Pear and coconut upside down cake

This is a variation on the easy chocolate cake recipe. I first made it last week to use up some manky pears that been in the fridge a few days too long. The consensus was that it was pretty nice, although I thought it was a bit sweet and could do with some citrus notes, hence the orange. Mum thought lemon would be too strong but I'm not so sure. I'm also thinking that other possibilities might be; the inclusion of dark chocolate chips, mixing some yoghurt in with the milk (I often do this with pancakes), lowering the sugar content, cooking the pears in red wine or port, perhaps using some honey, including some other spices and or nuts. Not all at once, but one variation at a time. Anyway, I had some doubts with this cake after a fraught mixing process in which my helper tried to eat the butter and sugar before it got mixed into the cake, but once again, this cake was lovely. Even if I do say so myself.

Ingredients

4 ripe but not too soft packenham pears
1 navel orange
1 1/3 cups of self-raising flour
1 1/4 cups of firmly packed brown sugar
6 tablespoons of dessicated coconut
125 butter at room temperature (or softened in the microwave)
2 eggs
2 teaspoons of vanilla essence
2/3 milk
some extra butter and sugar for the upsidedowny part of the cake

Making the cake

• Line and grease a 22cm springform cake tin. Preheat the oven to 180C.
• Using a vegetable peeler or zester, scrape the orange part of the orange rind from the orange and chop finely. Discard any pieces that have white on them.
• Core the pears and cut into eights. Add the orange juice and about a table spoon or so of sugar depending on the sweetness of the pears. Cover and cook in the microwave for about three minutes on high until the pears are just translucent.
• Place the rest of the ingredients in a mixing bowl and beat with an electric beater on high until the mixture is pale(r). It will not achieve a silky texture because of the coconut, but it should look kind of glossy.
• Sprinkle about a table spoon of brown sugar on the base of the cake tin. Dot with thin slices of butter (less than a tablespoon all up). Arrange the pears over this, reserving the syrup for later. Cover with the cake batter and gently smooth the top.
• Bake for about an hour or until a knife comes out of the middle of the cake cleanly. Rest for at least ten minutes before turning onto a serving plate.
• Heat the remaining syrup in the microwave on high for three to five minutes or until it is gooey. Spread over cake, smoothing with a knife dipped in hot water if necessary. Serve with cream.

Easy chocolate cake

This is adapted from a cake featured in the Sunday Life section of The Age newspaper back in 2004. It has become my standard, we need a cake today, cake. I use milk instead of water and tend to ice it with a glace icing instead of ganache, partly because I like icing sugar icings and partly because it seems to suit this cake. This is as easy as making a packet cake. Really.

Cake ingredients
1 1/3 self-raising flour
5 tablespoons unsweetened cocoa powder
1 1/4 cups of brown sugar
125g butter at room temperature (or softened but not melted in the microwave)
2 eggs
2 teaspoons vanilla essence
2/3 cup milk

Making the cake

• Pre-heat oven to 180C, line and grease a 22cm cake tin (I use a tin with a removeable base).
• Measure and place all the ingredients in a mixing bowl.
• Beat with an electric beater until the mixture is pale and silky looking, like with packet mixes.
• Pour into the tin and smooth out. Bake for about an hour or until a knife pierced into the centre comes out smoothly. Allow to cool for at least 5 minutes before de-tinning onto a serving plate. (I know I should put it on a rack to cool but rarely do as we often eat this cake fairly warm.)
  

Icing the cake
1 teaspoon very soft butter
icing sugar
unsweetened cocoa
water to mix

Mix ingredients until you get a thick and smooth icing. I usually use about half a 250 gram pack of icing sugar with cocoa to taste. For best results let the cake cool for at least 30 minutes before icing.

Muesli Slice

While I was on holidays, during Grace's nap, I sometimes felt like baking. Nice, well equiped kitchen looking over the treetops, an electric fan forced oven (unlike the antique caravan sized oven with unreliable temperature control we have at home in the pokey kitchen) and nothing much else to do might have had something to do with it. As would have the appetitie sharpened by the sea air and the general holiday disregard for any concept of dieting. Which leads me to the next point, I don't think this could be classified as a heathy food although it does contain some healthy ingredients. Made all the tastier with ample amounts of sugar and butter.

The recipe is roughly based on a recipe for Anzac biscuits I found in an old Women's Weekly cookbook. With the addition of muesli, an egg and a little more water. I've made this slice with golden syrup, honey and molasses and they're all good. Any brand of untoasted muesli with the bran turds in it will do, although personally I prefer one without the cursed dried paw-paw found in so many modern mueslis. Apricots are good though. Don't press it into the tin too hard and don't add too much water. As both seem to affect the texture. Although each time I've made it, it's been very edible. Indeed, I think we might be making this quite alot.

