TWD - Gateau Basque Fantasie

For the last Tuesday with Dorie this month, the recipe is Gateau Basque Fantasie.  A fantasie is a dish not made strictly in accordance with tradition.  Normally, a Gateau Basque is filled with pastry cream or cherry jam.  Here, it is filled with lashings of fruit and nuts instead.

The filling ingredients that I used were fresh orange segments, orange juice, ginger, apples, red grapes, dried apricots and toasted almonds.  I loved the bitterness of the orange, the crunch of the almonds, the chewiness of the apricots and the sweetness of the apples and grapes.

The pastry for this Gateau did not give me any hassles when making it, as experienced by some of my fellow Dorie bakers.  Where I got grief with this Gateau was in unmoulding it from the cake tin in which it was baked.  Up to that point, everything went to plan.  Come unmoulding time, the gateau cracked, as is apparent in the photo at the top of this post.  This did not detract one iota from the taste, but made it much more difficult to serve in an elegant manner.

As for the taste, this gateau is devine.  The buttery, sweet, biscuit-like pastry is the perfect foil for the fruit inside.  If you can live with a little cracking and untidiness in the pastry, then this is a wonderful dish to make.  It would be great to make it over and over with different seasonal fruits, as suggested by Dorie.

To see what the others made this week and how they felt about it, visit the LYL section of the TWD website.

Gingerbread Bundt Cake for Cake Day

Today, 26 November, is Cake Day.  Who knew  there was such a thing?  I didn't until I saw it mentioned in the newspaper today.  How exciting!  

Of course, I had to make a cake to celebrate Cake Day.  I recently received an email from the Mill House Kitchen as part of their Six Weeks of Christmas campaign which featured a recipe for a Gingerbread Bundt Cake with Maple Icing from Kath of Kulinary Adventures of Kath.  This cake looked and sounded delicious, and is very seasonally appropriate, so that is the cake I chose to make for Cake Day. You can find the recipe on Kath's blog here.

I somehow managed to leave the ginger tea out of the batter, as I had it cooling in the freezer while I did other things towards making the cake.  I was worried the cake might be a little dry as a result, but it wasn't, so clearly it is a forgiving recipe.    I also subbed in rice malt syrup for the molasses, as I did not have any molasses in the pantry.

This cake smelled amazing as it baked, with the brown sugar, cinnamon, cardamom, nutmeg, ginger and allspice scents wafting through the kitchen.  The resulting cake was soft, moist (despite the lack of tea!) and warmly spiced.  It is a cake that tastes like Christmas.

The maple icing added a lovely extra level of caramel flavour to the cake.  Red currants are a little hard to find, so I left them off as decoration.  The soft drips of maple icing were enough decoration, I think. 

If you are a fan of Christmas spices and like gingerbread, I recommend downloading the recipe for this cake at the link above and giving it a try.  It is a wonderful, Christmassy cake which holds plenty of promise for the holidays, and is sure to delight most tasters. 

Strawberries and Cream Sheet Cake - QBC

One of the recent recipes for the Queen Baking Club was Strawberries and Cream Sheet Cake.  This cake is a little girl's dream, being soft, moist, strawberry flavoured pink cake topped with swirls of strawberry and cream flavoured pink buttercream icing, liberally decorated with multi-coloured sprinkles.  

There is plenty to love about this cake, including the fact that the cake itself contains real strawberries.

I held back some of the cake batter so that in addition to the sheet cake, I could make eight cupcakes for a lovely colleague who was leaving:

There is so much joy in this cake, I recommend that you give it a whirl.  You will need:

250g butter
2 cups sugar
2 eggs
2 1/2 cups plain flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 cup buttermilk (or 1 cup milk soured with 1 tablespoon lemon juice)
250g strawberries, pureed then sieved to remove the seeds
2 teaspoons Queen strawberries and cream flavouring
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
hot pink food colouring gel

Preheat your oven to 180 degrees Celsius.  Grease and line a 20cm x 30cm sheet pan.

In a stand mixer, beat the butter until smooth and creamy (ie creamed in the old parlance).  Beat in the sugar until well combined.

Crack the eggs into the bowl, one at a time, and beat in well.

In a separate bowl, sieve together the flour, baking powder and baking soda.

Using a jug, combine the buttermilk, strawberry puree, strawberry flavouring, vanilla extract and enough hot pink food colouring to make it the colour you want.  (I kept it pretty low key.)

Add one third of the flour and one third of the liquid to the batter and on low speed, mix into the cake batter until just combined.  Repeat twice more until all of the flour and all of the liquid have been incorporated into the batter.

Scrape the batter into the prepared sheet pan and smooth the top with a spatula.  Bake in the preheated oven for 45-50 minutes or until cooked through.

Remove the cake from the oven and cool it in the pan for 15 minutes before unmoulding onto a wire rack to cool completely on a wire rack.

