Marble Cake

Just before Easter, I made the above cake for my colleague and friend Shauna's birthday. It is a an old fashioned marble cake, from the Australian Women's Weekly Bake cookbook.


I made this cake using brown sugar instead of white caster sugar because at the time, that was all that I had in the house. It seemed to turn out just fine, regardless. Although it is not the prettiest cake I have ever made, I think it is quite respectable, and tasted, well - like cake. I simply decorated it with water icing.


The recipe is very similar to this one, except that for the three colours, I had white, pink (using pink food colouring) and chocolate using cocoa powder instead of white, chocolate and orange.

Marble cake is an old favourite and easy to make, although it is impressive to look at. If you need a quick party cake, you could do worse than a marble cake.

TWD - Chockablock Cookies

This week's Tuesday with Dorie is hosted by Mary of Popsicles and Sandy Feet, who chose Dorie's delicious Chockablock Cookies. They are called "chockablock" because they are full of all sorts of ingredients - chocolate, dried fruit, nuts and coconut. They are also beefed up with oats and molasses (or in my case, golden syrup).


The recipe called for shortening and butter. I don't use shortening usually, so I just used all butter, and it seemed to work fine.


These cookies were fabulous - they require a lot of ingredients, which may make them prohibitive for every day baking, but are worth the effort if you have bits of this and that to use up. I did just that - I used mixed chopped nuts and almonds, cranberries, raisins and dried apricots.


Thanks to our host, Mary, for choosing these - she will have the recipe on her site. To check out what the other TWD bakers thought of these, check out the TWD blogroll.

Daring Bakers - Traditional British Pudding - Steak and Kidney Pudding

The April 2010 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Esther of The Lilac Kitchen. She challenged everyone to make a traditional British pudding using, if possible, a very traditional British ingredient: suet.


Unfortunately, I could not get a hold of suet, so I used lard instead. I found it rather unpleasant to work with, as the smell and texture were rather off-putting. I decided for a change to make a savoury dish, and chose the recipe for steak and kidney pudding provided with the challenge.


Because of the warmth in my kitchen, I found it difficult to pick up the rolled pastry, so I ended up half moulding it free-form into my pudding basin. I think this made the pastry a little thick to cook to perfection, as I ended up with a few under-cooked patches inside my pudding, despite steaming it for 3 hours.


When I turned out the pudding, it collapsed a little on one side, so it was not as aesthetically pleasing as it might have been.


For some reason, my meat turned out greyish, a little like a pork pie:



Despite the obvious defects, I found the steak and kidney pudding to be rather tasty. Unfortunately, perhaps because of its unloveable appearance, it was not popular at work, and I ended up turfing quite a bit of it.


I have successfully made a lovely steak and kidney pudding using a similar recipe once before. On that occasion, I use tallow (Supafry) in the pastry, and I wonder whether that fact, and that I steamed it for 5 hours instead of 3, the main differences this time. However, as I am unlikely to be making suet puddings on a regular basis, it won't be an issue that I will be investigating.


Thanks to Esther for being our host this month. To see what the other Daring Bakers made with their suet pastry, check out the Daring Kitchen blogroll.

TWD - Sweet Cream Biscuits

This week's Tuesday with Dorie is hosted by Melissa of Love At First Bite, who chose Dorie's Sweet Cream Biscuits. When I first read this, I was thinking of Arnotts Assorted Creams (which one's your favourite? Mine is Monte Carlo). However, these are actually Southern US style biscuits, which are very closely related to our scones, and apparently are very popular eaten with savoury dishes.


These biscuits were very easy to make - no mixer, no eggs, no butter. They simply consist of dry ingredients bound together with cream, pressed into a dough and cut into rounds before baking until golden. I had one warm with butter melting into it - delish!


I have been very grateful for the simple recipes that we have had the past couple of weeks, as things have been very, very crazy for me in the background for the past few weeks. Things are going to get worse before they get better, so bear with me if I tend to disappear for a while.


To check out what the other TWD bakers thought of these biscuits, check out the TWD blogroll. If you fancy making them yourself, check out the recipe in Dorie's book, or at Melissa's site.

TWD - Swedish Visiting Cake

Today's post will be short and sweet. For this week's Tuesday with Dorie, our host, Nancy of The Dogs Eat the Crumbs, chose Dorie's Swedish Visiting Cake.

What's not to like - it is a sweet vanilla plain cake with almonds on top and a crispy bottom obtained by baking in a skillet.

It is delish served warm with icecream.

See the blogroll for other interpretations of this cake, or Nancy's site for the recipe.

Fichi Biondi - Baked Figs with Gorgonzola Sauce

A couple of weekends ago, I walked to Graceville to see A Single Man (starring Colin Firth) at the Regal Cinema. It is a beautifully shot film, with an ironic ending. It is set in the 1960s, and has wonderfully stylised period sets. Julianne Moore was wonderful as the ditzy friend with an empty life.

On the way home, I dropped into the fruit shop at Graceville near the cinema, and was pleasantly surprised. As well as a range of fruit and vegetables which is far superior to the supermarket offerings, the shop stocked deli items which I previously believed could only be found in New Farm or the Valley.

It was too tempting to pass up, so I bought some figs and gorgonzola, and picked up proscuitto and cream at the supermarket to make fichi biondi - that is, baked "blonde" figs with gorgonzola sauce. I had spied this recipe in the May 2008 edition of Delicious magazine when I was searching for Italian dinner party recipes, and had wanted to make it ever since.




I wasn't disappointed - the baked figs were luscious, a little bit sweet and a little bit salty, and they melted in the mouth.

To make fichi biondi, you will need:

12 thin slices of proscuitto
12 fresh figs, stalks removed
10g butter (I left this out)
200ml pouring cream
100g gorgonzola dolce, roughly chopped

Preheat your oven to 200 degrees Celsius.

Wrap a slice of prosciutto around the middle of each fig, and secure with a toothpick:




Put the butter, cream and gorgonzola into a small saucepan, and melt over low heat, stirring until smooth.

Put the figs into a baking dish, pour over the sauce and cover loosely with foil. Bake the figs for 7 minutes, then remove the foil and bake them for a further minute until the prosciutto begins to crisp.

To serve, put 2 figs on a plate and spoon over some of the sauce. Delicious!!

Orange and Blueberry Layer Cake

We had a spate of birthdays over Easter at work, so I was busy cake baking. Fiona and Mel were first up, and I made them an orange and blueberry layer cake.

The recipe is modified from the Marbled Lemon Blueberry Layer Cake in Sky High - Irresistable Triple-Layer Cakes by Alisa Huntsman and Peter Wynne. You can find the original recipe here. I have made the lemon version - you can see it here.

Changes which I made to the recipe were:

• using marmalade instead of blueberry jam for marbling and to sandwich the layers - unfortunately, you can't see the marbling at all because the jam is orange coloured, but it tasted delicious;
• using oranges instead of lemons in the batter;
• adding whole blueberries to the batter instead of blueberry jam; and
• icing the cake with orange glace icing instead of buttercream.
  

The top of the cake is decorated with gorgeous birds eggs (pastel candy coated chocolate eggs) and fudge writing.

The cake disappeared, so I assume it was a hit!