks to the breadcrumbing) onto a rack over a large piece of baking paper to catch the glaze which you, of course, prepared by stirring together while the cake was baking. Brush the glaze all over the cake, not forgetting the centre hole, and keep recoating as the cake absorbs it as I do a vodkatini on a Friday night. Let stand until completely cool, then cover with cling film.

Oat and barberry biscuits

2011-10-06T18:27:00.000+11:00

I haven’t made Anzac biscuits since Year Eight. These have tiny sour-sharp barberries to tart them up a bit – and are the first thing to make from the promising Bourke Street Bakery cookbook before I attempt its sourdough starters and croissants and ginger crème brûlée.

Adapted from Bourke Street Bakery p304

165g rolled oats

220g plain flour

100g desiccated coconut

210g brown sugar

50g dried barberries

45 mL boiling water

185g unsalted butter

60g golden syrup

1 ½ teaspoons bicarb soda

60 mL water

Preheat oven to 170C. Combine barberries, boiling water and 35g of the sugar in a bowl.

Combine oats, flour, coconut and the remaining 175g of the sugar in a bowl and mix.

Put the butter and golden syrup in a small saucepan over low heat and stir until the butter has melted. Add the barberries and sugar mixture. Combine the bicarb and water in a cup and add to the pan. While it’s still foaming, add to the dry ingredients and mix well. At this point the barberries look so shiny and rubylike and somehow evil against that bland beige Anzac lumpiness.

The recipe says to take 3 tablespoons of the mixture at a time to roll into balls, which would yield a total of 12 huge biscuits – I took much smaller-sized scoops and formed walnut-sized balls, which I pressed lightly with a fork rather than pressing to be very flat with a spatula as advised. They need to be placed far apart to allow for spreading – I could bake only 9 at a time – and baked for 15–20 minutes.

After cooling on the trays, mine were that softer, chewier end of the Anzac spectrum than the thin crisp version in the BSB’s photo. Moreish, if inelegant, and the barberries did give it a whole new dimension.

Olive oil crackers

2011-09-30T21:09:00.001+10:00

I noticed these in the Ottolenghi cookbook last weekend when I made eight of its dishes including the Parmesan and poppy biscuits on the facing page to these, which is a story for another day. These are the sort of thing for which one always has the ingredients, for a change. And they’re pretty good, even without the dip one has failed to procure for Friday-night office wine.

Adapted from Ottolenghi: the Cookbook, p186

250g plain flour (I used 100g each of plain and bread flour, and 50gm wholemeal flour)
1 tsp baking powder
115ml water
25ml olive oil, plus extra for brushing (I used extra virgin)
½ teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon paprika
1/2 tsp cayenne
¼ teaspoon black pepper
course sea salt for sprinkling – I found Maldon a bit too coarse on the first tray’s worth, so ground normal salt over the rest

Combine all the ingredients except the sea salt in the mixer bowl, and knead it with the dough hook until it all comes together in a firm consistency. (Or do it by hand.) Wrap in cling film and leave it to rest for an hour in the fridge.

Preheat the oven to 220°C. On a well-floured surface, use a rolling pin to roll walnut-sized bits of the dough as close to paper-thin as possible – or at least attempt this for one long, oval ‘witch’s tongue’, feel despairing at the result, have a brainwave and GET OUT YOUR PASTA MACHINE!

It really does look like a sulphurous witch's tongue...

Oh, it’s so inexpressibly pleasing when I find an unexpected use for such a guilt-provokingly underutilised utensil as the Imperia Tipo Lusso SP150. Putting the bits of dough through the largest setting and then the second-or-third-smallest to produce perfect thinness was the easiest task in the world, even though I’ve carelessly lost the attachment that bolts the machine to a benchtop, so that most of my left hand was employed holding the machine down while a few leftover fingers had to elevate the dough as it fed through the rollers.

Lay the pieces on trays lined with baking paper, brush generously with olive oil, then sprinkle on the sea salt, or topping of your choice – I tried fennel and cumin seeds for the third tray. Next time I might try chopped rosemary or thyme.

Bake for about 6 minutes, until crisp and golden brown. Allow to cool and store in an airtight container.

Red-velvet and chocolate-hazelnut cupcakes

2011-09-29T21:46:00.003+10:00

A long, long time ago, back in January before-the-blog, there was a red velvet cake. I don’t remember where the recipe came from, but I did buy The Hummingbird Bakery Cookbook for the occasion and then didn’t use it. So I felt it time to put it to use and enter into the world of cupcakes, albeit years after the rest of the world.

I find mildly interesting the whole circulation of hand-me-down wisdom surrounding achieving the greatest redness – whether the cocoa shouldn’t be dutch-process, and what the whole vinegar–bicarb soda relationship is all about. I wish Harold McGee would weigh in, but to my knowledge he hasn’t.

There’s a million red-velvet cake recipes out there, so I had a look around on the internet before quite committing myself to just one. And the upshot was that I took a leaf out of Hummingbird, and also smitten kitchen, who is always great at doing her own roundup of the best of all the offerings out there. Amid all my tweaks I kept more or less to the Hummingbird quantities, which promised 12 cupcakes, but met SK halfway in substituting oil for some of the butter in pursuit of greater moistness, and ramped up the cocoa quantity very slightly.

I found that the mixture was barely enough for 10 cupcakes, let alone the promised 12, and the wrappers didn’t end up quite full.

Red-velvet cupcakes

Adapted from smitten kitchen and The Hummingbird Bakery Cookbook

150g cake flour
15g unsweetened cocoa (SK suggests not Dutch process, Hummingbird doesn’t say)
½ teaspoon salt
100mL vegetable oil

60g melted butter
150g sugar
1 large egg
½ teaspoons vanilla extract

½ teaspoon Wilton’s red gel food colouring
120mL buttermilk
¾ teaspoon bicarb soda
1 ½ teaspoons white wine vinegar

Preheat the oven to 180C. Sift together the dry ingredients and set aside. Beat together the oil, butter and sugar, then add the egg, vanilla and food colouring to produce a brilliant red batter.

Add the sifted dry ingredients and buttermilk in two alternating stages, beating on low. The colour will now be dull.

Combine the bicarb and vinegar in a cup so it fizzes like mad, adding it to the mixture as it does so. Three-quarters fill cupcake papers and bake for about 25 minutes.

Allow to cool before even thinking of icing them.

60g butter

200g icing sugar

150g cream cheese

½ teaspoon vanilla extract

Beat butter and sugar together, then add cream cheese and vanilla and beat for a few minutes until smooth and fluffy. Put into a piping bag fitted with a generous star tip and swirl it on. I found this quantity a bit small for my ten cupcakes, even though it had more cream cheese than Hummingbird suggested (but less than their 300g sugar). It might have been fine for their spreading with a spoon, though; I was getting all fancy-pants swirly.

I dipped the tip of a teaspoon in more red food-colouring gel and bashed it around a tablespoon of turbinado sugar in an espresso cup to produce the red sugar crystals to sprinkle on top.

I felt this batch of ten wouldn’t be enough for the office, so got up early this morning to do another batch from Hummingbird that had caught my eye, despite it being a bit too closely related in the chocolate area and not overly complementary. Again, I tweaked it to add the Nutella straight into the mix rather than dig holes out of the cupcakes to fill with Nutella after baking.

And this amount of batter made a paltry six cupcakes! Six! What could be up with their quantities? Twelve might work for mini-cupcakes, not a good honest afternoon-tea-sized cupcake of which my colleagues are deserving.

Hazelnut and chocolate cupcakes

Adapted from The Hummingbird Bakery Cookbook

100g plain flour

20g cocoa (I used Dutch process this time)

140g caster sugar

1 ½ teaspoons baking powder

pinch salt

40g butter, room temperature

120mL milk (I used leftover buttermilk instead)

1 egg

about 50g Nutella

Preheat oven to 170C. Beat flour, cocoa, baking powder, salt and butter to a sandy, combined consistency. I found it curious to involve the flour at the outset rather than adding it to the beaten butter and eggs and sugar and only just beating it in, as Maida would do, but followed it to the letter.

Slowly pour in the milk and beat well before adding the egg; again, beat well. I was becoming wary of all this beating of flour, and hand-stirred this bit, along with the scoop of Nutella I’d decided to add.

Spoon the mixture into 12 6 cases and bake for 25 minutes.

I wanted to involve the leftover cream cheese in the icing rather than Hummingbird’s recipe, so I borrowed from Tartelette to make my own.

100g cream cheese
50g butter
150g icing sugar
50g Nutella

½ teaspoon vanilla extract

I couldn’t help but add a splash of Frangelico.

Same process as for the icing above, but with chopped hazelnuts sprinkled over.

They were both pretty okay. What the hazelnut version lacked in looks over the red-velvet, it made up for in chocolatey, buttery delightfulness.

Peanut-Butter Pillows

2011-09-27T08:06:00.000+10:00

I had a dream, a terrible dream, in which every one of my colleagues went on a detox diet.

I woke with the remnants of a scream in my throat, thrashed my way out of the twisted sheets and went straight to make something chockablock with as much fat and sugar as I could find. Maida Heatter’s Peanut-Butter Pillows seemed just the thing to stabilise my universe.

Her recipe would make about 16 filled cookies, she said. Well, that wouldn’t do for force-feeding my workplace out of any consideration of diets, so I doubled everything.

Adapted from Maida Heatter’s Book of Great Cookies, pp 142–3

380g plain flour
1 teaspoon bicarb soda
½ teaspoon salt
230g unsalted butter
260g smooth (not chunky) peanut butter
200g raw or white sugar
170g light corn syrup (I used glucose syrup)
2 tablespoons milk
an additional cup or so of peanut butter for filling

I added about 50g roughly chopped dark chocolate

Sift together the flour, baking soda, and salt, and set aside. Cream the butter. Add the peanut butter and sugar and beat thoroughly. Beat in the syrup and the milk. On low speed, add the sifted dry ingredients, scraping the bowl as necessary with a rubber spatula and beating only until smooth.

Turn out the dough, knead it briefly and then form it into an even log about 20cm long and 5cm in diameter. Wrap the dough in clingwrap and refrigerate for at least a couple of hours.

Preheat oven to 180°C. Line trays with baking paper.

With a sharp knife, cut slices 5mm thick and place them 3cm apart on the trays – they spread quite a bit. My dough was still fairly soft and lost its roundness as I sliced it, but this is magical self-healing dough, and the most messy, oval, cracked biscuit sorted itself out in the cooking – not that these are exactly the epitome of elegance, they’re more your hearty gobstopper variety of biscuit.

Place a teaspooned blob of the additional peanut butter in the centre of each round, flattening it slightly to leave a 1cm border. Still enmeshed in my nightmare, I extended a chopped bit of dark chocolate to each, as garlic to a vampire.

Slice the remaining dough and place the rounds over one of the peanut-butter-topped biscuits. Let stand for a few minutes to allow the dough to soften slightly. Then seal the edges by pressing them lightly with a fork. Don’t worry about slight cracks in the tops – all that will happen is that peanut butter (and chocolate) will glimmer shinily through them, and since when was that a bad thing?

Bake for 15 minutes until lightly browned. Let the biscuits stand on the trays for about a minute. Then, with a wide metal spatula, transfer them to racks to cool.