For the icing:

250g softened butter
3 cups icing (confectioners) sugar
3 teaspoons Queen strawberries and cream flavouring
hot pink food colouring
sprinkles of your choice

Cream the butter in a stand mixer.  Add the icing sugar to the butter, and on low speed, combine the icing sugar with the butter, then increase the speed and beat the mixture until light and fluffy.  Add the flavouring and the colouring to the shade you want, then spread the icing over the top of the cake with a spatula.  Liberally douse with sprinkles, and slice to serve.

The Duke of Clarence Tavern, Sydney

Back in May, Lorraine of Not Quite Nigella blogged about an 18th century inspired British tavern called The Duke of Clarence.  One look at this post and I knew that this would be just the kind of place that Tim would love, so I sent him a link to the post.

Fast forward a few months, and we were planning a trip to Sydney.  I had forgotten all about The Duke of Clarence, but Tim remembered - and luckily he did.  We booked in for Sunday roast at The Duke of Clarence during our trip, and loved it.

The Duke of Clarence is tucked into a laneway behind Clarence Street in the Sydney CBD.  It was created by the owner to mimic a ye olde English pub, and a lot of the materials in the tavern were brought over from England, snapped up at the sales of fixtures and fittings from closed pubs.  The result is a dark, brooding and rather masculine atmosphere which is very effective:

My favourite area in The Duke of Clarence is the library, featuring bookshelves packed with old editions of books, fat sofas and a fireplace.  In winter, this would be the place to sit: 

For our Sunday roast, we were tucked into a cosy corner booth, and were straight away set up with a glass of rose and beer respectively.

We went with the Roast Beef ($26), served with gravy, baby carrots, broccolini, peas, beef fat roasted potatoes and a pillowy Yorkshire pud with a perfect hollow for pouring in the gravy:

If you like roast, you can't go wrong with this hearty offering.  Tim added pigs in blankets (sausages wrapped in bacon) for an extra $2.

We have stomachs of cast iron, hence could not resist the dessert menu.  Our waiter recommended the doughnuts, but we could not go past the Eton Mess ($12):

This traditional English dessert of smashed meringue, strawberries and cream was given a modern twist here with St Germain elderflower mango and Persian fairy floss.  It was devine - need I say more.

We stopped to try out the sofas in the library before leaving, where one of the friendly waiters tried to tempt us with another drink.  Unfortunately, we had to leave the cool, dark embrace of The Duke of Clarence for the bright sunshine of a hot Sydney day so that we could make the most of our weekend.  However, we would definitely go back.

The Duke of Clarence

Laneway, 156 Clarence Street
Sydney NSW 2000

Ph: 02 8999 3850

Pine Orange and Chocolate Pudding for the Centenary of The Magic Pudding

Recently, I visited the Norman Lindsay Gallery and Museum at Faulconbridge in The Blue Mountains in New South Wales.  It is an auspicious  time to do so, as this year marks 100 years since the publication of Norman Lindsay's famous children's book, The Magic Pudding.

I decided to celebrate the centenary of publication of The Magic Pudding by making my own steamed pudding in a pudding bowl, just like Albert, the Magic Pudding.  However, unlike Albert, my pudding is neither (a) a "cut and come again" pudding; nor (b) capable of changing flavours.  Having recently acquired Donna Hay's new book, Modern Baking, I was delighted to find that Donna had featured a recipe for a Clementine and Chocolate Pudding.  This fit the bill perfectly for my tribute to The Magic Pudding.

A few days after I made this pudding, I came home from work to watch Lyndey Milan's Taste of Australia on SBS Food, and laughed to see that she had filmed at the Norman Lindsay Gallery and Museum in 2014, and she also had made a steamed pudding to celebrate The Magic Pudding (a Coffee Banana Ginger Pudding).   You know what they say - great minds think alike ;)

As you can see from the title of this post and the photos, I made a modification to Donna's recipe.  She used candied clementines on the base (top) of her pudding.  I went to four different gourmet food shops in the 'burbs and could not find any, so knowing that I had candied (glace) pineapple at home, I decided to use that instead.  

I loved the flavour of the marmalade with the pineapple and chocolate - it would have been great with custard, but my very limited local supermarket didn't sell custard powder or less than a litre of ready-made custard, so instead I opted for whipped cream on the side of my pudding:

I gave a slice of pudding to my friend Wayne, and he said that the pudding was "moist and moorish". There you go - a ringing endorsement.  (I was pleased!)

If you would like to make this pudding for yourself, you will need:

3/4 cup orange marmalade
2 tablespoons sugar
200g thinly sliced candied fruit (clementines or orange slices or pineapple rings!)
10 pitted Medjool dates
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 cup boiling water
60g butter
3/4 cup brown sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
4 eggs
3/4 cup self raising flour
1/4 cup cocoa powder
1/2 cup almond meal
100g melted dark chocolate

Line a 1.75ml pudding steamer with baking paper.  I found this very difficult and next time, I would just grease the steamer like I usually do.

