Mandarine and almond syrup cake

I get my fruit and veg delivered by The Local Grocer these days, partially because I can't deal with Woolworths and Coles, my local IGA is pretty shit, and they pay farmers fair prices for their goods. Everyone is a winner - especially those who have to endure me whinging about how evil the duopoly supermarkets are, or me whinging about why some IGA's are awesome and why mine is crap and THEY HAVE NO BREAD AT ALL? I'M GOING HOME! I just let The Local Grocer do it. I don't even have to make a decision about what I want that way, they just tell me - this is what is in season, this is what we can get, so this is what you have. You can choose, I just choose NOT to choose.

This time I got 6 mandarines. I don't mind them, but I don't really like the smell of them when you peel them, and it sticks under your nails and on your skin all day. Do not like.

Photo c/o The Local Grocer with the caption "Eating seasonally? Time to start on the mandarins as local valencia orange supply has stopped. Only Californian and Egyptian navel orange imports available in any quantities at the moment and we won't be selling those! Our local navels come in around late May to early November so if you can hold off on oranges for just a few weeks you can avoid any imported produce :-)"

So these were my options;

Option 1 - let them sit in the box until they go off without eating them.

Option 2 - let them sit in the fridge until they go off without eating them.

Option 3 - eat them.

Options 1 and 2 have happened before. Don't judge me, you too have left stuff in your fruit n veg drawer in the fridge so long it no longer resembles what it once was. I refuse to believe I am the only one this happens to.

Anyway obviously, option 3 has to happen, because waste sucks.

I made cake. It is delicious. 

Dense but not claggy, sweet but with a punchy lemon edge. Much better than a similar cake I had made before, which requires the lengthy boiling of the mandarins, that stunk the house out. This one is just gorgeous, all over.

It looks plain... Don't judge a cake by it's cover.

Mandarine and almond syrup cake

Adapted from Ottolenghi's cake from Jerusalem

Ingredients
200g unsalted butter
380g caster sugar
4 clementines, zest grated, and juiced
Grated zest and juice of 1 lemon
280g ground almonds
1/2 tsp ground cardamom
5 medium free-range eggs, beaten

Method
1) Preheat the oven to 160C. Lightly grease a 24cm spring-form tin, and do what you gotta do to stop the cake sticking.

2) Put the butter, 300g of the sugar (the remaining 80g is for the syrup) and citrus zest in a mixer bowl, and use a paddle attachment to combine. Add about half the ground almonds a spoonful at a time and continue mixing.

3) Add the eggs one at a time, scraping the bottom and sides of the bowl as you go. Add the remaining almonds and ground cardamom and work until the mix is smooth.

4) Spread the cake batter inside the tin, and bake for 50-60 minutes - a skewer should come out a little bit moist.

5) When the cake is almost cooked, in a small pan bring to a boil the remaining sugar and citrus juices (the juices should add up to about 120ml), then remove from the heat. The moment the cake comes out of the oven, pour over the hot syrup, making sure it all soaks through. Leave to cool down in the tin. 

Chocolate Chilli Cupcakes with Cinnamon Cream Cheese Icing

Chocolate and chilli is a combination that people either love, or are really skeptical about. I am a lover of this combo, but am so often disappointed that you can't taste any chilli or get any heat. So when I decided to try this combination for myself, I made sure the flavours and heat were there!

I used the chocolate red wine cake recipe, which is an absolute winner, I use that ALL the time now, it's my go to recipe. It's so versatile - if you don't want the red wine in there, use full cream milk instead. You can add all kinds of flavourings to make this batter into whatever kind of cake you like. It works as a cake, or as cupcakes. This time I used mini cupcake tray, which gives me 24 cupcakes (the mix actually yields more than that, I also filled a 12 hole cupcake tray as well!). This is a great recipe for parties because you get so many cupcakes out of it!

Make sure you try the batter before you cook it - if you can get a hint of chilli, then it's perfect. When the cupcakes bake, the cayenne pepper becomes more pronounced - you can taste it, and it's hotter! Don't worry - the icing balances it out perfectly!

