Tag: comfort food

Chocolate Cake like your Grandma used to Make

So I have to start this post with a disclaimer: I don’t ever remember my grandma making cakes. My mum assures me that she did, and regales me with tales of amazing pavlovas made by whipping the eggs and sugar on a giant plate with a knife, but have no memories of this whatsoever. The cake I am going to tell you about is the kind of cake I imagine my grandma would have made.

The chill of winter calls for simple food and after browsing through my cookbooks again I stumbled upon my CWA cookbook. An oldie but a goodie. And no requirements for crazy fancy or difficult to find ingredients which is a huge saving on my time poor days. Having said that, I did use two rather special ingredients that were not necessary but definitely added to the final cake. These were some particularly indulgent cocoa and chocolate sprinkles that I bought on a trip to Josophans chocolate shop in Leura, Blue Mountains.

I have a thing about cocoa powder. I used to be a staunch Bourneville user until I realised how much lighter in colour it and the Nestle cocoa powder was compared to other brands. While expensive, Josophans’ cocoa powder drew me in with its rich, dark colour and I knew it would be a winner in any recipe.

I had intended to make this cake and bring it in to work for morning tea but I was turning into the driveway at work when I realised that I had left it at home. Along with my sanity it seems.

So, there was nothing else for it but to serve it as a particularly tasty morning tea on Saturday morning. Remember, when there’s chocolate cake involved the glass is always half full people! It was lightly chocolatey and moist. Definitely not the super rich chocolate hit of other cakes ive made but just right for morning tea. Simple yet satisfying.

Now I know that this photo is grainy, but I wanted to show you the tea I drank with this cake. It was Wedgewood Earl Grey that I was given as a present for Christmas. It was absolutely delicious! One of the best Earl Greys i’ve tasted in a long time.

mmmmmmmm…. chocolate cake…..

So, my lovelies, are you as forgetful as me? My terrible memory has been well documented in this blog. What is the silliest thing you have forgotten and did it turn out ok in the end? Tell me a story to help me procrastinate from doing my marking!

Recipe – Kim’s Chocolate Cake – From the CWA Cakes Cookbook

Ingredients

2 cups self raising flour

3 tablespoons cocoa

1 1/2 cups sugar

1 1/2 cups milk

2 eggs

2 tablespoons butter, melted

Method

1. Sift flour and cocoa into a bowl

2. Add the sugar, milk and eggs and beat well

3. Add the melted butter and beat for another two minutes

4. Pour into a tin (recipe does not specify, use your common sense!) and bake in an oven at 180 degrees celsius for 1 hour

Icing Note:

You can use your favourite chocolate icing for this cake but I used the Donna Hay Chocolate Cream Cheese Frosting that you can find here. Enjoy!

Broken Rules – Hot Cross Buns After Easter

Im the first to admit that I play it pretty safe. I figure that most rules are there to make life easier and keep me safe. I don’t like to cross the road against the lights, I don’t break the speed limit, I always put I before E except after C. However, I am also the first to admit that there are certain rules that are absolutely made to be broken. I like to wear odd socks, I frequently miss deadlines and I eat Hot Cross Buns whenever I damn well like. Not just at Easter. Want to know why?

The answer lies beneath this enormous thesaurus.

Oozing Chocolate Hot Cross Bun French Toast

I got the idea from Kitchen Wench when I was browsing around Easter time for some different ideas for Hot Cross Buns. However, with the craziness that inevitably comes with Easter and the end of school holidays, I didn’t get around to testing this one out until after Easter was over. But boy was it worth it. Worth it enough to justify the baking of Choc Chip Hot Cross Buns well after Easter has ended. I guess if I don’t bake them with a cross, they don’t necessarily count as hot cross buns?

And the recipe is so ridiculously easy! Slice your buns lengthways three times. Scatter some choc chips between the slices, squish under something heavy (e.g. the weight of the entire English Language) and dip into your french toast mixture.

Fry it so that it is crispy and caramelised on the outside, and soft and gooey on the inside

Sprinkle with icing sugar and serve with double cream. Why would you bother with anything less than double?

mmmmmm…. gooey….

