Parting is Such Sweet Sorrow - Honey Chocolate Cake

This Friday, Tarun, an accountant in our team at work, departed for the big wide world. He is going to take 6 months off to go home and spend some time with his parents before coming back to Oz to take up a graduate traineeship in a big bank.

Last year, I helped Tarun to make his own birthday cake, which was a Nigella Lawson chocolate cake recipe, so it seemed only fitting that I make Tarun another Nigella chocolate cake for his farewell.

For ages, I have wanted to make Nigella's honey chocolate cake (from p276 of Feast), partly because the flavour combination appealed to me, and partly because I fell in love with the cute bees that she used to decorate the top of the cake. I hadn't done so yet because of the rather large quantities of honey and chocolate that are contained in the cake (putting it in the "special occasion" category), but Tarun's sendoff seemed like the perfect excuse to indulge. Note that this cake takes over an hour to bake, so if you decide to make it, ensure that you have a leisurely morning or afternoon set aside to do so (or you could, like me, start at 6.30pm and still be finishing the decorating at 12 in the morning).

To make your very own cute as a button honey chocolate cake, you will need:

Cake

100g dark chocolate pieces
275g light brown sugar (Nigella uses muscovado sugar)
225g softened butter
125ml honey

2 eggs
200g sifted plain flour
1 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
1 tablespoon sifted cocoa powder
250ml boiling water

Glaze

60ml water
125ml honey
175g finely chopped dark chocolate or chocolate buttons
75g sifted icing sugar

Decoration

25g marzipan, tinted yellow
12 flaked almonds

white chocolate for piping (if desired)

Melt the chocolate for the cake on the stovetop and set aside to cool.

Preheat your oven to 180 degrees Celsius and grease and line the base of a 23cm springform tin.

Cream the butter and sugar in an electric mixer, then beat in the honey. Add one egg with a tablespoon of the plain flour, beat well, then add the second egg with another tablespoon of the plain flour and beat well. Stir through the melted chocolate, then the remainder of the flour and the bicarbonate of soda. Mix in the cocoa, and then the boiling water. Beat until you have a smooth, pourable batter and pour into the cake tine. Place in the oven and bake for between 1 and one and a half hours, depending on your oven. (Nigella recommends checking it every 15 minutes after the 45 minute mark. Mine took 1 hour 15 minutes.)

Remove the cooked cake from the oven and cool in the tin on a wire rack.

Once the cake is completely cool (and it takes a while - it is a big cake!!), make the glaze. Put the honey and water in a saucepan and bring to the boil, then remove from the heat amd stir through the chocolate until it melts. Add the icing sugar, and whisk until you have a smooth, pourable icing.

Pour the glaze over the cake until it is completely covered (you will have heaps left over). To make the bees, divide the marzipan into 6 equal pieces and roll each piece between the palms of your hands until you have short, fat bee shaped bodies. Stick two flaked almonds into each bee for wings then, using the leftover glaze, paint stripes and eyes on the bees using a skewer, then position the bees on the cake. Watch your bees for a while, because some of mine tipped in the sticky, runny glaze until it hardened up a bit. If you want a message on your cake, melt some white chocolate and pipe it on using a paper piping bag.

This cake was a very yummy, honey flavoured delight. It seemed to get a tick of approval from the punters, and because it is a relatively large cake, it fed our large crowd of about 20 easily (we only get small pieces, but that is usually plenty).

Good luck Tarun - and I wanna see you put those cake making skills taught to you by Sam and I to good use!

Blog Party #35 - Chocolate - Mini choc-orange cupcakes & Tia Maria and Milk

Stephanie of Dispensing Happiness is once again hosting Blog Party, and this month's theme revolves around my favourite food group - chocolate! When I found out about this, I could not resist participating.

For my appetiser, I have brought mini choc-orange almond cakes with chocolate icing to the party. To make these little cakes, from a recipe for Baby Blue Cupcakes in The Australian Womens Weekly Cupcakes, you will need:

60g chopped dark chocolate
1 teaspoon grated orange zest
2/3 cup orange juice
90g butter at room temperature
1 cup brown sugar
2 eggs
2/3 cup self raising flour
2 tablespoons cocoa powder
1/3 cup almond meal


For the icing:


125g softened butter
1 1/2 cups icing sugar
2 tablespoons milk
2 tablespoons cocoa powder

Preheat your oven to 170 degrees celsius and grease 2 x 24 hole mini muffin tins.


Put the chopped chocolate, juice and zest in a saucepan, and melt over low heat on the stovetop. Remove from the stovetop and set aside.


