Tuesday with Dorie - Grandma's All-Occasion Sugar Cookies

We are getting very close to Christmas now, so our TWD hosts are choosing lots of seasonally-friendly recipes for us to bake. This week's host is Ulrike of Kuchenlatein, who chose Grandma's All-Occasion Sugar Cookies from Dorie Greenspan's Baking - From My Home To Yours to bake.

These basic cookies can be flavoured and "dollied up" however you like to make them overtly festive, or left just plain. I chose to sprinkle mine with red, white and green decorating sugar to add a splash of colour while avoiding the commitment of having to ice them at 11pm in the evening, while I left the dough plain.

This was another Dorie recipe whereby the finished product tasted great, but the dough was difficult to deal with in reaching the end result because of its softness. I refrigerated my dough for more than 24 hours, but it very quickly softened out of the fridge. I cut the rolled out dough using cookie cutters instead of taking the "slice 'n' bake" option, which I think was a mistake. After the first few cookies, I realised very quickly why Dorie mentioned that she just used a round cookie cutter - the dough is too soft to tolerate fancy shapes well, and when the cookies bake, the dough spreads to such an extent that the shapes become puffed and distorted, ending up reminiscent of the Pillsbury Doughboy. For the last couple of batches, I actually cut out the rounds from the dough using kitchen scissors and left them on the backing paper when baking them.

Despite my issues with the dough's handling ability, the end result was delicious - and I am not really a cookie fan. The cookies were crispy and light (excepting the puffy, fancy-shaped ones, which were thicker and therefore softer), and the decorating sugar gave them extra "crunch" as well as colour.

Thanks to Ulrike for hosting this week's Tuesday with Dorie - you can check out how everyone else personalised their cookies by going to the TWD blogroll.

Lamb curry

Christmas is nearly here - I can't believe how quickly the year has flown! I am in the midst of a Christmas baking frenzy, as I am still working on my Christmas boxes, which have to be finished by next weekend. In the meantime, I am juggling that with the usual round of Christmas functions and doing the things that I enjoy doing - oh yeah, and going to work. I have two weeks off very soon, when I will join my family for Christmas - can't wait!

I have posted a lot of sweet things lately, and there will be more (I went through around 2kg of sugar today). However, just to mix things up a bit, I thought I'd post about one of the savoury dishes that I have made recently, which has slightly more nutritional value and is a little healthier than my cakes. This dish is a lamb curry, based on the Sri Lankan pork curry recipe in the November 2008 edition of BBC Australian Good Food magazine. The recipes in this magazine are good because they tell you how evil (or not!) they are at the end of the recipe, and this one is relatively low in fat and calories - I don't think the substitution of lamb would have changed this much. As always, I changed the recipe to match the ingredients that I had rather than going out and buying more.

Regular readers will know that I like a good curry, and I am always keen to try new ones. This one is simple but lovely, being packed with tomatoes and zucchini. I served it with boiled rice. To make it, you need:

2 tablespoons cooking oil
1.5kg pork shoulder, cubed (I used 1kg lamb instead)
1 finely chopped onion
2 crushed cloves garlic
1 tablespoon curry powder
1 1/2 cups chicken stock
3 diced tomatoes
3 zucchini, quartered lenghtways and sliced
1 bunch chopped coriander
salt and pepper
cooked rice to serve

Heat the oil in a frypan, then brown the meat in batchesand set aside. Cook the onion in the frypan for 5 minutes until soft, then add back the meat with the garlic and curry powder. Cook for around a minute, then stir in the stock and the tomatoes. Cover the frypan, reuce the heat and simmer for 1 1/2 hours.

Add the zucchini, and cook the curry for a further ten minutes. Stir through the chooped coriander and season the curry with salt and pepper to taste. Serve on a bed of rice.

Red Bull Cupcakes give you wings ...

My two "neighbours" at my secondment job, Aaron and Andrew, decided to test my baking skills by asking me to make Red Bull cupcakes. Given that they both generally drink "V", containing guarana, I was surprised at this shift in brand allegiance. I was also a little worried by this request, as I didn't want to be responsible for people getting a little too excited on all that caffeine. However, never being one to shy away from a challenge, I agreed to take on their request. This is how Red Bull cupcakes were born.

