Raiding the Pantry: Solstice Cake

Stepping into a dark June morning, rugged-up, the cold takes a moment to adjust to. Shivering hands are thrust deeply into pockets. Even the dog, bounding with her usual energy, is a little reluctant to leave the faint light of the hallway. Softly, the door clicks shut. The key is icy, finally found fumbling through layers and swearing under foggy clouds of breath. These days of early winter, with their misting chill hold such delicious promise. Summer has her charms, oh yes – the deadly nightshades; luscious, dripping stone fruits – but it’s winter and the kind of cooking that colder weather inspires that I adore. Stepping in, post-walk, kettle rumbling toward its familiar ‘ping’, I give the fruit, plumping in a fragrant bath of orange liqueur, one last stir.

As a greedy child, I stole chunks of tooth-achingly sweet icing from my mothers carefully, lovingly, crafted Christmas fruit cake. It sat on the sideboard each December dressed in snowy, wintry white, adorned with plastic sprigs of festive holly. But the cake itself was too rich, too dark, too adult for my taste. It still sits there in its time-honoured place, though these days the icing is, at last, safe from prying fingers. The cake, well, now that’s another story.

Here, close to the bottom of the globe, the pagan roots of the religious holidays that punctuate the calendar sit awkwardly. Traditions really do die hard. Rich, hot food served beneath a sweltering Christmas sky is beyond silly. Icy days and freezing nights on the other hand, make a cake attuned to the contents of the pantry seem worthy of a rare baking experiment. With the Winter Solstice, the shortest day of the year, rapidly approaching, A.O.F.’s Solstice cake event places the celebratory fruit cake squarely in the season to which it so clearly belongs. Sans icing, this fudgy cake is quite something. Heavenly scenting the house as it slowly cooks, just knowing that it’s sitting tightly wrapped in the pantry, waiting to reach perfection, is very nearly agony.

Marzipan Solstice Cake – feeds 8-10
Adapted from Nigella Lawson’s How to be a Domestic Goddess for both its tinker-ability and comparatively fast maturation. Nigella, Queen of Cakes, makes this with ready-made marzipan, but I made my own for the simple reason that there is already a truckload of sweetness coursing through it and besides, a cane sugar-free version is dead easy. This is hardly everyday fare. You may as well go all the way, I say.

100g (4oz) of sulphur-free dried apricots
150g (5oz) of dried pears
150g (5oz) of sultanas
100ml (scant ½ cup) of Cointreau or white rum
250g (9oz) of marzipan (something good OR see below)
100g (4oz) of caster sugar
100g (4oz) of unsalted butter, softened
2 eggs, beaten
50g (2oz) of ground almonds
Zest of 1 lemon
Zest and juice of ½ an orange
175g (6oz) of wholemeal spelt flour

If you’re making your marzipan (see below), start it first. Snip the apricots and pears into small pieces with scissors. Soak the dried fruit overnight in the alcohol of your choice and cover, giving it a lazy stir from time to time. Chop the marzipan into small dice and place in the freezer.

Next day, preheat the oven to 140 C (275 F).

Drain the fruit of any liquid left at the bottom of the bowl (my fruit drank it all – shame, that). Beat the sugar, butter and eggs together in a roomy bowl, followed by the ground almonds, zests, orange juice and flour. Fold through the drained fruit and the frozen marzipan dice and mix well.

Line the base and sides of a springform cake tin, approximately 20cm (8 in) in diameter, with baking paper. Spoon the mixture into the tin, level with the back of the spoon and bake in the preheated oven for 2-2½ hours, or until a skewer inserted into the centre of the cake comes out clean.

Cool in the tin. Wrap the cake in baking paper, then tightly in foil and set aside in a pantry for at least two days, but preferably a week.

Marzipan. Sugar-free.
The texture of this is akin to those little fruits that grace Proper Cakes rather than the silky, marble-like stuff used to ice them. Thanks go to Ricki who assured me it was, indeed, possible. Little nuggets dipped in lush, dark chocolate would be rather nice.

1 ½ cups almonds (about 225g)
3 tablespoons of rice syrup (from organic/health food shops)
¼ tsp of almond essence

Preheat the oven to 180 C.

