Caramel Yoghurt, a treat with cake

I mentioned caramel yoghurt so only seems fair to give the recipe for this, one of those simple great things to have with cake. Its Jill Dupleix recipe.

Mix equal quantities of softly whipped cream and Greek yoghurt (don't be anal, it's look-likely quantities) ,  place in a bowl, scatter the top with a few tablespoons of soft dark brown sugar. Cover with cling film and leave in the fridge for a few hours. Just before serving stir lightly with a fork.
  

An Orange Cake: Is it a pudding? Is it a cake?

When is a recipe yours?
The American Libertarians, an inspiring and intellectually rigorous bunch, say intellectual property should not exist in law. No copyright, no ownership once you put the book, article, software or film out there anyone can have it.This is not a position I could agree with: without the right to own the thing who would labour to produce it?

I got this recipe from the great Darina Allen's book Ballymaloe Cookery Course (the only cook book you will need as oppose to want. Buy it!) and she credits it to Sophie Grigson but it has gone through a few changes so that is why it is here, pace Darina, Sophie and the American libertarians!

It is very easy to make, gets great reaction but it always seems a little fiddlier and time consuming than it should. I double this recipe and make it in a 10" spring form normally but start with this in an 8" tin if you want to be cautious.

Line the tin with baking parchment

Mix 1oz of polenta meal with 1oz fine breadcrumbs, 3½ oz of ground almonds and 7oz of sugar (white, caster if you have it)
Add a 1½ teaspoons of baking powder.
Grate in to this the rind of one well scrubbed orange (its the wax, I don't live in a universe with unwaxed oranges, if you do, don't scrub. Demand is the thing: if there was demand for unwaxed enterprising merchants would so sell!) and hlf the rind of a similarly treated lemon.

Whisk together a very scant 7fld oz (better 6¾ fld oz) of sunflower oil and 4 eggs.

Mix the wet with the dry ingredients.
Pour into the prepared tin.
Place in the oven and then (and ONLY then) turn on the oven to 160°-170°c.
The cake will take about 45-60- minutes to bake.
Meanwhile you take 4 tbl spoons of whole coriander seeds and toast them in a small saucepan over medium heat until they start to pop. grind them coarsely, a few bashes in a mortar and pestle if you have one, otherwise just improvise.
Squeeze all the orange juice, half the lemon and add 3½ oz of sugar into the saucepan. Add the coriander seed and slowly ( you want to dissolve the sugar) bring to the boil and keep there for 4-5 minutes. I like to add a glug of brandy aswell but make up you own mind on that, before the boiling of course.

The cake is done when a skewer poke slant-ways through the centre  (the skewer test) comes out clean. if in doubt give it a few more minutes but take care: it does burn fairly easily. The cake should be a nice dark gold colour.

Carefully open the sides, put the cake on some type of big plate and pour the syrup slowly through a sieve onto it.

leave to cool and serve in small slices with whipped cream, crème fraiche or caramel yoghurt.

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Ingredients

1oz polenta flour (course maize meal)

1oz fine only slightly stale bread crumbs

3½oz ground almonds
1½ tea spoons baking powder.
Grated rind of  1 good orange, half the rind of a lemon.
7 oz sugar
7oz sunflower oil
4 eggs

4 table spoons whole coriander seed
3½oz sugar
Juice of an orange and ½ a lemon

8" spring-form tin

The Economy of Cake, A Bang for Buck Goodie!

In the Science fiction Novels of DP Bremmen the Iron Law of Space is Scarcity.

It's the Iron Law of the kitchen too. Time, energy and patience and effort are always scarce and what is scarce has to be hoarded.That is why everyone needs a Bang-for-Buck list, cakes that return hugely for what it takes to make them. Difference between Earth and space is someone makes the goods we need cheaper and better every year!

This is the ultimate chocolate cake, or rather the ultimate adult chocolate cake, takes about 10 minutes to make and beats every other chocolate dessert off the table. I got the recipe from from Delia Smith's Christmas over 14 years ago but could not buy double cream here at the time. Single cream makes a sulky, ill-behaved dry chocolate so-what, double a delectable well behaved please-can-I-have-the-recipe. Takes 24 hours in the fridge.(just twenty four hours in the fridgedaire, just twenty four hours from your lips!)

Watch this for sheer easy!

