Tag: cake recipe

An even better Lime Syrup Cake

So I am a little obsessed with limes. And when they get made into delicious things like…

lime syrup cakes

can you blame me? Now if you’re feeling like you’ve got a bit of deja vu, then you wouldn’t be too far off. I did post the CWA Lime Cake way back in 2010 when I began this blog. But with the second birthday of this little blog of mine swinging round, I thought i’d bring back my old favourite but with a little delicious tweak.

I saw this recipe on the beautiful Kiki’s blog after i’d scored a bag of limes ridiculously cheaply. Apart from making a Key Lime Pie and some watermelon, lychee and lime cocktails, Lime Syrup Cake was the perfect way to use these babies up. And the Women’s Weekly recipe that Kiki used intrigued me with its addition of ricotta. What I love about the CWA recipe is the beautiful light buttery texture of the cake as well as the lovely limey syrup left at the bottom. This recipe is much more dense but infinitely soft and oh-so-lime-syrupy!

I used Greek Style Yoghurt instead of ricotta because I couldn’t get my lazy ass to the shops to buy some. Oops.

But look at the cute tea cosy behind it!

If you’re currently suffering from the chilly turn in Sydney, I’m sure this hot, fresh out of the oven cake will warm you up

The super moistness and limeness of this cake comes from a little lime in the batter but mostly the lime syrup trickled over the top while it is still warm.

I recently discovered Weis Vanilla Bean Icecream. This has to be hands down the best vanilla ice-cream i’ve had so far. A few scoops of this baby cuts through the lime if you’re not such a fan of the sour.

mmmmmmmmmmmm

and an action shot, just so you can feel jealous. But better than feeling jealous, you can go get some limes and make this freakin cake! You won’t be disappointed!

So, my lovelies, do you love limes? And what do you like to eat to keep away these winter chills that are currently invading Sydney?

Lime Syrup Cake – Adapted from The Australian Women’s Weekly

Cake Ingredients

200g butter

1 tablespoon lime zest

1 cup (220g) caster sugar

3 eggs, separated

250g greek yoghurt

1/2 cup (125ml) milk

1 1/2 cups (225g) self raising flour

Syrup Ingredients

1/3 cup (80ml) lime juice

1/4 cup (60ml) water

2/3 cup caster sugar

Method

Preheat oven to 180deg (160deg if fan forced). Grease a 20cm bundt pan well with extra melted butter.

1. Beat butter, rind and sugar in small bowl with electric mixer until light and fluffy

2. Beat in egg yolks, yoghurt and milk

3. Transfer to a large bowl and stir in sifted flour.

4. Beat egg whites in a small bowl until soft peaks form

5. Fold into batter in two batches then pour into a greased 20cm bundt pan. Bake on 160 degrees for 40-50 mins. Check regularly as mine was truly cooked by then

6. Turn cake out onto a wire rack and cool for 5 mins before covering in syrup

 

Lime Syrup Method

1. During the last 10 mins of the cake baking, begin making your syrup

2. Stir the lime juice, water and sugar in a saucepan over a low heat until the sugar has dissolved. Bring to the boil.

3. Boil uncovered for 10 mins, keeping a careful eye on it! Don’t let it caramelise! In the mean time, stab your cake all over it’s surface with a skewer to help the syrup absorb

4. When the syrup has thickened a little, take the pan off the heat and pour gently over your cake.

 

 

Comforting Rhubarb Cinnamon Cake and the onset of Christmas

Sometimes I think that the following confession makes me quite un-Australian. But I cannot change the way I feel, I just really love Winter. Summer is nice and I like to go to the beach and spend time outside just as much as the next person but there is something so snuggly about winter that makes it my favourite season. I love winter pjamas, flannel sheets, hot chocolate, reading in bed on a blustery, rainy morning, roast dinners, open fires, winter wardrobes, is there anything not to love? I have spent christmas in the european winter a few times now and I love that you can eat all the traditional food and its not stinking hot. I mostly love that I can cook whatever I want whenever I want because it’s never too hot to have the oven on.  So im not particularly put out by this crazy change in the weather we are currently experiencing in Sydney as it makes the putting up of decorations and the cooking of christmas treats much less sweaty. And so, my lovelies, I put the oven on today, this cold and rainy day in DECEMBER… and made this

Stephanie Alexanders’ Rhubarb Cinnamon Cake

The recipe was astonishingly simple with no need to stew or pre-cook the rhubarb. The yield was one family size delicious cakey/puddingy dessert with tangy sweet rhubarb, fragrant cinnamon and lots of crunchy munchy topping. Just the thing to eat with a cup of tea while watching Love Actually (lets face it, it really is time to break out the Christmas movies).

