Christmas baking

This year I've been pretty organised and have done a fair bit of Christmas baking already - hurrah!

I've made two tropical Christmas puddings based on this recipe, one for my work Christmas barbecue and one for family. I'm not a massive pudding fan but these smell amazing and I can't wait to try them. Making puddings requires a lot of dedication: this recipe involved 6 hours of boiling time per pudding.



I've also made a spiced whisky fruitcake based on this recipe. I varied the dried fruits a bit (using up leftovers from the pudding recipe). I'm pretty sure my dad, who loves both fruitcake and whiskey, is going to appreciate this one!



Bring on Christmas!

Cookbook challenge, week 38: Gingerbread

The theme for week 38 was spice, and although cooking a curry or marinated meat was very tempting I decided to cook something sweet as it's quite some time since my last sweet recipe for the cookbook challenge (in fact, the last time was week 24!).
I chose a recipe from a new book, Cook's Bible by Lorraine Turner, which I found on special at Habitat recently. The recipe is a cake version of gingerbread.

Ingredients:
150g butter
175g soft brown sugar
2 tbs black treacle (I used golden syrup)
225g plain flour
1 tsp baking powder
2 tsp bicarb soda
2 tsp ground ginger
150mL milk
1 egg, beaten
1 tsp finely chopped fresh ginger
2 apples, peeled, chopped and coated with 1 tbs lemon juice (I used 1/3 cup of date puree that I needed to use up)

Melt the butter, sugar and treacle/syrup in a saucepan over low heat and leave to cool.
Preheat the oven to 160ºC and grease and line a 23cm square or 22cm round cake tin.
Sift the flour, baking powder, bicarb and ground ginger into a bowl.
Stir in the milk, egg, fresh ginger and cooled butter mixture, followed by the apples/date puree.
Mix everything together gently, then pour the mixture into the prepared tin and smooth the surface.
Bake for 30-35 minutes (my cake took 45 minutes).
Remove from the oven and cool in the tin.

It's a lovely, moist cake with a wonderfully zingy ginger flavour. It's great as is, but for a special occasion it would be fantastic with a thin layer of orange or lemon icing.

Trashy food: meatcake!

A friend recently hosted a bring-a-plate dinner, with the theme of sweets. I'll post more from this later, but I wanted to post the recipe for one of my contributions: meatcake! Vegetarians, avert your eyes.

I'm much more a savouries person than a sweets person, sweets become all a bit too much for me very quickly, so I thought I'd make this as a twist on the theme. I got a lot of tips from this site.

The meatcake in all its glory (thanks to Bec for this and the last picture)



Here's how I made it!

I mixed together the following ingredients to make a meatloaf mixture:
2kg mince, half beef and half pork
1 onion, finely diced
2 eggs, lightly beaten
2 tsp mixed herbs
1/2 tbs crushed garlic
2 tsp tomato paste
a good squirt of barbecue sauce
1 1/2 cups beadcrumbs
Salt and pepper

And then it looks like this:



I divided the mixture into two disposable foil pans, used because I didn't have two cake tins of the same size.



I put them in the oven at 190ºC and cooked them until their juices ran clear when cut into with a knife, which was about an hour and a quarter in my oven. They were then left them to drain on a cake rack (the meat leaks a lot of juices).



Once they had cooled and dried a bit, I put one on a cake stand and spread it with mashed potato. For convenience I used a packet of Deb potato - I didn't really have the time (or patience!) to cook and make a perfectly smooth mashed potato from scratch!




The final step is to ice the outside of the meat with mashed potato. I did a crumb layer first, by spreading a thin layer of potato over the cake. Next was the final layer using another packet of mash. It was actually quite hard to ice the cake as the potato prefers to stick to itself instead of the meat - I ended up finding that using the back of a very wet spoon resulted in the smoothest sides. I wasn't 100% happy with the result of the icing and would have loved to get it smoother and neater but I ran out of time - and mashed potato (I suggest using three packets of Deb instead of the two that I used).

I decorated the cake with bacon stars (lightly browned bacon, then shapes cut out using a biscuit cutter) and piped potato frosting, as shown in the first picture above.

It went down a treat!