And they were good, all crunchy and buttery and salty and sweet. There was no stopping at just one, or three. I stand by the chocolate, too.

Maida must have been making dinner-plate sized ones (perhaps to better allow for the pillow mound of peanut butter, which I didn’t achieve – more of a flattish layer in mine) to get only 16 out of one quantity – I got about 60. Too many, in fact, for the kitchen biscuit jar, but my colleagues were quick to resolve that issue.

Pinwheel biscuits

2011-09-19T19:15:00.005+10:00

I’ve always had a thing for a spiral (and in fact am frittering away my life looking for a suitably worthy garment on which to sew the red-and-white spiral buttons I got many moons ago from Buttonmania. (I have a lot of buttons experiencing that fate. Button paralysis, it’s called – a subcategory of that infamous scourge of the amateur sewist, stash paralysis.) And I fear I would be one of those unfortunates to be sucked into a whirlpool just by contemplating it a moment too long).

These are Vertigo-in-a-biscuit! I’m sure I remember these on a table at a school fete in 1982, and I was pretty delighted with them then, and curious about how they were done – in the same way that I remain curious about Castlemaine Rock.

I made the straight chocolate-and-vanilla recipe from Maida Heatter’s Book of Great Cookies, and no sooner had I slid the rolled log into the fridge than I got to thinking of all the other two-toned flavours that could be made. So I immediately got to making a matcha and white chocolate version.

220g plain flour

½ teaspoon baking powder

¼ teaspoon salt

30g unsweetened chocolate

115g butter

½ teaspoon vanilla extract

150g sugar (I used raw)

1 egg

1 teaspoon powdered instant coffee (I used not-instant ground coffee)

¼ teaspoon almond extract

1/3 cup pecans, finely chopped (I used walnuts)

Sift together the flour, baking powder and salt. Melt the chocolate in the microwave. (Or in a double boiler like Maida, although 30g would get lost in the corners, I’d imagine.)

Cream the butter, add vanilla, sugar and egg one by one, beating well. Drop the speed to low and add the dry ingredients just until it all comes together.

At this point, Maida says to take out a cup of the dough. That didn’t seem exact enough for me, so I added up the weight of all the ingredients and took out 270g. The melted chocolate and coffee went into one half, and the almond extract and pecans into the other.

Sandwich one lump of dough between two sheets of baking paper and roll out to a 14"x9" oblong. I have no concept of what this would look like even in centimetres, so I took a leaf out of My Little Kitchen’s book and taped the dimensions on the bench, where they showed through the paper as a guide. When it was more or less the right size overall, I peeled off the top layer of paper and trimmed off the excess from the sides, using it to fill in the corners. The dough was sticky but quite malleable, so this wasn’t too hard. Same for the other lump of dough, and then carefully, carefully laid one evenly atop the other.

Then the paper beneath the dough can be used to help roll up along the long side to form the roll. It all seemed to come together pretty well, and into the fridge to firm up for a few hours.

Then it’s all fun – slicing the log into ½ centimetre rounds, exposing the nice even spiral.

They’re baked for 12 minutes at 180C until golden at the edges, and out they come, pretty and buttery and crunchy.

For the second version, I simply replaced the chocolate and coffee with a tablespoon of matcha, and the almond extract and walnuts with 30g white chocolate. They were okay, and nice-looking, although the white chocolate didn’t come through strongly – to be expected, really. I might try more white chocolate next time, paired with lemon.

Mondrian marchpane

2011-09-17T19:04:00.002+10:00

It may seem counter-intuitive, but on certain blustery, eucalyptus-smelling Saturday afternoons in spring, all one wants to do is to slather one’s face with white lead, pop on a John Dowland playlist, and blanch one’s own raw almonds to make an Elizabethan marchpane.

The urge may have had something to do with accumulating these delightful and very beautifully Coralie-Bickford-Smith-designed books from the Penguin Great Food series and wanting to actually make something from them, as does the intrepid @PenfromPenguin.

It may have had something to do with procrastination as well.

So this 1615 recipe from Gervase Markham calls for Jordon almonds – I’m pretty sure he didn’t have pastel-coloured wedding bonbonnière in mind, so I reached for 250g raw almonds. (I briefly considered going straight for almond meal, but wanted to display some integrity for a change – and there was the procrastination thing.) I poured boiling water over them, waited a minute, drained and doused them in ice water.

Their skins remained stubbornly attached, and after painstakingly removing a few by way of scraping at them with a thumbnail, I repeated the blanching process and then found it all much easier – they started to just pop obligingly out of their skins when squeezed.

Then, continuing in the spirit of integrity despite the time wasted messing about with skinning the almonds, I cast them into a mortar and pestle and started bashing away. It wasn’t long before my integrity slipped and pooled around my alabaster feet, and out came the food processor. I added 140g icing sugar and blitzed it all into a paste with 2 tablespoons rosewater. It turned out smoothish, though nothing like wedding-cake marzipan.

I kept back a small lump of it to create conceits and subtleties for decorating later, and rolled out the sticky bulk of it between two sheets of baking paper to line the bottom of a cake tin.

Then I bashed up the reserved lump with a speck of purple Wilton’s gel for a regal touch, and tried various sculptures, shapes and patterns to arrange into a decorative whole, but eventually gave up on that and decided to keep it simple so I could wash the white lead off my face, kill the sounds of Emma Kirkby and Anthony Rooley, and generally get on with my life before I should mourn that the day had with darkness fled. I have a twenty-first-century attention span, you see.

I rolled out the purple paste, squished it into right-angled lines here and there, and – this is how slow I am – saw all the bright Wilton’s gels and thought I’d make with icing sugar and rosewater a little round Mondrian-inspired piece of artwork, all for me.

I baked it at 170C for half an hour, after which it was decidedly the worse for wear, with the icing having bubbled up and oozed where it shouldn’t, causing Mondrian to roll even more in his grave than my unmathematical distribution of colours had.

And it tasted just like macarons.

To make the best marchpane (Gervase Markham, The Well-Kept Kitchen, p74)

To make the best marchpane, take the best Jordan almonds and blanch them in warm water, then put them into a stone mortar, and with a wooden pestle beat them to pap, then take of the finest refined sugar well searced, and with it, and damask rose-water, beat it to a good stiff paste, allowing almost to every Jordan almond three spoonful of sugar; then when it is brought thus to a paste, lay it upon a fair table, and, strewing searced sugar under it, mould it like leaven; then with a rolling pin roll it forth, and lay it upon wafers washed with rose-water; then pinch it about the sides, and put it into what form you please; then strew searced sugar all over it; which done, wash it over with rose-water and sugar mixed together, for that will make the ice; then adorn it with comfits, gilding or whatsoever devices you please, and so set it into a hot stove, and there bake it crispy, and so service it forth. Some use to mix with the paste cinnamon and ginger finely searced, but I refer that to your particular taste.

Hermit Bars

2011-09-16T09:08:00.000+10:00

It seems this is an Early American classic of which every nineteenth-century Cape Cod woman had her own version to send with her sailor-man to sea, so well did it keep.

I made this recipe because the heroic blogger who baked every single one of Maida’s Book of Great Cookies recipes really liked these, and even sent them on the two-week trip through the post to test their keeping and transport capabilities.

These remind me of Xmas, somehow – maybe reminiscent of the panforte I’ve made for Xmases past. At work, they reminded Our Fearless Leader of her mother’s Lebkuchen.

Adapted from Maida Heatter’s Book of Great Cookies, pp 99–100

320g plain flour

¾ teaspoon bicarb soda

¾ teaspoon baking powder

½ teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon ground cinnamon

½ teaspoon ground cloves

¼ teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg

1/4 teaspoon ground cloves

¼ teaspoon mace

1/8 teaspoon allspice

120g unsalted butter

100g raw sugar

2 eggs

½ cup molasses (I used blackstrap, which was all I had – tasted like metallic liquorice, so I cut in a third of malt syrup)

140g raisins, soaked for a few minutes in boiling water and drained

115g roughly chopped walnuts

Preheat oven to 180C. Butter a 13x9 inch slice pan – no, really, butter it, as Maida says. Don’t just ignore that instruction, like I did, and line with baking paper instead, as I always do; no, not for this one.

Sift together all the dry ingredients. Cream the butter, add the sugar and eggs one at a time; beat until smooth. Beat in the molasses, stopping the mixer unless you want black strands of molasses whipped around the bowl and up the mixing shank to be found in all sorts of places afterwards. Add dry ingredients on low speed just until it comes together, and mix in the raisins and walnuts. This is a very thick, heavy dough by now, and Maida’s instruction to spread it smoothly in the pan is easier said than done, especially when you’ve gone ahead and lined the pan with baking paper that slips around everywhere.

Bake for 30 minutes until the top of the cake springs back when lightly pressed with a fingertip. Mine looked like the surface of the moon, and no springing was going on, but I took it out after 40 minutes regardless – I think it was a tad overcooked and dry.

Get going on the glaze, or have it done before the cake comes out – it needs to be applied while the cake’s still very hot.

150g icing sugar

30g butter, melted

½ teaspoon vanilla extract

3–4 tablespoons boiling water

Place the sugar, butter and vanilla in the bowl of an electric mixer, or prepare to stir it by hand – in which case, sift the sugar first against lumps. Beat on a low speed while gradually adding just enough of the water to form a medium-thick but pourable consistency.

Pour it over the hot base and brush to cover. It’ll melt into the nooks and crannies and become clearish in parts. Leave it to cool and dry before slicing into squares.

Alice B Toklas’s Tender Tart

2011-09-12T19:56:00.007+10:00

Amid all the recipes in the Alice B Toklas Cookbook for chicken in a gallon of cream and 12 egg yolks, here’s a tart made by ‘sweet weak Kasper’, one of a vast progression of servants from whom Alice B Toklas drew most of her recipes. (Different times, that’s all I can say – though I seem to be increasingly on my own in not employing a house-cleaner – still, given Gertrude Stein had to be waited on hand and foot and disliked seeing work being done, perhaps it was one way of keeping things slightly fairer for the devoted Alice B Toklas.) Unlike Gertrude Stein, Alice B Toklas uses commas, thank God, but no quote marks, and the meaning of a lot of her writing is difficult to untangle.

The recipe is also to be found in Gourmet Traveller, in which the top is latticed instead of solid, and a fluted tart tin is used – both of which I went with. But the quantities are quite different, higher ratio of butter and less sugar, and for the sake of the exercise I went with Alice B Toklas’s version, test-kitchenless though it probably was. It was delicious, but very sweet, which I imagine is why GT recommended serving it with goat’s milk yoghurt.

A TENDER TART

(p61 in my beautiful Folio Society edition with slipcase, velvety silver-topped pages and a line drawing of a painstakingly decorated carp on the cover and endpapers)

130g butter, 140g flour,* 1 egg yolk, blend with knives or pastry blender,** add only enough water to hold together, knead lightly, put aside in refrigerator.

***

Stir 2 eggs and 225g sugar for 20 minutes**** – do not beat. Add 1 teaspoon vanilla and 1 cup finely chopped hazel-nuts.