You need

• 3 cups of untoasted muesli
• 1 cup dessicated coconut
• 1 cup self-raising flour
• 1 cup brown sugar
• a dash of cinnamon
• 2 tablespoons of golden syrup, honey or molasses
• 100 g butter
• 1-3 tablespoons of water
• 1 teaspoon of bicarb soda
• 1 egg
• 1 lemon
• icing sugar

To Make

• Mix muesli, brown sugar, coconut, self-raising flour and cinnamon in a large mixing bowl.
• Melt the butter and the syrup together. Either in the microwave or in a saucepan on the stove.
• Mix bi-carb soda with one tablespoon of water and add to warm butter and sugar. It will froth up quite a lot.
• Add the frothy mix to the dry ingredients and stir well.
• Beat the egg with just a little water and mix in well.
• Stir. The mix should be fairly stiff but add a little more water if everything won't combine.
• Spread in tin lined with baking paper or greased. It needs to be fairly thin, say about two centimetres, but don't pack it as the mix will spread. A few gaps are fine.
• Bake at 180C (a little less if fan forced) until a bit puffy and golden brown.

To Ice

Squeeze a lemon. Add enough icing sugar to make a thin icing. It will seem like it isn't enough, but it is. Spread very thinly over the slice. When the icing has set hard, cut into squares. This is where the baking paper comes into it's own because then it can just be lifted onto a chopping board and cut with a big knife.This slice is a whole lot nicer than the ingredients would suggest.

Beetroot Risotto

I'm starting to get the hang of growing beetroot and this how most of it is used. It's not really what I'd call a proper risotto, made with stock and constant stirring, rather it's the sort of dish you can knock up the night before shopping day and fold some washing (or go on the internet) while it's cooking*. And it will be good.

It contains a small amount of chilli, not so much that it tastes hot, just enough to lift the flavour a little. I also tend to use cooking sherry (Mildara Chestnut Teal) rather than red wine**, because that's normally what I have on hand and it seems to work pretty well. Red wine gives a better colour, but I think the sherry gives a better flavour. If you were cooking this for children, you could leave out the alcohol(which cooks out anyway) and the chilli but it wouldn't taste nearly as good. If I'm light handed with the chilli, Grace likes this dish and there's an amusing photo of her somewhere covered in it.

You will need
a large onion
several cloves of garlic
about half a small chilli (depending on strength, we're going for buzz not fire here)
a big handful of aborio rice per person ( I use 3 handfuls for the two of us and a Grace meal the next day)
a 400g tin of crushed tomatoes
2 medium sized beetroot (the leaves too, if nice and fresh) peeled and cubed into chunky bite sized peces
a good slosh of cooking sherry or red wine
olive oil and butter
a good handful of mint leaves
paremesan cheese for serving

To make
Dice the onion, garlic and chilli and saute gently for two minutes in a tablespoon of olive oil and about the same of butter. Sprinkle with a pinch of salt. When the onions are translucent, add the rice and cook for a minute or two, stirring constantly. The rice should take up all the oil and look pearly. Add the slosh of sherry or wine and let it all bubble up. Stir well.

Add the beetroot cubes and stir. Add the tinned tomatoes and stir. Add about a tomato can and a half of water and stir well. Cover and adjust the heat so that it just simmers. Return in fifteen minutes, remove the lid, have a stir. The rice should be nearly cooked and the beetroot done. Cook a little longer if necessary. Stir to remove any excess liquid. Add the beetroot leaves if using, and the chopped mint.

Serve with shaved parmesan.

*I cook this dish in my heavy Le Creuset frypan that I've had for more than twenty years, that I cook nearly everything in. It's a very forgiving pan and it occurs to me that the cookware might have something to do with being able to leave it simmering.
**Once I made this with Port and thinking that I was using red wine, used quite a bit. The resulting rissotto was delicious and i think the extra sweetness in the port made up for the woody end of summer beetroot.

White Christmas

I love White Christmas at Christmas time, but not stuff you buy from the supermarket. Yucky. This is much nicer. It's adapted from The Big Book of Beautiful Biscuits published by The Australian Women's Weekly circa 1990 (but a reprint of an older series. I wish I still had the cake book from this series, the new one just doesn't cut it in my opinion). The success of this depends on the freshness of the ingredients, especially the milk powder. Don't be tempted to make it with some old powder you have lying around the cupboard like I did one year. It was foul. Buy a new tin. Also the original recipe uses glace fruit and sultanas but I just buy a packet of mixed fruit which works well. I've also doubled the quantity, assuming that you're making it to give away or share with a lot of people. It's not the sort of thing you want have lying around the house for too long.

You will need

• 500g copha
• 2 cups rice bubbles
• 2 cups full cream milk powder
• 2 cups coconut
• 2 cups icing sugar
• 1 375 packet of mixed fruit with glace cherries

To make

Place dry ingredients in bowl and mix well, making sure all the fruit is separated. Melt copha in microwave on high for 2-3 minutes. Add melted copha to dry ingredients and mix well. Pour into lined tin. Smooth down and refrigerate. When set, cut into small squares.

Andrew's short crust recipe

This recipe was given to me by a chef I worked with when we had the kitchen. Making proper pastry didn't come naturally to me, kind people said it was because I had warm hands better suited to breadmaking. Anyway, with the demands of running a cafe kitchen as well as cooking, I never really had the time to learn. This recipe is different to proper pastry, it's made by creaming butter and sugar and not at all temperamental. It can be quite hard which means that it doesn't go soggy as quickly, which means that for tarts they will stay nice enough for a couple of days.

