Friday is baking day

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The first cake I ever baked was a plain vanilla cake. I was about ten years old and had only the vaguest idea of how to make it, but I did know that my mum never – ever – used a recipe book when she made it. So I rang her at work to ask her how to to make one.

This was the first, but by no means the last, time we had this conversation under these circumstances…

Me: Hi Mum. How do you make a cake? I want to make one now…
Mum: Hello, dear. Okay, have you got a pen and some paper?
Me: Yesss…
Mum: Good. Write this down. Take 4oz of butter…
Me: How much butter is that?

And that’s how it went for a while. I always had to ask the butter question and never seemed to hang onto the recipe, until my mum eventually got me to write it down in the back of one of her recipe books. That way I could find it whenever I needed it – and I rang her less and less frequently as I became more confident.

Thanks, Mum – I still use your never-fail vanilla cake recipe whenever I make cupcakes. I’m pretty sure that DaughterDearest and Boychilde do as well, since it was the first cake they made too. We also use it as the base for a number of tasty winter desserts 🙂

My Mum’s Vanilla Cake Recipe
Oven to 350F/180C
Take 4oz softened butter – that’s about 125g; you can use margarine instead if you like – it actually works better.
Add 3/4 cup of sugar – just regular sugar, whatever you have to hand. I use raw sugar since that’s what I usually have in stock.
Cream the butter/margarine, then beat in the sugar until it’s smooth.
Add 2 eggs and 1 teaspoon of vanilla essence and mix well.
Add 2 cups of flour (sieved) and 2 teaspoons baking powder – mix this in gently whilst slowly adding 2/3 cup of milk.
Don’t over beat the mix
Bake in two pans for a layer cake (about 20 minutes) or in 12 cupcake cases (about 15 minutes).
Cakes should be well risen and starting to colour up by then.
Check the they’re done – use a skewer – then allow to cool for 5 minutes in the pan/s before turning out onto a wire rack
Ice the cake/s however you like – or just a sprinkle of sifted icing sugar does the trick if you’re lazy (or ten years old!).

Today I chose to bake it in a rectangular pan, cut it in half, fill it with carrot cake jam and then sprinkle it with icing sugar. Hopefully the recipients will enjoy eating it 🙂

friday cake_17jun16

Cumquats galore

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No sooner have we harvested hundreds (!) of limes and grapefruit, found homes for most of the fruit and pruned the trees, than the next episode begins.

Cumquats June 2016

Our cumquat tree’s overloaded with fruit… and it’s all starting to colour up. The calamondin (cumquat/manadrin cross) is catching up fast. This means yet another harvest coming up really soon. Looking back, I see that the trees were as overburdened with ripe fruit in mid-June last year…and the year before…

Over the past few years I’ve been a veritable cumquat-queen, making just about every imaginable (food) product I could think of. Last year I branched out and made raspberry and cumquat jam, but I’ve also made marmalades and chutneys, candied the cumquats to produce delicious sticky glacé fruit, brandied them, baked assorted cakes and scones and even made cordial.

cumquat chutney_2014

Since I still have a fair amount of jam and chutney stored in the fridge, I guess I’ll be baking and candying again this time around. Something new would be fun though, so maybe I’ll try Vietnamese-style cumquat flowers – they look pretty special. I also had a prowl around the recipe books in the local library this week for ideas and came across Homemade by Anna Gare, which includes a recipe for ‘Dad’s Cumquat Cake.’

Most of the cumquat-related cake recipes doesn’t use a huge amount of fruit and this is now exception. But 500g isn’t bad – and if the recipe works out and is super tasty, there could be many, many cumquat cakes distributed around the countryside… Failing that, I do still have recipes for all the other things we’ve made over the years!

Perhaps it’s time to prune these trees too – and to do it very thoroughly – in the hopes that reducing the tree size will likewise reduce the crop we get next year. After all, that worked soooo well with the grapefruit and lime trees… (not!)

Kitchen Goddess

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With the dogs keeping me trapped in one place for much of the past couple of weeks, I’ve taken to watching episodes of Master Chef.

Last week there was a bake-off between three of the contestants. The brief was to impress Nigella Lawson with a homestyle cake. They had 90 minutes to figure out what to make (ie. know the recipe well enough to just get stuck in), scoot to the pantry to claim their ingredients, get it all done and plate up something fabulous to present to the judges.

It was 90 minutes of cake madness. The stand-out winner (Matt Sinclair) chose to make one of my personal favourites: a carrot cake. He put a slightly different twist on it by baking the cake in two pans so that it would bake more quickly (very cunning) and sandwiching the layers together making up some carrot cake jam he whipped up.  He spread some lemony cream cheese icing in the middle as well, then used the rest of the icing to top the cake before sprinkling it with candied walnuts. It looked AMAZING. No, it looked delicious. Completely delicious – and I really (really!) wancarrot cake_may2016ted a slice.

So, over the weekend, whilst Himself was available to puppy-sit, I tried to replicate as much of Matt’s creation as I could remember. Fortunately I already have a carrot cake recipe that I’ve used successfully many times, so all I needed was a plausible recipe for carrot cake jam.

However, all the recipes I hunted down seemed to either leave out something I remembered Matt using… or include something not in my kitchen. So I improvised and came up with my own variation, which was good fun.

The next step was to make my carrot cake and improvise a lime cream cheese icing. After all, cooking is often about using what you’ve got to hand – and at present we have limes!