Ingredients
6 tablespoons unsalted butter, at room temperature
3/4 cup brown sugar
1/4 cup caster sugar
2 eggs
3/4 cup red wine
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 generous cup plain flour
1/2 cup cocoa powder
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon cayenne pepper

Method

1) Preheat the oven to 160°C, and non stick your tray/prepare patty pans.

2) In a large bowl, cream the butter and sugar until it forms ribbons. Add the egg and yolk and beat well, then the red wine and vanilla. At this point, the cake will look a little split, but it's all good, it'll come together!

3) Sift the flour, cocoa, baking powder, and cayenne together, and add to the wet ingredients. Mix gently until combined, then use a teaspoon to fill the cupcake holes about 2/3 to the top.

4) Place the trays in the middle of the oven for 15 minutes (depends on the size of your trays though!) or until a skewer comes out clean. Allow to cool before icing.

Now, the cream cheese icing... This isn't a recipe. It's just a guideline. I often find cream cheese icing gets really runny. I decided not to follow a recipe and just wing it. It worked.

I used a whole packet of cream cheese, and used my KitchenAid to beat it with about a 2/3 cup of icing sugar until it was sweet enough for me, double cream to take the savoury tang off the cheese, and some full cream milk just to loosen it up a bit (because the double cream was REALLY thick!). I added a heaped tsp of cinnamon as well. Just add these ingredients until you get to a consistency you can work with, whether you're piping or just using a palette knife. Use your instinct. 

I experimented with how I wanted the piping to look, though I'm really not much of a piper. I found out that I pipe slightly to the left! I actually quite like the look of having the stars and swirls mixed up on the stand.

These little cupcakes are perfect for high tea as well, which is handy as that is this months Sweet Adventures Blog Hop theme! Have a look at Delicieux, the host blog for this month!

Secret Cake Club Perth - Pumpkin cake

We had our last Clandestine Cake Club meeting on Saturday, but there is no need to be sad! Because while this is the end of Clandestine, we have branched out and created the Secret Cake Club Perth! We found that while there is nothing wrong with cake, people were starting to to want to bake more than just cake... as one of our members said, she got a new cookbook recently, and was flicking through it looking for something to bake for a meeting and page after page of gorgeous bakes she still had nothing, because it MUST be cake. Our members are fabulous bakers, and we wanted to give them the opportunity to show off their creativity, and bake the things they like! Coming into summer, having the oven on for 90 minutes does not suit us here in Perth, it's simply too hot. So being able to create other dishes, which require less oven time, or even having things set in the fridge instead is what will work for us! We have a nice new webpage (www.secretcakeclubperth.com), facebook page (www.facebook.com/secretcakeclubperth) AND twitter account (@SCCPerth). So come and have a look at the new thing in Perth!!

After the last meeting, which was retro/childhood cakes, we all needed the month between meetings to get over the sugar coma, which was made worse by the food colouring! The cakes looked amazing, but it's no surprise kids go nuts at parties! So this time we tried to even it out a bit, and we chose vegetables/savoury cakes as the theme! It was probably the best meeting we've had so far, there was such variety, and with the announcement of the NEW cake club, everyone was buzzing with excitement, it was such a social meeting.

I chose to make a pumpkin cake with a chai drizzle. I used the recipe from Delishhh, changed a few things, but not really enough to warrant the recipe being written out again, I just added more ginger and used treacle rather than molasses. I got a perfect looking cake, which was moist and really nice. I really liked it! I would definitely make it again!!

Tha chai drizzle was really easy - I just put a teaspoon of loose chai tea into about a cup of full cream milk, and warmed it up. I then added it slowly to a cup of icing sugar until I got a thick, pouring consistency. Poke some holes in your cake and drizzle it over!

If you'd like to come along to the Secret Cake Club Perth then check our website or Facebook page for the next meeting, or email me on secretcakeclubperth{at}gmail{dot}com, we'd love to have you!

Citrus cake with marmalade

Some days just call for cake. I don't even eat a lot of cake but I needed to make some anyway. Especially when I see a recipe where I already have everything I need! This was the case with Rachel Khoo's Quatre-quarts aux agrumes, or citrus fruit cake. I had everything except the orange zest. In place of that I had a jar of Maggies Place thick cut 4 fruits marmalade, that I got from my Urban Locavore box. 

