Gingerful biscotti

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.

White Pepper and Ginger Lemon Cake

‘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.

Peanut-Butter Pillows

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

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.

Hermit Bars

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.

Spanish orange cake

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.

Viennese Chocolate-Walnut Bars

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.

 

Georgia Pecan Bars

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.

Chocolate and Peanut Butter Ripples

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.

Cardamom biscuits

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.

Florida Lemon Squares

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.

East 62nd Street Lemon Cake

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?

Wienerstübe cookies

These are Austrian. They are coal-black, chocolate, black-pepper cookies – buttery, crunchy and spicy.

Maida Heatter’s Book of Great Cookies pp128­–9

These are every adjective Maida came up with above, and a damn easy slice-and-bake besides. The mixture can be thrown together while you’re waiting for a pasta to cook, rolled up, and put in the fridge for later. Or in the freezer, for that matter. Then whenever you feel like an elegant chocolate biscuit with your afternoon espresso or mug of Moccona, whichever the case may be, slice a good few off and bung them in the oven. They have a mouth-warming array of spices that set off the cocoa, and they’re about a million times better than a Chocolate Ripple.

1 ½ cups plain flour

1 ½ teaspoons baking powder

¼ teaspoon salt

¾ teaspoon cinnamon

¼ teaspoon allspice

½ teaspoon ground black pepper

Pinch cayenne

¾ cup dutch-process cocoa

180g unsalted butter

1 ½ teaspoons vanilla extract

1 cup sugar

1 egg

Sift together the dry ingredients.

Cream the butter, add the vanilla, sugar and egg and beat well. On a low speed, gradually add the dry ingredients, mixing only enough to blend.

Tear off a couple of pieces of baking paper about 40cm long. Distribute half the dough on each, shaping into a long, even sausage by rolling in the paper. There is no way I know of to be able to get this perfectly tubular, so I go for a squarish result instead by flattening each side on the bench. Refrigerate the snakes in their paper for at least two hours.

Preheat oven to 190C. Unwrap one of the snakes and cut into 6mm discs. 

Place on a tray lined with more baking paper – a centimetre or two apart is enough.

 Bake for 10–12 minutes. 

Lemon walnut wafers

These are semisoft with a tart lemon flavor—an old-fashioned cookie from Florida.

Maida Heatter’s Book of Great Cookies, pp 45–6

It had been a sorry while since any biscuits were baked. And to my horror and despair, when the time was finally found to bake biscuits, Maida Heatter’s Book of Great Cookies was nowhere to be seen. I could see the empty space between its chronologically-ordered sisters of Maida’s prolific late-70s period. I searched high and low. I checked that I hadn’t put it in the fridge. I blamed The Guitar Teacher, one of his students and the estate agent in that order, as the only souls to darken our door in the last fortnight.

‘It’s probably fallen down the back of the cabinet,’ TGT suggested, unhelpfully, as it was clearly impossible that such a hefty tome could fall down there.

‘What utter codswallop,’ I said dismissively, or words to that effect. ‘Anyway, it’s too hard to drag that great thing out to have a look.’

He nodded. ‘I’ll just grab the torch, shall I?’

Lo and behold, there it was, caught in the web of cords from the stereo, its little Post-it flags waving. You didn’t see that coming, did you, dear reader? A happy ending! Albeit one with some degree of egg on my face! I can’t help feeling that a happy ending makes this tale a tad flat and pointless, as it would Madame Bovary or Anna Karenina, and I have no idea how I got onto them, so without further ado, to Lemon Walnut Wafers.

1½ cups plain flour

½ teaspoon baking powder

¼ teaspoon kosher salt (Because I have bought some now, so often do recipes call for it. Does it differ from Saxa? Don’t ask me. But you could probably use whatever salt you like, really.)

Generous pinch ground ginger

120g unsalted butter, left out to soften if you manage to plan ahead. Me, I zapped it in the microwave for 10 seconds.

1 cup sugar

1 egg plus 2 egg yolks

1 lemon, zest and juice

60g walnuts, roughly chopped

Preheat oven to 180C.

Sift together flour, baking powder, salt and ginger and set aside.

Cream the butter by electric means (or hand – I don’t wish to exclude you, Alida Irwin), then add sugar and beat well. Add the egg and yolks, beating until the mixture is light and fluffy. On a low speed (you just stir normally, AI), gradually add sifted dry ingredients, mixing only until smooth. Mix in the lemon zest and juice and the walnuts by hand.

Blob rounded teaspoonfuls of the mixture onto baking-paper-lined trays, at least an inch apart (Maida recommends two inches, but I have a puny oven and meagre trays, and the biscuits didn’t spread far). It’s a sticky mixture and the blobs weren’t prettily rounded, but they sorted themselves out in the baking.

Bake for 20 minutes, or until the tops spring back when lightly pressed. Maida says, ‘These cookies will not brown on the tops, but there will be a thin brown edge.’ As always, she recommends reversing trays to ensure even browning, and, this time, I would have done well to follow this instruction – as it was, the front row had browned on their peaks while the rest were fish-belly pale.

Cool on racks. Do I even need to mention that?

As I suspected, these bore no more relation to wafers than this blog does to tragic nineteenth-century realism. They tasted pleasingly lemony, but were  US-style soft and cakey; a bit more browning and crisping all over would have been an improvement rather than something to avoid. One to file away for the false-teeth years, which are not, after all, so far off. Or perhaps I should refer to those as the naked-gums years – with all signs pointing to my generation not being able to afford housing in retirement, dentistry probably won’t be on the cards either. We could end up living out a Russian novel after all.