As soon as the whole thing was assembled, we hoed into it. Verdict from Himself: “Yum!!” Also: “More?”

I think we can call it a success 🙂

Oh, and after all that, I found the recipe for Matt’s cake on the MasterChef site yesterday! Ah well, mine worked pretty darn well, so if you’d like my recipe-combo to try, please please let me know.

It’s citrus time again

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This weekend it was time to harvest all our grapefruit and limes so that the trees can be pruned back. To this end, we bribed Daughter Dearest, Boychilde and their respective partners with lunch… and delicious lime cake.

Harvesting grapefruit and limes_May 2016

The result was a yield of 220 delicious pink grapefruit and 244 limes… and that’s excluding the dozens that went home with the helpers.

Some of our 2016 citrus harvest

I also juiced three dozen limes on Friday (frozen in ice trays for use at a later date) and used three (yes, only three!) limes in the delicious-cake-of-bribing. And most delicious it is too.

I found many variations on this recipe on the Internet and most of them appear to be based on a recipe from the Australian Women’s Weekly recipe. This is my version, as made to bribe the troops. I’ve simplified it, clarified the instructions (by making the cake!) and I’m sure you’ll enjoy it if you get round to making it.

Lime syrup cake with almond meal
For the Cake
200g softened butter
200g caster sugar (1 cup)
4 large eggs
100g self-raising flour (just less than a cup > 1 cup = 125g) – sifted
2 tsp baking powder
100g almond meal (~1 cup)
zest and juice of one lime

For the Lime syrup
50g caster sugar (~ ¼ cup)
zest and juice of two limes (about ¼ cup / 50ml)
¼ cup water

Preparation
Preheat the oven to 180C.
Line a spring-form cake tin and grease the bottom and sides.

Make the cake
Add all the cake ingredients in a large bowl and beat until they’re thoroughly combined. You can do this by hand but, really, why would you if you have an electric mixer?
Spoon the mixture into a spring-form cake tin lined with baking paper.
Pop the pan in the oven – I found it useful to put a baking tray under the cake tin to catch any seepage.
Bake in the preheated oven for approximately 40 minutes.

Meantime, make the lime syrup:
Add the lime juice, water and sugar to a pan and bring to a simmer, stirring regularly. Add the zest and then simmer the syrup for about 10 minutes – you don’t need to stir it for this period, but keep an eye on it.

The final touches
When a lovely golden colour and firm to the touch, remove it from the oven. Take the cake out of the oven, but leave it in the cake tin.
Using a skewer, stab little holes all over the top of the cake.
Now spoon the hot lime syrup over the top of the hot cake, allowing it to seep in between each spoonful.
Leave the cake to cool, remove from the cake tin (making sure that the syrup hasn’t stuck the cake to the sides…!) and serve.
The cake keeps quite well because of the almond meal, but it seldom has a chance to do so!

Pet Fud

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It was dark and rainy when I left the house this morning. As mentioned previously, this is a regular event for one or the other of us every six weeks or so. It starts with a silly o’clock scramble out of bed on Saturday morning, followed by some bumbling around to find a random assortment of (preferably our own) clothing, whilst trying not to disturb the rest of the household. I usually manage to sneak in a rushed cup of tea before the next step, which is loading a trolley into the car and heading off on a foray to the local meat markets.

Whilst this may seem like a daft thing to choose to do on a weekend, having two dogs on a protein rich diet makes it well worth the effort – particularly since I have an antipathy to commercial dog food. Firstly, it smells dreadful (both going into and coming out of the dogs). Secondly, the sulphur dioxide, sodium and potassium sulphite preservatives in ‘fresh pet meat’ can cause health issues. Thirdly, after having had a few dogs with gut problems in the past, it’s now my policy to feed my dogs human-grade meat products wherever possible – and to have as much input into it’s production as I can.

Yes it is time consuming, but it’s also well worth the effort. With Cassie growing in leaps and bounds and Molly still heading towards her full size, meat consumption is at an all time high. This means that our food production regime has had to be bumped up a notch to keep pace; today I bought 10kg beef mince and 8 ox hearts (no liver this time).

When I got home, I trimmed the fat off the hearts and cut them up into chunks that could be fed through the mincer attachment on our Kenwood. Once this was all done we added the packs of regular mince and 2kg of tinned sardines-in-oil, then mixed it all up together. This is a rather messy process and rather fraught with danger, since the dogs both reckon that the best place to be at food processing time is as close as possible, i.e. under foot. Clearly what they’re aiming for is to nab any morsels that might fall on the floor; what they achieve is to ramp up the general chaos factor several notches. Sigh. #lifewithpuppies!

So the next step is generally to take a break and feed the dogs their breakfast. This settles them down for a while and allows us to package the meat and clean up the mess. We measure the mix out into (a lot of) appropriate plastic containers, pop them in the freezer, then stack the dishwasher – before finally sitting down for a well-earned cup of coffee and (this time) a banana-pecan muffin.

In total we processed 2.16kg of meat/fish this morning. Combined with an appropriate amount of kibble with each meal and occasional added vegies, this’ll feed the dogs for the next 48 days. Total cost for the meat (excluding time) was $84 (meat $72, fish $12). We’re pretty happy with that, the dogs love it – and we’re off the hook for another six weeks!

petfudproduction_14may16