Nihowera's Mid-winter Christmas Feast 2007 - Christmas Pudding and Other Treats

Nihowera, contributed to by Bron and Emma, is hosting a Mid-winter Christmas Feast. I love Christmas and the festivities associated with it, so an opportunity to experience Christmas twice in one year is too good to miss!

I absolutely adore Christmas pudding, with its rich fruity taste, accompanied by lashings of custard and cream - even when it is a typical Aussie Christmas Day and it is 30 degrees Celsius outside! Given it is so cold in Melbourne in winter, Christmas in July is a much more appropriate time to eat Christmas pudding. Accordingly, for my contribution to the Nihowera mid-winter Christmas feast, I have chosen my adaptation of Nigella's Non-Conformist Christmas pudding, from p69 of Feast. I made this pudding in November last year, but this is its first public appearance.




The recipe, with my adaptations, is as follows:

300g dried figs, chopped
125g dried cherries, chopped
100g dried apricots, chopped
100g sultanas
100ml amaretto
50ml brandy
175g unsalted butter, chopped into cubes
100g fresh breadcrumbs
100g almond meal
50g cocoa
100g plain flour
1 tspn baking powder
1/ tspn bicarbonate of soda
150g brown sugar
2 apples, grated
3 eggs
150ml carton sour cream
1 tbspn vanilla extract
1 tspn cinnamon

Grease a pudding basin. Put the dried fruit in a saucepan with the amaretto and brandy and bring to the boil. Turn down the heat and simmer for 10 minutes. Put butter cubes on top of the fruit and simmer for a further 10 minutes. (Note - watch the fruit and stir it often - I let my fruit burn slightly onto the saucepan, which luckily had no ill effects on the taste of the pudding, but made my cleaning up job a lot harder!)

Combine the breadcrumbs, almond meal, cocoa, flour, baking powder, bicarbonate of soda and sugar in a bowl. Add the apples and the dried fruit mixture and mix well.

In another bowl, beat together the eggs, sour cream, vanilla and cinnamon until smooth. Pour into the fruit and flour mixture and mix well. Pour the pudding batter into the pudding basin, firmly secure the lid, and steam for 4 hours in a large saucepan of boiling water. (I managed to steam a number of self-adhesive wall hooks off the walls of my flat in the process!!) Check the water levels in the saucepan every half an hour or so to be sure that the pudding doesn't boil dry, and top up as necessary. However, ensure that you don't get water into the pudding - the water should come no further than half way up the sides of the pudding basin.

Take the pudding out of the saucepan and leave to cool and set in the pudding basin overnight. Unmould the cooled pudding, wrap in greaseproof paper and cling film, and store in the refrigerator until required. Leave the pudding flavours to mature for a few days or weeks before serving. When ready to serve the pudding, either resteam it for 1 1/2 hours, or (the easier option!) cut off slices and heat up in the microwave on high for approximately one minute. Serve warm with custard, cream and icecream.

Although she calls it a "non-conformist" Christmas pudding, Nigella does so because she has used non-traditional ingredients like cocoa, sour cream and almond meal in the pudding. It is not a reference to the taste, as it tastes as rich and comforting as any other Christmas pudding that I have tried, and is miles better than a store-bought pudding.

To finish off my contribution to Nihowera's Christmas Mid-winter Feast, I couldn't resist posting a photo of the Christmas treats that I made for work last Christmas. The photo features sugar cookies that have been coated in chocolate or icing, apricot balls, rum balls and miniature Christmas puddings.



Meri Kirihimete in July everyone!

Black Friday & a striped chocolate cake

Yesterday was Black Friday - that is, Friday the 13th - and from my perspective, it truly was a black Friday. The reason for this is that Tim left the building as a work colleague for the last time to move on to other things. In a job that often requires me to turn around results in a short time and for which I rely on good team work from my colleagues to be able to meet the expectations of others, I appreciated Tim's fast and to the point advice. Tim also has a unique sense of humour which often brightened up the routine of a working day for our group. While no-one in an organisation is irreplacable from a functional viewpoint, this doesn't take account of the fact that the individuals who fill each role in an organisation are valued by others for themselves, quite apart from the functional role that they perform. Tim is a fantastic person, and the imprint that he has made on my life cannot be filled by anyone else.