Roll out a little more than half the dough, place in deep pie plate, with detachable bottom, fill with egg-sugar-nut mixture. Roll out remaining dough and cover tart, press edges together so that the bottom and top crusts adhere.***** Bake for ½ hour in 180C oven. Exquisite.

*Quantities were all, like, ‘½ cup plus 1 tablespoon’ – thank you for conversions, GourmetSleuth.com, saving us all from trying to measure solid butter in a cup.

** Ha! Not likely. Hello, food processor.

***Paragraph breaks mine.

**** Ha! Not likely. Hello, KitchenAid on the slowest setting with dough hook. Though what on earth all this stirring-not-beating is supposed to do to the sugar and eggs is quite beyond me – a tedious chore devised to occupy the servants, perhaps.

***** I do not possess what might be known as a light hand with the pastry, but in my defence, and as frequently documented, I do not have a marble work surface, with which I remain convinced every obstacle to perfect pastry would be surmounted. In brief, I didn’t have much fun with this pastry – very breaky. I quickly gave up on the floured wooden board and went for the baking paper, which skidded around but was better – although the rolling pin kept picking up bits and ripping great holes in the rest, no matter how liberally floured it was. I patched up the base, but the 1/3 reserved for the top and scored with the lattice cutter fell to bits on contact with the tart filling and was generally a disaster. By way of apology to the tart, I went the extra mile uninstructed by Alice B Toklas and brushed it with a yolk* beaten with milk.

*On yolks, I have lots of them thanks to the macaron-making. Some sources say leftover yolks can’t be frozen; others say they can, with a drop of glucose syrup added to them. So I froze them accordingly in an iceblock-tray – and I find they’re not bad depending on what they’re being used for. They thaw fairly quickly, but remain much thicker than a fresh yolk, so are best suited for situations where they’re being beaten into other things. Great for when working from a cookbook such as Alice B Toklas’s where a full henhouse is assumed and something seems to be held against the use of the whole egg.

Korova Sablés

2011-09-11T12:12:00.001+10:00

These elegant, rich choc-chip slice-and-bakes are also known as World Peace Cookies in Dorie Greenspan’s Baking, but I prefer Korova Sablés, as they’re named at Pierre Hermé’s in Paris and in Dorie’s little earlier cookbook, Paris Sweets. Anything that touches on A Clockwork Orange is fine by me, my droogs, and these are good – in fact, you’ll be out of your rasoodocks with radosty to have these in your rookers, along with a nice moloko or chai.

175g plain flour

30g dutch-process cocoa

½ teaspoon bicarb soda

150g unsalted butter, room temperature

120g brown sugar

50g raw sugar

½ teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

150g dark chocolate (I used Callebaut Strong 70%, the very last of my 2.5kg)

Beat the butter until creamy. Add the sugars, salt and vanilla extract and beat for a couple of minutes.

Sift in the flour, cocoa, bicarb, add choc chips and beat on the lowest speed or by hand only until the mixture looks crumbly – don’t overwork it.

Scrunch the dough into a rough ball and then divide in half. Form each chunk into a log, wrap in baking paper or Gladwrap and put in the fridge to chill for at least 2 hours – it can stay there for three days, or can be frozen for future reference.

Preheat the oven to 165C. With a sharp nozh (I find a little serrated one good for getting through the choc chips), shive the logs into rounds about 1.5cm thick. If they crumble or break, just push them back together again – they’ll come good in the baking (I also roll their edges in sugar, for prettiness, but this is also a good moment to get them shapely again). Place lomticks onto a tray lined with baking paper, a centimetre or two apart.

Bake for 12 minutes. They mightn’t look cooked, but will firm up as they cool.

And then, oh my brothers, bliss and heaven, horrorshow gorgeousness and gorgeousity as you cram these into your rot.

Spanish orange cake

2011-09-02T23:44:00.000+10:00

And more orange fun. This almost exhausted my supply of oranges, so great has been my zeal for using them up. And now I have a backlog of orange recipes.

This was a good, rather plain and no-nonsense cake, dense and very orangey. The marmalade couldn’t be done without; some crème fraiche wouldn’t have gone astray, although the tub I purchased vanished from the fridge overnight. I have no conclusions whatsoever about that; can't even blame the cats.

350g plain flour

1 tablespoon plus 1 teaspoon baking powder

¼ teaspoon salt

240g butter

270g sugar (I used raw)

finely grated zest of 2 oranges

2 eggs, separated

3 egg yolks

2/3 cup orange juice

½ cup orange marmalade

Preheat oven to 180C. Maida calls for a nine-inch tube tin, but I used a 20cm square tin. Sift together flour, baking powder and salt.

Beat butter to soften, then add most of the sugar and beat for a few minutes until pale, keeping back a few tablespoons (as the sugar kept back is for strengthening the egg whites, I substituted raw caster sugar for that.) Add the orange zest and then the five egg yolks one at a time, beating well. Go to the lowest speed or hand-mix in the flour, alternating with the orange juice, until just incorporated. It will be quite a heavy, clumpy dough at this point.

In a clean bowl, beat the egg whites until soft peaks form, then add sugar and keep beating until they have glossy, firm peaks. Fold this into the batter, then turn it all into the cake tin.

Bake for about an hour or until a skewer withdraws clean. Cool cake in the pan for 20 minutes before placing on a rack over some greaseproof paper, or the sink, to collect drips from the glaze.

For the glaze, bring marmalade and 2 tablespoons water to the boil, then brush over top and sides of cooled cake. Let stand to dry for several hours (or overnight if you’re me) before transferring to a cake plate.

Bells of St Clement's

2011-08-31T22:07:00.015+10:00

[office kitchen, lunchtime]

The Saucemaker: So x has an orange tree in the backyard that is loaded right now, if you wanted some for anything.

Macarong: That would be excellent! I wish I had an orange tree, but, as you know, Saucemaker, I get no sun in my backyard and even thyme dies on me.

The Saucemaker: Cool, I’ll bring some oranges in then.

Macarong: Thanks ever so! I wish I could grow a rosemary bush in my backyard, because that would be the best thing ever. So sick of paying three dollars for a few sprigs that shrivel up in minutes.

The Saucemaker: Well, there’s a whole rosemary hedge. Do you need rosemary?

Macarong: Do I ever, Saucemaker! But you know what I really crave? Figs. I could make all those Mediterranean-type cakes with whole figs in them without paying twenty bucks at the market every time.

The Saucemaker: Oh yeah, there’s a fig tree as well. Totally laden with figs.

Macarong: Oh! [begins to hyperventilate] I’ve always wanted clementines, so I could do that Nigella Lawson whole-clementine cake with actual clementines.

The Saucemaker [waves airily]: Yep, loads of clementines at the moment. Doesn’t know what to do with all the clementines.

Macarong [weakly]: Pomegranates? Pine nuts? Saffron crocuses? Mangoes?

The Saucemaker: Mmm, don’t think the mangoes are in season yet, but apart from that, sure...

Macarong: But really I wish I could grow a lemon tree in my backyard, because that would be the best thing ever… [Enter The Labyris Bearer, The Intrepid Cyclist and The Tall Editor, rendering the kitchen somewhat crowded]…So sick of paying like two dollars for four waxed lemons I use up in a single day.

The Saucemaker, The Labyris Bearer, The Intrepid Cyclist and the Tall Editor in unison: Oh, could you use some lemons? We’ve got so many lemons on our trees we don’t know what to do with them!

Yes, I can always use lemons! So the moral of this tale is that my kitchen’s been enjoying a perfect embarrassment of citrus fruit lately, the first results of which were the two attempts at Poh’s orange chiffon cake. Long may the bounty continue.

Manna from Heaven's Orange Hazelnut Biscuits to which I added choc chips but they really needed salt

One thing perhaps worth documenting is the marmalade I made last night. I’ve never made marmalade before; I’ve never been a big fan of it, with its large matchsticks of chewy bitter rind. But I dimly remembered a fine version Alida Irwin did some years ago with a vanilla bean, so I gave it a go. To get around my rind aversion, I tried finely zesting rather than boiling up the whole oranges for an hour beforehand and cutting the skin into strips, which seemed to be the most common method found online.

3 oranges

200g raw sugar

juice of a lemon

vanilla pod, split and scraped

Zest the oranges with a fine microplane zester, get rid of the white pith layer with a sharp knife, and chop the orange flesh.

Put orange and zest in saucepan with sugar, lemon juice and the vanilla pod, and stir occasionally until thickened.

It’ll be runny enough to be poured into a jar, but will set a lot more while cooling.

It made one good-sized jar-full, which I didn’t bother sterilising first – I have Plans for this single jar, and am not looking for lengthy preservation.

Chocolate-orange hazelnut chiffon cake

2011-08-29T20:31:00.000+10:00

Poh’s chiffon cake is a three-layered extravanganza stuffed with cream and hazelnuts and covered with ganache; it has coconut milk in it, and lots of zest and orange juice. The zest came courtesy of The Saucemaker’s unsprayed, unwaxed backyard-grown oranges, but I used deep red blood orange juice from un-organic oranges; I wanted pink cake, but in spite of the promise in the measuring jug, it turned out plain old white.

Sooo before yesterday’s attempt, the couple more goes at chiffon cake since the black sesame have turned out like so many macarons...

...but a tiny chink of logic filtered through to my insomnia-ridden frontal lobe.

I’d been observing the chiffon-cake rule about not greasing or lining the tin, but also following the advice of some false friends on the internet about still lining the base so that only the sides need to have a knife run around them once cool.

Of course, it’s largely the cake adhering to the base when inverted that prevents it from falling into a flat tasty pancake. And of course my tin has a removable base anyway, so releasing the cake from that is eminently doable.

This looked almost as it should. It was a bit lopsided, and the top didn’t quite make it in one piece, and in slicing it into three it became clear that one side was more cooked than the other.

The ganache filled any nooks and crannies on top but then wasn’t sufficient to cover the sides as well; the two layers of cream wanted to break free from their confines and meld with the ganache.

But the texture was what I imagine it should be, and the hint of orange and crunch of hazelnut and ooze of whipped cream were all good. And with about five eggs per mouthful, unbelievably rich and filling.

Viennese Chocolate-Walnut Bars

2011-08-18T22:12:00.005+10:00

Rich, very rich. Chocolatey, walnutty, shortbready – Maida delivers again.

And otherwise a great opportunity to leave the DSLR in its bag and Instagram with a low-quality phone camera.

Preheat oven to 190C. Line a 20cm square cake pan unless it’s silicon, like mine. Have I mentioned I love my $4 Kmart silicon tin? Then get making the crust.

120g butter

50g dark brown sugar

200g plain flour, sifted

Cream butter in mixer. Beat in dark brown sugar. On low speed, gradually add flour and beat just until the mixture holds together. Press dough evenly across bottom of tin. Bake for 10 minutes. Meanwhile, make filling.

¼ cup raspberry jam

170g walnuts

2 eggs

¼ teaspoon salt

½ teaspoon vanilla extract

150g dark brown sugar

2 tablespoons dutch-process cocoa

As crust cooks, grind walnuts to a fine powder and set aside. Mine ground to more of a paste, but close enough.

Beat eggs at high speed for 2–3 minutes, or until slightly thickened. Add salt and vanilla and then, on low speed, add sugar and cocoa. Increase the speed to high again and beat for 2–3 minutes more. On low speed beat in ground walnuts, beating only until incorporated.