Now I know that Coca Cola and Red Bull are not the same, but I believed that I could use Nigella's recipe for Coca Cola Cupcakes from How to Be a Domestic Goddess as my base cake recipe, and simply substitute Red Bull for Coca Cola. And lo, an idea was born.

Weirdly enough, these actually worked. The cakes smelt horribly like Red Bull (not one of my favourite smells!), and tasted like caramel cakes. My friend Aphrodite, who has never tasted Red Bull in her life before, thought that these were caramel cupcakes. Although I chose not to decorate them in a fancy way (I actually felt very average when I made these, as I was still recovering from my head cold, so I did as little as possible), this was actually a good thing, as these cakes were made for the boys. And the boys loved them!!! It certainly is not something that I would have chosen off my own bat to make, but I am glad that the recipients of the cupcakes were pleased with the results. The boys had wanted me to add a syrup made from guarana powder to the cakes as well, but you can't buy this from an Australian health food shop - you have to buy guarana powder online, and there was no time for that.

To make these cakes, you will need:

200g plain flour
250g white sugar
1/2 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 egg
125ml buttermilk
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
125g butter
175 ml Red Bull
2 tablespoons cocoa powder

Icing

225g icing sugar, sifted
2 tablespoons butter
3 tablespoons Red Bull
1 tablespoon cocoa powder
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract

Preheat your oven to 180 degrees Celsius. Line a 12 hole muffin tray with cupcake liners.

Sift the flour, sugar, baking soda and salt together into a bowl and set aside.

Beat the egg, buttermilk and vanilla together in a separate bowl.

Place the butter, cocoa and Red Bull into a saucepan, and place the saucepan over a low heat, stirring, to melt the butter. Pour the butter into the dry ingredients and combine, then mix in the egg mixture.

Divide the cupcake batter evenly between the muffin pans, and bake in the preheated oven for around 20 minutes or until the cakes are cooked through. Tip the cooked cakes out of the muffin pan immediately on removing them from the oven, and leave them to cool on a wire rack.

Icing

Place the butter, Red Bull and cocoa in a small saucepan, and stir the contents over a low heat until the butter has melted. Take the butter mixture off the stove and stir through the vanilla. Beat in the icing sugar, one spoon at a time, until you have a spreadable but runny icing. Spoon the icing on top of the cupcakes while they are still warm, then leave them to set.

Enjoy with a Red Bull!

I can't go without mentioning that I went to a Crowded House concert on Tuesday night at The Forum in Melbourne, and it was magnificent! The warm-up act, Anika Moa, was very endearing and a great singer. I was already familiar with Anika's music because I accidently bought her album in New Zealand when I was looking for Brooke Fraser's - and what a happy accident it was. The Crowdies themselves played for nearly 3 hours, and had a lot of fun with the audience in a more intimate venue than they would normally perform in. I was very close to the front (I would have been closer, but I had to stop and buy a tour T-shirt on the way in!!), and absolutely loved being so close to my favourite band. If you ever see Pekingese dogs running around with camp lights on their heads, look out for the Crowdies! (You had to be there ...)

TWD - Linzer Sables

This week, Tuesday with Dorie is hosted by noskos of Living the Life, who has chosen Dorie's Linzer Sables for us to bake. Linzer sables are named after the town of Linz in Austria, and are a nutty, spicy cookie sandwiched with jam (traditionally blackcurrant jam).



These cookies are very cute, and I have often admired them. I ground my own almonds to make the almond meal for these cookies (admittedly because I forgot to buy almond meal rather than an earnest desire to make everything from scratch), and I used bought fig and ginger jam to sandwich the cookies together.



I had a dickens of a time with the dough, which goes unmanagably soft very quickly out of the refrigerator. At times, because I couldn't lift the shapes I had cut from the dough, I cut them out with scissors, paper and all, and placed them on the baking sheet. Because the dough was so difficult to handle, I had resolved never to make them again.



However, that was before I tasted the finished product. These cookies taste unbelievably good! When making them, I wondered why anyone would go to all that bother with such a soft, hard-to-handle dough. One bite, and I discovered why. All I can say is - make them! (Preferably in a cold room in the middle of a snow storm so that the dough doesn't "melt" before your eyes - but I jest ...)



Thanks to noskos for hosting TWD this week, and you can see all of the other wonderful versions of these simply delicious cookies by checking out the TWD blogroll.