Happy meatcake:

Light trifle cheesecake

I cooked this cheesecake recipe for my mum's birthday. Using the sponge finger biscuits for the base was easy and worked surprisingly well. I only used about 1/4 of the jelly mix in the cheesecake, as I felt it needed more for the topping. I also used light cream cheese.

One tip: the recipe recommends passionfruit jelly, but I think the flavour (and more specifically the colour) should depend entirely on the fruit you use to top the cake. I chose purple plums and blueberries, and the orange-coloured jelly clashed terribly! I mixed up some extra strawberry jelly and used it as an extra layer on top, which made it look much better.

White chocolate fairy cakes

This recipe was found by a friend on taste.com.au (thanks J!). It's possibly now my favourite cupcake recipe to make - you can't beat the white chocolate chunks!

I made a batch recently in mini muffin tins - this size made about 50 cakes and took about 14 minutes to bake. They were decorated with some tasty lolly fish that were given to me as a present - thanks S!

Slices: Lemon bars, Raspberry cheesecake brownies, Passionfruit slice and Spicy raisin loaf

I offered to cater dessert for my office Christmas party, and decided to do four slices. I decided to do this as they could be sliced into bite-sized pieces, and eaten without the need for extra cutlery.



The slice second from the left is a raspberry cheesecake brownie, from the Taste website. I made it as described, but decided not to save some of the chocolate mix to dollop on top of the cheesecake mix. I also had to cook it much longer than the recipe said. This was probably my favourite of the 4 slices. So rich but so good!

Second from the right is another Taste recipe, passionfruit slice. I've made it before and it's easy and impressive.

On the far right is my spicy raisin loaf. I made this to satisfy the fussy eaters who don't like overly sweet desserts!

Ingredients:
125g butter, melted
1/2 c golden syrup
1 c raisins (but I used currants this time)
1 tsp bicarb soda
3/4 c boiling water
1 1/2 c plain flour
2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp mixed spice
1 tsp ground cinnamon

Preheat oven to 180ºC.
Mix the butter, golden syrup, raisins and bicarb soda.
Add the boiling water and mix until all is melted and combined.
Sift in the flour, baking powder, spices and mix well.
Grease a 20cm loaf tin and line with baking paper.
Pour in the mix and bake for 1 hour.
Cool in the tin for 5 minutes then turn out onto a wire rack.


On the left are lemon bars. This is another recipe that I've been using for years, but I'm not very happy at how it turned out in my current oven. It's an older style and has an element on the bottom, so things don't get golden on the top as I am used to (and this slice looks and tastes much better when it's crispy and golden!). I can't fit these sorts of things under the grill... is it worth investing in a kitchen blow torch to finish things like this off?

Anyway, recipe below. Cardamon is the secret ingredient that really sets this recipe apart from your standard lemon slices!

Ingredients:
1 c softened butter
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 c caster sugar
2 c self-raising flour
4 eggs, lightly beaten
2 tbs lemon zest
5 tbs lemon juice
1/2 tsp freshly ground cardamon
2 c sugar
1/4 c self-raising flour
1 c shredded coconut

Preheat oven to 180ºC.
Blend butter, salt, sugar and 2c flour to make a soft dough.
Press into a 22x33cm pan lined with baking paper.
Bake 15-20 mins until golden.
Meanwhile, combine eggs, lemon zest and juice, cardamon, sugar, 1/4c flour and mix until smooth.
Pour over the baked crust.
Sprinkle coconut over the top.
Reduce oven to 160ºC and bake for 25 mins until firm.
Cool in the tin completely, then slice.

The week with two cakes

Birthdays = cakes!

Flourless chocolate and pecan torte, based on this recipe. Soooo very rich, but delicious. Great for gluten intolerant people - and chocaholics! I made this in a bit of a hurry, and used the freezer to cool it rather than allowing it to cool slowly on the bench, which meant that the insides were a bit soggier than they should have been. If I make it again I'll either cook it a bit longer or be more organised to allow it to cool on the bench for longer.



Passionfruit cheesecake, made from this recipe. I didn't photograph it very well, but this was suberb - nice and tangy and not too sweet. I used Lattice biscuits for the base.