Quince and cardamom custard cake

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

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

 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

 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

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

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

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?