A Few of My Favourite Things !

I was most surprised to receive yet another package in the mail last week. My BBM recipient could not fit all the items she had gathered into the package for her recipient – wicked grin – so she thoughtfully sent them onto me. I received an assortment of sweets, which I shared with my office colleagues, two types of biscuits, a jar of pate de olive nero, an apple syrup to have with cheese.

Thanks so much, Eva! I’m looking forward to slowly savouring these delicious-looking food items.

The word is out!

There are some fantastic Australian foodblogs out there and some of them are featured in this article by Liesl Rampono. I think it’s great that Rampono has actually looked into the Australian blogging scene in more detail than this article. There are even some quotes from the lovely Saffron at The Food Palate, so please check it out. Access is free however if you have any difficulties, I can email you a copy instead.

There is going to be an article on ‘The Food Blog Boom’ in the Epicure section of The Age tomorrow. I’m not sure if this will be the same article as the one reported by Saffron at The Food Palate, however I will keep an eye out for it and let you know.

Cats are curious creatures, aren’t they?

Look, Bella! There’s something in the window!

Why can’t I get it?

Visit Clare at Eat Stuff to see all the other curious kitties…

Well, it has been a ’sugar-high’ Friday but, unfortunately, my creations are not sufficiently dark enough to qualify for SHF #13 although I desperately wanted to participate. 

It all started last night when I made my first attempt to bake my MIL a cheesecake in a waterbath. After baking for 1.5 hours and cooling for another hour in the oven, I discovered that it’s not a good idea to bake the cake in a springform tin! I went to bed with cakes on my mind and the first thing I did upon waking this morning was to pull out and flick through Nigella’s How to be a Domestic Goddess. After 1 lopsided cake and a failed cheesecake, I was determined to not have a third disaster. Having used up 7 eggs on yesterday’s botched cheesecake, I was low on ingredients but I had everything required for a Victoria Sponge. I only made one small substitution, which was to use soymilk in place of regular milk as we don’t often have milk in the house unless we are expecting company. This is a really straightforward recipe and the batter can even be made by blitzing all the ingredients in a food processor before adding the milk.

The sponge was left to cool while I took A on a surprise birthday adventure – Diving with the Sharks in the Melbourne Aquarium. It should really be called Diving with the Rays as they really were the feature in the dive. We were able to even stroke them as they swam by!

Upon getting home this evening, I decided to bake yet another cake so that we would have one cake for my MIL and another one for A (yes, Plum, this would be the third lot of cake for him but what can I say? I like celebrating his birthday!). I have been eyeing the recipe for a Sour Cream Chocolate Cake (again from Nigella) for some time now and this looked like a good time to try it. Another straightforward recipe that involves creaming the butter with dry ingredients, mixing wet ingredients with cocoa, then mixing both together. It really couldn’t be any easier and results in a light moist chocolate cake. After brushing some syrup on the bottom half, I filled it with whipped cream and sour cherries and topped the cake with more cream. The cake demanded some shavings of chocolate to be sprinkeled over the cream – but wait, I had no chocolate on hand to shave. Luckily, I had recently been presented with some Fran’s Chocolate bars! While the chocolate cake was in the oven, I filled the Victoria Sponge with a mango-cream mixture and topped it with diced mango.

Both cakes were a hit and we’re hard-pressed to choose a favourite out of the two. The mango complemented the sponge beautifully and made for a lovely springtime dessert. The chocolate cake is very light on chocolatiness, the very opposite of a mudcake which I sometimes feel can be a little too rich. The sourcherries, which seemed overly sour on their own, were just right in the moist chocolate cake. All-in-all a succesful baking day – phew!

Victoria Sponge

225g soft unsalted butter, 225g caster sugar, 1 tsp vanilla extract, 4 large eggs, 200g self raising flour, 25 g cornflour, 3-4 tbs milk

1. Cream butter and sugar until pale
2. Add eggs, one at a time, adding a spoonful of flour in between each.
3. Fold in rest of the flour and cornflour and when it has all been incorporated, all a little milk as required to obtain a ’soft, dropping consistency’.
4. Pour into 20″ springform tin and bake for 50 – 55 min.
5. Leave in tin for 10 min before turning out to cool.