A cake by any other name ... Louise Cake

I love old-fashioned cakes, biscuits and slices. They remind me of growing up, being with Mum in the kitchen, visits from relatives and happiness. One of the many baked treats in Mum's repertoire when I was growing up was raspberry coconut slice, which she made effortlessly from a recipe in her head (which I do not have). This slice consisted of a buttery, cakey base, topped with jam and finally a fluffy coconut meringue.

I was therefore delighted when I received my copy of Ladies, A Plate by Alexa Johnston to see that raspberry coconut slice was a treat in New Zealand too - and that I now had a recipe to make it. Alexa's version goes by the very feminine name of Louise Cake, but is exactly the same as the more prosaicly named raspberry coconut slice.

To make this lovely old-time favourite, you will need:

70g butter
55g sugar
2 eggs, separated
1 tablespoon lemon juice
140g plain flour
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
5 tablespoons raspberry jam (I used ligonberry jam)
115g white sugar
55g coconut

Preheat your oven to 180 degrees Celsius. Grease a 30cm x 21cm slice tin.

Cream the butter and the sugar, then beat in the egg yolks. Add the lemon juice, then stir in the sifted flour and baking powder to make a soft dough. Press the dough into the base of the tin, then spread with the jam.

Beat the egg whites to the stiff peak stage, then fold through the sugar and coconut. Spread the coconut over the top of the jam, being careful not to mix the two. Sprinkle the top of the slice with a little extra coconut.

Place the slice in the oven and bake for around 25 minutes or until the top of the slice turns golden brown. Remove the slice from the oven and cut it into squares while still warm.

This is a perfect tea time treat that looks and tastes lovely, yet is very easy to make.

The Ultimate Chocolate Cake Challenge - Chocolate Cherry Cake

Lorraine of Not Quite Nigella is hosting The Ultimate Chocolate Cake Challenge - every chocoholic's dream event! She invites us to write up our best ever chocolate cake recipe and post about it. There are three ballotine boxes of Colefax truffles up for grabs for the best entries.

I am posting this at the last minute, as entries close in around two hours time. However, I couldn't pass up participating in an event close to my heart - that is, one featuring chocolate! I have seen some pretty fabulous chocolate cakes so far, such is the creativity being fostered by this event.

I have baked a Chocolate Cherry Cake from p153 of BBC Australian Good Food's November 2008 edition. This cake may not look spectacular, but the special part about it is that it is a low fat version of an old-fashioned favourite by Teresa Cutter, written especially for the magazine. Low fat and chocolate - methinks it is the cake for me!

Because of the apple and cherries in the cake, it is very moist. It is also very chocolatey, as unlike many low fat cakes, it contains real chocolate. Teresa, the creator of the recipe, cut down on the fat by leaving out butter and oil rather than totally replacing the rich flavour of real chocolate with cocoa. She has succeeded in creating a very chocolatey, moist cake, packed with delicious cherries, that would be a hit at morning or afternoon tea, or served as an after-dinner treat. The fruit content also means that there is less sugar in this cake than in the standard chocolate cake.

If you are trying to cut down on some fat and calories to save them up for your Christmas splurge, but are reluctant to give up your chocolate fix, then look no further than this little beauty, which is relatively simple to make (if you have a cherry pitter!!). The recipe is as follows:

100g chopped dark chocolate
1 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup cocoa powder
1/2 cup boiling water
2 egg yolks
4 eggwhites
2/3 cup plain flour
2 1/2 cups pitted fresh or frozen cherries
1 grated apple (I used Granny Smith)
icing sugar to dust the top of the cake (optional)

Preheat your oven to 180 degrees Celsius. Line the base and sides of a 20cm square baking tin with silicone paper.

In a large bowl, pour the boiling water over the chocolate, sugar and sifted cocoa and stir to combine. Leave the mixture to stand for around 2 minutes to give time for the chocolate to melt, then stir the mixture again until smooth. Beat the egg yolks with a fork in a cup, then whisk them into the chocolate mixture. Sift the flour, then fold it into the chocolate mixture.

In a separate bowl, beat the egg whites with an electric mixer until they form stiff peaks. Carefully fold the eggwhites through the chocolate mixture. Finally, tip the grated apple and cherries into the batter and stir until combined.