 

All you do is start with some ruby red rhubarb stalks

Chop them up. I think the chopping is quite theraputic

See, the red and green of the rhubarb marks the onset of the festive season. In fact you might want to bust out some of your christmas cds to listen to while cooking this

Whiz your cake batter in the food processor. Look! It matches the stand mixer from my last post 😀 hooray! And it’s red… see… christmas….

Stir through the rhubarb pieces and dump it all in a cake pan

And not too long after you can pop this baby out

Perfect delicious crispy crunchy top, and moist crumb with flecks of deep pink rhubarb.

JOY!

Just a step up from a plain old tea cake, the cinnamon addition gives it a bit more depth and the rhubarb adds colour and texture. You could probably cook it a bit longer to get it firmer in the middle but I love it more moist and pudding like. A super easy way to warm you up on a cold Summer winter day. I defy you to eat this cake and not feel comforted and cuddled. So, my lovelies, what do you like to cook/eat to warm you up when you are cold and feeling miserable?

Rhubarb and Cinnamon Cake from The Cook’s Companion by Stephanie Alexander

Ingredients

80 g unsalted butter

300g plain flour

380g brown sugar

2 eggs

a few drops of vanilla essence

1 tsp salt

1 tsp bi carb soda

1 tsp ground cinnamon

grated zest of 1 lemon

1 cup sour cream

400g rhubarb (cut into 1 cm pieces)

1/4 cup brown sugar (for the topping)

1 tsp ground cinnamon (for the topping)

Method

1. Mix together the butter and sugar

2. add the eggs and vanilla

3. sift together the flour, salt, bi carb and cinnamon then add to the food processor and pulse a few times to combine

4. Add the lemon zest and sour cream then transfer to a large bowl and stir in the rhubarb

5. pour into a 24 cm round tin that has been greased and lined with paper

6. Mix together the brown sugar and cinnamon and sprinkle evenly over the top of the cake

7. Bake at 180 degrees celsius for 1 1/4 hours or until a skewer inserted comes out clean

Zumbo for Beginners: The “It Mayo Shock You” Cake

For my birthday recently I was delighted to receive several cookbooks that I had been hankering after. As I have recently had to buy a new bookcase to store my ever increasing stash of cookbooks, I vowed to do more than just look at the pretty pictures and actually cook a proper amount of recipes from each book. My resolution was strengthened by the fact that holidays start in three weeks and after that I will have no colleagues/students to give my excess food to and my ever expanding waistline will soon begin to rival the equator. Fact.

And lets face it, with this selection how could you not be dying to have a crack at the recipes?

Anyway, back to the story. After the serendipitous meeting of Zumbo the other weekend (see here), I was determined to make something from the book, no matter how hard the recipes looked. The first recipe I opened to was this “It Mayo Shock You” cake and after the initial URGH reaction to the thought of mayo and chocolate (both of which I love but previously only separately) I was intrigued by the relative simplicity of the recipe.

Love the full page photos but intrigued by the continuous presence of tiny people. Any ideas?

I used the Kewpie Mayonnaise which is available at most supermarkets

(I also like to eat this squeezed on carrot sticks… mmmm…)

Yep. Equator. Told you so.

All you do is mix all the ingredients together then stir in the raspberries. So far so good…

The recipe made two small loaf cakes and my tins were a little too small so I had extra batter to make some cupcakes. No point in letting the excess go to waste!

Good lord, these cakes looked and smelled so good coming out of the oven

So the cakes came out fine, but then I hit a snag. I should have known that all would not be as it seemed. To go over the cake the recipe called for a chocolate glaze that seemed simple enough, but required the making of a mirror glaze which required an ingredient called Pectin NH. I’m familiar with normal pectin as ive used it in jam making many times before. One voice in my head said “go ahead lazy bones, just whack some jamsetta in and be done with it” while the other voice said “Katie, do you really think that someone with this degree of expertise in finnicky ingredients would just use normal pectin? Nuh uh.” For once, I made the right decision, as I found out later on that you cannot substitute normal for NH as they are totally different and act differently under heat. So I decided to admit defeat and use a normal chocolate ganache with raspberries on top of my cake.

But, I had my own secret weapon.

Ok, so not quite so secret, but pretty cool nonetheless. These babies are pretty much popping rocks and I thought I would put them on top of my ganache to give it a bit of a Zumbo lift.

You just have to remember that the star dust will lose its poppyness after it comes into contact with moisture so you don’t want to put it on your ganache before it has set.

This was quite possibly the lightest yet richest chocolate cake i’ve tried so far.

It was impossibly light. It was impossibly chocolaty but without being overly sweet.