Boil the almonds for 3 minutes, drain and add to a bowl of cool water. Slip each almond from its coat, place in a single layer on a baking tray and cook in the oven for 5-7 minutes, enough to dry them thoroughly. Cool.

Whiz the almonds to a fine texture in a food processor. Add the rice syrup and almond essence. Turn the machine back on and let it run until the mixture forms a ball around the blade. Remove the paste immediately then knead for a moment. Form into a log, wrap in greaseproof paper and refrigerate for at least 1 hour.

Makes 250g (or near enough).

There is something to be said for this sort of cooking. It really does connect you with tradition in a small, but significant way. Next time, I may even attempt mum's more laborious recipe.

Pictures when she's ready, folks.

Solstice Cake 2008 runs right up until the 25th of June. Get soaking and baking.

Home, sweet home

Our backyard, the one in which I grew up, teemed with wildlife. Backing onto bush land (Patrick White territory, no less) my father’s garden, always beautifully kept, is a haven for birds of all kinds. In a week that saw an extraordinary outpouring of emotion from the sublime (a nation’s long overdue apology) to the ridiculous, I spent most mornings patiently coaxing the Rainbow Lorikeets into eating, literally, from the palm of my hand. They sang to me then danced on the table for the camera, hanging first this way, then that. Jesters the lot of them, dressed in vivid green, red and blue.

As usual, food was central to the week away. There was Jo’s birthday dinner, a sun-soaked lunch on a central coast deck with Emma (we’ve hatched a little visual project to keep us both in check), an exquisite lunch with mum and dad and a long overdue catch-up at Red Lantern with my oldest friend. There is something about the simple – no, simple won’t do - spare elegance of Asian cuisines that cleanse more than merely the palate. Who would have imagined that fresh lemon juice mixed with roasted, ground peppercorns would make the most amazing, ever, dipping sauce?

My mother’s cooking is a dessert-lover’s dream. Her cherry sorbet was blindingly good, especially when paired with another made of ripe, juicy nectarines. A marriage of two beautiful stone fruits in each little bowl – one scoop assertive and unctuous, best attacked in small spoonfuls; the other light and pink, a tart contrast to the rich, wine-dark red. The pantry boasts six kilos of chocolate at any given time; three of the creamy, buttery white variety and three of the wickedly dark and bitter stuff. I was brought up on a passion for dessert. But somehow, working my own way around the kitchen, it seems that the sweet tooth that defines my small family has, in my case, been firmly extracted.

Is it a remnant of teenage defiance? That sheer will and determination to set oneself apart from the flock? Actually, I think it’s all the washing up. Coming back to our quiet, sparsely decorated home, the baking bug bit in an altogether unfamiliar way. Like that teenager I recall, my brand of baking is stamped, decidedly, with my own, unfussy, thang.

Chocolate thumbprint cookies – makes about 20

A revelatory one bowl wonder this recipe is and, thankfully, there’s very little washing up. Based on a recipe in Isa Chandra Moskowitz’s now legendary book, Vegan with a Vengeance, these are utterly, spectacularly, delicious.

5 tablespoons of macadamia oil (or almond, grapeseed, etc, but not olive)
5 tablespoons of soy milk (or rice, oat, etc)
1 teaspoon of vanilla extract
½ teaspoon of almond extract (this adds a great, marzipan-like something)
135g (4 ½ oz) unrefined sugar
120g (4oz) of wholemeal (whole-wheat) flour
5 tablespoons of good quality cocoa powder
Good pinch of sea salt, finely crumbled
Good pinch of baking powder
Jam (fruit preserves), your favourite, to finish

Preheat the oven to 180 C (375 F). Line two baking sheets with parchment.

Mix the first 5 ingredients together in a roomy bowl with a fork. Sift the flour, cocoa powder, salt and baking powder into the wet ingredients and stir well to combine.

Place dessertspoon sized dollops of the mixture onto the baking trays, leaving a little space for expansion around each. With damp hands, roughly mould each dollop into as round a shape as you can be bothered to, then gently press to flatten very slightly.

Bake for 5 minutes, retrieve from the oven and gently make shallow thumbprint sized indentations in each cookie. Fill each hollow with half a teaspoon of jam and return to the oven for 6 minutes. Cool on their trays for 2 minutes then cool completely on a rack.