Pour the cake batter into the lined cake tin, smooth the top, and place it in the preheated oven to bake for 35 minutes or until cooked through. Remove the cooked cake from the oven and cool it in the tin on a wire rack.

Once cool, turn the cake carefully out of the tin and dust the top with icing sugar before cutting it into squares. Enjoy!

Thanks to Lorraine for hosting this challenge, and I can't wait to see the array of other delicious chocolate cakes.

Daring Bakers - Caramel Cake and Caramels

It is Daring Bakers Reveal Day today, and this month's challenge was pretty special (if a little terrifying in the execution). It involved making a caramel cake (flavoured with caramel syrup made from scratch), a caramelised butter frosting (also flavoured with the caramel syrup), and caramels! How about that for a triple treat. Our hosts this month are Dolores of Chronicles in Culinary Curiosity, Alex of Blondie and Brownie, Jenny of Foray into Food , and for our alternative bakers, Natalie of Gluten-a-Go-Go.

The caramel cake recipe is by Shuna Fish Lydon, as published on Bay Area Bites . The caramels (Golden Vanilla Bean Caramels, nonetheless) are from Pure Dessert by Alice Medrich (Artisan Press).

The biggest challenge about this for me was making not only one, but two sorts of caramel. Now, I have to confess to being a fraidy cat when it comes to very hot things which are likely to spit and splutter at me, which is why I avoid deep frying - and making caramel! We were warned in the instructions for making the caramel syrup that, when we added water to stop the caramelisation process, it would spit violently - and sure enough, it did. I unfortunately didn't read the tips of the other Daring Bakers for containing the spitting before I made the syrup, so I relied on the "duck and cover" method to avoid being burnt (which luckily for me, seemed to work). However, I was fortunate in that both lots of caramel came off without a hitch. For the syrup part, I was lucky in that I had recently made caramel for Tuesdays with Dorie, which taught me that you don't stir the sugar while it is melting (otherwise it recrystallises into a lump).

I managed to complete the entire challenge over two week nights so that I could make it as a farewell gift for Simon, one of my colleagues. (This was unplanned, otherwise I would have made it at my leisure on a weekend.) Simon started about the same time as me, and has been a good friend. He taught me how to make better use of my digital camera, and hence the photography that you see on this blog, as lacking in technique as it sometimes is, could have been worse except for Simon's help. Simon also made me laugh because he always addressed me as "lawyer" or "solicitor". Just before Simon left, I learned that this is a Chinese custom for addressing professionals (Simon is originally from Hong Kong).

The golden vanilla bean caramels were absolutely delightful to eat, although finicky to make. Here are my caramels in the pan while setting:

The recipe said to line your pan with buttered alfoil - now this is where I had another hitch in proceedings, as the alfoil stuck stubbornly to the caramels:

I subsequently learned that one Daring Baker suggested freezing the caramels to remove the foil more easily. Another option would have been to use a silicone pan for setting the caramels, as another Daring Baker did.

In the end, I did manage to remove the foil with the aid of a metal spatula and a lot of patience and grunt work. Cutting the caramels was a challenge in itself, because they wanted to stick to the knife and to themselves:

Here is the finished product, wrapped neatly in pieces of cellophane:

The caramel was very soft, so I also cut out a star from the caramel to decorate Simon's cake, as you can see in the picture at the top of the post. Unfortunately, the star melted for some reason (even though the cake was cold!), so that when I unveiled the cake at work, the star was just a blob of caramel.

Here is my caramel syrup, used to flavour the cake:

I have a whole jar of this syrup left over, so I can make the cake again, or invent other uses for it (including some of the suggestions from my fellow Daring Bakers).

This is the unadorned caramel cake - isn't it a beauty?

This is my caramelised butter frosting. I had a dickens of a time straining the particles out of the browned butter, and I think that some still got through into the finished product:

Finally, here is a slice of the cake itself - I like to think that it is in "soft focus" rather than blurred:

There was a lot of work in this challenge, but I really enjoyed the final products. The caramels in particular were appreciated by my work colleagues, and disappeared at a great rate of knots. The caramel cake is lovely and moist, and I would certainly make it again, perhaps with a different frosting.

You can check out over one thousand variations of this caramel cake at the Daring Bakers blogroll, and the recipe at our hosts' websites. Enjoy! Thanks to our hosts this month for a fabulous challenge.