Beat the butter, eggs and sugar with an electric mixer until light and creamy. Fold in the sifted flour, cocoa, almond meal and chocolate mixture. Spoon the mixture into the mini muffin tins, and bake for about 20 minutes. Remove the cakes from the oven and leave to cool in the tin for about 5 minutes before turning out onto a wire rack to cool completely.


To make the icing, beat the butter with an electric mixer until light and creamy, then turn the electric mixer to low speed and beat in the icing sugar and milk in two lots. Stir through the sifted cocoa, then spoon the icing into a piping bag fitted with a star nozzle and pipe the icing in a swirl pattern onto the top of each cake. Sprinkle with orange dollarettes, if desired.

These little cakes are very strong on flavour, so a mouthful is all that you need. I also made some larger ones for work, and I was informed that people preferred the smaller cakes because of the richness of the cakes.

The beverage which I have brought along is a new one for me - it is Tia Maria and Milk. To make it is dead simple - heat up a glass of milk in the microwave and add a shot of Tia Maria, then stir thoroughly before enjoying while the milk is still warm. Delicious! I would make this again.

Thanks to Stephanie for hosting Blog Party again this month, and do check Stephanie's site for the roundup here.

A Tale of Two Cupcakes - Lime coconut and chocolate plum

Having made a lovely batch of lime curd and "putting up" some tasty (if a tad thick!) plum jam, I thought it would be great to share some of it with my colleagues in baked goods. I then thought, what better way to do this than in filled cupcakes.

My mind ticked over, and thought that lime and coconut would be great friends when teamed up in a cupcake, while plum and chocolate would also be perfect. Accordingly, I searched my recipe books for coconut cupcakes and chocolate cupcakes that I could use as a base for my creations. That trusty cupcake tome, The Australian Womens Weekly Cupcakes, came to the rescue with some suitable base recipes (see their Lemon Meringue Cakes on p60 and their Honeycomb Creams on p 12), and lo, there were two dozen filled cupcakes in contrasting flavours.

Lime coconut cupcakes

To make lime coconut cupcakes, you will need:

125g cubed butter at room temperature
2 teaspoons lime zest
2/3 cup sugar
2 eggs
1/3 cup milk
3/4 cup dessicated coconut
1 1/4 cups self-raising flour, sifted
6 teaspoons lime curd
250g icing sugar, sifted
juice of one lime
green food colouring
green sanding sugar

Preheat your oven to 180 degrees Celsius, and line a 12 hole muffin tin with cupcake papers.

Beat the butter, zest, sugar and eggs together with an electric mixer until light fluffy. Using a wooden spoon, stir in the milk, coconut and flour. Put even quantities of the batter into each cupcake paper, and bake the cakes for 2-25 minutes until cooked through. Turn out the cakes onto a wire rack to cool.

Once the cakes are completely cool, cut a cone-shaped hole in the top of each cake, cut off the point of the cone-shaped piece of cake and set aside as a "lid" for that cake. Fill the hole with approximately half a teaspoon of lime curd, then pop the "lid" of the cake on top of the curd.

Make the icing by combining the icing sugar with the lime juice, adding water if necessary to form a thick, spreadable icing. Dye the icing the desired shade of green, then spread the top of each cake with green icing, and sprinkle with sanding sugar to decorate. Set aside until the icing has dried.

Chocolate ginger plum cakes

For the chocolate ginger plum cakes, you will need:

1/2 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup plain flour, sifted
1/2 cup self-raising flour, sifted
1/4 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
1 teaspoon ground ginger
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg
90g butter, cubed, at room temperature
1 egg
1/4 cup milk
2 tablespoons golden syrup
50g dark choc bits or chopped dark chocolate
6 teaspoons plum jam
250g icing sugar, sifted
1 tablespoon cocoa powder
cold water
sprinkles to decorate

Preheat your oven to 170 degrees Celsius and line a 12 hole muffin tin with cupcake papers.

Combine the flours, bicarbonate of soda and spices in the bowl of your electric mixer. Add the butter, egg, milk and golden syrup, and beat on low speed until the ingredients are just combined, then increase the speed and beat until pale and fluffy. Using a wooden spoon, stir through the chocolate chunks/bits, then place equal quantities of batter into each cupcake paper. Bake the cakes for 30 minutes or until cooked through, then turn them onto a wire rack to cool completely.

Once the cakes are cool, cut a cone-shaped hole in the top of each cake, cut off the point of the cone-shaped piece of cake and set aside as a "lid" for that cake. Fill the hole with approximately half a teaspoon of plum jam, then pop the "lid" of the cake on top of the jam.

To make the icing, combine the icing sugar and cocoa powder in a small bowl, then gradually add cold water, a little bit at a time, until you have a thick icing of spreadable consistency. Spread the icing on the top of each cake, then decorate with sprinkles.

