Sour Milk and Raspberry Cake

A lovely cake that I made some time ago is Matthew Evans' (The Gourmet Farmer) Sour Milk and Raspberry Cake.  The sour milk I imagine works a little like buttermilk to produce a tender crumb in the cake.

As it is raspberry season, while the recipe calls for frozen raspberries, this cake would be a great way to highlight fresh raspberries:

Look at that lovely golden crumb:

Serve the cake warm or room temperature,  by itself or with cream, custard or icecream:

To make this cake, you will need:

250g butter, softened

1 1/2 cups sugar

3 eggs

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1 cup sour milk or buttermilk

2 2/3 cups self raising flour

100g raspberries, fresh or frozen

Preheat your oven to 180 degrees Celsius, and grease and line a 26cm springform tin.

In a stand mixer, beat the butter and sugar until light and creamy.  Beat in the eggs, one by one, then the vanilla.  Add the milk and flour in two alternating batches, and fold in until just combined.

Gently fold through the raspberries, then scrape the batter into the prepared cake tin and level the top with a spatula.

Bake the cake for 35-45 minutes or until cooked through when tested with a spatula.  Remove the cake from the oven and leave it to sit in the tin for 10 minutes before unmoulding onto a wire rack to cool completely.

Roasted Hazelnut Panna Cotta with Strawberries

 

Some time ago, I spied a recipe for Roasted Hazelnut Panna Cotta with Strawberries by Helen Goh in the Good Weekend magazine.  It looked so good, and I had most of the ingredients, so I was in to make it.

This is the end result:

Mine were probably a little softer set than they should have been, and I ended up with some hazelnut crumbs in them, but I don't care - they were soft and silky and flavoursome.

If you would like to try these panna cotta, you will need:

6 dariole moulds
1 teaspoon vegetable oil for brushing moulds
200g whole skinless hazelnuts, toasted
600ml full fat cream
200ml milk
130g sugar
pinch of salt
3 sheets leaf gelatine
peeled skin off a lime
12 strawberries
1 tablespoon icing sugar
1 tablespoon lime juice

Preheat your oven to 180 degrees Celsius.

Lightly brush the inside of each dariole mould with vegetable oil and place them together on a large baking tray.

Pu the gelatine leaves into a bowl of ice water and allow to soften (~ 5 minutes).

 Meanwhile, roughly chop the hazelnuts in a food processor.  Put the chopped nuts into a large saucepan with the cream, milk, sugar and salt.  Turn the heat on to the lowest setting and stir the mixture gently until it comes to a simmer. Once the mixture reaches a simmer, turn off the hear and add the lime peel.  Squeeze the excess moisture from the gelatine and add it to the cream mixture.  Stir to combine, then leave the mixture to infuse for 30 minutes before straining into a jug.

Pour the mixture into each of the dariole moulds, then place the moulds on the tray in the fridge to set for ~ 6 hours.

To unmould the panna cotta, run a knife gently around the edge of each one, then invert onto a serving plate.  If it doesn't unmould easily, dip the mould briefly into hot water before inverting again.

Serve with chopped, macerated strawberries on the side or on top of each panna cotta.

Devilled Eggs

 If they're scrambled I can only eat two eggs. If they're deviled, I can eat forty.

Devilled eggs is one of those party dishes that everyone jokes about, but most secretly enjoy.  Until recently, I had never made devilled eggs, but that changed when my team held a disco themed virtual Christmas party.  I know that they did not eat food at discos, but disco food was one of the prize categories, and I assume that they meant food from the disco era AKA the 1970s.  So devilled eggs and pineapple hedgehogs it was!

I made these devilled eggs using Nigella Lawson's recipe, which rather fancily pipes the egg mixture back into the whites.  They were rather good, a good mix of creamy and spicy, which is just as well, as I had to eat them.

If you would like to make these eggs, you will need:

12 large eggs (or however many you want to make
and adjust other ingredients accordingly)
4 tablespoons mayonnaise
2 teaspoons mustard
a good pinch of salt
1/4 teaspoon paprika
3 drops tabasco sauce
2 tablespoons olive oil
3 tablespoons boiling water

Bring water to the boil in a saucepan, and add the eggs to it one by one.  Boil the eggs for one minute, then switch off the heat and leave the eggs to sit in the saucepan for 12 minutes.  Fill a bowl with ice cold water and transfer the eggs to that bowl, and leave to sit for 15 minutes before peeling the eggs.

Halve each egg lengthways and gently remove the yolk.  Put the yolks into a mixing bowl.  Choose 18 of the best looking white-halves and place them on a serving platter (you need more yolks than whites).

Add the mayonnaise, mustard, salt, paprika and tabasco to the egg yolks and mash them all together before blending with a stick blender to combine thoroughly.  Ass as much of the boiling water as is required to bring the yolk mixture to piping consistency.

