Thirty-seven

Almost eight years ago, at the age of twenty-nine-and-a-half, I swapped a love affair with cigarettes - sucked back with such delight, such seriousness - for a less-labored daily climb to my second-floor home. By the light of a flickering television, I knitted, furiously, a length of scarf not unlike Tom Baker’s Dr Who might sport, to wrap around and around and around. To hide within. As it lengthened, the stitches became calmer, looser, found a rhythm of their own. Six months later I emerged, smoke-free.

The Artist, rather fortuitously, turned up at roughly the same time. At thirty, an astonishingly gifted astrologer lunged for the polished chunk of rose quartz I wore around my neck, cooed and held it in his palm. I felt it almost burning as it fell back into place. ‘He must be dynamic, this fellow’, his tape recorded voice declares, ‘to have captured the eye of a Leonine woman’. He was. He is. I have listened to that recording of my younger self, chattering away merrily with the astrologer, many times since. In between the giggling, I hear forgotten hurts and a voice teetering, at times, dangerously close to tears. Des read me like a book. And I’m thrilled, each time, that he did.

I had plans - small ones - of a quivering jelly for this post, one to celebrate the ripening bounty of the neighbours orange tree and, in a smaller way, my 37^th birthday. Champagne mixed with freshly squeezed orange juice, some sweetness to tame the sour, all set to soft, shimmering wobbliness with agar-agar. A scientific kitchen challenge. But failure is not be tolerated on one’s own birthday.

So we sensibly drank the champagne in front of the fire instead.

I’ll stow the idea away for Christmas, perhaps, for warmer weather and other celebratory nights. Simplicity wins out every time. Besides, I know, somehow, you’d much rather this Apple and Olive Oil cake, adapted from that marvellous, wonderful, beautiful Anna Del Conte. In fact, I think you should down tools and go and make it right now. Think of it as my birthday gift to you.

Anna Del Conte’s Apple and Olive Oil Cake
The thing that irritates me most about baking is the butter. I have little patience with it anyway, but waiting for butter to soften drives me nuts-o in winter. This moist, delicious cake uses olive oil not as substitute, but in preference to the stuff. I mean, how clever is that?

120g (4 oz) of sultanas
Freshly brewed tea
500g (1 lb) of apples – about 5 small ones
150ml (scant 2/3 cup) of olive oil
200g (7oz) sugar
2 organic eggs
175g (6 oz) of wholemeal (wholewheat) flour
175g (6 oz) of ‘strong’, Italian ‘00’ flour
2 teaspoons of ground cinnamon
1 ½ teaspoons of bi-carb soda
½ teaspoon of baking powder
½ teaspoon of sea salt

Soak the sultanas in enough tea to cover. Set aside to plump for 20 minutes. Peel and core the apples and cut each into small dice.

Preheat the oven to 180 C (350 F). Grease and line a 20cm (8 in) springform cake tin.

Beat the oil and sugar together until well amalgamated. Break the eggs into a teacup and add them, bit by bit, beating all the time. You’ll end up with a creamy mixture. Set a sieve over the bowl and sift in the flour, cinnamon, bi-carb soda, baking powder and salt.

Mix to a stiff batter with a metal spoon – I cannot claim to understand the reasoning behind this, but do so as it is often suggested. You don’t want to go upsetting the baking gods. Drain the sultanas well. Fold through the mixture with the diced apple. This is a very stiff mixture and will be visibly studded with fruit.

Scrape into the prepared cake tin, smooth down the top and bake for at least 1 hour – mine took 1 hour and 20 minutes and needed to be topped with foil halfway through to prevent it from burning. Watch it closely and check for doneness with a skewer inserted into the centre of the cake. If it comes away cleanly, your cake is done.

I’m completely besotted.

Oh I do love a good birthday.

Solstice cake, unwrapped

Solstice Cake.

Unwrapped a day or two early. (Greedy. Always.)

The marzipan dissolves into the texture of the cake, making for a perfect combination of fudge and crumb. Surprisingly, not at all dry. Not one bit.