Soften jam in the microwave if it’s jellylike, then spread over the hot crust, leaving a centimetre border at the edges.

Pour filling over the crust and jam, tilting pan to level.

Bake at 190C for half an hour. Cool completely before icing.

170g dark chocolate chips

2 tablespoons corn, rice malt or golden syrup

2 teaspoons espresso coffee

2 teaspoons boiling water

1/2 cup walnuts, chopped

In a bowl, microwave chocolate in 20-second bursts stirring in between until melted. Add corn syrup, coffee and boiling water, and stir until smooth.

Spread icing over cake; sprinkle with chopped walnuts and press down gently. Cool and refrigerate for an hour or two or overnight before slicing into squares and serving at room temperature.

Adapted from Maida Heatter’s Book of Great Cookies, pp84–5.

Castagnaccio

2011-08-17T20:22:00.004+10:00

This is one bastardisation of a classic that blows the real thing out of the water, and I don’t care what anyone says. It’s also in my list of top ten favourite cakes of all time. I don’t know what the other nine are; I just wanted to give myself a tiny bit of scope. Oh hell, maybe it really is my favourite cake of all time.

I first ate this style of chestnut cake at Coffea years and years ago, in the days when I’d go to the Vic Market on Tuesday mornings before uni; it was always still warm from the oven, and the woman grew to recognise me as a helpless addict. I pleaded for the recipe, but she said she’d have to kill me. She handily labelled it Castagnaccio, so I managed to conduct a search for a recipe of the Tuscan classic on a newfangled thing called Google, spent $10 on 500g of chestnut flour at David Jones and tried it. It turned out greyish, oily and horrible, nothing light or sweet about it at all, and it gave me a gut-ache. I tried it again ($10 was a whole hour behind the video shop counter back then, so the flour was a significant purchase), but I couldn’t understand why it was so unlike the one I knew.

Soon after, the Guitar Teacher and I happened to find ourselves in Florence, and sought it out. It was heavy and doughy and faintly bitter, nothing like the castagnaccio back home.

As a woman possessed, I was always going on about it to anyone who would listen, until one day Alida Irwin pressed upon me a Gourmet Traveller supplement. Within it was a Chestnut Flour, Raisin and Rosemary Cake that proudly boasted of being lighter and sweeter than the traditional castagnaccio, with self-raising flour replacing half the chestnut flour, and a truckload more sugar. I went home and made it. Well might it proudly boast, for it was the one.

I’ve made it probably twenty times since then, getting my chestnut flour at Mediterranean Wholesalers for about $5, and keeping it for up to a year in the freezer since it goes rancid in no time otherwise. It’s a good one, dignified yet homely and comforting, light yet dense and crunchy at its base. People often take it for gingerbread, for some reason, but invariably come back for seconds – The Quiltmaker, for example, found it so wholesome she ate it for lunch.

[adapted from Gourmet Traveller circa 2001; among minor other tweaks, I make this larger version]

100g raisins, soaked in hot water or verjuice for at least 30 minutes

200g chestnut flour

200g plain flour

2 teaspoons baking powder

1 teaspoon sea salt

250g unsalted butter

400g brown sugar

420mL milk

1 ¾ teaspoon bicarb soda

2 eggs

a good few sprigs’ worth of rosemary leaves, chopped a bit

40 pinenuts

olive oil

Line a roughly 20x30cm slice tin with baking paper. Preheat oven to 180C.

Blitz flours, baking powder, sea salt and butter in a food processor until crumblike. Add brown sugar and process until combined. Press half the flour mixture firmly over base of lined tin (being no good at judging amounts visually, I put it on scales and weigh 500g into it).

Whisk bicarb soda, milk and eggs in a bowl. Add to this remaining flour mixture and drained raisins, mix well and pour over base – it’ll be quite runny. Scatter with rosemary and pinenuts and drizzle all over with olive oil.

Bake for 50 minutes or until a skewer withdraws clean, covering with foil after 40 to prevent over-browning. Cool in tin.

It’s wildly good when still vaguely warm, but will keep excellently well for a couple of days.

Black sesame chiffon cake

2011-08-14T22:07:00.003+10:00

Ever since I got Keiko Ishida’s Okashi: sweet treats made with love, I’ve been eyeing off the three chiffon cakes and waiting for a chance. It happened to be Alida Irwin’s 111^th birthday recently, and I put together a Japanese meal – I thought she, as a woman of the 1920s, might find a touch of the Orient interesting and exotic, but it turned out she’d already been there twice and had actually done a stint as a Noh entertainer while carving out her illustrious career as an undercover spy. But I digress.

For dessert I decided at the last minute to have a go at Keiko’s black sesame chiffon cake, which looked so majestic, tall and plain, pure white on the outside and porous grey-black inside. It seemed my regular non-stick little-used Bundt tin might do for it; I even had black sesame seeds on hand. And it wasn’t bad, for a first go, and for one with no concept whatsoever about chiffon cakes.

Its strangely elastic yet light texture, which seemed at odds with its 5 eggs, piqued my interest, and I decided to look further into the subject. On Google, I found chiffon cake was, variously, a Malaysian sweet and one invented by a Californian salesman in the 1940s. Either way, a tube tin that wasn’t non-stick or even greased was needed, and ideally would have little feet at the top so it could be inverted to cool the baked cake – eliminating collapse. Various sources claimed chiffon cake tins could be got at any Asian grocery for a song.

I embarked on a quest through the not-inconsiderable number of Asian groceries in my area, spreading out from Brunswick Street to Richmond and Chinatown. No one had ever heard of them. I eventually got the tin at London & American stores, though it was 23 rather than 20cm. And I found it rusted if any water was allowed to be in its vicinity for longer than a few minutes, so it’s one of those things that has to be dried in a warm oven after washing.

Black sesame paste was another challenge, with treks to Minh Phat for items thus labelled yielding a sprinkle-able gray powder before the much more paste-like version was found.

So after all that, I put it together without any fuss, but the hard-won cake tin didn’t yield as good a result as Alida’s. It was rather vertically challenged and sad, though its texture and taste was good. Still, I’ll have another go at the red bean and matcha versions – after all, I spent $28 on another cake tin, and by God it will be put to use.

(adapted from Keiko Ishida)

5 egg yolks
20g brown sugar
30g black sesame paste
60g water (yep, by weight)
40g vegetable oil
20g black toasted sesame seeds

5 egg whites
90g caster sugar
10g rice or corn flour

70g cake flour

250mL cream

20g caster sugar

more black sesame seeds to garnish

Centre a rack in the oven so a tallish tin can fit in, and preheat it to 170C. Sift flour.

Combine egg yolks, brown sugar and black sesame paste in a bowl and mix well. Add water and oil and mix well. Add flour and mix until batter becomes sticky, then fold in black sesame seeds.

For the meringue, combine sugar and corn flour. Beat egg whites until foamy. Gradually add sugar mixture and continue whisking till whites are glossy, with stiff peaks.

Add a third of the meringue into egg yolk mixture and fold lightly before folding in the remainder to just incorporate – you don’t want the weighty yolk mixture to deflate the buoyancy of the whites.Not that you necessarily want the pockets of white that I had, either.

Pour batter into an ungreased chiffon cake tin – I cut out a circle of baking paper to line the bottom, but that was all. Bake for 50 minutes. When cake is light brown on top, remove from the oven and turn it over, leaving it to cool.

Whip together the cream and sugar, and ice the cake with a spatula, avoiding crumb spreadage as best you can.

To remove chiffon cake from pan, run a spatula along the sides of the cake to release it.

The next day, about a third its proper height

Spicy black bean brownies

2011-08-13T16:55:00.000+10:00

David Lebovitz wrote recently about a Mexican restaurant in Paris called Candelaria, which among other things, makes a Brownie Epicé Haricot Noirs. This idea of making a brownie out of black beans was intriguing, and when the Dumpling Fiend (who is also a nachos fiend) invited me to her Get Up in That Nacho party, it seemed the perfect occasion to wheel this out.

David mentioned a recipe on the 101 Cookbooks blog as forming the basis of this Candelaria one, and I gleaned that the added epicés were star anise and chili.

60g unsweetened chocolate
230g unsalted butter
2 cups soft-cooked black beans, drained
1 cup walnuts, chopped
1 tablespoon vanilla extract

½ teaspoon ground star anise

1.2 teaspoon chilli flakes
¼ cup instant coffee granules
¼ teaspoon salt
4 eggs
1½ cups light agave nectar (I used up all the Trader Joe’s Raw Agave Nectar I’d brought home from the US a few months ago, and made up the rest with brown malt syrup.)

Preheat the oven to 180°F. Line an 11x18-inch slice pan (a large one) with baking paper.

Begin melting the butter in the microwave for a minute before adding the chocolate – a trick I read somewhere recently that ensures the chocolate won’t catch. Stir to melt the chocolate completely.

Place the beans, half the walnuts, the vanilla extract, and a couple of spoonfuls of the melted chocolate mixture into the bowl of a food processor. Blitz for about 2 minutes, or until the batter is thick and the beans smooth – I added a bit more chocolate to loosen things up a bit.

In a large bowl, mix together the remaining 1/2 cup walnuts, remaining melted chocolate mixture, coffee substitute, and salt.

Beat the eggs until light and creamy, about 1 minute. Add the agave nectar, etc. and beat well.

Stir the bean/chocolate mixture into the coffee/chocolate mixture. Add the egg mixture, reserving about 1/2 cup. Mix well. Pour the batter into the prepared pan.

Beat the remaining 1/2 cup egg mixture until light and fluffy, and drizzle it over the brownie batter. Lightly drag a chopstick through the egg mixture, creating a marbled effect.

Bake for about 40 minutes, or until the brownies are set – took about an hour for me. Let cool in the pan, and then refrigerate before cutting into squares – they’re too soft at room temperature to cut neatly, and they’d be messy and gooey when served unless well-refrigerated, so I kept them in the fridge.

I also liberally sprinkled even more chilli flakes over, for heat and some sorely needed prettiness – these are no handsomer than any other brownie. People were kind about their lack of looks in the party post-midnight gloom, though, and they were found incredibly rich and fudgy, and I won a medal for my efforts. That was a great moment.

In lieu of the concluding brownie pic I failed to capture, I'll go one better and give you the be-medalled Nachos Fiend bashing the crap out of her piñata with a broom.

Macaron improvement, thanks to Syrup & Tang

2011-08-13T14:11:00.002+10:00

So I only managed to get a photo of the very worst, for a self-deprecating tweet. The rest were slightly better.

It has been some weeks since my last ~~confession~~ post. There has been horribly cold weather, troubling economic and social developments near and far, kimchi and brie sandwiches, and newly discovered knitting.

There has been illness, much work, yet another failed batch of macarons, and a rejuvenating couple of days off to go to some sessions at the Melbourne Film Festival. It was after a gloomy-and-thus-right-up-my-alley Romanian film about infidelity and marriage breakdown that I hung out with Steeles at Brunetti’s and had one of their macarons, then another.

With the brightly coloured little delights plus the rejuvenation, new enthusiasm sprung in my heart. And when I stumbled across an incredible site that night called Syrup & Tang, in which a brilliant food writer provides detail like no other seen anywhere, I was running not walking to separate those eggs and get some white maturation going.

