Dessert Day - the "what the eff, Jamie Oliver?" edition

Over the past couple of years, it's become a little bit of a tradition that Deidre and I get together, possibly bake something, meet up with Inspector Climate, go to a 6pm-ish movie, and are all back at our respective homes by like 9.30pm. Which is FABULOUS, because it means you're busy on New Year's Eve, but don't have to spend a million years at a party socialising with people you're not particularly interested in socialising with. You can go to bed at 10pm if you want, or you can ring in the new year sitting on the sofa in your PJs and watching Jurassic Park for the five hundredth time. In short, it's the best New Year's Eve of ever.

Anyway.

We decided to do Dessert Day pretty much at the last minute and so had almost zero ideas of what we wanted to make. Eventually, I remembered the salted caramel brownies that I'd had in London and decided that sounded like just the thing. So I trawled the internet for recipes and came up with this one from Jamie Oliver.

And let me tell you, there were a few things that made almost zero sense to us.
1. Crinkling up the baking paper and wetting it. Pretty sure it made no difference whatsoever...
2. The whole not stirring thing. Golden syrup is really thick and it's pretty hard to swirl it.
3. The size of the baking tins involved. They both seemed much larger than was entirely necessary.

Pre-baking

Post-baking. Definitely didn't look like the picture...

On the plus side, they were delicious

 In between baking, we watched Pitch Perfect and ate far too much roast pumpkin dip and fancy cheese (using the cheese cleaver, obviously. It's not Dessert Day without the cheese cleaver).

And while the brownies were delicious, there were a few things that we decided we'd do differently in the future:
1. Make more salted caramel. This quantity seemed insufficient.
2. Use a smaller pan so that it's easier to hide the chunks of caramel in the brownie.
3. Freeze half the caramel, cut it into chunks, and bury the chunks in the brownie. Much easier than dealing with sticky spoonfuls.
4. Pour some of the caramel over the top AFTER they've been baked so that it doesn't all get absorbed into the surface of the brownie.

Still, they were delicious whether warm or cold, and the combination of salted caramel and suuuuper dark chocolate was fairly phenomenal. So on the whole, I'd call them a win. Just not as much of a win as they could have been with a few alterations.

And then we went to see The Hobbit: Battle of the Five Armies. I'd recommend the brownies way before I recommended the movie. It was...not great. But, you know, there was a battle pig, so that's something!

Have you made salted caramel brownies? Which recipe did you use? And did it involve scrunching up and wetting the baking paper?? Because that still seems weird...

K xx

Flourless chocolate cake

So I made a birthday cake for my mum over the weekend, and decided to try a recipe I'd not used before. It turned out pretty damned well if I do say so myself!

I don't have any proper photos of it because I was busy making the recipe into a vlog for VEDA at the time, but I DO have a photo of the finished product, which is probably about all you really need. It's a really simple recipe and it turned out surprisingly well, so I figured (in light of the fact that it's been incredibly quiet around these parts recently) that I'd share it with you guys.

Ingredients
4 oz (115g) dark chocolate
125g unsalted butter
3/4 cup caster sugar
1 tsp vanilla extract
3 eggs
1/2 cup cocoa

Chop chocolate and butter into small chunks. Melt together in a double boiler. Remove from heat, stir in caster sugar and vanilla. Allow to cool slightly, then whisk in eggs one at a time. Add cocoa and mix until just combined. Pour into a greased and lined 8" cake tin and bake at 190 degrees C (375 degrees F) for 20-25 minutes or until a thin crust forms on the top. Cool in the tin for 10-15 minutes, then turn out onto a wire rack. Dust with icing sugar to serve.

I'll be perfectly honest, the hardest part about this cake? Was getting it out of the tin. In the future, I think I'll be doing what several people said they do in the comments and making 1.5 times the recipe in a 9" springform tin!!

Does this sound like something you'd make?

K xx

The carrots make it healthy, right??

I've never really been a big fan of carrot cake. It's always seemed like something healthy in disguise as a dessert. Plus, it usually has sultanas in it, and I hate dried fruit. Anyway, one of my colleagues in Canberra used to make this totally amazing carrot cake with mountains of cream cheese frosting, which instantly made the carrot cake worth eating.

Stupidly, I neglected to get the recipe from her, and I've been looking for a decent, dried fruit free carrot cake recipe ever since. I found this one while flipping through one of the cookbooks at work last week and figured I'd give it a go over the long weekend.