This can become something. I think.

It totally did.

A buttery, sweet cake, covered in the contrasting marmalade, which has a touch of sweetness finished off with a kick of bitter orange and a citrus tang! This is a very adult bake, as it is not completely sweet, but sweet enough to know it's cake. To keep it sweet, make a sugar syrup with lemon and rosemary and drown the cake in that instead of the marmalade. Heaven.

I took this to Carolanne's Kitchens 2nd birthday celebrations (I kinda cake crashed! Who brings cake to a birthday party!?) and was happy to see most of it gone! 

Recipe inspired by Rachel Khoo's Quatre-quarts aux agrumes.

Ingredients
4 eggs
250g golden caster sugar
250g plain flour
a pinch of salt
finely grated zest of a lemon + juice
1 tsp baking powder
250g butter, melted and cooled
1 jar of Maggies Place thick cut 4 fruit marmalade (or any brand that is your fave!)

Method
1) Preheat oven to 180C, and prepare your baking tin (original recipe calls for a loaf tin but I used a bundt).

2) Seperate the eggs and in one bowl beat the whites with half the sugar to form soft peaks, in the other bowl, beat the egg yolks with the other half of the sugar, until thick and pale.

3) Gently combine the flour, salt, zest, juice and baking powder with the egg yolk mix and then slowly add the melted butter.

4) Add the egg whites carefully, folding them into the mix until combined.
5) Pour the batter into the prepared tin and bake for 50-60 minutes, or until a skewer comes out clean.

6) Leave the cake to cool in the tin, when it has cooled enough to take it out of the tin, heat your marmalade gently on the stove until it has become pouring consistency. 

7) Prick holes all over the top of your cake, then pour over the marmalade. 

NB The original recipe says the cake cooks in 35-40 minutes, however mine was not NEARLY done by then, and it needed an additional 25-30 minutes. You'll have to use your judgement here, and just keep checking your cake after its been in the oven 40 minutes.

Savoury cake - Rachel Khoo

My darling bf recently returned from a 2 week trip to England for some family weddings, and tucked away in his bag was a couple of bits and pieces for me! England is SO MUCH cheaper than Australia, and so I managed to snag some great workout clothes, an awesome union jack cushion for the couch and most importantly, Little Paris Kitchen, by Rachel Khoo. What a man! How is this... he knew I didn't have many French cookbooks and so he thought it would make my collection more complete - he also remembered me watching her episodes on YouTube, and knew I liked her. I have found a keeper here ladies!!

Flicking through the book, I loved it. Bookmarking recipes, well, there are A LOT I plan on making. In fact this week is pretty much only recipes from her book - some are involved and fiddly, for a Sunday bake up when you have the time (and will) to potter in the kitchen. Others are so easy they're perfect for a week night meal, which are the ones I'll use this week. Will write more about this book as I use it, as I'm sure I'll use it a fair bit!

So the recipe that popped out for me was the cured sausage, pistachio and prune cake. It's a really unique combination of flavours and it sounded delicious - however I don't have prunes or pistachios in the house, but I do have a jumbo smoked chorizo sausage from Mondos that I got in my Urban Locavore box. Perfect. Rachel mentions that the combo that goes into these savoury cakes can be whatever takes your fancy, or whatever is in your fridge! Serve them with a lightly dressed salad or take them on a picnic. Super versatile.

Heres the recipe - adapted from Rachel Khoo's Little Paris Kitchen.

Smoked chorizo, fetta, and spring onion cake

Ingredients

2 cups plain flour 
15g baking powder
1 smoked chorizo (Mondos was delicious!), diced into rounds and quartered
2 or 3 fat spring onions,  chopped roughly
100g fetta (about half the block, I used danish fetta)
4 eggs
100ml milk
150ml olive oil
3 tbsp plain yoghurt
pinch of salt to taste 
pepper

Method

1) Preheat the oven to 180C and line a square brownie tray with baking paper (a few drops of oil will help the paper stick).

2) In a bowl, mix together the flour, baking powder, sausage, and spring onions.