Put 1lb of really good dark chocolate (I uses Lidl 60%) broken up in a heat-proof bowl.
Add 5 tablespoons of Rum & 5 tablespoons of Liquid Glucose.
Put in the microwave and heat at a low (I use 300w)until the chocolate is completely soft.
Stir gently until the mixture is uniform. Sit the bowl down, we have 3 things to do.
Line the bottom of a 9" spring-form tin with parchment.
Scatter 3 oz of finely crushed ameretti biscuits (the hard crispy ones- I get them from Shortis Wong's food treasure house on John St) on the parchment- you don't even have to measure, its about half the packet if you eat 2 for yourself. (oh Dusty! You doooon't even have to meeeeeasure, you don't even haaaaaave to say you loveeeeve me....)
Beat 1 pint of DOUBLE CREAM and a pinch of salt (always salt for chocolate!) gently until the cream just thickens.
The lining,crushing, scattering and beating should take just about 5 minutes, time for our chocolate to be just cooled.
Stir HALF the cream gently and thoroughly into the choc/rum/glucose and pour this mixture into the rest of the cream and do the gently and thoroughly stirring again so we have one uniform mixture.
Pour this into the tin, cover with cling-film and put in the 'fridge.
24 hours ( or 4 days- you can make this babe well ahead!) loosen at the sides with a knife, take off the sides, cover the cake with a flat plate and invert.
Take off the tin base which is now on top, carefully peel away the parchment and that is it.
Oh joy!

Delia Smith can be found on-line at Deliaonline. Find her spiced apricot and orange chutney. She uses coriander seed as the spice in orange which brings me to a wonderfully oddball cake that is a bit more effort but still a bang-for-buck goodie, Spiced Orange Cake. I will deal that with next but need to go now and make something to please three year old Caitlin who is coming calling.

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ingredients:
1lb 60% chocolate
1 pint double cream
5 table-spoons liquid glucose
5 table-spoons rum
3 oz ammereti biscuits
pinch salt
tin: 9" springform bottom lined with parchment

Ingredients matter, capitalism is great for cake & put raspberries in your Pound Cake

So we have done a cake & some basics are obvious.


If property is about location, location, location then cake is about ingredients, ingredients, ingredients. Butter, free range eggs, real vanilla, only the best ingredients will give you the best cakes.Silk purses & Mrs Pigs ears but it is magnificently easy to find and buy the best. We live in an age of food wealth & profusion .
Commerce & capitalism has created a situation where food is better, cheaper and more available than any-time in history.Best ingredients are cost but because Government is "helping" some things cost more than they ought.

The very best, freshest, sweetest eggs you can have are either your own hens' if you have the space to let them graze and pick or those bought from a farm that sells some surplus. Thousands of farmers wives used to sell lovely eggs BEFORE the EU in the drive to regulate. inspect, prevent & persecute them out of business. You still might be lucky enough to find one but don't tell the Vampires of Brussels.Why the eggs in the fridge, everyone else says room temperature for all ingredients? The cold egg stiffens the butter making for a better mixture, works for me!

Perfectly good butter is being sold own brand by supermarkets BUT would be up to half its current price but for the utter daftness of the CAP. Enough politics back to cake!

Vanilla is expensive, The only orchid we use for food, the seed pods have a labour intensive 6 month fermenting process before they taste "vanilla". Yet it has come down in price & is more available: I find Nielsen & Massey cheapest and best, sitting on the shelves in Dunne's, Superquinn & most of the others. They do a lovely vanilla syrup with the seeds in it, use at the same rate. Nothing compares to real vanilla, the synthetic is disgusting but the demand for vanillin,the  main flavour, is so high that synthesis pays though whether it paid the Japanese scientist who found away to extract vanilla from cow dung I do not know. I'm sticking to Nielsen's and Masseys!

Flour is sold fresh, dry and lovely and in quantities that would astonish a citizen of any other century. Lidl & Aldi do not include raising agents in their own plain flours, everyone else does so just up the baking powder 25% if you buy flour there. Plain or cream flour is what you are looking for: low in gluten.

Eggs go stale, flour dies, make sure you bake with fresh ingredients. No matter how well you buy storing badly will ruin your ingredients. Dry cool is always good, away from strong smells & flavours helps. Don't bung the garlic in the flour press!

Last post did pound cake. For a simple, lovely variation scatter a punnet of frozen raspberries on top just before you put the cake in the oven. Some will break up as you manhandle their brittle frozenness The berries will randomly sink, dotting the cake with their tart loveliness. Takes a little longer to bake, freezes beautifully & looks gorgeous as it tastes. I make it in a 12"x13" roasting dish.