As part of Tim's leaving presentation, he was presented with collective gifts from the team, which included lots of chocolate! It therefore seemed apt that the leaving cake that I chose to make for Tim contained about 400g of chocolate. This cake was a striped chocolate cake, the recipe for which I have to thank Zinnur from the beautiful blog, Our Patisserie. The recipe for this cake can be found here.






I have made this cake once before, and was able to draw on that experience to realise that I needed to make two roulades instead of one to end up with a cake of normal (ie 20cm) diameter. If you only make a single roulade, you will end up with a very small cake, and will have to waste a lot of the chocolate layers. Even when I used two roulades to make the "striped" component of the cake, I still had to trim off a small amount of the chocolate layers to match the diameter of the three cakes. I chose to decorate this cake with grated white chocolate and white chocolate piping to contrast with the dark ganache, instead of with the chocolate curls used by Zinnur. This also enabled me to personalise the cake with a piped message (which is legible even if it is a little wonky!).


Apart from the "heavy duty" chocolate experience that this cake provides, it has the advantage of the "wow" factor, especially if you don't tell anyone that the cake is striped inside before it is cut. It looks a lot harder to make than it actually is - the only tricky parts are ensuring that your roulade strips are approximately even in width so that you end up with a flat middle section for the cake (hence ensuring that the three sections fit evenly together), and that the three sections of the cake end up approximately even in diameter (so that you don't end up with something akin to the Leaning Tower of Pisa!).





I enjoyed eating this cake as much as making it, and I particularly enjoyed the "oohs" and "aahs" from my colleagues when they saw the stripes and wondered how I made the cake. Unfortunately, Tim was rather unwell with a cold on his last day, so I am not sure if he could taste this cake or whether he liked it. However, I hope that he did.


Good luck Tim - I will miss you!

Blog Party #24 Lemon meringue pies and rose spritzer

Blog Party hosted by Stephanie at Dispensing Happiness is turning two this month, and to celebrate, the theme of this month's Blog Party is Blogger's Choice. Brilliant! I had already decided to make baby lemon meringue pies for work this week, so nominating them as the appetizer for my entry for Blog Party was a no brainer.

The recipe that I used for my lemon meringue pies is this one, found on Exclusively Food. In my madness, I started making the pies at 8pm on Sunday night to take to work on Monday morning. Accordingly, this recipe was especially attractive because the pastry is made in the food processor rather than having to laboriously rub the butter into the flour. Making the pastry was a breeze, and took no more than 5 minutes (which was a blessing at that time of night, given that the pastry has to chill for an hour before you can use it). Anyone can make this pastry if they have a food processor, I promise - it is so easy.

Instead of rolling out the pastry to line a pie plate and blind baking it, as you would for a full sized pie, I cut out circles from the rolled pastry and placed them in patty tins to form baby tart shells. Before baking, I pricked the bottom of each tart shell a couple of times with a fork, and baked the tart shells for around 20 minutes (yep, the same time as recommended for the full sized tart shell!).

The lemon curdy filling was also really simple to make - I ended up with a thick, sharp yet sweet, smooth curd, and did not have to sieve out any lumps. The sharpish lemon with the lovely fluffy sweet meringue top is a killer combination. The only part that was even remotely difficult about making these pies was trying to spread a meringue top over each tiny tart to seal it without mixing it into the lemon curd. (I have to confess that around 11pm at night while I was doing this, I was asking myself why!!)

There was plenty of lemon curd filling left over (having made tiny tarts instead of a full sized one), which will go perfectly on crumpets for breakfast on chilly Melbourne mornings.

I managed to make 24 perfect (ah, well, I thought so! As you can see, I ate one!) baby lemon meringue pies, and one bite assuaged my fears that the pastry would be tastless and inedible - it was crisp and melt in your mouth. (I have a mild phobia about making pastry, even though I have in recent years been able to make it successfully - that fear of failure never leaves you!)

For an accompanying cocktail, I looked no further than the wonderful wild hibiscus flowers that I purchased for Wild Weeds, and made a rose spritzer. I placed a hibiscus flower plus a little syrup in which they are stored in the bottom of a champagne flute, and filled the flute half and half with rose wine and sparkling mineral water. Yum!

