No 13 - Citrus Muffins

Citrus Muffins

Mum sent this recipe over a couple of years ago.  I’ve no idea where she got it from but it amused me because her enthusiasm for it indicates she must have finally got herself a food processor.

She apparently makes lemon ones.  I haven’t tried lemon yet but the orange, tangerine or mandarin ones are fabulous – fabulously easy, fabulously moist and tasty.  Rare for a muffin recipe, these are still moist and palatable on the second day after they were made, but there are seldom any left at the end of day one.

200g citrus (skin and all)

1 c sugar

 Blend these together in the food processor.

Add

1 large egg

½ cup of milk and blend thoroughly.

Sift together 1½ cups flour

1 tsp baking powder

1 tsp baking soda and gently pulse these dry ingredients into the wet mix until just mixed.

Lastly mix in 100g melted butter

Bake in well greased muffin pans (12 standard size) or cupcake papers,  20 minutes at 170 -180C.

Citrus Muffins

No 12 - Carrot Cake

Carrot Cake

Carrot Cake – it’s a coffee shop staple isn’t it?  I can remember carrot cake appearing on the radar in my early teens.  Carrots?!  In a cake?! That’s mad!  Looking back, what was in fact mad was that as soaked in butter as we were we’d had no experiences of cooking with oil (for anything).  The choice of oil wasn’t great and I suspect we used some really ropey ones.  I do recall those early carrot cakes being greasy;  moist, but oozing oil, - and greasy.

And cream cheese icing – what a revelation that was.  Carrot cake was possible an epiphany in my life, the point that sparked my interest in a world of food and cooking.

I think this particular carrot cake recipe came form one of those websites that advocates and provides suggestions for using up left-overs.  The idea is admirable and I subscribe to it whole-heartedly but am I alone in finding the suggestions regularly verge on daft?  Who has left-over cooked carrots?  We all know how much the family will eat, especially of such standard everyday vegetables as carrots.

Having said that it is easy to cook extra with a carrot cake in mind (but that isn’t using up left-overs is it?).  What is genuinely crazy is the notion that there’s a stray pineapple just lurking around because no one knows what to do with it.  Eat it.  Eat the thing.  Pineapple isn’t that common that we’d kick one aside in favour of a plate of kale, or a cheese sandwich.

My paternal grandfather was a grocer during WWII.  My father and his two brothers were young lads.  One of the advantages of living at the grocer’s shop was that you stood a better chance than most of getting your hands on something exotic and/or rationed from time to time.  For the boys, when asked what they wanted for a birthday the answer was simple – a pineapple.  They knew they’d have to share it with absolutely everyone if said pineapple could be sourced, and it meant forgoing any other gift, but that was it, the pinnacle of having it all; a single pineapple.

On top of that there are absolutely no criteria by which this cake might be regarded as a frugal on ingredients.  It is however a really great cake so gather up your left-over cooked carrots and that spare pineapple which just happens to have over-lingered in your fruit bowl and make this cake.

Carrot Cake

225g self-raising flour

½ tsp cinnamon

½ tsp baking soda

4 eggs

225g soft brown sugar

½ tsp vanilla essence

100g cooked mashed carrot

75g over-ripe pineapple (puréed)

75g chopped walnuts

75g desiccated coconut

125ml sunflower oil

Beat eggs and sugar together until fluffy, add oil, carrots, pineapple, essences, walnuts and coconut. Pour the wet ingredients into the sifted dry ingredients and mix.  Pour into greased, lined 8” spring-form tin.  Bake 45 -50 minutes in moderate oven (170C to 180C)

Cool in the tin and ice with

75g cream cheese

175g icing sugar

Vanilla or lemon essence.

That photo in the “Mr B’s cake decorating class” (below) is a double recipe made in a big gugelhuf mould; the hole is stuffed full of chocolate brazil nuts and the décor is exactly what it appears to be.  He made it for his daughter – and it definitely wouldn’t pass the motorbike ride test.

