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.

Drier / Dehydrater / Dried fruit (bananas in this case)

I got a question today about the drier I mentioned in the last post - see here
(that is a bag of dried bananas beside it ...I slice  them longways so they dry quicker)  I never pass up an over-supply of cheap, ripe fruit which has reached the end of its shelf-life.

This one does not have variable temperature and is supposed to be used for fruit and veg only.  Meat should (in theory) be dried at a slightly higher temperature, but I have dried meat and fish in it very successfully - cut into strips and marinated before drying. 

It is a great bit of kit for preparation for some long distance sailing, and has done very good service over the years.  Even fruit leathers are possible - fruit pulp (sweetened with a bit of pureed banana if needed), gets spread out on freezer paper on the trays - takes a little longer but is just as effective.

Banana Curd

Heard of Lemon Curd?  Well this is the banana variety.  My grandmother used to make this.  It is not a long keeping spread - a few weeks (6-8 say) and preferably in the fridge or cold safe.  New Zealanders eat a lot of bananas - so we have a lot of bananas getting over-ripe from time to time too.

Last week I bought 5 kg of bananas for 50p, put most of them in the drier, and reserved the over-ripe and damaged ones for banana bread.   Somewhere in the middle of a thought process a memory fought its way to the surface and I had to go on a quest .... for an old diary that had the 'other' childhood recipes.  And here it is:

Banana Curd

Set up a double-boiler - basin over a pot of boiling water.

In the basin melt together:
2 oz caster sugar
2 oz butter
juice and zest of half a lemon
juice and zest of quarter an orange
1" stick of cinnamon & 3 cloves (ground)

Add 2 beaten eggs and cook stirring for a couple of minutes
Add 10 mashed bananas, reduce the heat to a simmer and cook for a further 10-15 minutes.

Pot is up in small pre-warmed jars and cover and seal.  You can eat this straight away so have some freshly made bread handy.

No 43 - Cherry Almond Biscuits

Mothering Sunday - while my other half was entertaining 'sa mere et sa soeur' following his maginifient roast pork 'lunch', I took my turn at doing the dishes and turned the kithen to my own use to bake something a little bit special for a meeting at work tomorrow morning.  I needed to hunt out a biscuit recipe that I hadn't made before (for my personal challenge), and I've found this which fits perfectly with my current obsession for recipes with ground almonds.

And this one is really easy.

Cherry Almond Biscuits

200 g butter
90g caster sugar
1/2 tsp almond extract
25g ground almonds
200g self-raising flour
glace cherries

Melt the butter, stir in sugar and essence, sift in the flour and add the ground almonds. Mix the lot to a smooth dough,

then roll teaspoonfuls into balls and space them out on baking sheets (aim for 25-30).  Stick half  cherry on top of each, flattening the ball slightly. 

  Bake 15-20 minutes at 160 degrees C (fan oven)/180 degrees C (conventional).  Leave them 5 minutes on the trays before transferring them to a wire rack.  They are very buttery and will crumble if you move them too soon.

No 42 - Coffee Walnut Biscuits

There is a jar of aging instant coffee taking up space on the shelf above our kettle.  Neither of us drink instant coffee, and the only visitor who does (other half''s mother) insists on a particular brand - which isn't this one.  

Not being one to throw anything away unless it poses serious risk to health or digestion, and never having heard of or eaten a coffee flavoured biscuit, I decided a coffee flavoured biscuit was well over-due.

This week's biscuits (see previous post) seemed rich in chocolate (in particular), dried fruit of all kinds (but with a clear preference for cherries), nuts (for England), but no coffee.  So some research was called for.

It's quite simple really - take a basic biscuit recipe (butter, suggar, egg, flour and leavening, and add coffee - and some walnuts, I reckon, because coffee and walnuts go together like.... well like...coffee and walnuts.)


Coffee Walnut Biscuits

150g butter
100g brown sugar
100g golden caster sugar
1 egg
1 tsp vanilla extract
250g flour
75g chopped walnuts
1/4 tsp each baking powder & bicarb soda
2.5 tablespoons instant coffee dissolved in 1 TB hot water and 1 TB milk

Cream butter and sugars, add egg and beat well.  Sift in dry ingredients and add coffee mix, walnuts, and vanilla.  Roll into balls, space out on a baking sheet,  and flatten with the bottom of a glass dipped in sugar.

Bake at 160 degrees C (fan)/ 170-180 degrees C conventional, for 15 minutes.

A Baking Week

I've just had a week at home (some annual leave to use up, and my available funds committed to a trip home to EnZed in April), so I have spent it getting the allotment ready for Spring, cleaning up a topper dinghy and our old escort van which are both for sale, digging up my front lawn which was pure moss and not a great enhancement to the house, and BAKING.

The allotment hasn't needed any digging, the layer of seaweed suppressed the weeds, and a thick mulch on top of some two year composted stable waste has it looking very loved.  This year's potato bed is deep under straw and the seed spuds are chitting on the kitchen windowsill, where I have been able to watch over them while doing my daily baking.  I dug 7 biscuit recipes off the BBC Good Food website and resolved to make one batch a day.

So here they all are (clockwise from bottom centre)

Custard and White Chocolate Biscuits http://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/2198644/custard-and-white-chocolate-biscuits
A great tasting crisp biscuit, easy to make

Cherry Shortbread Hearts
http://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/1104645/cherry-shortbread-hearts These are a bit of a challenge to make - you need to have a  lot of time to rub butter into flour.  I cheated and cut it in using the food processor.  It was virtually impossible therefore to bring the dough together without some extra wet ingredient (that isn't mentioned in the list of ingredients).  I used a few tablespoons of water.