Two cakes up and only started!

I can cake, anyone can cake

Cake is luxury, unnecessary, only existing because we have a surplus of resources with which to indulge ourselves and others. Cake is love because it takes care and speaks when words just cannot.

Show up with a cake instead of empty hands and you won't have to stutter words, your effort and care are clear.

Cake is everything best about us and our lives, a dawdle with friends, packaged happiness and love. Yes I LOVE cake and that's what this blog is about.

Cake is the product of freedom, the Workers' Paradises barely do food, surpluses and choice are market benefits. capitalism's urge to make wealth makes food & lots of it & at quality like never before. The WMKB would stop us having cake,their cousins, the food fascists, hate the lovely rich everyman pleasure & the food snobs affect to despise the the very pleasure itself. I keep hoping with their attitude to pleasure they will soon give up sex & stop reproducing. A man can dream!

So then lets have a cake!

One of the best cakes to know is Pound Cake, richer than Madeira & a basic recipe that can be used over and over again.

I'm talking pound here but you can make half or quarter this mixture. I like to make more rather than less because it more cake bang for my buck of effort.

Turn oven to 150° C for a fan oven, 160° if not BUT ovens vary more than people so always learn your oven and WATCH your cake.

Take a pound of fairly soft butter & beat it in a food processor/electric mixer for 3-4 minutes, longer again if your beater is small and much longer if you are stuck doing this by hand. This will be with the paddle mixer if you have one. Yes BUTTER. Nothing else will do. Flies that will eat ANYTHING wont eat marge.

Add a pound of sugar and continue beating. Add 1½ teaspoons baking powder. Beat on!
Add 1 teaspoon of vanilla extract. Not essence which  is anti-freeze: pure natural vanilla extract. I use Nielsen & Masseys. Beat on!

When the sugar butter mixture is gone pale change beater to whisk you poule-de-luxe that had a paddle.

Now take from the fridge 8 free range eggs.

ADuck eggs on Jordan's and Laura Green's
farm in Edinburgh, Virginia,US.
Ducks, Khaki Campells anyway are still semi-wild!

Its not Harry Potter or Star Trek, you put them there earlier and they are free range, not third-world-children-starving organic because you are not evil.  Duck eggs are great, mixture of duck and hen are great & just hen eggs will do lovely. But FREE RANGE, properly coloured bright yellow yolks. And FRESH. Always cover eggs in the fridge: eggs are porous, breathing & will pick up anything near them. Onion smokey bacon Pound Cake anyone?

Even though your eggs are fresh you still take the care to break EACH one into a cup before adding.

Add an egg to the mixture and continue to whisk/ beat. after a few minutes the mixture will become cohesive, not two different mixtures sliding against each other or against the bowl.

Continue to add in sequence, breaking each egg into a cup to make sure you have not some horror reeking of Hydrogen Sulphide & beating thoroughly between additions. Take your time! Scrape down the sides of the bowl so the whisk can get at all the mixture,

While this whisking is going  on you are  going to need something in which to bake the mixture. Tin space between roughly 130 to 160 square inches are what we want: spring-form tins two nines or tens, a large roasting dish 12 by thirteen or even four seven inch spring-forms. Rub the tin(s) with butter, margarine aside from not being fit for consumption by flies will stick your cake, or spray with those cake releasing oil sprays. I prefer butter.

Line at least the bottom of the tin with baking parchment (remind me that we need a glossary page that has more information . I'll do tin lining there) and better the sides.

Weigh 12 ounces of plain flour and add 4oz of cornflour. Sift.

When the last egg has been whisked in gently and thoroughly mix the flours in. By hand is best, you want to avoid developing the gluten in the flour. When that is done I like to mix in a dash of cream, double is of course best but I've used milk. 2 fluid ounces, a few tablespoons.

Pour and spatula (spatula is a VERB?) into your tin(s) mounding the mixture to the sides if it will mound, leaving a hollow in the centre.

Bake.

The cake is done when you can see a slight gap between the side of the tin & the cake, depending on tin and oven, up to 90 minutes but watch it. Burnt cake is an abomination and a shame and the burner shall feel misery and know the smell of failure.

Turn out of the tin onto cooling rack after a while, not any sooner than 5 minutes.