Here's what you need for the cake:

1 cup vegetable oil (I used canola)
1 1/3 cups firmly packed brown sugar
3 eggs
3 cups firmly packed coarsely grated carrot
1 cup coarsely chopped walnuts
2 1/2 cups self-raising flour
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
2 teaspoons mixed spice

Start by putting the oil, sugar, and eggs into a large mixing bowl. The recipe actually says to mix them in a small bowl, then transfer them to a large bowl, but...WHY?!

Beat them together until thick and creamy:

Then add ALL THE CARROT OMG. Seriously, it was all three of those carrots from the ingredients photo:

Stir it through, then add the walnuts:

Then add the baking soda, mixed spice, and self-raising flour.

Mix it all together, and pour the mixture into a greased and lined deep 22cm cake tin. The recipe specifies a round tin, but I used a square one because the only round one we have that's big enough is springform, and pff. And yes, it NEEDS to be deep. This is a monster of a cake.

Bake at 180 degrees C (350F) for about 1 1/4 hours. Mine was gluten free so it took a little longer, as always. Leave the cake in the tin for like 10 minutes, then cool on a wire rack.

Then go out to a 30th birthday party for like five hours, get home at 11.30pm and decide to frost the cake. Obviously, you will forget to take photos of the frosting-making process... (This part is optional)

Here's what you'll need for the frosting:
30g butter, softened
80g cream cheese, softened
1 teaspoon finely grated lemon zest
1 1/2 cups icing sugar

Beat the butter and cream cheese together in a small bowl until light and fluffy, then gradually beat in the icing sugar. Mix through the lemon zest with a knife so that it doesn't just all get stuck in the beaters.

We decided to cut the cake in half, given that there's only three of us to eat it. So half of the cake got wrapped up un-frosted and put in the freezer. I was going to halve the quantity of frosting, but Mum was all "PFF, WHY?!?!?!" So feel free to double the frosting. There's no judgement here...

The verdict? It's pretty freaking good, y'all. The icing wasn't QUITE as cream cheese-y tasting as I would have liked, but I feel like doubling the quantity was definitely a good idea. The cake is pretty dense but it's got a lot of texture to it that stops it from feeling like you're eating a doorstop. Or something.

Basically, it's delicious. And really, you can't go wrong with cream cheese frosting, now can you?

Where do you fall in the great carrot cake debate? Dried fruit? Or no dried fruit?

K xx

Choc orange cake

It's been a while since I've done any baking, so when I got an incredible chocolate/doughnut dessert instead of cake for my birthday and then received this book from Ness, it seemed like a perfect opportunity to make a cake!

Here's what you'll need:

Pretty simple, huh?!

Here's the full list of ingredients:
200g butter, softened
200g + 75g golden/raw caster sugar
4 eggs
Juice and zest of 3 oranges
200g self raising flour
100mL double cream
150g dark chocolate
Edible gold leaf, if you have money and stuff

Start by chopping up your butter. It should be softer than mine was...

Add in the 200g of raw caster sugar (which looks a little like sand) and cream it together:

Beat the eggs and zest two of the oranges:

Add the eggs and the zest into the butter and sugar mixture and mix to combine. It will look lumpy and gross and kind of reminiscent of vomit. DON'T PANIC, EVERYTHING WILL BE FINE:

Add in the flour - mine was gluten free - and fold it in. It will continue to look lumpy and gross. Then add the juice of one orange and fold that through too:

Pour it all into a greased ring pan (the recipe specified a 24cm savarin tin, but all I had was a 20cm ring pan. It worked perfectly) and shove it in the oven at 180 degrees C for 30 minutes (mine, because it was gluten free, was more like 35 minutes):

While the cake is in the oven, make your orange syrup. Put the remaining 75g of raw caster sugar into a small saucepan:

Add the juice of 2 oranges (zest the third one before you juice it!), and stir over low heat until all the sugar has dissolved. Set aside to cool.

When the cake is done (i.e. when a toothpick/kebab skewer comes out clean), take it out of the oven and spoon the orange syrup over the top.

Leave it to stand for five minutes (mine was more like ten, because gluten free tends to be a little slower to absorb things), then turn it onto a cooling rack.

Once it's cool, make the ganache topping. Chop the chocolate into small, even pieces. Heat the double cream over a double boiler, then add the chocolate and stir until smooth:

Leave it to cool until the mixture coats the back of a spoon, then cover the cake. Top with the remaining orange worth of zest or some edible gold leaf if your budget stretches to that:

Leave it to set, then try not to shove your entire face into the cake because it's so pretty.