Sliced thinly and enjoyed with a steaming cup of rooibos tea and Jo, who’s had, one could say, the Week from Hell.

There will be another for the Solstice itself. Am converted, completely, to the wintry joys of a Fruited Cake.

Just no lurid glacé cherries or horrid mixed peel…

Want to join in?

Pop on over to Confessions of A Food Nazi. You have until the 25^th of June.

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.

Spring cleaning and other discoveries

Ernest H. Shepard

Throwing the windows open, pushing up your sleeves, getting a little bit dirty. Nothing’s quite as rousing as a good spring clean. Cobwebs in the mind swept out with the cobwebs lurking in the corners. Re-alphabetising books might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but had I not been doing just that, I wouldn’t have come across this from Kenneth Grahame:

‘The Mole had been working very hard all the morning, spring-cleaning his little home. First with brooms, then with dusters; then on ladders and steps and chairs…till he had dust in his throat and eyes…and an aching back and weary arms...It was small wonder, then, that he suddenly flung down his brush on the floor, said “Bother!” and "O blow!” and also “Hang spring-cleaning!” and bolted out of the house without even waiting to put on his coat.’

That first paragraph of The Wind in the Willows is one of the most delicious beginnings to any book I know. Like Mole, my tidying had been halted and was to be so for a couple of lazy, book-filled hours. Alphabetising has its charms. I wouldn’t have come across another gem, placed by me on the wrong shelf had tidying not been firmly on the brain.

Melinda of Melbourne Larder wrote in July about a rather grandly-titled Bible Cake, a recipe gleaned from her beloved grandmother’s cookbook. I too am custodian of my grandmother’s recipe book, written in her familiar, slightly wonky hand writing.

Unsurprisingly there was no need to fight for it given the tiny size of our family. I asked. I received. The book itself, hand-bound in red, was made by my father and stands as a reminder that bookbinding is a skill high school woodwork teachers, those younger than dad, no longer possess. Shame really. I would have enjoyed the Industrial Arts a great deal more had I learned to wield an awl, sew booklets of paper and stretch leather over thick layers of board. Mind you I did make a barbeque fork with an excellent double twist in the handle in year 7 metal work, long since lost in my travels. Haven’t ever had a barbeque to use it on. How un-Australian.

I digress.

Grandma learned to cook as a servant, in the kitchens of much grander homes. She wasn’t a fancy cook. No deep-fried lemon zest in these pages. Baking was her thing, and very good at it she was. In fact there are only two savoury recipes in the whole book – one for Quiche Lorraine and another for Cheese Scones. There are recipes with wild names like Impossible Pie and Champagne Pastry; recipes attributed to women who, like my grandmother, are no longer around. But my favourite by far is a recipe for Mock Nougat Bars, an oat-y, chewy slice that sounds very like something copied, possibly, from the Australian Women’s Weekly in WWII – a substitute for something exotic in far leaner times. Unthinkably easy to make and very adaptable, I like to imagine that the oats and wholegrain flours make up just a little for that whole cup of sugar, but I’m fairly sure that I’m fooling no-one but myself.

Mock Nougat Bars
Why Mock Nougat? Who knows. It’s had many incarnations in my lifetime. This, then, is the current favourite. Add any dried fruits or nuts you like, use all white flour, omit the chocolate. Sweet spices like cinnamon and ground ginger work very well. Over to you. It’s dense and chewy and a good-ish snack every once in a while.

125g of unsalted butter
1 tablespoon of golden syrup
1 cup rolled oats
1 cup sugar
½ cup of wholemeal flour
½ cup of brown rice flour
1 teaspoon of baking powder
1 cup desiccated coconut
1 egg, lightly beaten
Small handful of glace ginger, chopped
Small handful of dried fruit
Small handful of chocolate chips

Preheat the oven to 160 C.

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

Mix the dry ingredients together, add the cooled butter and golden syrup, followed by the beaten egg and mix well. Mix in the ginger, fruit and chocolate chips. Spread out in a baking-paper lined rectangular tin (approx 20 x 30 cms), pressing down with the back of a spoon to even the surface. Bake in the preheated oven for 25 minutes. Cool in the tin and cut into fingers while still warm.