And the best part is, if you make a whole batch of choc chip buns, you can make this for breakfast every day for a week. What could be better than that?

You can find the recipe here.

So, my lovelies, what rules do you like to break?

Going nuts for donuts! (version 2.0)

Who could forget the fabulous month where Daring Bakers‘ introduced us to the joys of home made donuts? I certainly couldn’t! Which is why I found myself craving the yeasty golden goodness of these treats in the chilly lead up to Easter this year. I had a few issues with the recipe from the October challenge and wanted to see if following the advice of other Daring Bakers would further improve the results of this already astounding recipe. Turns out, they do. Sorry for the anti climax.

But what could be anti climactic about risen dough? Look at this baby rise! I followed the instructions to the letter this time and resisted adding any more flour, despite the extreme wetness of the dough. Sometimes I think that there is nothing more joyous than coming back after an hour and seeing that beautiful crown of dough peeking over the rim of the bowl!

I didn’t have the luxury of using the S family kitchen with all its adult supervision and granite benchtops, not to mention tiled floors. So I was extra careful in my own kitchen (particularly after the poached pears debacle! My stove top is still recovering…). I kitted myself out with numerous bath towels to smother any small fires that may arise and was generally much more careful than I would otherwise be.

This is one well risen dough! Look at that honeycomb of air bubbles…

I patted the dough out onto my baking mat. It was still much too wet to roll out, although it had dried a little during the rising process.

I cut the dough into donut shapes using concentric circles

and banished them to their oily doom!

Muahaha!

Mmmmm… golden fried goodness

After dipping them into the sugar cinnamon mixture they came out looking perfect!

Light and tasty and just pretty damn good!

I think the long cold rise over night in the fridge gives it a greater depth of flavour

And so my second foray into donut making was a great success. But do you think I stopped at just sugar cinnamon donuts? Of course not!

So I made sugar cinnamon strawberry jam donuts!

These babies went down even better than the original recipe donuts. I’m sorry I don’t have a middle shot to show you, but the insides are filled with strawberry jam. Mmmmmmmmmmmm….

The only alteration you need to make to the recipe is to cut one round without a hole in the middle, let the donut cool and cut a slit into the side of it. Insert a piping nozzle and squeeze strawberry jam inside. Fill up as much as you want!

The recipe can be found here.

So my lovelies, what is your favourite flavour of donut? Do you like them plain, or do you go all out with jam and cream?

Dear Blog, Happy Birthday! Love Katie

Who doesn’t love birthdays? My own love for these annual celebrations has been well documented, as has my fervent belief that all birthdays should be celebrated with cake. Preferably coloured pink. So what did you think I would bake to celebrate the first birthday of this beautiful little blog?

A pink birthday cake of course!

Note to self: be less predictable.

As I pondered the possibilities of decorating this cake, the work of Yayoi Kusama came to mind. Kusama is a famous Japanese artist who has a penchant for spots with a dash of craziness. Of the very psychedelic variety. See exhibit A:

I first stumbled upon her after buying a t shirt in Japan with her face on it. I had no idea who she was, or even if she was a real person, until a Japanese girl in an art gallery asked me if I was a Kusama fan. Smile and nod.

She brought an exhibition to the MCA in Sydney a few years ago which was clever and playful and ticked all the right boxes. So, while not quite as ground breaking as her work, I thought I would break out the polka dots for my blog birthday cake.

First came this chocolate cake and ganache

Apologies for the blurriness.

Then came the spots.

A spot over here and a spot over there and a spot in my ear and a spot in my hair

Well that was just overkill. There were no spots in my hair or ears…

All in all, not a bad effort! Apart from the lumpy ganache, but hey, its not THAT obvious is it? *whistles*

And with a bit of double cream and a cute cake fork, what better way to celebrate a birthday?

So, happy birthday blog, and thank you for keeping me sane over what was one roller coaster of a year! Here’s to many more exciting years together  xoxo

So, my lovelies, what is your favourite kind of birthday food?