Happy second birthday to Stephanie's Blog Party!

This post is dedicated to Tim, who likes lemon meringue pie and who inspired this choice.

Tarun's birthday chocolate cake

Nigella's old-fashioned chocolate cake
Originally uploaded by Cakelaw

I love baking and the pleasure that it brings to me and others in equal measure. To satisfy this passion, I have been baking a birthday cake for each person in my group at work. However, this week the tables were turned when Tarun asked if I could show him how to make his own birthday cake. Accordingly, I sought out my inner teacher this week and gave Tarun a baking lesson.

Knowing that Tarun likes chocolate cake, as a friend of mine had already given him a lesson in how to bake a mud cake, I chose Nigella's old-fashioned chocolate cake from p269 of Feast. Tarun was unconvinced that he was up to the challenge of this double decker beauty, but Nigella promised that this cake was simple to make.

We had a few interesting moments making this cake, because Tarun does not have a food processor or a stand mixer. However, we got there in the end, with Tarun doing the lion's share of the work so that he could learn - but in my case, perhaps it was the blind leading the blind!! I was slightly worried about the cake because the batter seemed very thick, but my worrying was needless - the cake turned out beautifully, with a rich chocolatey smell and a taste to match. Tarun was already an expert at melting chocolate from his earlier baking lesson, so he basically made the icing himself.

Instead of Nigella's enchanting sugared violets, we decorated Tarun's cake with jaffas - which had the advantage of there being plenty left over to eat later ;).

Everyone at work who tried the cake that I spoke to loved it - especially the very thick, rich, chocolatey icing. Well done Tarun - and happy birthday!

Mulligatawny soup

Mulligatawny soup
Originally uploaded by Cakelaw

I have been fascinated by mulligatawny soup ever since I saw the Soup Nazi episode on Seinfeld, and George ordered mulligatawny soup. "Mulligatawny" is a great word, isn't it? I had no idea what mulligatawny soup actually entailed, so when the July edition of Delicious magazine featured a mulligatawny soup recipe by Jamie Oliver on p36, I had to make it.

Jamie says that "mulligatawny" is an anglicisation of the Tamil words for "pepper water". This seems an apt description of this soup - it has a rich, peppery flavour, which was not entirely to my liking. My soup finished up being very thick, and I had to add extra water to thin it over the one and one quarter hour cooking time. The flavour seemed almost smoky - whether this was because my soup was overcooked (my stove has a mind of its own) or whether this is the way it is meant to be, I do not know.

I probably wouldn't make this soup again, but it gives me great pleasure to have, at least once, tried mulligatawny soup, as seen on Seinfeld.

Chilli chicken

Chilli chicken
Originally uploaded by Cakelaw

It was a miserable day weather-wise in Melbourne today. After a crisp clear start, it became foggy, grey and freezing cold. I spent the afternoon working in front of the heater. To that extent, the terrible weather was a godsend, as there was nothing to distract me from finishing the speech that I have to deliver in a week and a half.

To warm me up from the inside out, I made Chilli Chicken from p74 of the July 2007 issue of Delicious magazine for dinner. The original was White Chilli Chicken, and relied on using white and yellow ingredients for its aesthetic paleness. I was not concerned about the finished product being white (in fact, I prefer it not to be!), so I coloured my onions in the pan, used green capsicums and chillis instead of yellow, and used three bean mix instead of cannellini beans.

While the picture I have taken of this dish makes it look rather unattractive (how do you take an attractive picture of something like this!), it tasted superb. It contains creamed corn, which both thickens the dish and gives it a pleasant creamy flavour. The dish is served with rice for extra body.

I would definitely make this again - it is both filling and tasty.

Hawthorn craft market

Today I visited the Hawthorn craft market for the second time. It is on the first Sunday of each month from 10am to 3pm at Hawthorn Town Hall, and is packed with food, plants, clothes and crafts.

To give you the flavour of the quality of the market, my purchases today were:

Butterfield Farm pumpkin and ginger jam:

Gorgeous cupcake from Hello Cupcake by Sandy:

Baby knitwear for a friend by Susan Pierce:

There are so many fabulous things to check out at Hawthorn craft market - if you live in Melbourne, I highly recommend dropping in to check it out.