And I'm baking another batch tonight.

For the boys, you understand...

Heat and Ice

She, the dog, was useless on Friday. Utterly useless. By 4.30, the air had warmed up and the sun was beating on our backs. The park was practically empty, ours to wander, blissfully, without interruption. She panted in the heat, tongue lolling, seeking the shade of every, single, tree. I know how she feels. We are not alone in our dread of the impending Australian summer. It’s going to be a long hot one.

Saturday morning: armed with bags of soil, he filled the long wooden troughs, ‘rubbish’ rescued under cover of dark, each one stencilled, enigmatically, with the number 920. These wooden, movable garden beds are perfect for renters, keen to learn but lacking permanent roots; allowing us to discover just how much sun each plant can take. They’ll get precious little water, these babies. They’ll need to be tough. This garden is a jumble of pots, empty olive oil tins and found objects; a travelling garden of familiar, favourite bits. A little chaotic, but perfect for practice. Gardening, practical, getting-your-hands-and-knees-dirty gardening, teaches you things that books and even the odd interstate phone call to a gardener-father, cannot.

I watched on, sorting through packets of seeds ordered, on a whim, months ago. Crookneck squash, Bull’s Blood beetroot, French Breakfast radishes, silverbeet “Vulcan Red”. More rocket, so successful has it been. Basil, two kinds, and another pot of borage, though I’ve no idea what one does with the stuff. He lugged earth; I got my fingernails dirty. We were toasting thick slices of Challah and brewing a pot of ginger-spiked tea in less than an hour.

Clouds rolled in at noon, bringing heavy, delicious drops of rain that fell, briefly, satisfyingly, on the newly planted. As it passed, trailing fresher, cleaner air, the windows and doors were flung wide open. The temperature drop is immediate and reviving. Right now, before it’s hot enough to stagger the uninitiated and stupefy even the well-versed; before January’s bushfires hang, threateningly, in the air, hot days are something special. It’s like standing, toes tightly gripped, on the edge of summer. One hand grasping the last of the asparagus, in disbelief that spring – amazingly – has been and gone, the other reaching, longingly, toward the bounty of the months and, with some luck, our garden ahead.

Dessert is often an afterthought around here. The main event holds more interest to my way of thinking. But with hot days and nights snaking in, earlier than expected, and a gift in the shape of an ice cream churn to master (she’s a good sort, my mum), I’ve been thinking about the last course a lot more of late. Not something cloyingly sweet – too hot for that. Lemons, the very last of them, for a cool ending to Friday night and, as it turned out, Saturday night too.

Lemon Yoghurt Ice – for 4

My notes read, ‘Three to four lemons. All you’ll need.’ The tree in the front garden had exactly four fruit left worth eating. What are the chances? You’ll need both a food processor and an ice cream churn for this, but more people seem to have these pieces of hardware than I used to think. You can make it with all yoghurt too – 1 cup of vanilla swapped for the pure cream would lower the fat content considerably. Or so I like to think.

3-4 lemons, unwaxed and organic if possible
2/3 cup of caster sugar
1 cup of pure (single) cream
1 cup of thick, tangy natural yoghurt

Zest the lemons and whiz together for 1 minute with the sugar in a food processor. Squeeze the lemons, strain (you’ll need 6 tablespoons of juice) and add to the sugar and zest and whiz again – the sugar should start to dissolve.

Add the cream and yoghurt and pulse, quickly, 3-4 times, just to combine. Chill for 30 minutes before freezing, according to the manufacturers instructions, in an ice cream churn. Best eaten on the day it’s made, but for the next couple of days it will be good too – just make sure that you place the container in the fridge for 20-30 minutes before you serve to soften, just a little.

This is my entry for Weekend Herb Blogging #110 hosted this week by Truffle from What's on My Plate for Kalyn Denny, creator of this weekly event.

Spice cake - a recipe

Cake baking ain’t a strength I'm afraid to say. Not that I don’t love reading about baking or, better still, eating baked goods, it’s just that I never seem to be able to achieve the results I crave. Too impatient methinks. When Wendy recently posted a call for easy, no fail cake recipes, I knew exactly how she felt.