No 17 - Ginger Cake

Ginger Cake

Sunday this week was spent in a classroom.  I’d planned this some weeks ago so I knew that I had to do my baking on Saturday night if I was doing any this week.  It also meant the poor cake was going to be dragged about in a box in my backpack on Sunday which potentially was not going to do it any favours.  It was going to have to be a fairly solid cake and I decided on a Ginger cake.  This recipe came off the internet a few years back after a colleague had complained that my cakes inevitably had either fruit or chocolate – neither of which she was prepared to eat – and why didn’t I make a nice ginger cake instead.

So I did, and I used this recipe, and it was voted a great cake and it was only in sharing the recipe that I realized that I’d left out the leavening.  I never have self-raising flour about as very few of my recipes require it so I just make up my own.  On that occasion I’d forgotten to add leavening and only realized when I was copying the recipe out.  Oops!  Still no one noticed and the cake was voted pretty damned good actually.

Ginger Cake

225g (8 oz)self-raising flour

175g (6 oz) butter

175g (6 oz) caster sugar

4-6 pieces preserved stem ginger in syrup, chopped

3 large eggs

2 TB ginger syrup (from the jar)

2 Tb milk

1 TB black syrup (treacle)

1 Tb ground almonds

1 tsp ground ginger

1 tsp grated fresh ginger

Pre-heat oven to 170C.

Grease and line a 15 x 25 cm tin (6" x 10")

Cream butter and sugar, add beaten eggs with a little flour.  Fold in the ginger syrup and black syrup.  Gradually add sifted flour and ground ginger.

Fold in the almonds, milk, and grated and chopped ginger.

Bake 40-45 mins.

Suggestion - iced with lemon icing.

Saturday’s ginger cake was a complete disappointment.  I remembered the leavening........ and it came out of the oven collapsed in the middle.  That never happens to me.  Ok it has happened to me once before and it was, now let me see, oh yes it was a ginger cake!  (Different recipe.)  In a phone call home I mentioned to my Mum how disappointed I was with this cake and she remarked that she never makes ginger cake because they always collapsed in the middle.  Now that is strange – either we have a genetic predisposition to messing up ginger cake, or ginger has a weird effect on cake.   I’ve got the answer of course – use a baking tin with a hole in the middle.

Here is another ginger cake recipe I have used.  Apart from the middle being slightly lower than the edges (my first ginger cake ‘disaster’)  it was exactly as described, crisp on top, beautifully light, moist and delicately gingery.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2003/nov/23/foodanddrink.shopping

No 10 - Ngaire Clarke's Easy Fruit Cake

Ngaire Clarke’s Easy Fruit Cake

Ngaire (or her husband) was some distant cousin of my maternal grandmother.  When I left home aged 16 and started work in the NZ Forest Service, Ngaire and Roy were people I could call on in the nearest town to our forestry camp.  Roy regaled me with takes of his days as an engineer working on hydro-electric dam construction and Ngaire fed me tea and cake.

This one is a beauty, best eaten really fresh.  Loved, it was recently adopted by one of my French colleagues who tells me that the  French don’t have a tradition of heavy fruit cakes, but that she would tell her family this was an English Xmas cake and they’d love it too.

‘Shame to mislead them like that but if an essentially English style cake makes a hit in France, then “good ol’ Ngaire” I say.

Easy Fruit Cake

1 lb (450-500 gms) mixed dried fruit
8 oz (225 gms)butter
3 eggs
1.5 cups sugar
2 cups flour
2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp each of mixed spicve and cinnamon

Prepare a 9 inch (23cm) cake baking tin.

Boil 1 lb of mixed dried fruit in enough water to cover for 15 minutes.

Drain and chop in 8 oz butter

Beat together 3 eggs and 1 1/2 cups  sugar until fluffy.

Add the egg mix to the fruit with 2 cups flour,  2 tsp Baking Powder, 1 tsp ground mixed spice and 1 tsp cinnamon.

