Sugar High Friday - Spice Up Your Life - Spicy Banana Cake; Yum-Yum Award

Pastrygirl of Dessert First is hosting Sugar High Friday (created by The Domestic Goddess) for October, with a theme of Spice Up Your Life. It's simple - make a sweet dish containing one or as many spices as you like.

I had quite a few overripe bananas living in my fruit bowl, so I wanted to incorporate them into my recipe. A quick Google search brought me to this recipe for Spicy Banana Cake - perfect! It contains cinnamon and cloves, along with bananas, raisins and nuts. I used a combination of hazelnuts and walnuts instead of pecans, because I had some that needed using up.

Here is a photograph of my finished cake, which I baked in a 9 inch springform pan instead of a 10 inch tube pan:

This is a wonderful, moist and huge cake! (The strange looking bit on one side is where a clump of banana rose to the top.) I don't like a heavy banana flavour, but this was not overwhelmingly banana-flavoured. The bananas and the raisins made the cake moist, and the nuts added a fantastic texture.

To spice up my life a little more, I added cinnamon to the water icing that I iced the cake with. Here is a slice of the cake (displayed on a plate instead of a napkin for a change!):

Mmm, mmm - don't you love the chunkiness and texture? I would gladly make this again (if I weren't so buy making new recipes all the time).

Don't forget to watch out for the roundup of recipes to spice up your life on Pastrygirl's site after the end of October.

In the meantime, I have been cross-stitching again, and made another baby album banner, this time for my work colleague Matt and his wife:

This teddy bear pattern came from p38 of the October 2008 edition of Cross Stitch Crazy.

Finally, my blogging pal Ivy from Kopiaste has awarded me the Yum-Yum Award:

Thanks Ivy!

There don't appear to be any rules attached to this award, so I will pass it on to the following people, whose blogs I find "yum-yum":


Tammy of Wee Treats by Tammy

Susan of Food.Baby

Arfi of Homemades

The Caked Crusader

Swati of Swati's Sugarcraft

Rosie of Rosie Bakes a Peace of Cake

Do visit these blogs if you haven't already - they all have great photos and recipes to enjoy.

Daring Bakers - Pizza

When the moon hits your eye
Like a big pizza pie
That's amore

Jack Brooks

This month's Daring Bakers challenge is pizza, chosen by our host, Rosa, of Rosa's Yummy Yums, in honour of Sher, who was to be her co-host with Glenna before tragedy struck.

The challenge was to make our own pizza dough using Peter Reinhart's recipe, and to attempt to toss it to make the base for a pizza. You can find the recipe for the dough on Rosa's site. I had never made pizza before, let alone tried to toss the pizza dough, so this month's challenge was once again a learning exercise for me.

The recipe made enough for 6 small pizza bases. I made two pizzas and stored the rest for a rainy day.




I did try the tossing method to make the bases:





but unfortunately it did not quite turn out as planned:




Not being the patient sort, I then turned to the rolling pin to flatten out the bases.

My first pizza was an Aussie classic - the Hawaiian, with tomato paste as the sauce, topped with shredded ham, pineapple pieces and grated cheese:



The second pizza that I made was a tandoori chicken pizza, with a mango chutney and yoghurt sauce, topped with caramelised onion, chicken strips marinated in yoghurt and tandoori curry paste then cooked with the onion in a frypan, zucchini strips, capsicum strips and grated cheese:

Both pizzas were delicious, but my favourite was the Hawaiian. (There are critics who say that pineapple on a pizza is just wrong - they don't know what they're missing!!)

I subsequently made a beetroot and pumpkin pizza, using yoghurt and mango chutney sauce, cubed baby beets, cubed roasted pumpkin and fresh coriander:

Thanks to Rosa for hosting this month's challenge. You can check out all the other great pizza topping combinations, and have a laugh at everyone's attempts at tossing the dough, here.