I was surprised in that my favourite cakes were the chocolate ginger plum cakes, which have a lovely gingerbread quality. The lime coconut cakes seemed a little dryer, and didn't have the same depth of flavour as the chocolate ginger cakes.

My tip when making cupcakes in cupcake papers is NOT to let them cool in the muffin tin - I found out to my detriment that the heat from the tin steams the papers partly off the cakes, making for a slightly untidy appearance. You all probably knew that already, but hey, I didn't, and if I can save one other person from making this mistake, it was worth it.

At work, the chocolate ginger cupcakes were the biggest hit, confirming that I have very good taste (and can make a mean, if thick, plum jam!).

Roast lamb with almonds; lamb giouvetsi

I recently had my friends Charet and Marco over for Sunday lunch. For dessert, I served my Daring Bakers Opera Cake. However, for the main meal, I served roast lamb - but not just any old roast lamb. I marinated my lamb using a recipe by Karen Martini from Where the Heart Is.

The marinade gave the lamb an interesting flavour which made it a little more special than if I had just roasted it in the oven seasoned with salt and pepper. Although I personally would have cooked the lamb for longer than recommended by Karen (as I found it too rare for my taste), I enjoyed this dish, and my guests said they did too.

To make this lamb dish, you will need:

2kg boned leg of lamb
fresh basil
fresh oregano
2 bay leaves
8 cloves peeled garlic
1/2 cup vegetable oil
zest and juice of 2 lemons
1/2 cup almond meal
salt and pepper

Put the basil, oregano, bay leaves and garlic in a food processor and blitz until chopped up finely. Add half the oil, the zest and salt and pepper to taste, and blitz until well combined. Finally, add the almond meal and blitz, then place the mixture into a bowl. Stir through the other half of the oil and the lemon juice.

Score the fat on the lamb with a knife, then rub the marinade all over the lamb. Place in a plastic bag and allow to marinate overnight in the refrigerator.

The next day, preheat your oven to 230 degrees Celsius, and bake the lamb in the oven for 25 minutes. Turn down the heat to 180 degrees Celsius, and continue to bake the lamb for at least another half an hour (or if you like your lamb cooked more than medium rare, bakeit for longer).

Once the lamb is cooked, remove it from the oven and allow it to rest for about 20 minutes before carving. I served it with baked potatoes, pumpkin, parsnips and carrots seasoned with salt, pepper and oil, and twice cooked beans in tomato sauce.

One of the problems that you have with a large piece of meat and only three people is that you have a lot of meat left over. For a couple of nights, I was content to continue to eat roast lamb. However, I soon became quite sick of the same thing every night. That is when Peter of Kalofagas came to the rescue with his recipe for lamb giouvetsi. Hooray!

If you would like to make your own lamb giouvetsi, you can find the recipe here on Peter's site.




I had all of the ingredients except for the pasta, which I picked up at the grocery store. Unfortunately, my grocery store does not sell Greek pasta (orzo), but I figured that risoni would be very similar, so this is what I used. It also does not sell Greek cheese, so I used grated cheddar. My final variation was to use vegetable stock instead of lamb stock, because I had a huge carton of it in the cupboard that I bought in a fit of false enthusiasm for a risotto that never was.

Finally, I wanted to show off my wedding gift for Charet and Marco that I completed when I wasn't cooking, blogging or off on some other project. It is the largest single piece of cross stitch that I have completed to date. As you can see from the date on this piece, Charet and Marco were married about a month ago, and I bought them a bottle of French bubbly to enjoy on the big day. However, I only finished sewing this last night after about 2 months of on and off work. It took much longer than I anticipated - when I finished the cross stitch, I hadn't counted on how much back stitch there was, and how long it would take me to complete it.

There are a few mistakes in this piece where I wandered from the pattern, but you can't tell from looking at it (relief!). However, it was not a good idea to go off on a tangent, simply because it made everything harder as I could no longer follow the pattern exactly. As a result, I had to take a fair bit of artistic licence by following the picture on the packaging to complete the piece. I have now mounted and framed this piece, and intend to give it to the happy couple when I next see them. I hope that they like it!

Lime curd

After the Daring Bakers Opera Cake challenge, I had a large number of egg yolks (6!!) left over. I didn't want to use them to make even more desserts, given my groaning fridge was already full of them, so I chose to make lime curd instead.