The verdict? This cake is AMAZING. Orange cake has a tendency to be a little on the dry side in my experience, even if it's got a crapton of butter in it. But the orange syrup gets rid of that completely. It's moist and light, and the raw caster sugar stops it from being overly sweet. But it's also rich thanks to the ganache. You could probably make it without the ganache if you wanted, but the chocolate factor really adds an extra level of amazing to the equation!

Yum.

Give it a go and let me know what you think!

K xx

Dessert Day - pie edition

Monday in Melbourne was Labour Day. And to honour all those who stood up and complained that working more than eight hours a day is a suckfest, we had a day off. WHEEEEEEEEEE. Obviously, said day off led to to the making of Dessert Day plans.

Perhaps the most significant revolutionary event to happen at Dessert Day was that Deidre and I decided to revolutionise the way in which we select which movie to watch. Prior to now, we've had a "watch all the things that we collectively own by one actor" approach, which means that the last...three? four?? Dessert Days have been accompanied by the works of Hugh Grant. But NOW? We're going to play a game of leapfrog, where we pick one actor from the previous movie and watch something else that they're in. As a result our viewing will now look something like this:

Two Weeks Notice (Monday's selection) --> The Proposal --> 27 Dresses --> Enchanted --> Sweet Home Alabama --> Legally Blonde.

Etcetera.

ANYWAY. We decided to make gluten free apple pie, on account of Deidre and Inspector Climate recently went to Tasmania, and he tortured her by eating apple pie that she couldn't have on account of gluten. Plus, everybody loves pie.

Too right, Dean. Also, source.

We used Smitten Kitchen's all butter pastry recipe, but made it in the food processor because we're lazy time was at a premium. We made it exactly as per the instructions in the book, using White Wings gluten free flour (by weight, not cup measurements) and drizzling the water in slowly, as gluten free flour often doesn't need as much liquid (which proved to be the case here).

Once the pastry was in the fridge thinking about what it had done, we set to work preparing the apples. Smitten Kitchen's recipe for deep dish apple pie (which I can't link to because it's only in her recipe book) required five pounds of apples. We decided against using the springform tin and crumbly/streusel-y topping in favour of a pie that had a full pastry lid, and we adjusted the amount of apples accordingly. We started with somewhere around the 1.75kg mark, and 1.5kg probably would have been about right as it turned out.

We broke out a peeler, corer and slicer that Deidre and Inspector Climate received as a wedding present, which was both terrifying and excellent. I suspect we would still be peeling and slicing apples otherwise...

How the apples came out of the magical doohickey.

From there, we mixed the apple slices with the juice of one lemon, 100g of sugar, 30g of flour, 1/2 teaspoon of salt, and a decent sprinkling of cinnamon. Then we rolled out the dough for the base (read: mostly Deidre. I suck at dough rolling. It always ends up totally wonky shapes) and flipped it into the pan. Once we'd done that, it was starting to get pretty soft, so we chucked it back in the fridge for five minutes to firm up a little.

It looked pretty promising once it came out again. Then we filled it and it looked even MORE promising:

And then we rolled out the lid, put that on, and added some decoration and an egg wash so it would brown nicely:

We also had enough apples left over to fill three ramekins, although not enough pastry to make lids for them. So we just cut out shapes instead and placed them randomly over the top. Then it was into the oven at 180 degrees C for half an hour, followed by a further hour at a little over 160 degrees C. An hour and a half (and some Hugh Grant and Sandra Bullock ridiculousness) later, we had a pie!

The recipe recommends letting it cool to lukewarm, then putting it in the fridge, but that was FAR too much waiting, considering we'd already waited an hour and a half. So we let it cool for as long as it took to watch an episode of Will & Grace, and then cut into it.

It wasn't pretty, but it was DELICIOUS. The pastry was nice and flakey and the apple wasn't too sweet (the original recipe said 200g of sugar for 5lb of apples. We used 100g for a little under 4lb). In the future, I'd probably add some nutmeg and a pinch each of allspice and cloves just to give it that extra-autumn-y flavour and smell.

In short, pie is delicious. And this will give you just enough time to get all your supplies together for Pi Day! YOU'RE WELCOME.

K xx

The easiest cheesecake of ever

So as you may well know if you've been friends with me for any length of time, yesterday was World Nutella Day. As Deidre now has a job (RUDE), I was forced to celebrate on my own. Given that it's approximately a million degrees in Melbourne (AGAIN) this week, I decided to keep things simple and go with something that wouldn't require me to use the oven. Pinterest failed me, because all the no-bake Nutella things on there seem to require a tub of Cool Whip, which a) you can't get in Australia and b) I would refuse to use anyway because I'm pretty sure it's not actually food and is instead a giant tub full of chemicals.

