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

Dessert Day - oversized lemon edition

On Friday afternoon, Deidre and I met up with my IRL BFF, Char, for a spot of Dessert Day magic. Our first step was to source ingredients and, considering we'd taken over Char's parents' kitchen for the occasion, we headed out into the back garden to check the lemon tree. We came back in with the most ridiculous lemon any of us had ever seen:

It was absolutely ENORMOUS.

Anywho... Following a trip to the supermarket (and then another trip because we forgot to buy caster sugar. FAIL), we pressed on with the actual baking part. Our first challenge was to recreate a version of Deidre's wedding cake from this recipe. Except we decided that it wasn't sufficiently challenging, and that we needed to make a bunch of changes.

Obviously, we weren't about to make a tiered cake, because EFFORT. Instead, we decided to change things up a little and make one lemon cake and one raspberry cake. So we followed the recipe, except that we left out all the lemon-y stuff. We divided the batter into two equal parts, and added the following:

Cake 1
- 1/8 cup lemon juice
- 1 large pinch lemon zest
- 1/2 teaspoon lemon extract

Cake 2
- 1/8 cup raspberry coulis (cook 1/2 cup raspberries with a couple of teaspoons of caster sugar for a couple of minutes, then push through a sieve and allow it to cool)
- 1/2 teaspoon raspberry extract

While the cakes were in the oven, we made the lemon curd exactly as it appears in the recipe. Except, you know, the eggy version not the vegan version. Because the vegan version sounds DISGUSTING and I suspect it would result in something that looked a lot like lemon flavoured snot... *gags repeatedly*

I split the cakes, which caused rather a large amount of stress, and then we pressed on with making the frosting. We decided that it might end up too overwhelmingly lemon-y if we used the frosting from the recipe, so we used the basic butter, sugar, milk and salt quantities it lists, and then just added a teaspoon or so of vanilla extract. It was pretty amazing, I have to say.

The assembly process was MUCH more straightforward than the chequerboard cake - we alternated layers of cake and put about 1/3 of the lemon curd between each layer. Then we smothered the whole lot in frosting. There was a reasonable amount of frosting left over, and the cake looked a little plain. So we added the leftover raspberry coulis to it, and I grabbed the piping bag and went to town!

It was pretty fabulous cake. It doesn't taste or look like it's gluten free, and the frosting didn't make it soggy, which is sometimes a problem when it comes to gluten free stuff. Plus, it got the seal of approval from two of Char's younger brothers, so it must have been rather spectacular! I think in future though, I might stick with straight lemon and some kind of cream cheese frosting. Or straight raspberry with coulis or jam in between the layers and the vanilla frosting we used here. It was amazing, but there were so many flavours going on that it was all a little overwhelming.

Our second recipe for the day was these apple fritters. We followed the recipe exactly, except that it turns out that one and a half apples was enough to give the required quantity. Which was a bit of a bummer because we'd already peeled three apples. Womp womp.

These were completely fabulous, but I strongly recommend using a candy thermometer to check the temperature of the oil - the first lot we did ended up too brown on the outside and not quite cooked in the middle. But once the oil had cooled down a bit, they came out perfectly!

Conclusions?
Cake: Would definitely make again but with some alterations to give a more uniform flavour.
Fritters: Would definitely make again, but would double the recipe so that there are more delicious tiny doughnuts in my life.
Giant lemon: Completely delicious, unlike most oversized fruits.
Things I would change next time: Being insanely awkward when one of Char's brothers came home while she was out buying sugar, because OBVIOUSLY it would have been the only one of her brothers who wouldn't recognise me...
Deep frying: Not nearly as terrifying as last time.
Splitting cakes: Forever terrifying.

So. Would you take the lemon option, the raspberry option, or the All the Flavours option?? I need opinions so I know what to make next time!

K xx

101 in 1001 #66

On Saturday, I realised that I hadn't done any baking since New Year's Eve. Okay, so it's only like two weeks - hardly the end of the world. But I felt the need to rectify the situation all the same. And for some reason, I got it into my head that I wanted to make a lemon and poppy seed cake, and put cream cheese frosting on the top.

For once, all my cookbooks failed me. The only lemon and poppy seed cake recipes they contained were for syrup cakes. And making a syrup cake without the syrup seemed risky. So I turned to the internet. The recipe I ended up using (which I've since lost the link for. I AM SO SMART, S-M-R-T!) said something at the bottom about how you could double the frosting recipe and use half of it to fill the cake. Which is how I ended up crossing #66 (make a filled cake) off my Day Zero list.

I've attempted to make filled cakes numerous times in the past, and they've always ended up looking something like this:

Clearly, my MS Paint skills are spectacular and Google failed me with decent pictures, and my cake cutting skills in the past have been...squiffy at best. (The candles were to make it look more like a cake and less like a cylinder with a crack in it.) Anyway, I figured it was about time to see if I could do any better. Oh, and technically, this recipe is for an orange and lemon poppy seed cake. It worked out much the same, really!

Here's what you'll need:

(Plus, 250g block of cream cheese, a ton of icing sugar, and some lemon juice for the icing, all of which I forgot to put in the picture. #FAIL)

Start with 1/3 cup of poppy seeds and put them in a small bowl:

Add 1/4 cup of milk:

And leave them to soak. Meanwhile, grease and line a 20cm round tin.

Chop up 125g of softened butter:

Add 1 cup caster sugar:

And cream them together.

Try not to just eat it with a spoon. Then zest one orange and one lemon:

Add the zest into the creamed butter mixture, along with 3 eggs, added one at a time. Beat in between each egg.