Smothered in rich ganache with the pop of raspberry and the magical mouth popping star dust, this was the dessert of champions!

So, unfortunately I couldn’t fully reproduce the recipe as it was written, but I feel an immense sense of achievement just from making the cake. Next on the list are the “toasted lammyjammit” and the “honey comb-over” yes, I am going to work my way up to the much much more challenging ones. Baby steps peeps.

So, my lovelies, what is the craziest dessert you have ever made or eaten? Did you do a fist pump in the air when you completed it? I may have…

It Mayo Shock U – From Zumbo by Adriano Zumbo

Ingredients for the Cake

291 g japanese mayonnaise

210g caster sugar

6g vanilla extract

300g plain flour (sifted)

6g baking powder

5g bi carb soda

65g unsweetened cocoa powder

285g water

165g fresh raspberries plus extra for decoration

Method

1. Mix the mayonnaise, sugar and vanilla for 3-5 mins until the sugar begins to dissolve

2. Sift the dry ingredients together and add to the mayo mix. Mix on a low speed to combine

3. With the motor running, add the water and mix until combined (beware of the splatter potential though, I don’t know if I didn’t use a big enough bowl or of the mixture was just super wet but I ended up with cake batter everywhere!)

4. Remove the mixer and carefully stir the raspberries through using a wooden spoon or spatula

5. Pour into two small loaf tins (7.5 X 7.5 X 20 cm) that have been greased and lined with baking paper

6. Bake on 170 degrees celsius for 45 mins, or until a skewer inserted into the middle of the cake comes out just a little moist

7. cool the cakes in the tins and turn out carefully, making sure that you leave them the right way up

Ganache

I was super lazy and just melted some dark chocolate and then added some cream until I had the right consistency. You could always just pour melted chocolate straight on as well I suppose. Super super chocolaty!

Then garnish with raspberries and strawberry star dust!

Spiced Pound Cake and teachable moments

 I would like to begin this post with a picture of the delicious crunchy bits that form on the top of some cakes. Enjoy.

Now back to business. Sometimes during the course of a lesson we are lucky to get what we call a ‘teachable moment’. When something unexpected happens (inside or outside of the classroom) from which we can draw a moral, life or course related lesson. Sometimes it’s as simple as seeing what can happen when you swing on your chair – and inevitably fall off and crack your head. Sometimes it’s as complex as discussing the international ramifications of a tragedy such as 9/11. It can be anywhere along that spectrum and it gives the lesson a bit more of an edge and relevance that you hope will leave the students with a lasting impression and a more insightful view of themselves and the world around them.

As i’m a very slapdash cook (and person!), my kitchen disasters often lead to such ‘teachable moments’ in which I realise an important lesson. I don’t often post the recipes that don’t work out. Don’t get me wrong, this recipe is amazing and my lesson is nothing to do with this cake. It is more to do with cutting corners….

It starts with basic cake ingredients. A few eggs, a little butter and sugar…

Then we put the batter into a bundt pan. Trust me, everything tastesbetter as a bundt!

And then we have a delicious fragrant, spicy pound cake!

This cake doubles as a room freshener as the smell of the spices wafting out of the oven while it bakes fills the house making everything smell delicious.

So where’s this ‘teachable moment’ I hear you ask?

well, its nothing to do with the deliciously soft and spongy interior to this cake

or the way its moist innards contrast with the crunchy munchy exterior

instead, my lesson was…

never skimp on greasing the pan.

I said I was lazy and often cut corners. I wing it and fly by the seat of my pants. Sometimes I don’t grease the pan properly. This time, it bit me in the ass. Hard.

While still tasting delicious, I couldn’t help but feel sad for my mangled cake and wonder if it would have tasted even better if I had shown it a tiny bit more love and care and taken time to grease the pan properly. Que sera.

So, my lovelies, what baking (or life) lessons have you learned when you were least expecting it?

Spiced Pound Cake Recipe – Adapted from the Hummingbird Bakery Cookbook

Ingredients

230g unsalted butter

650g caster sugar

5 eggs

240ml full cream milk

1 tsp vanilla extract

1/4 tsp ground cloves

1/2 tsp cinnamon

1/2 tsp ground nutmeg

400g flour

1/2 tsp bicarb soda

1/2 tsp salt

Method

1. Put the butter and sugar in a bowl and cream until light and fluffy

2. add the eggs one at a time mixing well before adding the next

3. beat in the milk and vanilla extract until well mixed

4. Stir the spices, bicarb and salt into the batter until well combined

5. Pour the batter into a bundt tin and bake in at 170 degrees celsius for 60-70 mins or until golden brown

Enjoy!