As this recipe freezes really well, I tend to make the larger quantity and freeze tart size portions. From memory it's enough for 4 domestic size tarts. Being untemperamental this mixture can be microvaved to thaw it out. It also makes quite nice biscuits, either plain or with passionfruit icing. But that's another story.


You will need

small quantity

• 250g butter
• 250g caster sugar (sometimes I use brown sugar which turns out OK)
• 350g flour (about 1/4 self raising and the rest plain)

larger quantity

• 500g butter
• 500 g caster sugar
• 500g plain flour
• 200 g self-raising flour

To make

• Chop the butter into pieces and soften slightly in the microwave if really hard.
• Cream butter and sugar with electric beater on high.
• Add about three quarters of the flour and mix on low speed. (Andrew used to insist on it being mixed by hand, but I don't think it makes a difference if you use a slow speed) Add the rest of the flour until you have a moist but slightly crumbly dough. Most of the time you will need all the flour, but it can vary.
• Knead just enough for the dough to cohere. If you accidentally add too much flour, add just enough cold water to bring the dough together. It will still be fine.

To make a pie or tart crust

• Press into tin, making sure that you don't make the corners too thick. Trim.
• Bake at 180C until crust puffs up a little and maybe starts to colour, depending on how tough, er crisp, you like your crust. Remove from oven and press out the puffy bits with the back of a spoon.
• Fill with tart filling and bake as per filling recipe.

To make biscuits

• Roll out quite thinly.
• Cut biscuit shapes.
• Bake at 180C until just brown.
• Ice or not.

Plum jam

We have a plum tree in our backyard. The plums are small, not that nice to eat, but they make the best jam. Especially if there is a fair percentage of under ripe fruit. This makes the jam very tangy, slightly sour. It also sets really well due to the high pectin content of the under ripe fruit . I think making jam is fairly easy, but I learnt as a child from my mother and grandmother.

Sometimes it doesn't go well, which can be blamed on the fruit or the weather or poor timing. My tips for success would be:

• Don't try to make too much at one time. 2 or 3 kilos of fruit at time, maximum.
• Make sure you have a big enough pan. The fruit and sugar should fill less than the bottom quarter of the pan.
• Plan ahead. Have ready jars, cellophane covers, scales and sugar.
• Child minding. I had someone else around to look after Grace during the critical bits. Hot sugar and toddlers do not mix. Although she was fascinated, close supervision was the order of the day.
• Do not attempt to do while you are doing something else. Jam making is not something that can be multi tasked.
• Help with de-stoning small fruit is good. If others like to eat the jam too, suggest that help with this task would be welcome. It took two of us about an hour to prepare the fruit. In good company, that goes quickly. On your own, it's a drag.
• Boiling sugar is hot. Use oven mitts or tea towells when moving the pan around. Wear sensible shoes.

You will need

2 to 3 kilos of plums
equal weight of white sugar (usually I prefer to cook with brown sugar, but I think jam works better with white sugar)
glass jars
cellophane covers and elastic bands
big preserving pan
scales

To make

• Wash jars well in hot soapy water. Rinse well in water with vinegar. Air dry. Preheat oven.
• Wash and dry fruit.
• Remove stones. Some people prefer to make this type of jam with the stones in and skim at the end. I prefer to remove the stones and know that I won't have any on my toast.
• Weigh fruit progressively as you complete stoning a bowlful. Weigh out the same weight of sugar and add to pan. Keep going until the pan is quarter full of fruit and sugar, you have stoned three kilos of fruit or you think you have enough. Mix well.
• Place jars on a tray in a warm oven, with heat turned off.
• Place pot of jam on medium to low heat and stir regularly. Make sure you scrape along the bottom of the pan and into the corners. Do not let the sugar catch on the bottom of the pan or burn. Ensure all the sugar is melted.
• Once all the sugar has melted, turn the heat up. Stir frequently. It will froth up and then die down again, after boiling for 10 or fifteen minutes. Skim. (I'm not a big skimmer, I don't mind a little froth in my jam.)
• Start testing for set by spreading a little jam on a plate. When it has cooled, run your finger through the jam. The surface should wrinkle. Plum jam usually takes about twenty minutes. Towards the end, I take the pan off the heat while testing for set.
• Once the jam is ready remove from heat and get your jars out of the oven.
• Ready your cellophane covers and a little dish of water or vinegar.
• Pour jam into jars. I use a gravy boat, filling the gavy boat with a ladle.Then tipping fairly neatly into the jars, which I have spaced out on a tray.
• Clean any spilled bits around the neck of the jar. Moisten cellophane with water or vinegar, place over jar and secure with an elastic band. I like to do this while the jam is still hot. This causes the covers to tighten and seal well.
• After the jam is cool, clean any spilt bits from the outside of the jars and label. I've called this one Early plum, 2006.
• If you have the jar lids, place loosely over the cellophane before storing.
• Jam made this way will last several years. We finished the 2002 batch earlier this year.