I like someone whose level of obsession makes mine seem the epitome of easygoing, nay, slack. And he’s right here in Melbourne, and is also somewhat scathing about the macaron efforts he’s found around these parts. I never knew there were so many – and this post was three years ago. I started making them before I went to Paris last year, and had never actually eaten one before; I've only noticed them on last year's Masterchef and gradually appearing around Melbourne in the last few months. But then, I don't get out much.

Among the gems of wisdom on offer at Syrup & Tang is a table that gives the proportions of almond meal and sugar per grams of egg white. This is about a hundred times better than trying to follow a recipe set out in numbers of eggwhites, or even weight of egg white; this formula frees one to use any amount of white one happens to have sitting about.

And there are comparison trouble-shooting photos. Among them I found the dead ringers for my failed, flattened attempts so far; gentle reader, it seems I am guilty of over-mixing as well as over-thinking and over-working.

On offer are the two distinct techniques for macaron-making: French and Italian. I tried the simpler but less reliable French method first for the purple lavender ones, in which all the eggwhite (aged for 4 days in this case) is beaten at once. They were much better than any others so far, without the wild spreading after piping them out.

They even developed little feet, although the feet reduced slightly in size as they cooled.

And then they tended to leave their guts on the silicon – too sticky inside, probably undercooked, although the edge ones had faintly browned surfaces.

I stuck them in the fridge for a few days until I got around to trying the Italian method for the yellow lemon ones, which involves sugar syrup and beating only half the eggwhite (aged for 8 days now) – more like the Dorie Greenspan recipe. Even better! They were well-shaped and domed, and barely spread at all.

They had feet!

I still had problems with the sticky innards, and the trick of mostening the underside of the baking paper didn’t help...

...but I tried the final noted solution to this, of bunging the whole tray of macarons into the freezer for a while. They popped off like a charm.

I made up a ganache with 200g white chocolate, 200g cream and the fine zest of a lemon, and refrigerated it overnight for more solidity before using it to sandwich the macarons, but it was still too runny. It made the macarons too soft; they had to be eaten with the head held back, and the chin and fingers washed afterwards. Not good.

Still. Closer. And these posts on the subject, amounting to essays, have been the find of the year. How can I possibly repay Syrup & Tang?

Devil’s Food White-Out Cake

2011-07-21T23:02:00.001+10:00

For the first time in recent memory, I thought I’d found something pretty good-looking, albeit with a vague Franco Cozzo aesthetic. And it was no less pleasing in the eating – I never knew that whole dark choc-chips in cake could be such a viable thing.

This is the very same layer cake that graces the cover of Dorie Greenspan’s Baking, with a few tonings-down. I kept just the two layers rather than attempting to slice them lengthways in half.

This was mainly because I decided not to follow Dorie into crumbling one of the halves to stick all over the marshmallowy meringue-like icing – it made it look too much like a curly pelt to me. But marshmallow icing – now what could be done with that? I get to use my blowtorch all too little since I moved on from creme brulee every night, so out it came and what fun I had.

This is a great, rich, fudgy cake to have in the stable. There’s a plethora of other ways it could be dressed up. It’s reason enough to buy Baking, with the other 299 recipes as a bonus, but the recipe can be found all over the internet like a fabulous, badly kept secret.

Poppyseed and ricotta cake with lemon curd

2011-07-19T20:49:00.000+10:00

This variation on Italian ricotta cheesecake from the Pickled Sisters Cafe is possibly the most excessively-ingrediented cake I’ve ever made, even counting The Most AMAZING Buttermilk Chocolate Cake EVER. Alida Irwin should take note of this recipe for when her chooks are laying wildly and she has a thousand eggs to use up. Adding the final ingredient of 400g lemon curd to the mixer bowl (of no mean size) threatened to take the batter over the top of the beater. I had concerns about it all fitting in the 24cm tin that’s the closest I have to the recommended size. It went in – just – and thankfully there was no raising agent to worry about, although it did puff right up to the very edge.

It needed almost two hours in the oven. It also needed a knife dipped in warm water to slice it with, rather than a blunt serrated knife that left more of its innards piled up with every slice. It was very crumbly, and refrigerating didn’t seem to help that.

It does seem I’ve lost any remote knack I ever had for making sweet things that are also easy on the eye. But this was so lemony and lightly moist with all that ricotta and cream cheese and the nine eggs and the lemon cream accompaniment and the slight grittiness of the poppy seeds that all was forgiven. Just as well, as it fell into three pieces as I tried to shift it from springform base to serving plate, and it had to be wodged together and liberally covered in sifted icing sugar which covers a multitude of sins, as I always say, but wasn’t quite up to that crack in the centre.

Macawrong II

2011-07-19T10:08:00.000+10:00

No. These are not mine, they are made by someone much clever than me and I have stolen the picture from a photo library because I suck at macaroning.

And again to the actual subject of my blog, despite its tangents into biscuits and slices and such. It happens – I have a brainwave about a combination of flavours, forget the pain caused by the last macawrong, do a lot of online research into an alternative recipe and method that might just work this time, and schlepp over to Brunwick to buy another lot of almond meal at the inestimable Royal Nut Company.

This time wasn’t the time it worked.

This time, I found a recipe in the LA Times by none other than my favourite Dorie Greenspan, supported by an article she’d written with interesting notes about Pierre Hermé.

It was quite different to recipes I’d tried in the past, involving beating only half the eggwhites, then adding a sugar syrup heated to 125C to them, then just mixing the unbeaten remainder to the almond-and-icing sugar mix before adding the meringue and stirring.

Another interesting variation was layering the laden baking sheet on top of a spare one, and sliding the doubled setup into the oven.

And yet another was baking the macarons for 4 minutes at the preheated 180C, then quickly opening and closing the oven, and repeating.

What could go wrong with a recipe based on one by the man who ‘spent years studying the intricacies of macarons’? Mind you, I feel I’ve done the same by now, and that’s not working out so well.

I converted Dorie’s ingredients thusly, and figured out exactly what her ½ cup/4 eggwhites should weigh.

150g almond meal

150g icing sugar

½ US cup eggwhites (120g, or about 4)

½ teaspoon vanilla extract

150g white sugar

3 tablespoons water

Dorie didn’t say so much about what ‘mix well’ meant, so with my BodyPump-exhausted arms I counted one hundred melanges in French, or at least to fifty twice over so as to avoid the numbers getting all complicated (quatre-vingt-dix-sept – why did I take up learning this language?), due to something David Lebovitz said about them in his macaron post.There is such a bewildering array of approaches out there, and research that can be done and stones turned. Perhaps I overstirred for this recipe?

The only other variation was not adding the food colouring until I’d mixed well and then halved the mixture to add the different colours and flavours, and I can’t see how this could have affected anything.

I was trying for a magma-like consistency, but I’ve never really been close enough to magma to know what that is. I knew it wasn’t good when it flowed from the piping bag without any squeezing from me, and proceeded to spread flatly as pancake batter across the fibreglass sheet.

Here’s another thing. The first tray was totally flat. The second and third, for all their failings, developed little feet! Under the same conditions. Why bother being scientific when the universe is such a bitch?

Even the ones that developed little feet were impossible to remove from the fibreglass sheet in one piece, which is something I’ve only ever experienced back when I was using baking paper. They had to be scraped off, and I stuffed angry handfuls of them in my mouth until I felt ill and soaked the rest off in the sink and watched all that eggwhite and almond meal and carefully sifted icing sugar going down the drain.

As obsessive as I feel keeping on going with trying to perfect this, it's that I think I’ve hit on a pleasing flavour combination. The addition of lemon zest and lavender oil to the two portions lifted the shells from being something quite boring and tasteless on their own to very eatable, even without the variations on white chocolate ganache I had planned for them.

Amazing reading online about failed macarons, such as this marvellous and informative post by Not So Humble Pie and all her commenters. Some people stuff them up so badly the macarons chirp like birds as they cool! I felt better after reading that, although less good when I read that a description mirroring my result was due to a phenomenon known as broken meringue. Have I been breaking all my meringues all these years?

By some beginners luck, I once made these work – the second or third time I tried, and even the first few were a good 70% better than this. I get 10% more sucktastic at macarons every time.

I aim to attempt these again next weekend, and have separated the eggs to prove it. The whites will sit out on the bench all week, just like the chefs do it, however counter-intuitive and against all food-safety it may seem. Meanwhile, I’d love to go to this workshop that Dorie went to, in Paris, wouldn’t I just.

Georgia Pecan Bars

2011-07-16T12:17:00.000+10:00

Another contender for the Ugly But Tasty Awards, adapted from Maida Heatter’s Book of Great Cookies, pp108–9

Preheat oven to 180C and centre a rack in the oven. Line a 13x9” oblong slice pan, though I found this made a rather thin slice by Australian standards and I’d try a 7x9” if I did this again.

Crust

200g plain flour, sifted

½ teaspoon baking powder

100g dark muscovado sugar

120g unsalted butter, chopped up

¼ teaspoon salt [my addition]

Maida says to add the butter to the dry ingredients and cut in the butter with a pastry blender. I don’t have one of these utterly unfamiliar-looking objects, and neither does any eBay seller in Australia, so that’s too bad – into the Kitchenaid with it until it formed a rough crumbly mixture I could flatten firmly into the base of the pan and set aside.

Topping

2 eggs

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

50g dark muscovado sugar

¾ cup dark corn syrup (I used roughly equal parts golden syrup and raw agave nectar to approximate this)

3 tablespoons sifted plain flour

200g pecans (I used half walnuts once I found out I had too few pecans – yes, I should have checked first, and no, I didn’t – checking the Back Fridge is a very cold exercise at the moment and one readily neglected)

I also added a good handful of choc chips at the end because I felt like it and it seemed right. And I stand by that.

Beat the eggs to mix. Add vanilla, sugar, syrup and flour and beat until smooth.

Pour the topping over the waiting and uncooked crust, tilting to form an even layer. Scatter over the pecan pieces, with walnuts and choc chips in my case.

Bake for 40 minutes (an hour for me) or until the top is golden brown – which it already is, but I won’t quibble.

After about 20 minutes, carefully lift the slice out of the tin in its baking paper, and leave on a rack to cool completely before moving it to the fridge to chill for an hour before attempting to slice it up with a serrated bread knife.

Limburgse vlaai

2011-07-14T22:50:00.001+10:00

It seems to be high rhubarb season in Alida Irwin and the Croissanteur’s charming and productive acres of garden. I staggered homewards last weekend under a bunch so generous and of such prodigious length that it couldn’t fit it in the fridge, so something had to be done to make it fit. I’m a fan of roasted rhubarb rather than stewed – it’s more colourful, more tart, more intense, and retains just enough of its former shape, and could not be easier. Here’s the word on roasting it.

Trim a bunch of rhubarb and cut into 5cm lengths (without being exact about it), and throw into baking dish with 100g raw sugar and a vanilla bean, maybe some orange or lemon peel. Cover with foil and put into a 200C oven for about 15 minutes before removing the foil, shaking the dish a bit and continuing to roast for another 5–10 minutes to reduce the syrup. The rhubarb will still look quite solid after this, but touching it with a fork will reveal that it’s meltingly soft.