Almond & Lemon Curd Biscuits
http://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/9839/almond-and-lemon-curd-buttons
A bit of work but well worth it; fabulous biscuits.



Chocolate Chunk Pecan Cookies
http://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/5720/chocolate-chunk-pecan-cookies
I accidentally cut a few corners on the assembly method for this recipe and it turned out to be the easiest (and possibly most luxurious) of this week's biscuits.  Crisp but with a bit of a tendency to crumble (and can be eaten straight from the freezer as my other half will attest).


Pistachio & Cranberry Cookies
http://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/1759655/pistachio-and-cranberry-cookies
Despite the name, this is 'shortbread'.  It is a good shortbread too.  Leave it in the fridge for longer than suggested in the recipe and use a well sharp knife to cut the log.


Gooey Chocolate Cherry Cookies
http://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/9837/gooey-chocolate-cherry-cookies
The name says it all.  This one was voted favorite by a group of the other half's work associates.



Star Anise Biscuits
http://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/10212/star-anise-biscuits
They smell heavenly, - and have delicate flavour.  I made these ones small to have beside that special coffee.

No 41 - German Plum Cake

The inspiration for baking something new often comes (in my kitchen at least) from having something I want to use up before it wastes.  So it was with plums I had bought cheaply and in large quantity a couple of years back.  The answer was Plum Cake, and although I suspect it is meant to be made in a shallow rectangular baking tin, and cut into squares (a 'slice' I suppose), it works well for us like this - particularly if we intend to spoon it out still warm and eat it for pudding with lashings of custard.


The plums are a refreshing tart contrast to sweet cake, and the ground almonds ensure a moist firm texture.

German Plum Cake

150g golden caster sugar
150g butter
3 large eggs
75g sifted plain flour
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
100g ground almonds
75g chopped walnuts
16 plums (depends on size - use 8 of those big ones we get in supermarkets these days)

Cut the plums into quarter and remove the stones.  (I slice the really big plums into smaller pieces than quarters.)

Cream the butter and sugar until it looks like french vanilla ice cream.  Beat the eggs lightly and add them bit by bit to the creamed buter/sugar mixture and beat in well.

Sift in the flour and baking powder and fold it in with a metal spoon.  Fold in the ground almonds and walnuts chopped to about pea-sized pieces.

Spread the mixture into your chosen baking tin (well greased beforehand of course), and throw the plum pieces on top.  The mixture rises up through the plums as it cooks.

Bake 40-45 minutes at 170-180 degrees C (depending on fan or conventional oven).

PS. I also put a dash of vanilla in the mix

No. 40 - Belgian Biscuits

These are probably no more Belgian than I am.  They seem to be an Australian and New Zealand thing, however in texture and with all their spices they are not unlike a lot of the biscuits that abound in Northern European countries.

By traditional they are round with serrated edges, iced with white and sprinkled with raspberry flavoured jelly crystals.  Jelly crystals are a bit hard to find here, where I note that jelly seems to be made from blocks of concentrated jelly rather than gelatine in granular form. 

They were a treat to make as a child; being allowed to spread one with jam and find another exactly the right size and shape to sandwich onto it, carefully swipe on a circle of white icing and decorate with a pinch of the jelly crystals.  The good thing about jelly crystals is the burst of intense flavour that they add.  Pink sugar provides the look, but it really lacks the zing.

This week I made them heat-shaped a.) because I’ve got heart-shaped biscuit cutters, and b.) because it’s St. Valentine’s Day on Thursday.

Belgian Biscuits

1 1/2 cups brown sugar

250g butter, softened

1 egg

2 1/2 teaspoons mixed spice

1 1/2 teaspoons cinnamon

2 3/4 cups plain flour

1 tablespoon baking powder

1 Tb cocoa

Raspberry jam, white icing, and pink sugar or jelly crystals

Cream the butter and suggar, add the egg and beat well.... I read a version that goes - throw the softened butter, the sugar and the egg in the blender..... it seems to work equally well so do that.  Then sift in the dry ingredients and pulse until you have a dough-ball.

Tip it onto your bench with some sprinkled flour and squash it about a bit to make it all stick together, cut it into two, wrap the pieces in plastic film and refrigerate them for half an hour or so.

Pre-heat the oven to 170 degrees C (fan oven) - 180 degrees C conventional and prepare two or three baking sheets.

Roll out the dough to about 5mm thick, cut it with a biscuit cutter and slide the biscuits onto baking sheet.  Bake 15-20 minutes and cool them on a rack. 

Stick the biscuits together with raspberry jam.  Ice them with white icing and sprinkle with pink crystals.

You can make pink sugar with 1/4 cup of granulated sugar, and a couple of drops of red food colouring - mixed well.

Saturday was wet and snowy and I spent the day out cutting birch off some common land with the Hampshire Conservation Volunteers;  a great day out despite the weather, a magnificent bonfire, and a piece of birch to take home for my wood-carving class, where I plan to make a kuksa (and possibly some wooden spoons for my kitchen).  Anyway as a result the baking was left until the last minute on Sunday and I was too rushed (and too lazy truth be known) to do some fancy flood icing on my themed biscuits.  Maybe I’ll save that for next year….but I doubt it.  They are not for sale and they’ll be consumed in an instant whether swiped or flooded with icing – so swiped it is.  They did however get royal icing because I’m a convert to its superior properties.