Put the yolk mixture into a piping bag fitted with a star tip and pipe the yolk mixture into the cavity of each white, and sprinkle each one with extra paprika.

Serve.

Seasons Greetings

 From me, my family and friends to you, your family and friends, wishing you all the very best for a very merry Christmas and the holiday season!

Ottolenghi’s Spicy Nuts

 Jingle bells, jingle bells, jingle all the way

Christmas in Australia on a scorching summer’s day ...

             

The final item in this year’s Christmas boxes is Spiced Nuts, from an Ottolenghi recipe.

These nuts are made with 2 teaspoons of cayenne pepper, so they pack a punch. They’d be great with a cold beer by the barbie, with seafood sizzling away.

If spicy nuts with kick are your jam, you will need:

380g of mixed nuts

80g pumpkin seeds

1 teaspoon sunflower seeds

3 tablespoons vegetable oil

2 tablespoons honey

1 teaspoon salt

2 sprigs rosemary, leaves only

2 teaspoons pepper

2 teaspoons cayenne pepper

Preheat your oven to 170 degrees.

Put all of the ingredients except the pepper and cayenne together in a roasting tray and stir to combine. Roast for 15-17 minutes, stirring from time to time, until the nuts turn dark brown. Remove the nuts from the oven, stir through the pepper and cayenne. 

Allow the nuts to cool in the tray, stirring from time to time. 

Serve with a coldie!

Gingerbread Buche de Noel

There is no Tuesday with Dorie scheduled for this week, so instead, I will share my Gingerbread Buche de Noel that I made from Baking Chez Moi for my choir’s end of year  lunch.

I  made this recipe for TWD in 2014, so it is fun to revisit it all these years later.

This is the gingerbread sponge roll pre-filling:

and being rolled up with the pecan praline-studded filling inside:

and the snowy-frosting coated, praline studded final product:

It was just as big a hit now as it was then. I only have a photo of a half slice:

However, you can see all the marvellous complexities of this dessert.

If you are keen to try it and don’t have the book, the recipe is online here.

Gingerbread

 I need no gift beneath the Christmas tree this year

Christmas with you is all I truly need my dear.

                                                   Deborah Cheetham, "Christmas with You"  

During this year of virtual everything, ABC Classic Radio commissioned Yorta Yorta woman, Deborah Cheetam AO, to write a new Christmas carol to be recorded by a virtual choir.  The wonderful result is Christmas with You, which 1,500 people from around the world sang as a virtual choir.  You can find the video here.  I was very proud to be part of this project as a soprano (not my usual singing part but this one was within my range and I liked that part the best). 

On the topic of Christmas, another addition to my Christmas boxes this year was gingerbread, made from the recipe in the November 2020 issue of the Australian Women's Weekly. I didn't have dark brown sugar so my gingerbread don't have the same burnished hue as theirs, but they tasted great.

I decorated the gingerbread with rolled fondant that was stencilled with some beautiful Australian Christmas themed stencils by Berry Sweet from Miss Biscuit, that I airbrushed on.  I figured that having invested in an airbrush earlier in the year, I was going to make the most of it!  I also sprinkled the biscuits with some edible gold glitter.  

If you would like to try the gingerbread recipe, you will need:

350g plain flour
100g brown sugar
100g dark muscavado sugar
1/2 tablespoon baking powder
1/2 tablespoon ground ginger
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ground cloves
115g cold butter, chopped
87g (1/4 cup) golden syrup
1 egg

In a food processor, place the flour, sugars, baking powder and spices and pulse to combine.

Add the butter, and pulse to combine.  Add the golden syrup and 1 egg, and process together until the mixture the dough just comes together.  

Turn the dough out onto a floured work surface and knead until the dough is smooth and the same colour throughout.  Wrap the dough in clingfilm and refrigerate for an hour.

Preheat your oven to 180 degrees Celsius.

Remove the dough from the fridge and roll it to a 6mm thickness on a floured bench or between two pieces of baking paper.  Cut out desired shapes and place onto a baking tray lined with baking paper.   Re-roll the scraps and keep cutting out shapes until all the dough has been used.

Bake the biscuits in the preheated oven  for 12 minutes or until the biscuits are firm to the touch, rotating the trays front to back and top to bottom if you bake more than one tray at once.  Remove the trays from the oven and allow the gingerbread to cool completely on the trays.

Decorate as desired.  I rolled out fondant and cut out shapes the same size as the biscuits, and using a paintbrush dipped in water, lightly moistened the top of each biscuit and pressed the fondant shape gently on top.  After the fondant had dried, I stencilled the biscuits using an airbrush and red and green airbrush colours, then before the colour dried, lightly sprinkled edible glitter on the top of each biscuit for that festive shine.