Rhubarb thus roasted can sit in its fuchsia-red syrup in a container in the fridge for a few days until a fitting purpose arises for it, or until one’s Dutch colleague hears of it and suggests something that requires spelling out and googling. When no full recipes are to be had in English, well, it has to be fabricated according to The Tall Designer’s description and some Google Images. And when the traditional strawberries are unavailable for the traditional pairing with rhubarb, frozen raspberries must be dug out.

Who knows what a real Limburgse vlaai has in common with the custardy bread-pastried fruit pie I turned out? They look a bit flatter, for a start; I think there’s only one way I can really find out, though, and I need to save up first.

1/2 teaspoon dry yeast
1/3 cup milk warmed in microwave for 20 seconds or so

1.75 cups plain flour

1 tablespoon raw sugar
1 teaspoon salt

60g butter, room temperature
1 egg

Sprinkle the yeast into the warm milk. While they get to know each other, mix the flour with the sugar and salt in the bowl of the mixer. When the milk looks slightly frothy, add it to the dough and mix for a minute with the dough hook. Add the egg and continue to knead until the dough comes together, then throw in not-too-hard chunks of butter.

It took about ten minutes to reach a point where it was all balling together and coming away from the sides of the bowl – for a while I thought it would never lose its buttery stickiness. Cover the bowl with cling film and place somewhere warmish to rise, such as atop the column heater.

Grease a pie dish, roll two-thirds of the dough into a circle on a floured surface – easier said than done, as it keeps shrinking itself again like slithery soft elastic – and pull and push it into the pie dish, more or less up the sides. Jab holes in the dough, cover with a tea towel and let rise again until puffy. Keep the other third of dough for rolling out and then deciding you’re not up to cutting into the traditional even strips and crisscrossing over the top, and dig out the all-too-rarely-used lattice cutter instead.

Meanwhile, make custard – I used the same basic recipe as for the quince custard cake:

2 eggs

2 tablespoons cornflour

500mL milk

2 tablespoons sugar

1 teaspoon vanilla extract or a vanilla bean

Pour the cooling custard into the puffy dough case, cover with the rhubarb and raspberries, and drape the lattice-cut dough over the top, squidging it around the perimeter into oneness with the base dough.

Bake in a 200C oven for fifteen to twenty minutes until golden and oozing juice is caramelising around the lattice top. It looks as if it might be pretty good straight out of the oven, although TDT said it was eaten cold, so we did that today around the lunch table. Never before was Guinea Pig Thursday so aptly named. It was edible, not too bad at all, although I would like to know what Flemish spices or flavourings are used to round it out and take it further.

Chocolate and Peanut Butter Ripples

2011-07-13T22:18:00.000+10:00

Adapted from Maida Heatter’s Book of Great Cookies, pp32–3

Chocolate dough

55g unsweetened chocolate*

120g unsalted butter

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

¼ teaspoon salt

150g raw sugar

1 egg

150g sifted plain flour

Preheat oven to 170C and line two trays with baking paper.

Melt the chocolate in the microwave or a double boiler and leave to cool a bit.

Cream the butter; add vanilla, salt and sugar and beat well. Beat in the egg and then the melted chocolate. Reduce mixer speed and gradually add the flour just until combined. Roughly halve the dough and set aside in a couple of cereal bowls.

Peanut-butter dough

30g unsalted butter

¼ cup smooth peanut butter

100g brown sugar

2 tablespoons plain flour

Cream the butter with the peanut butter until smooth. Beat in sugar until well mixed. Add flour and mix until just combined.

Maida says to drop barely rounded teaspoonfuls of the chocolate dough on the trays, topped with the peanut-butter dough and then another layer of the chocolate. There was no way this cement-like dough was dropping anywhere, so I used fingers to shape then into something roughly circular and flat. The first lot of chocolate dough made the promised 30 biscuits, so I shaped the peanut-butter and remaining chocolate dough into roughly even logs and cut each of them into 30 even pieces to make sure it would all work out in the end. Even though Maida suggested only flattening them lightly at the very end of the process with a fork dipped in sugar, they were toppling towers of dough, so I flattened each layer – gentle I was not.

Bake for 15 minutes, and not more – they did crisp up as they cooled, as Maida promised. But they were hardly the ‘rather thin, crisp, candylike cookie’ that had to be ‘handle[d] with care – these are fragile’ as they were described. Not at all thin, and crisp only around the edges. And the concentric circles as illustrated were far from the reality.

*I had some Trader Joe’s unsweetened chocolate in the house, which has never been the case before I went to the US in April and brought it back. I probably would have used a 70 percenter or so if I hadn’t had this. I tasted a bit out of curiosity – like taking a mouthful of bitterest Droste even for one who likes chocolate sufficiently dark to put hairs on the chest.

Quince and cardamom custard cake

2011-07-07T22:41:00.007+10:00

I’ve made this cake several times since it was invented some winters ago by one who is known on blogs far and wide as the Cake-maker Extraordinaire. The CME put quince on the map as far as I was concerned, and her pairing it with cardamom was truly inspired. I am honoured to follow in her Camper footsteps in transforming these ungainly furry yellow fruit to an aromatic ruby-red delight, with a slab of vanilla custard sandwiched by cake to go underneath.

Quinces can be pot-roasted in a leisurely and civilised fashion for many hours in the oven with excellent results and a most fragrant kitchen as CME does, or pressure-cooked in under an hour as I did this time (adapted from Suzanne Gibb’s Pressure Cooker Recipe Book, p159).

I cup white wine or verjuice plus one cup water

2 cups sugar – I used raw this time for more flavour

stick cinnamon, a vanilla bean, a clove or two, perhaps a few cardamom pods or some lemon peel

4–6 quinces, depending on size, quartered and peeled (if you like, as I do – or just scrub the fuzz off), but not cored – that’s more easily done afterwards, and the pectin in the cores possibly helps the syrup to thicken.

Put liquids and sugar into pressure cooker and bring to the boil, stirring to dissolve sugar. Add quince quarters and lock the lid. Bring the pressure cooker to low pressure over medium–high heat and cook for 40–50 minutes. After the lid is unlocked, you’ll probably see that the quinces are pinker than they were, but they’ll continue to redden as they cool in the syrup.

If the syrup isn’t thick enough, keep cooking with the lid off to reduce. Once the quinces are cool enough to handle, carefully cut the cores away before returning them to the syrup. They can be refrigerated for a few weeks or frozen for future reference, and used in the next quince-and-cardamon-custard cake that is called for.

Custard

2 eggs

2 tablespoons cornflour

500mL milk

2 tablespoons sugar

1 teaspoon vanilla extract or a vanilla bean

Whisk together the eggs, cornflour and milk in a saucepan, and then place over low–medium heat, continuing to whisk until thickened, 10–15 minutes. Take off the heat and whisk in the sugar and vanilla extract, or scrape in the bean. Pour into a soup bowl or suchlike so that the custard settles in a shallow pool of a smaller diameter than the cake tin you plan to use. Leave to cool, and ideally refrigerate overnight* – the custard will be more solid and easier to work with.

Cake

200g room-temperature unsalted butter

50g raw sugar

100g light muscovado or brown sugar

½ teaspoon salt

2 eggs

300g plain flour

2 teaspoons baking powder

½ teaspoon ground cardamom

½ cup buttermilk (or normal milk with ¼ teaspoon vinegar left to stand 15 minutes)

20g butter

2 teaspoons caster sugar

½ teaspoon ground cardamom

a couple of handfuls slivered almonds or pistachios

pot-roasted or pressure-cooked quinces – 2 or 3 depending on size

Preheat oven to 180C.

Sift the flour, baking powder and first ½ teaspoon cardamom; set aside.

Beat the butter until creamy and add both sugars and salt. Beat until pale, then add the eggs one at a time. Add the flour in two goes, with the buttermilk in between, and mix in just until incorporated.

Spread half the resulting thick batter over the base of a lined 20–22cm springform tin, and carefully slide the cold custard on top. Then cover with the rest of the batter as best you can, working from the outside in and trying not to break up the custard too much.

Arrange generous slices of quince over the top, neatly or messily as they come. Drizzle with some syrup for good measure. Brush with the extra melted butter and sprinkle with caster sugar, more cardamom and chopped nuts.

Bake for 1 hour and 15 minutes, or more like 2 in my oven. Let it cool completely before cutting, and be rewarded with a neat horizontal seam of custard winding through the slice.

*Rather than refrigerated overnight as I have done in the past, this time the custard was just cooled; it split a bit and would have melded with the top layer of batter if I’d let it. Don’t do what I did another time, and pour in the custard still warm due to needing to get to my uncle’s house in the country for lunch – it just blends itself in with the cake batter and when the first slice is cut it appears completely uncooked.

Cardamom biscuits

2011-07-04T21:46:00.013+10:00

Did you ever use cardamom? I did, but I never really tasted it until I tried this recipe.

Maida Heatter’s Brand-New Book of Great Cookies p169–70

A freezing Sunday evening at the end of a weekend lacking in that indefinable something a lot of them lack in these days, and a sudden need to get into the kitchen accompanied by Björling and de los Angeles doing that lacking-sound-quality but still-bloody-heartrending Madama Butterfly, and make what Maida calls rolling-pin cookies, usually to be avoided like the plague due to an inexplicable lack of marble worktop.

½ teaspoon freshly ground cardamom seeds (about 2 teaspoons of pods, seeds extracted and ground in a spice grinder or mortar and pestle, then sifted)

2 ¼ cups plain flour

1 teaspoon cream of tartar

125g unsalted butter, room temperature

1 teaspoon baking soda, or what we would call bicarbonate of soda, not baking powder. Sigh.

¼ teaspoon salt

1 cup packed brown sugar (I used light muscovado)

1 large egg

Preheat oven to 180C.

Sift the flour and cream of tartar; set aside. I actually followed the instruction to sift this time, as the proud new owner of a big shiny drum sifter.

Beat the butter until creamy and add the cardamom, bicarb and salt. Beat in the sugar, then the egg. Add the flour and mix in just until incorporated.

Halve the dough for ease of handling on a postage-stamp-sized work surface, and roll to about 5mm thick. It's quite a sticky dough, and the rolling pin kept sticking to it; for the second half I rolled it out on baking paper.

I punched out circles with a glass, and placed them the recommended 1½ inch apart on the baking-paper-lined sheets and into the oven for 20 minutes, only twice as long as recommended. They didn’t spread or puff up as described; it seems I made the classic error of reading ‘baking powder’ for the bicarb, thanks to the USian betwixt-and-between ‘baking soda’.

They were the sort of unassuming neat flat golden disc that is what it is, and exactly the sort of unchallenging baking the evening called for. The cardamom gave them a nice warmth and also misled several colleagues who held them in esteem for their gingeriness. The texture was crispish and shortbready and pleasant even with the incorrect raising agent, other than which I have every confidence they would have been infinitely more fascinating.

Heston Blumenthal’s treacle tart with vanilla ice-cream

2011-06-30T19:35:00.000+10:00

First, a bit of fandom.