Bake at 170C (160C fan oven) for 1.25 to 1.5 hours  (9" tin)

Toasted Mueslei

Tigger asked that I post more recipes that use honey.  His bees have started whizzing about the place again and in a couple of months he will be contacting all his friends and customers (or posting on his blog) to try and sell the next batch of honey.

Toasted Mueslei

5 cups of rolled oats (I use the jumbo rolled oats)

1 cup desiccated coconut

1 cup wheat germ  (wheat germ isn’t always available in my local shops so I substitute a cup of hulled sunflower seeds)

1 cup skimmed milk powder

1 cup of chopped nuts

½ cup honey

½ cup good cooking oil

Mix all the dry ingredients together in a large flat roasting pan.  Heat the honey and oil gently, pour it over the dry ingredients and mix it all really (REALLY) well.  Toast it at about 125C until it is golden.  You will need to stir around two or three times during the toasting process. 

At the end add  1 cup raisins / sultanas / currants.  Store in an airtight jar.

The original recipe had a cup of oil and a cup of honey.  I found this to be overpowering but you might like your mueslei really sweet and stuck together like clusters, so vary that according to your own taste.

You can also add things like linseed, sesame seed, chopped dried fruit etc according to your taste.

No 11 - Mum's Christmas Cake

Xmas Cake

Christmas cake always gets made in August or September and put away to mature for Christmas.  When I left home I got 2 recipes off my mother and will reproduce both here.  I prefer the Easy Xmas Cake recipe, but this year, for the first time, I made the Pineapple one.  I may have undercooked it slightly but it had passed the skewer test.  On cutting it at Christmas it seemed a bit more moist than I’d want a Xmas fruit cake to be.  That would be the pineapple.  It didn’t last long at work so clearly they didn’t mind moist.

I bake in a fan oven, bought new when we moved in here a couple of years ago.  However despite the expense of a top name and an A+ energy rating etc., the annoying thing doesn’t cook evenly; it burns one side and a back corner.  So I decided that no fan was going to dry my Xmas Cake out and went for top and bottom elements for an hour then bottom only for the rest of the cooking.  That might be the cause of the undercooking, but as I say, if you like your cakes moist……

Pineapple Xmas Cake

8 oz butter
8 ox brown sugar
6 eggs
12 oz flour
1 tsp mixed spice
1/2 tsp grated nutmeg
1 dsp glycerine
3 lb mixed fruit
1 small tin of crushed pineapple (440 grams), drained
Essences as desired

Boil the fruit and pineapple in water to cover for 10 minutes, drain, add glycerine and cool.

Prepare a 9" deep baking tin - we traditionally line the bottom and sides with heavy brown paper and make sure the paper comes well above the sides of the tin.

Cream butter and sugar, add eggs one at a time, add dry ingredients and fruit.

Level it out in the baking tin and bake for 3-3.5 hours at 165C for the first hour and then at 130C for the rest.


Easy Christmas Cake

Put 3 lb mixed dried fruit in a pot with
8 oz brown sugar,
8 oz butter,
1 Tb glycerine and
1 cup water. 
Boil 10 minutes and leave to cool.

Separate 4 eggs and beat the white and yolk separately.  Add the beaten egg components time about with

1 lb flour
1 tsp Baking Soda
2 tsp pMixed Spice

Bake in a lined 9" deep tin in a slow oven (about 130C) for 3.5 hours

No 9 - Louise Cake

Something of a misnomer as it’s more a square than cake, but the base is a ‘short-cake’ consistency and the topping easy to assemble.  Known as ‘lousy-cake’ by my family, the sweet meringue and coconut topping sets it apart from other hard-iced squares.  Now that I work with Louise I have dropped the ‘lousy’ and the cake didn’t last long at work.  Back home, the shearers never sent any back from morning and afternoon teas either.  I believe it came out of a Journal of Agriculture cookbook (NZ) in the 1960’s.