TWD - Trick or Chocolate-Chocolate Cupcakes

This week's Tuesday with Dorie is hosted by Clara of I Heart Food4Thought, who has chosen Dorie's chocolate-chocolate cupcakes and encouraged us to dress them up for Halloween.


Here are the cupcakes pre-decorating:

I really liked these, because they were chocolatey without being OTT, rich, "I contain a family block of chocolate" flavour. There was only 150g of chocolate in the whole batch, including the frosting. I made my cupcakes as patty cakes (half way between a muffin and a mini muffin) so that I had enough to go around the troops.

Halloween is not an event that is traditionally celebrated in Oz, although I am informed that children now do go trick or treating. However, I wanted to join in the fun, so I coloured some ready rolled fondant orange using gel colours, and cut out Halloween shapes using the mint-condition cutters that I bought with grand (but unrealised) intentions last year. The features were drawn on using a food colouring pen.

Thanks to Clara for hosting TWD this week . You will find the recipe at her site. To see other interpretations of these cupcakes, please visit the TWD blogroll.

Oh my, Apple Pie - Sweet Pies Event

My friend Ivy at Kopiaste is hosting a Sweet Pies Event - all you have to do is make a sweet pie and post about it during October. So come on all you budding "Waitresses" out there - bake a pie and join the fun, and you will be entered into the draw to win some Tupperware.

A little while ago, some people that I met at a professional dinner introduced me to the Britain's Best Dish website. One of the dishes featured on the site and in the TV show that it accompanies is a Traditional Apple Pie, which along with Apple Crump, was the most popular dish on the site last year (although neither of them won the prize as Britains's Best Dish). Having already tackled the apple crump (although not a fan - too sugary and buttery for me!), I decided that the apple pie would be perfect for Ivy's event. You can find the recipe for this Traditional Apple Pie here.

This apple pie is not like my Mom used to make, because it uses lard in the pastry. This sounds rather gross, but I am willing to give things a go, and it tasted OK. Lard is not commonly used in Australian pastries, although old cookbooks suggest that it may once have been, and lard is certainly not easy to buy. However, in the spirit of adventure and compromise, I used Supafry as a lard substitute, as it is, after all, tallow (that is, clarified beef fat), and lard is rendered pork fat. One important difference that I noticed between the pastry in this apple pie and my usual pastry is that it was much crisper - perhaps this is attributable to using half butter, half animal fat in the pastry?

Although I didn't realise until I started, some of the directions in the recipe are quite vague. For example, it says to peel, core and chop the apples, but not how finely to chop them. I just used my you-beaut gadget to core and cut each apple into eighths in one go, which seemed to be fine enough for the purposes of this pie. The recipe also says to cook the apple with sugar and lemon juice "to taste". Unfortunately, if you taste the apples too much, you'd have none left for the pie. For the record, I used two tablespoons of lemon juice and a third of a cup of sugar, which made my tart Granny Smith apples quite sweet. Where the recipe says to dot the pastry with extra margarine when making the lid of the pie (without saying how much extra margarine), I totally ignored it, as there was enough fat in there already, and it didn't seem to affect the final outcome.

While the recipe calls for quince marmalade with which to cook the apples, I used good ol' orange marmalade, which did the job nicely. I also used butter instead of margarine. Finally, there was no way I was leaving a carton of milk on the bench for two to three days to create sour milk - the potential health issues are mind-boggling. Instead, I used buttermilk, which I thought may be a fair substitute, given that you can "fake" buttermilk by adding lemon juice to ordinary milk, which sounds pretty sour to me.

Despite its odd ingredients, I really liked this apple pie - it beats the commercial ones hands down, and I liked the unusual crispness of the crust (even though I have divorce myself somewhat from the fact that it contains animal fat).

Don't forget to check Ivy's site in early November for the Sweet Pies roundup - thanks for hosting Ivy!