Then add in 2 cups of self raising flour (If you're doing what I did and using gluten free flour, don't dump it in like you would with regular flour. Because it will go EVERYWHERE)...

...1/2 cup of sour cream...

...1/4 cup orange juice (I juiced the orange that I'd zested)...

...and the milk/poppy seed mixture:

Beat it until it's just combined:

And then pour it into the tin.

Now, the recipe said to bake it at 160 degrees C for 40-45 minutes. I'm not sure if the recipe is CRAZY WRONG or if it was the gluten free flour that did it, but after 40 minutes, it was still about 40% liquid. I think all up, it took an extra 15-20 minutes before a skewer came out clean. So basically? Don't be surprised if it's not done after 40 minutes!

Here's the (FINALLY) cooked cake:

Let it cool for 10 minutes, then turn it out of the tin. Once it's cool, slice the cake in half. One of my cookbooks has a double page spread on cake splitting techniques. Considering how poorly I've faired in the past, I thought I'd avoid just using a knife. So I got some thread and used that instead. It took a bit of effort to get started, but after that it was SO much easier to keep it straight! And I imagine if you used dental floss instead of thread, it wouldn't be as hard to get going.

I'm not sure I'd use this frosting recipe again for reasons that will become apparent. But here it is anyway.
250g block of cream cheese, softened:

1 cup icing sugar:

4 tablespoons lemon juice:

Beat it all together. Use half as filling:

And half as icing, then sprinkle the top with poppy seeds so it doesn't look really boring:

Okay, the reason I wouldn't use this recipe again? It was INSANELY runny. I had to use an extra 1/2-3/4 cup of icing sugar just to get it to a consistency that would stay on the cake. Even then, it was kind of...custardy?...in texture. And then I had to transfer the entire cake to a cake carrier rather than just covering it with cling film because the ICING DIDN'T SET. EVER. So if I'd cling filmed it, the icing would have just stuck to the cling film and not the cake.

So I think in the future, I'd use a different frosting recipe. One that had at least a small amount of butter in it so that it would set.

ANYWAY. Despite the baking time debacle and the frosting dilemmas, this cake was pretty damned good. As evidenced by the fact that we demolished the entire thing in two days!

So there you have it. I'm pretty sure I'll be attempting filled cakes more often in the future!

K xx

Challenge recipe 14: Portuguese custard tarts

When I made the raspberry soufflés a couple of weeks ago, I was racking my brains for a use for the egg yolks. The idea of throwing out four egg yolks just seemed like a total waste, plus I wanted to have some kind of dessert-y substance as a back up plan in case the soufflé turned out to be a complete disaster.

After a little bit of delving, I came across this, which allowed me to use up THREE of the four yolks. Back in the days when I worked in Brewery Land, there was a coffee shop just around the corner that was staffed by the champion in the Australian barista competition and the champion in the Victorian barista competition. So obviously, they were all Judgey McJudgerson about the fact that I don't drink coffee.

They also made killer hot chocolate, which was most of the reason why I kept going back. But on Mondays, it was an entirely different reason. Because on Mondays they also sold Portuguese custard tarts. And they were AWESOME. So when this allowed me to use up the eggs AND try my hand at lemony custardy goodness, I knew I had to try them.

Here's the book:

And here's what you'll need:

Start by greasing a muffin pan. I used melted butter because I'd just been using it to grease the soufflé dishes.

You then need to thaw a sheet of butter puff pastry. My supermarket didn't HAVE butter puff pastry, so I spread it in melted butter instead.

Put 1/2 cup of caster sugar into a medium saucepan:

Add 2 tablespoons of cornflour:

3 egg yolks:

And 3/4 cup of cream (and 1/2 cup water, which I apparently forgot to photograph):

Mix it all together with a whisk wooden spoon because you've just discovered you don't actually own a whisk:

Wash a lemon, and then peel off a strip of the rind. I actually wound up doing this with a knife because the peeler just kept sliding off the surface...

Add the lemon rind into the mixture, along with a teaspoon of vanilla extract. I COULD have used vanilla extract, but when I was last home in Melbourne, I bought some vanilla beans, and figured I'd give one of those a go too. I cut the bean in half, scraped out the insides with a knife, and then dumped the whole lot into the saucepan too:

Put the whole lot over medium heat and stir until it comes to the boil. When it does, take it off the heat and take out the rind and the vanilla bean. Look at the delicious black vanilla-y bits in there!

While the custard cools, cut the pastry sheet in half (I was lazy and just folded it), and then roll it up from the short side:

Cut it into 12 pieces and roll it into balls:

Roll them out on a floured surface to about 10cm. Clearly, I'm not very good at making things round...

Press the rounds into the muffin tin. They'll look really mangled and weird rustic:

Spoon the custard into the cases:

How good does that look?!

I sprinkled a little cinnamon across the top before I stuck them in the oven:

And bake at 220 degrees C for 20 minutes:

Cool in the tin for 5 minutes, then move them to a cooling rack. Apparently after that, I forgot to take photos because I was too busy making souffle and cooking chicken and roast potatoes... So I apologise, but you don't get a photo of the finished product out of the tin!

The verdict? They're pretty amazing. I'll have to try them again and use butter puff pastry rather than kludging together a solution as best I can. And I think next time, I might leave off the cinnamon. The one's at the coffee shop next door to Brewery Land had cinnamon. But I think it just overwhelmed the lemon and vanilla flavours in these.

And, obviously, I need to practice my skills with the rolling pin.

I'll definitely be trying them again!

K xx