ANYWAY.

Luckily, Google delivered in the form of Chocolate Suze's No Bake Nutella Cheesecake. And she really wasn't kidding when she said it was super easy. I used Leda brand arrowroot biscuits for the base, because I needed it to be gluten free, and they were surprisingly awesome. Annoyingly, gluten free biscuits only seem to come in 200g packets when you need 250g, but OH WELL. I also used unsalted butter because that's what we happened to have and also because I really don't like salted butter. I added the butter a little bit at a time because sometimes with gluten free stuff, the quantities of wet ingredients are a little on the high side, and I probably had 5-10g of melted butter left over at the end.

Other than that, the only alteration I made was to stick the jar of Nutella in the microwave for about 20 seconds, just so that it was easier to get out! It looked pretty promising when it went into the fridge:

When I took it out of the fridge five hours later and popped the springform pan, the cheesecake started to split. But that was quickly fixed by locking the pan shut again and running a butter knife around the inside to loosen it!

The verdict? It's pretty rich but totally delicious. The arrowroot biscuits help cut through some of the sweetness and I was really REALLY surprised at how well it set considering there's no eggs or gelatine in it and it wasn't baked. Plus, I had the whole thing made and in the fridge within about 20 minutes. TOO EASY.

How did you celebrate World Nutella Day?

K xx

Dessert Day - the "that's not what we planned on making" edition

So a few days before Christmas, Deidre sent me a text message that included a picture of a recipe she thought we should make for Dessert Day - a red velvet cake star in the middle of a white chocolate cheesecake. We established that we should Dessert Day on the 30th of December, and then the festive season took over and we promptly forgot all about our plans until the night of the 29th of December. Obviously, this led to us vaguely wandering around my local supermarket on Monday morning searching for ingredients for the aforementioned fancy cake, and largely unable to find them (for example, vegetarian gelatine).

So we ultimately abandoned that plan and turned instead to something we've been meaning to make for ages and have never quite gotten around to - Tim Tam cake. We used this recipe with a few alterations:

1. Beat the eggs, then gradually add in the sugar.
2. If you are using a Kitchenaid to beat the eggs, transfer them into a different bowl before adding the dry ingredients, otherwise you'll end up with clumps of flour everywhere thanks to the weird bottom of the Kitchenaid bowl.
3. Make two separate lots of cake batter. We had to throw out the second cake and start from scratch because a) it ended up smaller than the first one, b) it had a giant clump of unmixed flour in it, and c) sitting around while the first one baked didn't do the batter any favours, and it was basically a really sad puddle of grossness. So we started over, and the second (third?!) cake was a dramatic improvement on either of its predecessors.

We also left out the Tim Tams because GLUTEN (and gluten free ones are a) kind of gross, and b) not available at my supermarket), and I'm not convinced that we missed out. Oh, and we added raspberry extract to the frosting for the middle, and it was quite possibly the best decision I've ever made. It was so delicious that it was a struggle to get the frosting into the cake!

Oh, and you could probably cut back the ganache recipe by at least a quarter, because there was way too much. Anyway, enough of my wibbling, let's get to the pictures, which is what you really care about, right?

Sad looking bottom layer of cake

Delicious frosting of epic proportions

Sad cake is less sad once frosting is involved

Second cake added and smothered in ganache

Now with added bite so that it really looks like a Tim Tam

Om nom nom nom nom

We also made lemon sorbet from the Commonsense Cookery Book, a stalwart of Australian kitchens. The recipe is as follows:

4 cups water
2 cups caster sugar
1 cup lemon juice
2 tablespoons lemon zest

Bring water and sugar to the boil, stirring to dissolve sugar, and boil for five minutes. Cool syrup, then add lemon juice and rind. Pour into refrigerated trays, freeze until syrup becomes mushy. Beat well and freeze again until solid.

Now we, obviously, did the first two steps and then used the ice cream maker to speed things along. Still, when we came to dish it up and take photos, it was baaaaaaaaaasically in a state not much more solid than a Slurpee, and plopped into the parfait glass in a very splashy way. Still, it was delicious. Although I would recommend not using a Microplane to zest the lemons, as it led to little strings of lemon zest all the way through...

Unlike the cake, the sorbet did not photograph particularly well:

Still, it was delicious, and that's what really matters!

What should we make at our next Dessert Day?

K xx