Two birthdays - Primavera cake and chocolate mud cake

It was a busy week for birthdays in our office last week - which meant there was a lot of baking, but not much blogging, at my end. We had two birthday boys to follow up Sue - there was Luke on Wednesday and Lee on Thursday. Because I am seconded two days a week, I made both cakes for Wednesday so that no-one misses out (and nor do I ;)).

The cake pictured at the top of this post is the Primavera - genoise filled with pastry cream, soaked with rum and topped with fruit, and finally glazed with apricot jam. I chose this cake for Lee because it is not only beautiful, but low fat (although apparently Lee has given up the dietary concerns). I was a little heavy-handed with the rum, so it was stronger than I expected (and blew poor non-drinking Valar away!), but was still a very nice cake.

It's a bit fussy to make, but visually is worth it. You could easily skip the alcohol with no ill effects (it may even improve the taste, depening on what your preference is). The recipe, from Alice Medrich's Chocolate and the Art of Low Fat Desserts, is as follows:

Genoise

2 1/2 tabelspoons butter
1 cup sifted cake flour
1/2 cup + 2 tablespoons sugar
3 eggs
2 egg whites
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Pastry cream

3 tablespoons sugar
4 teaspoons plain flour
4 teaspoons cornflour
1 egg
1 egg yolk
1 cup skim milk
3/4 teaspoon vanilla extract

To finish

6 tablespoons rum (or in my case, a little more)
2 cups berries or sliced soft fruits (eg kiwi fruit, mango)
1/2 cup strained apricot jam

To make the genoise:

Preheat the oven to 180 degrees Celsius, and grease and line a 9 inch cake tin.

Melt the butter in a sacuepan and simmer until the sizzling subsides and the butter turns golden brown, and strain the mixture through a paper-towel lined strainer, and keep the mixture hot until needed. (For the record, I used olive oil spread instead of butter and I didn't strain it.)

Mix the sifted flour with the 2 tablespoons of sugar and set aside.

In a heatproof mixing bowl, whisk the eggs, egg whites and 1/2 cup of sugar together, then place the bowl over a saucepan full of simmering water on the stovetop and heat until the mixture is lukewarm. Remove the warm eggs from the heat, then beat with an electric mixer at high speed until the mixture cools, lightens and triples in volume. While this is happening, reheat the melted butter to ensure it is hot and stir the vanilla extract through it.

Sift one third of the flour over the egg mixture, and fold it through with a rubber spatula. Next, fold through half the remaining flour, and then the remainder of the flour. Put one cup of batter into a large bowl into which the melted butter has been poured and fold it through, then fold the remainder of the batter into the mixture.

Scoop the batter into the prepared tin, and bake for abouit 25 minutes in the preheated oven. Cool the cake in the tin on a wire rack, then unmould it. The cake may be stored on the bench wrapped well for about a day, but be careful - I wrapped mine in cling film, and when I unwrapped it, half of the surface crust of the cake pulled away.

To make the pastry cream:

Mix the flour, sugar and cornflour together in a small bowl. Add the egg and egg yolk, and beat until the mixture is pale and thick.

Warm the milk until nearly but not quite boiling in a saucepan on the stovetop or in the microwave, then pour it over the egg mixture, whisking constantly to ensure the eggs don't cook. Put the resulting misture in a saucepan and stir it over mnedium heat on the stovetop until it becomes a thick custard, whisk in the vanilla extract, then place the mixture into a clean bowl to cool, then cover and refrigerate until needed. (Can be made up to 2 days ahead.)



To assemble the cake:

Cut out a cardboard circle the same diameter as the cake, and place the cake on the cardboar circle. Using a saucepan lid, plate or other round object about 7 inches in diameter as a guide, cut a ring from the centre of the cake, leaving a 2 inch wide "donut" shaped outer cake.

Cut the small inner cake into 3 layers (I cut it into just 2, and it was fine for levelling purposes). If you have three layers, keep 2 only. Put one of those layers into the hole in the cake, and soak it and the inner sides of the cake ring with rum using a pastry brush.