A couple of weeks ago, Heston Blumenthal was rumoured to be appearing on Masterchef, and I located the relevant remote with difficulty and tuned in to Channel 10. The emotional displays and cliffhangers and competitive wranglings and repeats of imminent crisis around those commercial breaks are usually enough to keep me away, but there was Heston.

I’m almost as much of a Heston fan as The Guitar Teacher, who is a frustrated scientist. TGT has every TV series and book he’s ever put out, as well as the Harold McGee On Food and Cooking tome from which Heston says he draws inspiration. All fascinating reads of incredible depth and curiosity and experimentation and scientific enquiry, including the McGee chapters on eggs and ice-cream, which are as far as I’ve got with him. I do intend to read the whole thing one day.

Heston’s recipes and their equipment requirements are almost invariably beyond our humble reach, although we’ve managed the pizza and tomato sauce from one of the In Search of Perfection books.

I love his later books, but not for the practical aspect of their recipes – here must be a brief photographic digression into their beauty. The Fat Duck Cookbook (and this is not even the slipcase version with its multiple ribbons) and Fantastical Feasts go way beyond food porn and into a weird art.

All the equipment you need for lickable wallpaper.

And Heston’s equally fascinating and bizarre TV shows present him as a pleasantly obsessive and refreshingly non-ego-driven chef, after the Gordon Ramsey-style histrionics found so widely elsewhere.

I can’t believe I even attempted to book a table at The Fat Duck when we visited the UK last year. Got a phone card and sat there pressing redial to call first thing in their morning, exactly two months before the first possible date. But it was no go. I knew it was popular, but not that 30,000 people try and fail to get in each week or month or something.

Anyway, so it was my birthday last weekend, and The Guitar Teacher asked a week beforehand what I wanted to do, which is a question that can generally be taken to centre around food and eating for the day. I told him I just wanted him to make me dinner without me having to plan anything.

TGT smote his brow and promised to take me out anywhere I wanted, anywhere. I didn’t want. I would sit back and leave everything up to him. It could be as simple as he liked. Did he listen, and decide upon a simple but delightful entrée of cannellini beans dressed in olive oil, followed by a slow-cooked beef cheek on celeriac puree, perhaps with a tiramisu to follow; all things he has made before without drama and with great success? Nooo, he went straight to blow the dust from the Heston Blumenthal books.

Ultimately, TGT settled on the treacle tart with vanilla ice-cream, and I was called three times at work the day before my birthday with urgent questions about where to get dry ice for the ice-cream (I counselled him to abandon it and make a more-doable David Lebovitz version), where to get Lyle’s Golden Syrup, where to get pastry flour, was it wrong to have thrown out six eggs when the last one's yolk broke (so wrong I can barely think of it).

I ended up getting involved with the tart; it was no job for one person. And one extra in the kitchen would have been welcome just to read aloud the endless stages of the recipe. I'm sure treacle tarts are never the soul of restraint, but this one was a monument to excess. Every component had the contents of a vanilla bean in it, one even allocated to the few pinches of sea salt for sprinkling on at the finish.

The pastry was an almost-even match of flour and butter, with four eggs besides, and as rich and sticky as that implies; it was rolled out under great duress but looked good enough in the tin chilling before its bake;

then it shrunk and oozed litres of butter everywhere as it cooked, not browning until it had been in the oven for twice as long as the recipe suggested, and its sides collapsed over the blind-baking beads and swelled and thickened.

Because the capacity of the tart case looked drastically reduced, we halved the filling to use up only one tin of hard-to-come-by Lyle’s Golden Syrup instead of two (King & Godfree’s delivered the goods, as it turned out), which in the fullness of time proved the perfect amount.

Sticky pecan-cinnamon buns

2011-06-25T14:26:00.002+10:00

Adapted from Dorie Greenspan’s Baking (p51), and Thus Bakes Zarathustra’s The awkward girl who bakes (I was initially drawn to her blogpost title, why could that be?)

Put 2 sachets yeast and 1/3 cup each of bathwater-temperature milk and water (I put both together in a Pyrex jug and zapped it in the microwave for 30 seconds) in the mixer bowl and stir by hand to dissolve the yeast. Add 600g plain flour and 2 teaspoons salt, and give it the dough hook on medium-low for a minute or so, just until it’s a dry, shaggy mass.

Scrape down the bowl, add 3 eggs and ¼ cup sugar and mix on medium until the dough forms a ball, about 3 minutes. Add 340g room-temperature butter in chunks, waiting until each looks to be incorporated into the yellow sticky mass before adding the next. By now it’s a soft oozy dough.

Set the mixer on medium-high and leave it for about ten minutes, by which time the dough should be pulling away from the sides of the bowl, and, in my case, creeping above the hook to take over the motor.

Cover with Gladwrap and leave somewhere warm to double in size, which could take 40 minutes but was more like two hours in my freezing house. That’s okay – plenty of time to feel the warm brioche dough, which is up there with kitten-belly fur in tactile delight.

Punch the dough down in the bowl, recover with Gladwrap and refrigerate, punching it down again every half hour or so until it stops rising, about 2 hours, then leave in the fridge overnight.

Separate the dough into two equal halves, and only use one half – the other can be frozen, or there’s nothing like a little brioche to whip out, for which Dorie originally wrote this recipe. I put the full recipe here as it’s tricky to halve 3 eggs, but you can try to make just the half-quantity if brioche dough in the freezer doesn’t float your boat.

For the filling, mix 1/4 cup raw sugar, 1/4 cup brown sugar, 1 tablespoon ground cinnamon and ½ teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg in a bowl. Mash 40g room-temperature butter with a fork to spreadableness.

Find a 9"x13" baking dish and butter it generously. I could only find a smaller one, which meant the scrolls were a bit crowded and the central ones weren’t completely cooked through.

In a heavy saucepan, bring 200g brown sugar, 120g butter and ¼ cup golden syrup to the boil over a medium heat, stirring frequently. When the sugar has dissolved, stir in 1/2 teaspoon vanilla, and pour into the baking dish. Sprinkle 1 ½ cups pecans all over the sticky, oozy glaze.

Flour your dedicated Italian marble work surface, or if by some oversight you lack one, clear a modicum of space on your cramped benchtop. Roll the dough into a 40cm square, spread with a good chunk of just-softened butter, and sprinkle over the sugar mix.

Roll the dough up tightly and slice into about 15* 3cm lengths. Fit the scrolls cut-side-down into the baking dish atop the pecans, leaving a little more space between them than I did here.

Cover with baking paper and leave in a warm place until the buns have doubled to puffy softness.**

Meanwhile, preheat the oven to 190C. Remove the baking paper and bake the buns for about 30 minutes, until they’re puffed and golden and bubbling with glaze.

Allow about five minutes for them to set a bit before clasping a serving platter over the baking dish and inverting – do it fast to minimise run-off. The glaze will still be verging on molten, so be careful. Eat while warm, obvs. Terribly rich and terrifyingly good.

* Since I failed to find a dish large enough, and because I hoped to feed only three people, common sense might have whispered to me that perhaps I should bake a half-quantity. I clearly lack common sense, because we had way too many. Two buns are all that can be effortfully eaten and even those left me feeling beyond replete and verging on ill. The leftover portion, Dorie says, can be tightly gladwrapped and frozen, then thawed overnight and taken from there.

**At this point, I gladwrapped the dish and refrigerated it for the next morning, reasoning I could get up and leave it to rise on the heater and then bake it. But it needed at least two hours and a move to a just-turned-off oven to even think about rising again, much as The Guitar Teacher and Alida Irwin visiting from the country and I glowered at it hungrily. I do not think these are the best choice for breakfast unless you’re willing to get up at an ungodly hour, which was not the case this morning – Dorie recommends almost two hours for them to rise from rolling-out stage as it is. But I failed to read that last bit after Alida Irwin and I staggered home from a Friday night on the tiles. As it was, TGT and I didn’t eat these until midday, long after Alida Irwin had given up on my hostessing and left.

Florida Lemon Squares

2011-06-23T19:47:00.005+10:00

I don’t know about this Florida place after which Maida names so many of her recipes. I’ve seen Dexter, and there were no lemon squares or brownies or biscuits in evidence there, unless his emotionally manipulative wife made them before that scene with the bath, you know that scene. She was more of a pancake-in-a-bottle type though, not that there’s anything wrong with that.

But these ugly wonders from Maida’s Book of Great Cookies are pretty good, wholesome and lemony and full of texture – all about character rather than looks. And most forgiving of my numerous workarounds.

220g plain flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 can condensed milk
Finely grated zest 1 large lemon
1/2 cup lemon juice
150g butter
200g dark brown sugar, firmly packed (I used half light-brown and half dark muscovado)
100g oatmeal (I used rolled oats)

Preheat oven to 180C.

Combine the flour, baking powder and salt and set aside. Pour the condensed milk into a bowl, zest over the lemon and gradually add the lemon juice, whisking to keep the mixture smooth. Set aside.

Cream the butter, add sugar and beat well. On low speed gradually add the dry ingredients, beating only until combined. Mix in the oats. The mixture will be as dry and loose as that for apple crumble, which it basically is.

Sprinkle about 2 cups of the oatmeal mixture evenly over the bottom of a 9" x 13" pan lined with baking paper (I used a 7" x 9"). Pat the crumbs firmly (or get the coffee tamper onto it) to make a smooth, compact layer.

Pour the lemon mixture evenly over the crumb layer and spread with a spatula to evenness. Sprinkle the remaining crumb mixture over the lemon layer. It’s okay if a bit of the lemon layer shows through in spots (though it won’t if you’ve used a much smaller pan than recommended).

Bake for 35 minutes until lightly coloured (mine took 55 to achieve any colour). Cool completely in pan, then refrigerate for at least an hour (or overnight) before removing from pan and baking paper to cut into small squares. Some icing sugar sifted over can help with their appearance. Serve fridge-cold. Or, I infer, they’d be as tooth-curlingly sweet as Rita Morgan and oozing condensed milk besides.

Sesame biscuits

2011-06-19T22:34:00.001+10:00

I don’t get Okashi by Keiko Ishida out enough, but like its simple, familiar recipes with often-unusual ingredients such as soy flour and brown-rice syrup. I’ve made the green tea sables, which were great, and the tofu cheesecake, which was the weirder end of great, which probably makes it just okay.

I’ve been looking at the photo of these black-and-white sesame cookies for ages, taken by their handsomeness-rather-than-prettiness, and the way the miniscule black seeds are sliced into a cross-section; it took me a while to find an opportunity where I happened to have both white and black seeds in the fridge.

And they’ve turned out to be delicious – just sweet enough, with a buttery, nutty flavour. I do love a sesame seed. These are like a Sesame Snack in a biscuit.

220g plain flour

50g white sesame seeds

50g black sesame seeds

100g unsalted butter, softened

100g icing sugar

1/8 tsp salt

40g egg yolks, from about 2 eggs

Put flour into some sort of container and chill in the freezer (not sure why, perhaps it’s a texture thing, but why not). Toast sesame seeds at 160C for about 15 minutes, or until the white ones develop a slight tan. Set aside to cool.

Beat butter, icing sugar and salt until pale and creamy. Add egg yolks and mix well. Add flour and sesame seeds and fold in with a spatula. At this point the dough will seem very dry and crumbly, but it can be scrunched together.

