Miscellaneous baking

Part of Dorie Greenspans towering tiramisu torte. Part, not the whole, because grabbing a camera in the jubilation of baking my first frosted layer cake was very low on my list of priorities. Tender sponge, brushed with strong espresso syrup, sandwiched with lashings of shaved chocolate and mascarpone filling and frosted with espresso-mascarpone fluff clouds. Clouds taste like this in heaven.

From the ethereal to the decadently dark and delightful. I would go to hell in a heartbeat for a pan of these French chocolate brownies...Dorie Greenspan again.

And lastly, Nigellas almond-orange cake with a bar of Green and Blacks Maya gold grated over it. Yes, girl must have chocolate always.

Apple spice caramel cake

Sometimes nature gives you something so perfect, like flowers in apples, that you stand and stare, knowing you cannot improve on perfection. But sometimes, Australian Gourmet Traveller gives you something so much more perfect, like apple spice caramel cake, that you cut into said apple, go "hmm" at flowers-in-apple, take a picture for posterity and promptly layer apple slices over a layer of seething caramel, to form the base of this beautiful, fall inspired cake.

The recipe calls for a layer of caramel swooshed around the bottom of a spring form pan, apple slices layered over the top and the lovely brown-butter batter poured over the top. In theory, this is supposed to be an upside down cake, in practice, I forgot to line the tin and the caramel stuck to the base, so this was very much a downside down cake.

The recipe calls for a caramel sauce to go with the cake, which I took great delight in making and eating copious quantities of. Such a gorgeous confection it was, amber and glistening, sweet, with that deep butterscotch flavour shining through.

Chocolate crunched caramel tart

One of the most decadent tarts I have ever eaten, crumbly almost-shortbread pastry base, caramel with honey roasted peanuts stirred through it and a soft pillow like layer of chocolate ganache. Quite as much fun to make as to eat, whizzing all the pastry ingredients together in the food processor, pressing the dough into a tart pan, freezing and then baking till golden brown, making chocolate ganache and watching the alchemy of cream and chocolate come together to form this delightfully voluptous concoction and caramel, sweet caramel (quite literally)! Dorie Greenspan, another hole-in-one for you!

Caramel, with the pre-baked tart base in the background

The tart - assembled and ready to go!

The tart - gone.

What I have been cooking/baking..

Or "I am too darn lazy to write a whole post, so I will flood you with pictures instead."

Spud watching my rosemary bread dough rise

Pasketti Bolognese - yes, that's what I call it

Butter chicken - how I love thee

Ina Garten's wonderful moist lemon-yoghurt anything cake (recipe here)

Rosemary remembrance cake - for m and deborah

Please see here for recipe.

Sorry this has taken me so long, been having horrible technical issues with Blogger!!

Chocolate cuties!

Were these dark? Yes.

Delicious? YESYESYES.

Chocolatey? *swoon*

The darling boy bought me Dorie Greenspan's wonderful book 'Baking from my home to yours' off Amazon, for strangely enough, no antipodean bookstores appear to stock this tome of sweet delights. It arrived yesterday, tucked neatly into a brown box, heavy and glossy in my hands.

I opened it with many squeals of joys, spent a while leafing through the book and mental 'must-bake-NOW' notes and then sent the boy off to the shop, to buy flour, raw sugar and sour cream, essential cake ingredients.

I decided to bake these lovely chocolate cupcakes with ganache frosting because I love the cuteness of mini-proportioned cakes with sugar decorations and edible glitter and because Dorie's description was irresistible. These cupcakes were everything she promised, and more. Deep, dense and fudgy with a tight crumb and decadent not-too-sweet icing.

One proviso, use the best chocolate you can find for these, it's taste really will shine through. I used Lindt Ecuador 70% piccolos.

Rosemary remembrance cake

A beautiful cake from Nigella Lawsons' book 'Feast', a subtly scented rosemary butter cake, made soft and sweet with stewed apple in the cake batter. A large sprig of rosemary pressed into the middle of the cake leaves a scented trail down the middle of the cake, adding zest to every bite.

A beautiful cake, but a sad cake this is, from the funeral section of the book. I made this cake in memory of a beloved teacher, as fragrant, full of life and sweet as this butter yellow loaf.

Banana bread

It has been a while I know, too long. Too long have I neglected oven and hearth, ignoring the joys of cupcake liners in neat rows, batter encrusted spatula and the gentle oven firm of a cake that is done just right. Too long.

The reasons for my absence are manifold, new job, new dog and new oven! The new oven was the worst, lying to me, turning cakes a deep golden on top while inside, raw batter lurked, only making an appearance when I turned the cakes out of their tins. One too many times of this, and I stopped baking, declaring "I'm a horrible baker, no more."

The draw of the oven, overripe bananas and 70% Lindt Ecuador piccolos proved too strong though, so yesterday, I pulled out my mixing bowls and spoons and baked one of our old favourites, Tessa Kiros's banana bread. As always, I added chocolate chunks to the batter and macadamia nuts, simply because I had some sitting in the fridge and everyone knows macadamias + chocolate = heaven.