Reserve one third of the pastry cream and set aside, then spread the rest over the well in the centre of the cake, including up the sides. (My pastry cream was way too thick to do this without wrecking the delicate cake, so I just spread it on the bottom.) Moisten the second cake layer with rum, and plac the moist side down on top of the pastry cream, and press down on it to level it out. Spread the remaining pastry cream over the top of the second layer, but do not spread it on the outer ring of cake. Moisten the top and sides of the cake with rum.

On serving day, arrange the fruit on top of the inner circle of cake where the pastry cream is spread so as to conceal the join, but leaving a visible outer ring of cake. Simmer the apricot jam then strain it to make a glaze, and brush it over the top and sides of the cake and the fruit. Refrigerate the cake for a couple of hours or until ready to serve.


For Luke, I made chocolate brandy mud cake:



I have made this cake before, and you can find the recipe here.

Ultimately, there was something for everyone, and I enjoyed both cakes (although taste-wise, I found the rum in the Primavera little over-powering!). Happy birthday guys!

Chicken, pumpkin and basil stir fry

Sometimes it would be nice if I could subsist on the things that I bake - life would be delicously sweet indeed! However, the reality is that my baked goods are often missing a few food groups, and I would no longer be able to fit through my doorway - sigh ... I have been feeling rather flabby after winter, and although this has not held me back in the baking and tasting department (hell no!), it means that I have been turning to lighter alternatives for dinner.

The dish pictured at the top of this post is a lovely chicken, pumpkin and basil stir fry that featured in the October issue of BBC Australian Good Food. I thought that the recipe was too light in the sauce department, and I was fully prepared to go a little more heavily with the sauce - but I tasted it as is, and it was just perfect. There is no runny sauce, just a surprising amount of flavour.

If you would like to try this, you will need:

1 1/2 tablespoons cooking oil
400g pumpkin, peeled and cubed
300g trimmed green beans
650g chicken breast, sliced into strips
1 sliced chilli
1 cup fresh basil leaves
1 1/2 tabelspoons fish sauce
1 teaspoon sugar

Put 1 tablespoon of oil in a large wok, and once hot, add the pumpkin and stir fry for roughly 10 minutes until soft, adding the beans half-way through to cook concurrently. Remove the pan from the heat, and put the veges aside, covered, so that they keep warm.

Add the 1/2 tablespoon of oil to the wok, and once hot, and the chicken and stir fry it until browned, then add the chilli and half a cup of basil, and stir fry for one further minute. Finally, add the vegetables, fish sauce and sugar to the wok mixture, and stir it through to coat the veges and meat with the sauce. Serve with the rest of the basil leaves and lime (if desired).

I really liked this - basic but good. The only slightly palaver-part about making this dish is peeling and cutting the pumpkin (never my favourite thing), but the result is worth it. Bon appetite!

Sue's Birthday - Lemon Blueberry Cake

It was Sue's birthday last Saturday, and her first day back from maternity leave on Monday. To celebrate, I decided to make her a cake that I have been eyeing up for some time, the Marbled Lemon Blueberry Cake from Sky High - Irresistable Triple-Layer Cakes by Alisa Huntsman and Peter Wynne.

You are meant to start this cake off by making blueberry jam; however, I didn't have any blueberries, and instead substituted some quality bought blackberry and apple jam.

You make the cake in three separate layers (no tricky cutting!), and colour part of the batter with the jam, which is then swirled through each layer for the marbling:



You then "glue" the cooled layers together with jam:

before making a lemon buttercream (which I had to start twice, because the first time I ended up with toffee in my mixing bowl due to overheating the sugar syrup):

and cover the whole cake with the buttercream. I then decorated mine with rolled fondant daisies with piped buttercream centres.

You can find the recipe for this cake in the book, or online here at Leite's Culinaria.

What can I say - this cake is yummy, so if you have the 9 eggs needed to make it, go for it!