3) In a seperate bowl, whisk the eggs until they are thick and pale in colour.

4) Gradually whisk in the oil, milk, and yoghurt, then add the salt and pepper.

5) Add the crumbled fetta, and fold the mixture together gently, bit by bit. Don't over mix, better to undermix it (you don't want to develop the gluten like you would in a bread recipe, you want a light cake, not a tough one!).

6) Pour the batter into the prepared tin and cook for 25-30minutes or until a skewer inserted into the middle comes out clean. Leave in the tin to cool.

NB; If you'd rather use a loaf tin (as Rachael's recipe calls for), then bake for 30-40 minutes.

Check out Eating Those Words for another delicious looking take on this recipe!

Amazing bread!

I have sung the praises in a previous post about the book Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a Day, and so I thought that I should share the recipe for the bread here, because its THAT easy, and the dough is SO good to work with.

It's commonly known that for doughs and pastries, everything handles better when it's cold. That is one massive plus of this dough, when it's finished its first rise, it goes in the fridge to mature further - meaning when you take it out to bake, its fridge cold. This dough does not stick much and requires minimal dusting of flour to get it under control. It's a gorgeous dough to use. The recipe I'll give you is the "master" recipe, the plain and simple boule dough, the artisan free form loaf. The book has plenty of other variations, in fact, today I have a put a dough in that's a mix of dark rye flour, plain unbleached flour, and LSA - it's rising at the moment so stay tuned for how that one turns out!

In the meantime, get baking, with the best recipe for bread I've ever used - it's even easier than soda bread! For best results you need a pizza stone/marble slab, which can be picked up fairly cheaply from some markets, or sold from offcuts from benchtop stores (which is where I got mine!).


Boule dough


3 cups lukewarm water
1.5 tbsp granulated yeast (2 packets)
1.5 tbsp course salt
6.5 cups unsifted, unbleached, all purpose white flour
Cornmeal for pizza peel


NB - I don't use corn meal and I don't have a pizza peel. I just use baking paper, some flour and a round, flat rimmed pizza tray. 


Method
1) Warm the water slightly, it should feel just above body temperature. Warm water will rise the dough to the right point for storage in about 2 hours. You can use cold tap water and get an identical result but will take you 3-4 hours. It doesn't make much of a difference as you only do this once per stored batch.


2) Add yeast, water and salt to in a resealable lidded container (a pretty big one - I'm using a big pot at the moment!), don't worry about getting it all to dissolve.

3) Mix in the all the flour at once, kneading is unnecessary. Mix with a wooden spoon, the dough hook of your food processor until the mixture is uniform. You can use your hands if the spoon is difficult, just wet your hands and press the mixture together - don't knead! You're finished when everything is uniformly moist without dry patches. This step should be done in a couple of minutes, and will yield a dough that is wet and loose enough to conform to the shape of its container.


4) Cover with a lid (not airtight) and allow to rise at room temperature until it begins to collapse (or at least flattens on top), approx 2 hours (depending on the water/rooms temperature). Longer rising times, up to about 5 hours, will not harm the end result. You can use a portion of dough at any time after this period. Fully refrigerated dough is easier to work with than dough at room temperature, so the first time you use this method, it's best to refrigerate the dough overnight (at least 3 hours) before shaping a loaf.

5) On baking day! Prepare your surface (pizza peel with corn meal, floured surface, baking paper - whatever you like as long as you can get the dough into the oven quickly and easily, as its hot!). Take about a grapefruit sized piece of dough from the container in your fridge and put it on your prepared surface. Sprinkle the surface of your dough with flour and shape it (add flour as needed to stop it sticking) into a ball - you can see how to do this via THIS video. Place it on your baking sheet/pizza peel and let it rest for 40 minutes. Don't worry if the bottom of the dough appears to be a pile of rough ends, in the resting time it will relax and merge with the rest of the dough. You can also make other shapes like plaits or rings.


6) 20 minutes before baking preheat the oven to about 230C, with your marble stone in the middle, and an empty roasting tray/pan on the bottom shelf.