Sour-Cream Chocolate Cake

200g plain flour, 200g caster sugar, 3/4 tsp baing powder, 1/4 tsp bicarb soda, 1/2 tsp salt, 200g soft unsalted butter, 40g cocoa, 150ml sour cream, 2 large eggs, 1 1/2 tsp vanilla extract

1. Combine all dry ingredients except cocoa in large bowl and mix butter in well.
2. In separate bowl, whisk together set ingredients and cocoa.
3. Slowly add cocoa mixture to dry ingredients mixture, beating until thoroughly mixed.
4. Bake in 20″ springform tin at 180C for 45 min.
5. Leave for 10 min in tin before turning out to cool.

Have you ever had one of those baking days when things just do not go according to plan? Sigh, what can you do?

Last night, I set out to bake a light airy chocolate sponge cake for my hubby whose birthday is coming up this weekend – talk about being deflated (the cake, that is!). I was looking forward to slicing the airy chocolate sponge in half and brushing the middle with jam before filling it with strawberries and cream and perhaps dusting the top with icing sugar…well, that was the PLAN, right?

I found a recipe for a basic chocolate sponge and I followed its instructions to the letter and everything was looking quite good until it came to the actual baking of the cake. The instructions were to bake the cake at 175C for 15 minutes, which I thought was quite a short amount of time but being the kind of person that I am, I followed the instructions. Hah! I won’t be doing that in a hurry again! I pierced a skewer through at 15 min at found (surprise, surprise) that it wasn’t ready. I left it for another 15 before checking, then another 15, then another. I think I must have opened the overn door about 3-4 times before the cake was finally done, but the result was a very sad-looking collapsed chocolate sponge cake. The cake didn’t even have the decency just to be collapsed in the middle but it had to be lopsided as well.

This morning, I came to decorate the cake and discovered that it’s mighty difficult to slice a lopsided, collapsed cake evenly much less top it with whipped cream evenly. But I made a valiant attempt to make it look half decent and to distract people from the leaning-tower look by topping it with blueberries and stranberries.

I did have another look at the instructions and noticed that they used a jelly roll tin, which I’m now guessing means a really shallow tin that is used to make roulades…so maybe I didn’t follow the instructions to the letter then – oops!

After baking, I wanted to frost them with a peppermint icing, but alas, found that I was not in possession of any peppermint essence. I was SURE that I had bought some a couple of months ago in preparation for these cupcakes, but no…my memory deceived me. Instead, I iced them and sprinkeld more Peppermint Crisp over the top (not shown in picture).

I was hoping (fingers crossed) that the peppermint crisp in the middle of the batter would have stayed there to form a nice pepperminty centre to the cupcake, but when I cut one of them open to get a photo, I found that the chocolate had sunk to the bottom and did not make for a pretty picture Nevertheless, these cupcakes were moreishly yummilicious. They had a crispy top (my favourite part) but the peppermint at the bottom also made this section interesting to eat. The icing was a little sweet for my liking so I’d like to try a different type of (peppermint) frosting next time. Any ideas on this would be much appreciated!

Aromatic Chocolate Cupcakes

110g unsalted butter, 200g dark muscovado or brown sugar, 1 large egg, beaten, 1/2 tsp vanilla extract, 50g dark chocolate, melted and cooled slightly, 100g pl flour, 1/2 tsp bicarb soda, 125ml boiling water

1. Cream butter & sugar, then beat in egg and vanilla extract
2. Fold melted chocolate and blend well but do not overbeat
3. Add alternating spoonfuls of flour/bicarb soda and boiling water until you obtain a smooth & fairly liquid batter
4. Fill muffin cases halfway and sprinkle chunks of Peppermint Crisp in centre. Spoon more batter over the chocolate to fill case & bake at 180C for 30min
5. Ice and sprinkle more Peppermint Crisp over top

Have I mentioned that Bella & Tasha both LOVE brown paper bags? Even when there is nothing inside, they will convince themselves that they can see something and they will dash into the bag head first so that all we can see is their bottom sticking out, tail up in the air! They sometimes even manage to scare themselves and take a huge backwards leap back out of the bag before pouncing on it again. It’s great that they can amuse themselves so easily and with such a simple toy :-p

Clare is back this week as the host of WCB so head over to Eat Stuff to catch up on what the other kitties have been up to…