I don't think she'd mind me sharing it with you.

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.

Spice cake

Not much of a baker.

But sometimes, cake is just what's needed.

Feel like a proper step-mother now.

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.

Banana bread recipe

Baking is not my forte. That’s not to say that I don’t enjoy it; indeed it’s one of the more pleasurable ways of spending a Saturday afternoon. It’s just that I lack the patience that baking requires. And I’ve had some disasters, mainly now I come to think of it from Nigella Lawson’s books, but that’s not necessarily the Domestic Goddesses’ fault - I’m a bit slapdash with my measuring and as every cook worth their weight knows, you don’t go messing with cake.

Mum on the other hand is a born baker, a confirmed dessert-a-holic and a gifted cake maker to boot. Her choice of main course on any restaurant menu is decided by what dessert it will best complement. I grew up with her endlessly baking cakes, biscuits, slices and memorably one year, old-fashioned ‘boiled lollies’ as end of year thank you gifts for my school teachers. The individually cellophane-wrapped sweets left the palms of her hands bruised a deep shade of purple for weeks afterwards. They were however, spectacular.

Over the years my taste buds have changed. Icing has ceased to be made; probably because by the time that the cake comes out I am ravenously hungry (the smell of baking make me slightly crazy) and cannot wait for the cake to cool before being iced, but in truth I think it’s because I find that extra sugary hit to be tooth-achingly, brain-achingly sweet. The kinds of cakes I make now are simple ones, those that require no further gilding beyond release from their tin and at most a quick dusting of sugar or cocoa. But they are full of flavour.

There’s a little book by David Herbert called ‘the perfect cookbook’, and everything in it turns out, as the title suggests, perfectly every time. With my cake-making skills as they are, his recipes have saved me on a number of occasions, and they do leave room for a little personal experimentation. This cake was originally based on his, but has morphed into something else – and isn’t that the mark of a really good cookbook?

Banana bread
Serves - oh, who knows - maybe just two of you. All I know is that by the end of day three it’s starting to look a bit sad. But it probably won’t last that long anyway.

¾ cup of wholemeal flour

¾ cup of plain white flour

½ teaspoon of ground cinnamon

½ teaspoon of ground ginger

1 teaspoon of bi-carb soda

1 teaspoon of baking powder

125g of unsalted butter, softened

1 cup of caster sugar

2 eggs, lightly beaten with a fork

2 very ripe bananas (you know the kind – black and beyond disgusting)

¼ cup of plain yoghurt

¼ cup milk (I used soy and it was fine)

Small handful of glace ginger, chopped roughly

Small handful of walnuts, roughly broken with your fingers

Handful of very dark chocolate chips

Preheat the oven to 170 C. Grease a 23 x 12cm loaf tin with a little butter and line the base with baking paper.

Sift the flours, spices, bi-carb and baking powder into a bowl. Tip the bran left at the bottom of the sieve into the bowl as well.

Cream the softened butter with the sugar until pale and fluffy. Add the eggs, a little at a time, beating well after each addition.

Mash the bananas with a fork, add them to the butter and sugar mixture and beat well with a wooden spoon. Now add 1/3 the sifted flour mixture to the bowl, folding it gently through and following with the yoghurt. Fold in 1/3 more of the flour, followed by the milk and then the remaining flour, making sure it is all well combined. Fold in your ginger, walnuts and chocolate.

Spoon into the prepared tin. Bake in the preheated oven for 55-60 minutes. A skewer inserted into the centre should come out clean when it’s ready (though if you’ve speared a chunk of molten chocolate, wipe the skewer clean and try another spot!). Cool for 15 minutes in the tin before turning out onto a cooling rack. Keeps for three days.

Banana bread

Banana bread, studded with walnuts, glace ginger and a huge handful of very dark chocolate chunks. Stunning.
Recipe will follow, I promise.