Louise Cake

5 oz butter

2 oz sugar

2 egg yolks

10 oz flour

1 tsp Baking Powder

Cream butter and sugar, beat in egg yolks, add sifted flour and leavening.  Roll the paste out 1/3" thick on a teflon baking sheet, top with raspberry jam and cover with meringue and bake on a moderate oven for 20-25 minutes.  Cut into squares.

Meringue

2 egg whites

4 oz sugar

2 oz desicated coconut.

Whip egg whites until stiff, then fold in coconut and sugar.

No 8 - Ginger Crunch

Ginger Crunch

I’ve always associated this square with my father.  I seem to recall that when I was child he called it his favourite.  (He did like ginger and I’ve certainly inherited that from him.)  It might just have been the encouragement a father gives to a child proudly presenting their newly baked offering.  And certainly this is easy enough for a child to make.  I love the contrast of the hard crunchy base and the smooth sweet gingery top.

Have the topping ready for when the base comes of out of the oven and cut it while it’s still warm.  Cold, it will shatter and fall to pieces under knife.  (it definitely passes the motorbike test.)

Ginger Crunch

4 oz butter

4 oz sugar

7 oz flour

1 tsp Baking Powder

1 tsp Ginger

(2 oz chopped preserved ginger)

‘Mix in the usual way’ -  Cream butter and sugar, add the preserved ginger (if using) sift in dry ingredients.  Press the mix into a sponge roll tin, bake at 180^o C for 20-25 minutes.

Topping: Melt together  2 tablespoons of butter, 4 tablespoons icing sugar, 2 tablespoons of golden syrup,  1 tsp ground ginger.

Pour this over the warm base.  Cut while warm.

No 4

Chocolate Cherry Cake

I have to be prepared to publish my disasters - don't I?

We moved house nearly 3 years ago right on top of my partner’s birthday.  Lots of housewarming morning teas coincided with a need for  birthday cake.  So I made a chocolate cherry brownie.  It was dark, moist, heavy, rich, smooth on the palate with beautiful glacé cherries throughout.

Do you think I can find that recipe?  I cannot.  I even tidied up my recipe folder, filed things, stuck slips of paper and recipes scribbled on cardboard packaging etc into the correct categories, but no chocolate cherry brownie.  I vaguely recalled condensed milk.....

I pulled a chocolate/cherry brownie recipe off he internet.  It described itself as brownie.  It was cake.  Cake pure and simple.  (Brownie fans will know what I mean.)  It was light, relatively dry, disappointing; so disappointing I have scrapped all record of it – sent it packing to look for the real thing....’and don’t come back until you’re bringing it with you!...’ and won’t be reproducing it here.

Chocolate cake recipes abound and virtually all have more to recommend them (even as cake) than that one.

No 5 - Lemon Biscuits

Lemon Biscuits

Drawing up my list of things to bake, I realized that I had nothing flavoured lemon; quite remarkable really as despite an extensive veg garden when growing up, we grew no fruit except a lemon tree.  There was an ancient pear tree in the orchard of the ‘old house’ on our farm (the house by then a grain store and tractor shed), whose pears were sparse and hard, but no apples, no plums, none of the fruit trees which could easily have graced our growing space. 

I suspect the lemon tree was more a gardening challenge than an enjoyment or culinary necessity.  We must have been beyond the southern limit of where they happily thrive and I don’t recall its lemons making it into anything other than the ginger beer.

So my recipe book had nothing lemon, but I was sure there must be such things a lemon biscuits; so I resorted to the internet.

I chose this one: http://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/267608/lemon-biscuits

It seemed a bit odd that it had no leavening and only 2 egg yolks.  The biscuits were a bit ‘lemon shortbread-ish’ but of all the things I’ve produced for work (I’m up to 17 in this challenge but have been baking for these cake-testers for years), this is the one that has had the most repeat requests.

I’ve also subsequently tried it with 1 egg instead of 2 yolks; it doesn’t work well so find another use for the whites and stick to 2 yolks.