So this recipe, adapted from one in ‘The Perfect Cookbook’ by David Herbert, is just the kind of thing for me – no need to lug out the Kitchenaid; no need to wait for butter to soften (no microwave in this little kitchen) and, best of all, not a lot to wash up afterwards. ‘Stress-free’ cake making, just as Mr H. suggests.

And the step-sons love it.

Cinnamon and ginger cake
This is quick to make and best eaten within a day or two. Don’t find that it usually lasts that long, especially if you make the gingery syrup to soak the cake that is suggested below.

60g (2oz) of unsalted butter
½ cup of golden syrup
1 cup of stoneground, wholemeal flour (or white flour)
1 teaspoon of bi-carb soda
1 teaspoon of baking powder
1 heaped teaspoon of ground ginger
1 heaped teaspoon of ground cinnamon
½ teaspoon of allspice
½ teaspoon of 'fragrant sweet spice’ (optional)
½ cup of caster sugar
½ cup of soy milk (or dairy milk if you like)
1 egg, free-range and organic, beaten

Preheat the oven to 170 C (325 F). Grease and line the base of a loaf tin with baking paper.

Melt the butter and golden syrup together in a small saucepan over a low heat. Cool.

Sift the flour, bi-carb soda, baking powder and spices into a bowl. Stir in the sugar. Pour in the milk, followed by the egg and mix well with a fork. Gradually add the melted butter and golden syrup, stirring until well combined.

Pour into your prepared loaf tin and bake for 50-55 minutes, or until a skewer inserted into the centre of the cake comes away clean. Cool in the tin and dust with icing sugar if you like.

If you can wait that long.

A syrup to make it something special:
This is lovely as is, a sort of simple, fragrant afternoon tea cake. But you can smarten it up by making it into a sticky syrup cake. Mr H. suggests placing ½ cup of sugar, ½ cup of water and 1 tablespoon of finely grated fresh ginger in a small saucepan. Bring it to the boil then simmer for 5 minutes.

Mr H. says to spoon a little on top of the hot cake when it comes out of the oven. It then becomes dessert. I disagree. Pour the whole lot over the cake and things get even better. Especially when served with this yoghurt - the Greek one with a hint of honey is fantastic stuff.

Easy and good.

Quince

After the Owl and the Pussycat were married in the Edward Lear poem,

'They dined on mince and slices of quince,
Which they ate with a runcible spoon.'

Now, I’m not sure about the combination of mince and quince (though there are many Middle Eastern dishes that happily combine the two), but the quince itself is a fruit that would be more than welcome on my wedding table (metaphorically speaking, people). Such delicious little morsels are worth waiting all year for. And I’d love a runcible spoon, whatever that is, with which to eat them.

The transformation that cooking can bring about, the alchemy if you like such fanciful ideas, is nowhere more evident than in the slowly cooked quince. The change from dull and inedible to headily-fragrant, jewelled pink is miraculous. In just under 3 hours, with a bit of lazy attending to now and then whilst pottering about, they are ready. It’s enough to make a girl feel very clever indeed.

before

Recently I read that Mexican cooks use the pips, cores and skins to make a syrup to soothe coughs and sore throats. If you have a jar of these quinces in the fridge, a spoonful or two ladled into a glass and sipped slowly with a smidgen of honey will do your aching throat no end of good. Thus the use of the whole fruit in this recipe – there is much wisdom to be gained from traditional ethnic cookery. Use it or lose it I say. Just in time too with winter, officially that is, just days away.

Maggie Beer and Stephanie Alexander both wax lyrical about the quince. Naturally I turned to them first, but both used excessive and frankly scary amounts of sugar. Deborah Madison saved the day (again). In fact you could quite easily replace the sugar with something like agave syrup or even honey to make it far more virtuous. Over to you.

The fruit makes a luscious dessert with a spoonful of the poaching liquid, a coat of thick vanilla yoghurt or cream and a few hideously expensive but oh-so-worth-it amaretti biscuits crumbled over the whole lot. Kept with its syrup in a tightly sealed jar in the fridge, it will be good for two months.

