No 45 - Upside Down Citrus Cake

'Birds on Bikes', a group of local women, had their annual tour of the Hayling Art Trail last weekend.  It was followed by a meal and social gathering at the large and very welcoming home of one of the organizers of Birds on Bikes.  The invitation to join them was accepted with delight, and as the main course was to be curry, I had no problem deciding what to make to contribute to deserts; there are still jars of my unset marmalade lurking on my top shelf.... 

So in addition to the Lime Marmalade Cheesecake (see No 36), I made this marmalade cake with oranges and lime marmalade.  (Lime so goes with curry.)  This looks like the sort of thing that could easily weld itself to a baking tin, so I hauled out the silicon bakeware.  

(I hate this stuff, it's rubbish for cooking a Christmas cake in, but for cakes that weld to the tin, this turned out to be just the ticket.)   This is a 23cm cake pan.   If you want a deeper cake use a smaller pan.

Upside Down Citrus & Marmalade Cake

Grease the bottom and sides of the cake pan with a heavy layer of unsalted butter.  Sprinkle in 2 tablespoons of demerrara sugar and arrange thinly sliced oranges in there.

Pre-heat the oven at 180 degrees C.

Cream 200 grams of unsalted butter & 200 grams of golden caster sugar until it is the colour of french vanila ice-cream.

Beat in 4 large eggs, 1 at a time with lots of beating in between.

Add the zest and juice of an orange and zest off a lemon, and 3 generous tablespoons of lime marmalade.

More beating.

Fold in 200 grams of self-raising flour and 50 grams of ground almonds.

Dollop the mix on top of the arranged orange slices, swipe your spatula round the top a bit to even it out, and bake it for about half an hour (in your pre-heated oven).

When it has cooled a bit, tip it onto the serving plate and dress the top with 3-4 tablespoons of marmlade.  Your marmalade won't be an unset disaster like mine so you might need to warm it up first to make it runny.

Et voila...

....marmalade cake

Sorry about the pink cake-carrying understorey.  That colour combination was just so 'in-your-face' I had to photograph it like that.

And the astute among you will have noticed that the photgraphs are two different cakes - of course they are; one of them had to come to work to count for the blog.

No 44 - Mati's Scones

I have just been back home in NZ, and my niece Mati has taught me how to make scones her way.  I won't say they are fail proof - I managed to fail a batch last Saturday morning (made the mix a bit wet and they were tasty and moist but a bit in the flat side) - but they are certainly easy and once you get the hang of the consistency to achieve before you bake them, they can beome a quick and easy fresh baking response to unexpected visitors, or bored kids on a wet day....

Mati's Scones

400 grams self-raising flour

300ml cream

300ml lemonade

Mix it together.  Tip it onto a well greased baking tray (or baking sheet), pat it into shape and run a knife through it where you want it divided into scones.  Bake 20 minutes of so in an oven pre-heated to 180 degrees C.

If you are wondering about the round baking dish - it happens to be the 'plastic' dish that some of those oven-ready TV dinners come in (you know the peel off the lid and put it in the oven kind).  They make quite good non-stick baking dishes, keeping the wet scone mix in shape; but it did mean we had triangular scones...  They taste just the same.

Sweet chestnut and chocolate biscotti

I have been out in NZ where it is autumn.  Sweet chestnuts were falling from the trees in the park around where my Mum plays croquet.  Eating chestnuts has never been a tradition with any of the Kiwis that I grew up with and it seems that they have over the years simply been swept up by the road sweeper and the bloke who mows the grass under the trees.

In recent years there has been an influx of itinerant workers from the Far East and they have brought with them some wonderful new food attitudes, including eating sweet chestnuts.  So the chestnuts are collected but it remained a mystery to most of the locals what you might do with a chestnut to make it edible.

So here we go.  I scrounged up a bag of them which amounted to about half a kilogram once boiled and shelled (see below), whizzed them to a damp powder in the blender and proceeded to make this recipe

http://en.julskitchen.com/dessert/chestnut-chocolate-cookies
And Juls presents it so much better than I do so follow the link.  Just one word of warning her recipe uses chestnut flour, what I produced was damp chestnut powder - the texture of the end biscotti was superbe but the mix was too damp to begin with and needed extra flour.  I also added pistachios to my mixture.

To shell sweet chestnuts, cut the shell on their rounded side and either bake them in an oven at 180 degrees C for about 20 minutes, or boil them for about 20 minutes, and then keep them hot while you pull both layers of the shells off.  Much easier to do it you can keep them warm.