Put the marmalade and sugar in a saucepan and bring to the boil.  Continue to boil for 2-3 minutes until slightly reduced, then strain into a bowl.  Chill the strained marmalade mixture until cold.

Place the sliced, candied fruit into the base of the lined pudding steamer, then cover with the chilled strained marmalade. 

Put the dates, baking soda and boiling water into a bowl and let it stand for 10 minutes.  After that time, place the mixture into a food processor and blitz until smooth.

Put the butter, brown sugar, and vanilla into the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with a paddle attachment and beat until well creamed.  Beat in the eggs, one at a time.  Add the flour, cocoa powder, almond meal, melted chocolate and date mixture and beat until just combined.  Scrape the batter into the pudding bowl over the top of the fruit and marmalade, then secure the lid of the pudding steamer.

Put the pudding steamer into a large saucepan.  Pour boiling water down the side of the saucepan until it comes three quarters of the way up the side of the pudding steamer.  Cover the saucepan with a lid and let the pudding steam for two hours.  Keep an eye on the water levels and top up if needed, as if the pudding boils dry, it will burn (and it won't be great for your steamer or saucepan either).

After the allotted cooking time, remove the steamer from the saucepan and leave it to stand for 15 minutes.  Then comes the tricky part - remove the steamer lid, put your presentation plate on top of the steamer, then invert the steamer onto the plate to release the pudding (you hope!).

Serve the pudding warm in slices with cream, icecream, custard, chocolate sauce or all of the above!

TWD - Sweet Potato Pie Bars

This week's Tuesday with Dorie recipe is Sweet Potato Pie Bars, being very Thanksgiving appropriate.  Even if you don't celebrate Thanksgiving (like me), there is a lot to love in these pie bars - buttery shortcrust base, custardy sweet potato filling, and the piece de resistance - a toasted marshmallow topping (optional/not optional).

The only thing that caught me by surprise was how quickly the marshmallows toasted under the grill - I left the room for a minute and could smell them about to burn.  Yikes!

These bars would definitely be a repeat if I ever have the time and inclination, because they are sooooo good.

The lovely tea towel my pie bars are displayed on came from the Norman Lindsay Gallery and Museum, and features a cat cartoon by Norman Lindsay, who was apparently very fond of cats and owned several in his lifetime.  I think it goes well with my cat Fish's Eddy plate, which is hiding under the bars.

To see what everyone else made this week and what they thought of it, visit the LYL section of the TWD website.

Spring Chicken Terrine - Red Tractor November

The Red Tractor calendar recipe for November is Spring Chicken Terrine.  I am not a huge fan of terrines, but they are OK.  Terrines are great for picnics or serving with crackers or bread as a starter at a dinner party.

This month's calendar quite is as follows:

When I was at University, jacarandas struck terror into the hearts of students, as legend had it that you were doomed if you had not started studying before the jacarandas bloomed.  It was also said that if a falling jacaranda flower hit you on the head, you would forget everything for your exam.  For this reason, this month's quote brings back that feeling of Swat Vac and exams - not the most pleasant feeling in the world.

This terrine is made with a mixture of pork mince, chicken mince, spinach and prosciutto. My terrine was a half recipe only.  I quite liked it, though would have loved some chilli to give it a bit of oomph.  Instead, I gave it oomph by serving it with mustard pickles and gherkins:  

If you would like to try this terrine for yourself, you will need:

500g pork mince
500g chicken mince 
1 onion, finely chopped
1 tablespoon butter
1 teaspoon ground allspice
1 tablespoon fresh chopped thyme
2 tablespoons green peppercorns
2 eggs
1 packet frozen chopped spinach, thawed and with excess water squeezed out
Splash of balsamic vinegar
100ml chicken stock
salt and pepper
12 slices prosciutto

Preheat your oven to 170 degrees Celsius.

Mix the minces together in a large bowl.

In a small frypan, saute the onion until soft, and add to the bowl of mince with the allspice, peppercorns, thyme eggs, spinach, balsamic vinegar and chicken stock.  Season with salt and pepper to taste, and mix together well (your hands work best for this).

Grease a terrine dish and line with the prosciutto, reserving two slices for the top.  Put the mince mixture into the prepared terrine dish and pack down well.  Place the two reserved slices of prosciutto on top and press down well.

Place the terrine in a baking tray, filled halfway up the sides with hot water.  Put the baking tray in the oven and bake the terrine for one and half hours or until cooked through.

Remove the terrine from the oven and allow it to cool to room temperature on a wire rack.  Once cooled, cover the terrine with foil, and place a heavy object on top of it and put it in the fridge to chill overnight.

Serve with bread, crackers and your choice of condiments.