7) Dust your loaf lightly with flour and slash whatever pattern you like into your bread, using a serrated knife (a cross, tic tac toe, scallop). Get about a cup of water ready by the oven, and then take your dough to the oven and slide your dough with a quick flick of the wrist onto the marble stone. Pour the water into the roasting pan underneath your marble slab and shut the oven door to trap the steam (this helps the crust develop).

8) Bake for about 30 minutes until the crust is golden and the bottom of the loaf sounds hollow when tapped.  The loaf should rise while cooking (oven spring) and you should have a crusty delicious loaf of bread!

Artisan Bread in 5 minutes a Day - Jeff Hertzberg and Zoë Francois

I have a pretty good incentive to start baking my own bread. It's just been reported that one of the big supermarket chains, Coles, has been implying that their Irish soda bread was fresh baked, when it was actually imported from Ireland. I don't normally buy much from Coles or Woolworths, because I don't like or trust them anyway, but its as good a reason as any to bake my own fresh bread! Bakery bread is awesome but it does get expensive if you're buying it all the time!

I bought this book a couple of years ago but never got into it for one reason or another. However now that I'm on school holidays I have the time to have a go! Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a Day by Jeff Hertzberg and Zoë Francois has, through years of trials and testing, broken down the steps necessary to bake great bread. The idea is that you make one master batch of dough and keep it in the fridge, then take out a grapefruit sized ball of dough, shape it, rest it and bake it. I was skeptical about it really being THAT easy.


It is.


The dough is awesome, and contains only yeast, flour, salt and water. Its elastic and I used yeast that was past its use by date, so I added an extra sachet to be sure. That thing rose like a champion, it was coming out of the mixing bowl!

It's recommended that you refrigerate the dough overnight before your first loaf, but I was impatient and baked one last night. It came out well, but didn't rise loads - I also realised I had the oven on too low, so that wouldn't have helped!

I left the dough in the fridge overnight, and then baked a small loaf this morning, this time following the instructions exactly and got a MUCH better looking loaf! It rose a lot in the oven which was great!

The dough is meant to take on sourdough qualities the longer it stays in the fridge, and its said to last 14 days. When you take the dough out of the fridge it is tough yet elastic, it's a bit sticky but managable. I have a metal spoon next to it in the fridge to scoop out the dough, it's quite cool how it stretches, and it feels like great dough. I felt like I knew what I was doing!

The book has a variety of recipes, variations and really helpful advice and explanations on just about anything you can think of, as well as recipes for different flours.


I'm really looking forward to getting stuck into this book, because so far it's been really manageable to have a great loaf of bread, every day! I don't think we'd have time to bake it before work, because of the resting/cooking time, but you'd def have fresh bread at night, ready for the next day. The dough is so easy to make and so low maintenance, and then grabbing the dough from the fridge and shaping it is really easy too.


Given that Saturday is Bastille Day (July 14th), I'm going to make some baguettes! Stay tuned to see how they turn out!

June Clandestine Cake Club - Gluten free!

What an awesome spread our talented bakers bought to the June Clandestine Cake Club, Perth! The theme was gluten free, which gave us an amazing range of cakes! We expected almond/hazelnut meal cakes but we had a range of cakes made with all kinds of different flours, as well as an espresso roulade made with no flour or nut meal at all, and a raw cake! Big thanks go out to Liv, who hosted this months event - she was the hostess with the mostess!

Our cake club numbers jumped significantly when Renee Bergere of Great About Perth, Agenda City and Scoop featured a write up about us, and we were stoked when there were so many people interested!

What is kinda funny is... you'd expect the organisers of cake club to be fab bakers right? Well, Carolanne is, but of course, my cake didn't work! I made a baked cheesecake with roast pineapple in it, but it WOULD NOT set! ARGH! I learned something though, so now I know for next time to add a lot less pineapple! It goes to show that you do NOT have to be an amazing baker to come to cake club! You just have to have a love for baking and a want to socialise!

We're going to try and get a collection of the recipes, so if you're reading this and you attended, please get in touch if you'd like to include your recipe!

Have a look at the amazing range of gluten free cakes below!

For the recipe for Martines' delicious coffee pecan bundt cake, check her awesome blog Chomp Chomp!

If you're interested in attending the next cake club, then please check in HERE for updates!