Poached quinces – adapted from Local Flavours by Deborah Madison

6 quinces (4 if they are huge)
¾ cup of caster sugar
1 cinnamon stick
5 cloves
2 wide strips of lemon zest
1 tablespoon of rosewater (optional – but very good)

Rub the downy-fuzz from the quinces with your fingers, though there may not be any on yours. Give them a good rinse. You’ll need a very sharp knife for this, so sharpen yours if it’s looking dull.

Trim a little bit off the base of each fruit so that they stand upright. Cut away the skin from top to bottom in long strokes. Quarter each fruit lengthways. Cut out the cores. Reserve all of the trimmings. Slice the fruit into wedges just larger than 1cm.

Place the skin, cores and pips, into a heavy-based saucepan or lidded, flame-proof casserole with 2 litres of water. Bring to the boil, reduce the heat to a simmer and cover. Cook for 30 minutes.

Strain the liquid and return it to the saucepan. Add the sugar, stir to dissolve and add the remaining ingredients. Bring to the boil, reduce the heat to very low and place a piece of baking paper, roughly cut to fit the pan, directly on top of the fruit to help keep it submerged. Cover and simmer for 2 ½ - 3 hours (maybe even a little longer). When ready, the slices will have become a deep pink and should be slightly translucent.

Store, with their syrup, in a lidded jar for up to 2 months.

after

No runcible spoon required.

A Very Good pear cake

Recently Truffle posted a recipe for a pear and spice cake.

This is one of those dense cakes, more rustic than light-as-a-feather. Just the way I like my cakes to be. Ice cream to serve was suggested, but it’s hard to find a good one. Find one however, I did – a preservative-free rhubarb one, a blush-pink colour that looked rather good next to slices of the golden cake. If I could have just one more piece of cooking equipment, it would be an ice cream churn.

This is pretty much Truffle’s recipe with a few small changes here and there to suit what we had in the cupboard - and I hate mixed peel, so out it went. Truffle’s recipe uses 8 tablespoons of butter which I reckoned on being about 125 g and, seemingly, it worked.

Delicious still warm with ice cream or some plain, thick yoghurt swirled with a little cinnamon and the seeds scraped from half a vanilla pod. You could even add a drizzle of pure maple syrup to the yoghurt, just to sweeten the deal.

Pear and spice cake - enough for 8-10 servings

¾ cup of almond meal
½ cup of polenta
½ cup of plain flour
Large pinch of baking soda
Pinch of salt
2 heaped teaspoons of ground cinnamon
1 heaped teaspoon of ground ginger
½ teaspoon of allspice
125g of unsalted butter, softened
¾ cup of sugar
2 eggs
1/3 cup of plain, thick yoghurt
2 teaspoons of vanilla extract
2-3 pears, cored and thinly sliced
Extra sugar for sprinkling

You’ll also need a spring form pan approximately 25cm in diameter, though Truffle suggests (wisely) that you could use a smaller one, in which case you will only need 1-2 pears. Grease it and line the base with baking paper.

Preheat the oven to 160 C.

Tip the ingredients from the almond meal through to the allspice into a large bowl and using a hand-held whisk, aerate the dry ingredients, whisking out any lumps. Set aside.

Cream the butter and sugar together until pale and creamy (about 5 minutes). Add the eggs, one at a time, beating well after each addition. Add the yoghurt and vanilla and mix well.

Fold in the dry ingredients, mixing well before spooning into the prepared spring form tin and smoothing the mixture down (not too obsessively) with a spatula. Arrange the pear slices as artfully (or not) as you like on top. Sprinkle a little sugar over the pears and bake for 45-50 minutes, or until a skewer inserted into the cake comes away clean.

No photo of finished cake. It was all eaten before I had a chance to do so.

Truly, the mark of a Good Cake.

Bloody freezing

What the hell is going on! The weather today in Melbourne is wild and unexpectedly cold for the end of spring. Let me rephrase that. It is bloody freezing down here! These unseasonably cold arctic winds are whipping the trees outside our office window around madly, and there odd patches of sunlight creeping in between dark and heavy skies. Cold weather food is the order of the day. But with the boys coming tonight, the question is what to cook?

Risotto.