Before and after

The boy and I have just moved into a house with several fruit trees in the backyard and several trees bending under the weight of swollen purple figs, means several hours spend scratching our heads as to what to with the fruit. Cake? Jam? Fig paste? Take some to work? Give some away to friends? Dehydrate them?

We decided to do the latter with one large lot of figs this weekend and now have a large plastic jar full of dried figs to use in cakes, bread loaves, cookies and tagines!

Nigella's Chocolate chilli cinnamon pudding

The Pinkeagle acknowledges that this looks a little like a cowpat with a serving of cream on the side (appropriate no?), but equally she, beseeches you to try this recipe, for in the interests of all things holy, this is THE BEST CHOCOLATE PUDDING she has ever eaten!

Dark, luscious, melting, sweetly spiced with cinnamon and the faintest hint of chilli, this pudding has been a winner with everyone who has tried it, including people who claimed they were too full to eat another bite, and then went on to eat large bowlfuls of it.

I serve it with vanilla icecream everytime I make this, cream would work just as well, but I rather like the cold sweetness of the icecream melting into little puddles against deep cocoay brown.

Ingredients:

Butter for greasing
150 gm flour
2 tsps baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1 tsp cinnamon
1/4 tsp chilli powder
50 gm cocoa powder (the best quality cocoa you can afford)
200 gm castor sugar
125 ml milk
1 tsp vanilla extract
60 ml corn oil
100 gm brown sugar
175 ml boiling water
60 ml dark rum

Preheat oven to 180' C and grease a 23 cm round baking dish.

Combine flour, baking powder, baking soda, castor sugar, half the cocoa, cinnamon, chilli and a pinch of salt. Beat milk, vanilla and corn oil together. Pour into dry ingredients and mix.

Combine remaining 25 gms of cocoa and 100 gm brown sugar in a bowl, making sure there are no lumps. Sprinkle over the top. Pour rum and boiling water over the pudding and bake for 30 minutes until the top has set into a bubbly sponge and the underneath is gooey and liquidy.

Veggie pesto lasagna

Or what was once veggie lasagna before being demolished by a very hungry person with a very greedy dog watching over her hopefully.

Pesto lasagna is not usually my thing, I almost always cook up a big batch of red sauce with meat and pureed veggies and layer with lasagna sheets and rather a lot of shredded cheese. However, the generous gift of an entire basil plant last weekend was turned into two large jars of pesto, so in the interests of not-wasting-summer-bounty I decided to make a large veggie lasagna.

I have no recipe for this lasagna, I never do, for stews/curries or pastas.

I layered lasagna sheets brushed with generous amounts of pesto with shredded mozzarella, pre-roasted shreds of succulent red and orange peppers, large slices of pumpkin and sweet potato as well as raw mushroom, tomato and zucchini slices. Sprinkled generous amounts of oregano over the baking dish, and poured some pureed tomatoes over the lot, for extra moistness.

Baked for about an hour at 180' C until a skewer slid through easily, with no crunchy resistance. Served with bitter greens.

5 quarters of an orange

One of my favourite Joanne Harris books, and otherwise, one of the boys new-favourite cakes. He pops up with these all the time, "I really love pineapple upside down cake/orange cake/ Oompa Loompa magic mush (yes, I made the last one up) can you please make some for me this weekend!

Always an adventure it is, to look through batter spattered pages of old favourites and walk out of the library with bulging bags of books and then spend hours hunting for the perfect recipe and tweaking it to match what the boy wants.

This time, he wanted fluffy orange tea cake, like the one they sell at Queen Vic market. Only, less artifically orange.

I turned to a Womans Weekly 'Old Fashioned favourites' recipe book I borrowed a few weeks ago, because I remembered seeing a relatively simple orange cake in there. Mixed and creamed and grated orange peel into the batter, baked it for 55 minutes, until fluffy and yellow.

Let cool and then iced it with a mixture of icing sugar, orange juice and a few drops of orange blossom water.

The orange blossom water added a touch of the exotic to an otherwise rather staid Australian cake and brought to mind whiffs of burnt umber under burning sun with every delicately floral scented bite!

Berry cheesecake

This recipe is a firm favourite in the Pinkeagle household! Such firm a favourite that I had the husband and the dog walking around behind me hopefully, as I carried the cheesecake from oven, to fridge, to counter and then back to fridge, dressed with it's crown of crimson sweetness.

Not a crumb did I drop, much to their chagrin. I baked this cake for a friends birthday, a few weeks ago admittedly. This blog has been sadly neglected, what with moving, and then new, tiring puppy and new, tiring job! Things-I-love tend to take a backseat when it comes to things-I-must-do, such as work and pay rent and clean up puppy puddles.

No more though, life is joy and life is for living, and what can be more alive than a gorgeously tender-bellied cheesecake, swollen with zesty berries and the tang of cream cheese?!