After Googling for a curd recipe which used six egg yolks, I came up with the following recipe, which came from here at the I Love Desserts section of GlobalGourmet.com:

1/3 cup lime juice
6 egg yolks
1 tablespoon cornflour
125g butter, cubed
1 cup sugar
zest of 3 limes

Combine the lime juice and cornflour in a small saucepan. Add the sugar, zest, and egg yolks, and mix well. Place the saucepan over a larger saucepan of simmering water, and whisk the curd mixture until it is thick. Add the butter slowly in small pieces, combining between additions. Once the butter has been mixed in, remove the saucepan from the heat and spoon the curd into a bowl. Press clingwrap onto the surface of the curd and chill in the refrigerator.

Lime curd can be enjoyed in so many ways - as a spread on toast, muffins, crumpets etc, as a filling for cakes and desserts, or straight out of the bowl! This curd has a lovely tart edge to it, which I prefer to the creamier curds, and contrasts nicely with the sweet blandness of a crumpet - my favourite way to enjoy it.

Welsh Speckled Bread - Bread Baking Day #10 - Breakfast Breads

Melissa of Baking a Sweet Life is hosting this month's Bread Baking Day, and she has chosen a theme of breakfast breads. She has asked us to share your family's/country's traditional breakfast bread.

Yesterday, as I was flicking through The Age Good Weekend magazine, I saw a recipe for Welsh Speckled Bread which sounded like a perfect recipe for this event. Even though the origin of this recipe is Welsh, not Australian, because Australia is a country of many different immigrant populations, I think this bread qualifies as being traditional for at least some Aussies. It relies on self-raising flour as the rising agent instead of yeast, and forms a dense, heavy loaf. The recipe, by Matthew Evans, is as follows:

500g mixed dried fruit
100g sugar
300ml hot tea
500g self raising flour, sifted
2 tablespoons marmalade
2 teaspoons mixed spice
1 beaten egg
warmed honey to glaze

Put the dried fruit and sugar in a bowl, and pour over the hot tea. Leave the mixture to sit overnight so that the fruit absorbs most of the tea.

Preheat your oven to 170 degrees Celsius. Grease and line a two litre loaf tin (or in my case, a slightly smaller loaf tin and three mini loaf pans).

Place the fruit in a large bowl, and stir in the sifted flour and spice, then add the beaten egg and combine well. Push the dough into the prepared loaf tin/s, and bake in the preheated oven for 60-75minutes or until the bread is cooked when tested with a skewer. Remove hte read from the oven and immediately brush the top of the bread with the warmed honey to give the top a lovely, glossy appearance.

Cool the bread in the tin for around 5 minutes, then turn onto a wire rack to cool completely. To serve, spread generous slices with butter or margarine. Yum!!!

Books for Love Ethnodelicious

Arfi of Homemades has organised a fundraising event called Books for Love to raise funds for Indonesian children suffering from cancer. This involves the auctioning of books online through donating blogger's websites. Arfi will collect and send the auction proceeds to the Indonesian Care of Cancer Kids Foundation (YKAKI), which you can read about at Arfi's post announcing the auction.

I am donating Ethnodelicious: Eat! Travel! Collect! by Dorinda Hafner and William and Dorothy Hall (2005, Cameron House, softcover,160pp, RRP AUD$39.95) to this event. Dorinda Hafner is a Ghanian-born Australian TV chef. You can read more information about Dorinda here.

This book combines, cookery, travel and information on collectibles across six continents and regions and numerous countries. The content is divided first into continents or regions, and then into various countries. For each country, the authors have written a short spiel about its history and food, and what you might look for to collect as a traveller to that country. Each country chapter is then peppered with various recipes which are either traditional to that country, or which use the produce of that country.

The authors also give their own short insights and recollections on each of the feautrued countries. This book may be for you if you are interested in cookery from all over the world, and would like a sampler of authentic or modern dishes based on the cuisine of the featured countries.

This book is brand new and in good condition.

Bidding opens at AUD$10 - lower bids will not be accepted, and the book will be passed in at auction if I do not receive any bids equal to or higher than the opening bid. Simply place your bid in the comments section below, leaving your contact details (email or website). The highest bidder will win the auction. At the close of the auction, I will notify Arfi of the identity of the highest bidder, and she will send the winner the payment details via the contact details that they provided. Subject to Arfi notifying me that payment has been received from the winner and providing me with the correct mailing address for that winner, I will send the book to that person by mail. No further correspondence will be entered into.

While I will use all reasonable care in packaging the book and to ensure that I address it to the address details given by the winner and pay the postage, no responsibility will be taken by me and I will not be liable to the winner if the book goes astray or is damaged in the post.

Bidding opens today and closes next Sunday, 8 June 2008, at 9am sharp, Australian EST.

If you have any questions about the book, please leave them in the comments section of this post. Happy bidding!