Last night I made the most luscious rice pudding. Puddings of rice are not something I would normally even consider making – too stodgy and filling – but yesterday I bought home a bag of sticky black rice. Asian desserts don’t really do it for me, though I know many people who positively love them. But I am now a convert (well, to this recipe at least). It was the most beautiful deep, deep purple. The cardamom softly scented the rice; the coconut cream and mango made it rich but light. A touch of exoticness in the kitchen and not a bit of dairy in sight. The Artist even liked the mango element…

So risotto it will be – a deeply satisfying bowl of warm risotto. I plan to make more than enough (difficult thing to do this as the Musician would eat the entire thing if he could) so I can make a dish of risotto croquettes with spring vegetables from Deborah Madison’s Vegetarian Suppers book for tomorrow.

I urge you to make this. You won’t be disappointed. Not for a second.

Black rice pudding – serves 2

100g of black glutinous rice
50g of palm sugar
500ml of water
Seeds from 2 cardamom pods
A little coconut cream
1 ripe mango (or more if you like) – peeled and sliced

Put the rice, sugar, water and cardamom seeds into a large pan. Bring to the boil then reduce the heat to its lowest setting. Cover with a lid and stir frequently (lazily as you go past the stove is fine) for 45 minutes. Uncover, turn up the heat a little bit and stir constantly for another 15 minutes. The rice should be sticky and sloppy, but still distinct and separate.

Spoon into small bowls, top with a little drizzle of coconut cream and top it all with the skinned mango slices. Beautiful in a rather unexpected way.

Healing a broken heart

How do you heal a broken heart? Sugar (or chocolate) is what usually leaps to my mind, and I know that I am not alone. This was confirmed for me recently when the beautiful Eileen, a lovely soul I work with, had her heart broken by her now ex-boyfriend. What can I suggest? Sugar will cure just about every sort of heart ache and while it's all very well and good to sit down with a packet of Tim-tams and devour the lot in an evening, go one better and try making this Lemon Tart instead. This is rich stuff indeed, so proceed with some caution...

In the recipe I suggest 'golden, unrefined caster sugar'. This is a more nutritional product than the ordinary stuff from the supermarket as it has been much less refined. Besides that, it has a much lovelier flavour. The best brand is Billingtons and you can get it from good food shops (though I loathe the word gourmet, but you'll find it in those shops as well).

Lemon Tart

Begin at least 6 hours before you intend to serve

For the pastry

200g of wholemeal plain flour

100g of organic, unsalted butter, cubed and chilled

30g of golden, unrefined caster sugar

1 egg yolk, beaten

Iced water

For the filling

250ml of double cream, full fat please!

200ml of lemon juice (about 4-5 small ones)

Zest of all the juiced lemons

9 eggs

275g of golden, unrefined caster sugar

Begin by heating the cream to boiling point. Then add the lemon zest, remove from the heat and let its scent infuse the cream for several hours. Sift the flour into a bowl, tip the bran caught in the sieve back into the bowl and add the butter and sugar to it. Rub them in with light fingers so they are turned to fine crumbs.

Bring the dough together with the beaten egg yolk and just enough ice-cold water to bind so add it by the tablespoon to be safe. Reserve a small lump of pastry to fix any cracks that may develop on baking the pastry blind, the beautiful custard is far too precious to allow it to escape.

Preheat the oven to 125 C.

Butter and flour a 28cm loose-bottomed tart tin. Place the pastry in the freezer for 15 minutes. When ready, grate the pastry into the tart tin and press it with your fingers into the sides. Much easier than rolling out such soft dough. Chill in the fridge for 30 minutes before baking blind for 10-15 minutes. Remove the beans and bake for another 5 minutes. Allow it to completely cool, patching up any little holes with the reserved pastry.

Whisk together the eggs and sugar and stir in the juice and the strained, scented cream. Place the tart tin on a baking tray and set it on an oven shelf pulled part-way out of the oven. Transfer the filling to a jug and very carefully fill the tart case to the rim. Gingerly move the shelf back in and bake for between 1 and1.5 hours until set. If after 45 minutes the filling still looks and feels like tepid liquid, turn the heat up a smidgen, but turn it down if it's cooking too quickly.

Remove from the heat as soon as it is set so that it doesn't colour or toughen. Chill to room temperature before serving dusted with icing sugar.