The recipe says to divide the dough in half, transfer each half to a piece of baking paper, and shape into an oblong 12x7x2.5cm. That looked a bit difficult to achieve, so I lined a small oblong container that had once held quince paste with gladwrap and compacted the dough into it with a coffee tamper.

Refrigerate for at least 3 hours.

Preheat oven to 160C. Slice the chilled dough 5–7mm thick. Bake for about 20 minutes until golden brown and the toasty, sesame-y fragrance fills the kitchen.

East 62nd Street Lemon Cake

2011-06-18T17:57:00.002+10:00

When I sent this recipe to my friend Craig Claiborne, he printed it in the New York Times. It became amazingly popular. I heard of many well-known people who started serving it. I heard that Nancy Reagan and Bill Blass love it.

Maida Heatter’s Book of Great Desserts, pp126–7

250g unsalted butter

2 cups sugar

4 eggs

450g plain flour, sifted

2 teaspoons baking powder

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 cup milk

finely grated zest of 2 lemons

Glaze

1/3 cup lemon juice

2/3 cup sugar

Preheat oven to 180C. Grease a bundt tin.*

Cream the butter. Add the sugar and beat for 3 minutes. Beat in the eggs individually, scraping down the bowl as necessary with a spatula. On lowest speed alternately add the dry ingredients in three additions and the milk in two additions, beating only until smooth after each addition. Stir in lemon rind. Turn the batter into prepared pan.

Bake for about an hour and 15 minutes until a skewer comes out dry. Let cake stand in pan for about 3 minutes, then cover with a rack and invert. Remove pan, leaving the cake upside down. Place over a large piece of foil or waxed paper while preparing glaze.

Stir the lemon juice and sugar together and brush all over the hot cake.

Let cake cool completely. Transfer it to a cake plate, and let it rest several hours before cutting. I sifted over some icing sugar as well, because it looked so damn boring.

* There’s quite a lot of batter – it could be good in a small loaf tin and a few muffins made with the remainder, which was the plan until my loaf tin was discovered to have rust in its corners from the tears of neglect it had shed. My silicon bundt tin isn’t my favourite piece of artillery, for some reason, but I turned to it with that feeling of guilt I get when I don’t use things much.

I had a slight issue with the way one side of the cake rose dramatically while the other remained flat. One side was cooked after the specified time; the other really wasn’t. Maybe it was too high in the oven. Maybe it should have been rotated halfway. Maybe there was a hidden seam of baking powder not mixed in. Maybe me and my oven are heading for a confrontation.

Okay, I’ll stop prevaricating. The famous cake favoured by many a society hostess?

This was a perfectly nice inoffensive cake. It couldn’t have been easier to throw together, and it was a pleasant accompaniment to my morning cup of Earl Grey. But after the claims to fame it had, it just didn’t seem terribly special or interesting.

Were I an Upper East Side hostess, I probably wouldn’t be ordering the help to make this so I could serve it up at a significant morning tea in my luxurious Mad Men-esque apartment. I wouldn’t be foregrounding it in the New York Times. I wouldn’t be choosing this if my husband were the president and I could eat whatever cake I felt like.

Maybe dense cakes of pronounced lemonness were a novelty in WASPy circles in the seventies, although I find it difficult to believe that people had fewer cakes to attempt and revel in back then.

I do remember that the various kitchens of relatives and family friends contained at most three cookbooks, one of them invariably the massive Women’s Weekly tome and the rest also leaning towards comprehensiveness and utility; beyond them there’d be the card file of handwritten recipes for ‘Daisy’s fruitcake’ and ‘Gran’s potted meat’ with a few ill-fitting clippings of rock cake recipes from Women’s Day slotted in.

I do get that there was a time when housewives had not much else to do with their time but cook, and that it was more drudgery than tantamount to a leisure activity affording relaxation and a vague sense of wholesome virtue and reclaimed domesticity-for-fun. (Okay, I’m going out on a slight limb with that – obviously most people are hardly in a position to just eat out every night, a solution dismissively put to me by a stupid, patronising git of an estate agent when I demurred that in an otherwise doable Parkville apartment there was no room for anything beyond a bar fridge that would have taken up most of the bench space as it was. Digressing. Sorry. But my point is – or was – that baking has become more an optional pleasure than a regular duty, and given rise to ever-more complex cakes and exotic ingredients.)

I know there wasn’t always TV glamourising baking at the nicely worn tables of Julia Child and Two Fat Ladies and Nigella and Masterchef – but surely Fanny Cradock and the Galloping Gourmet made some sort of cake back then. (Can’t imagine Keith Floyd as much of a cake man; not so conducive to sloshing Bordeaux around.) And then there were Europeans settling in with all their dense lemony cakes and poppyseed cakes and countless other fascinating cakes.

So it remains a mystery to me why this plain lemon cake was such a big deal. Any ideas?

Carnitas

2011-06-11T18:18:00.000+10:00

Dedicated to Misslice

It goes like this.

Try to identify which unlabelled jar holds ancho chillis, out of the numerous varieties from Casa Iberica and Victoria Street that have accumulated in the cupboard.

Find the right chilli with the help of Google Images.

Place in grinder, grind, sniff curiously at its strangely figgy aroma, sneeze and weep copious tears for a long time.

Preheat oven to 180C and spend a scant ten minutes preparing hunks of pork shoulder (oh yeah, salt it the day before) for a four-hour braise according to David Lebovitz’s excellent recipe.

Straight up, or the next day, prepare or otherwise gather together refried beans, guacamole, salsa, sour cream and tortillas. Eat with carnitas.

That’s all.

Lemon meringue pie

2011-06-10T23:21:00.002+10:00

Pâte sablée: difficult, crumbly and messy, and a sore trial for one who may be described as all of the above – and who therefore favours completeness, coherence, truth and resolution in all things, apart from the occasional novel and film and blogpost. But enough about one, and back to the pastry.

It crumbled when slices were cut out, and kept on crumbling as it was eaten. But all that crumbliness made sense in a feisty texture that made all other pastries seem orderly variations on damp cardboard. It was buttery-biscuity-crisp, yet soft and light at the same time.

This was a Dorie Greenspan recipe from Baking (and can be found on her website); she advised against rolling due to the pastry’s fragility, and as one deprived of a marble worktop, I could get behind the suggestion to press it into the tart tin instead. But I was at a loss at the instruction ‘Don’t be too heavy-handed – press the crust in so that the edges of the pieces cling to one another, but not so hard the crust loses its crumbly texture’ (p444). In trying for a middle ground between firm, even coverage and heavy-handed crushing of the pastry’s crumble, mine was thick where the bottom of the tin met the fluted sides, and tapered to patchy thinness around the edge, and was anyone’s guess in the middle.

I made a mistake in tin choice – the lemon tart I was following called for a fluted tart tin, but I was adding a meringue layer just because I was intrigued by the idea of using the back of a soup spoon to form little spikes, and so I should have used a pie dish with gently graduating sides and made life a lot easier.

One positive discovery was about sifting icing sugar, an activity I don’t love. I was trying to push rocks of the stuff through with the back of a spoon and not having fun when I had the fairly obvious idea of treating the sifter as a mortar and introducing a pestle to it. It turned out to be a brilliant idea, and I offer it up gratis to the portion of the world that hasn’t thought of it already.

The lemon cream was from a recipe Dorie named ‘The Most Extraordinary French Lemon Cream Tart’ and that wasn’t hyperbole. The lemon filling differs from the usual lemon curd in that the butter (all 300g) is held back from the lengthy and arm-destroying whisking over the water bath, then added once the mixture has cooled for ten minutes and gone into a blender – hence becoming something more like an emulsion, and lighter and silkier in texture.

Mine might have been silkier again if I’d strained the lemon zest out, but I left it in, thanks to Dorie’s re-thunk post and the new Microplane superfine zester that is the light of my life and the threat to my knuckles.

I made a quick meringue that Dorie included with a key lime tart recipe, but was perhaps a little too quick with both the eggwhite beating and the baking in the oven – it was edging towards work time. A pity to rush the last stage of a process that had taken three days – crust sans baking one night and into the freezer, lemon cream the next, and finally baking and putting it all together before work. But the spike-creation was fun.

Dorie says to serve or refrigerate; I did both, and refrigeration’s the better way to go. The first slice I cut out looked like this. Later ones were more upstanding.

Lemon sablés

2011-06-08T21:45:00.001+10:00

Sablés are plain and buttery, like a lighter shortbread, and are just the thing sometimes when baking must be done for the sake of one’s sanity, yet there’s not a lot of time or desire to spend on anything involved and complicated. I’d made chocolate and green-tea versions before, but never these sablés au citron from Dorie Greenspan’s Paris Sweets.

I don’t pull out that book often enough for my own good. It presents well-tried recipes from various Parisian cafes, Pâtisserie Lerch in this case, and everything I’ve ever done from it – burnt-butter financiers, sablés Korova (reborn as the famous World Peace Cookies in Baking) – has been simple and pleasing.

I might have gone on about this before, but Dorie’s recipes are so meticulously detailed and clearly explained in terms of expected outcome that they’re a pleasure to follow and hard to stuff up. She’s one of those writers whose recipe books can be read like novels, especially this one with all its Parisian backstory and diminutive size.

This recipe’s a classic slice-and-bake, dough mixed together in moments, formed into logs and refrigerated until needed – the zesting took the longest to do of any one stage, but that clean, sharp lemon-oil aroma that floats up is worth a few minutes. Before baking, the logs are painted with an egg-yolk wash and rolled in sugar, which gives them a crystally, crunchy edge. And that’s it – simplicity in a biscuit.

Of course, it should be that simple, but my oven let me down as usual – the biscuits around the edges of the tray gained the slight goldenness I wanted for all of them, but most were pale and their texture not as good. And my logs never form perfect circles, as noted before, and this time I really wanted them to be like buttery coins. I'm sure it’s because I am deprived of a marble benchtop.

But they were good with tea anyway, all fifty of them, and in terms of baking-lite as relaxation, sablés are it and a bit.

Beginnings

2011-06-07T22:25:00.003+10:00

Beginnings of a week rich in lemon-based things, if at all possible.

Beginnings of kimchi courtesy of David Lebovitz, which I hope will ferment enough in my wintry kitchen to use in Orangette's kimchi fried rice before much longer. I know appallingly little about Korean food, and this took my fancy over the weekend.

After soaking chopped-up wombok in salted water overnight it was very easily thrown together, and it was only afterwards when I began to read through the 65 comments on David's post that I noticed how many foodie-oriented people were saying they’d never have the balls to attempt fermented cabbage. I make no claim to possessing an undue number/amount of balls, so I found this a bit unnerving after my slapdash preparation – what’s expected to happen? A home-brew-type explosion, or a poisoning à la the first episode of The Borgias where it’s curtains for Derek Jacobi?

Two days later, I see no bubbling in that giant swing-top jar, and it still just pongs of garlic and chillies, but maybe I’m doing it wrong.

Beginnings of a new era for The Guitar Teacher and his love affair with XO sauce. After yet another Victoria Street source petered out, he was forced to face facts and get self-sustainable and make his own. I can only try the stuff at a ratio of a thousand-to-one in congee, but it seemed XOey enough for me. Though not very red.