Vanilla Jam Cake Recipe

- Alex Prichard Leave a comment

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Every now and then I have a good trawl through all the recipes I have tagged in delicious but have not yet cooked. In some ways it’s a depressing exercise as I tag faster than I’ll ever cook and I have a feeling that in 20 years time I’ll still be finding recipes I tagged in 2006 and haven’t made yet …

The ‘cake’ and ‘baking’ tags offer a particularly happy hunting ground and so I came across the basis for the following recipe. The blog is now defunct (or, as it describes itself, “in a coma”) but thanks to blogger it’s still a resource for all and hungry.

Of course, the first thing I had to get my head around was the fact that the recipe was all in American measurements. ¼ cup of butter – really? Am I supposed to melt the butter and measure it that way? What is wrong with saying 2 oz or 200 grams or whatever it is that you actually mean? In desperation, I whinged to my American friends on Facebook. The responses were generally along the lines that no, they had no idea why sticks and cups are considered sane units of measurement. One said that in America sticks of butter have the cup markings on the package (in much the same way that our packaging has marks at 50g intervals) but that didn’t, to my mind, resolve the issue of accuracy. I know that when I cut the butter at the 50g mark it is invariably anywhere between 45g and 55g once I get it on the scales. And in the age of cheap, digital scales why not use a unit of measurement that makes sense for non-liquid ingredients?

Goodness – I feel quite stressed now!

So I printed the recipe out, sat down with the internet and worked out conversions as best I could. Keeping in mind that I personally often find American recipes a little sweet, I did some massaging and came up with MY vanilla jam cake recipe. It looks like the original, but the recipe is for those of you who don’t have access to sticks of butter readily marked out into cup measurements!

A couple of pro tips. Grease your pan well – if any jam escapes it will be sticky, sticky, sticky! Ensure you have at least a third of the batter in the tin before you add the jam. The jam runs the risk of sinking and escaping and causing more sticky, sticky, sticky. And finally – if jam does escape and your cake comes out looking a little butchered (er, yes, that would be me!) don’t start shovelling warm cake into your mouth. The jam will be fearsomely hot and you’ll end up regretting it.

You don’t need to ice the cake and it keeps quite well for a day or two (that’s as long as it lasted …).  The jam acts as internal icing and helps to keep the cake moist.  It has a lovely vanilla flavour and gets plenty of plus points for being so easy to cook.

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Vanilla Jam Cake Recipe

Ingredients

  • ~ ⅓ cup of jam (your choice, I used strawberry as that's what we had open in the fridge)
  • 200g self raising flour
  • 150g golden caster sugar
  • 50g unsalted butter
  • 1 tsp vanilla paste
  • 1 egg
  • 180mL sour cream

Instructions

  1. Preheat oven to 180°C (160°C fan) and grease well a 1lb loaf tin (8" x 4").
  2. In the food processor, cream the butter and sugar and then add the flour, vanilla and egg. Finish with the sour cream.
  3. This makes a very thick batter.
  4. Spoon approximately ⅓ - ½ the batter into the loaf tin. Spoon the jam over the batter, but avoid the edges. If the jam is quite lumpy (or cold) it is a good idea to spoon it into a bowl and give it a bit of a beating before adding to the batter.
  5. Top with the remaining batter and place in the preheated oven.
  6. Cook for 40-45 minutes or until golden and cooked.
  7. Allow to cool in the tin briefly and then tip out onto a rack and allow to cool (remember, the jam will be very hot).
  8. Ice if desired.
https://eatingadelaide.com/vanilla-jam-cake-recipe/

Bread & Bone Wood Grill

- Alex Prichard Leave a comment

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date of visit: Tuesday 23 September 2014

Unless you’ve been living under a rock you’ll know that Peel Street is the new ‘it’ place to be in Adelaide. New small food and bar businesses are popping up all over the place (I’m not even pretending to keep up) and Peel Street in particular has zoomed past its neighbour, Leigh Street, in terms of density of offerings.

Bread & Bone already has a reputation for the best burgers in Adelaide and the people who I know who have already been there have all rated it very highly. While the exterior is quite imposing, and you can’t miss it, it’s not entirely obvious that Bread & Bone is the restaurant that’s tucked away upstairs from a small courtyard (downstairs is Maybe Mae, through its hidden door). I suggested it for lunch with a friend as I didn’t feel like spending a lot of money and the burger and hot dog side of the menu keeps everything under $20. For the evening or seriously hungry, there is also a selection of wood grill dishes that sit in the $20-30 zone.

It being lunch time, I took one look at the menu and chose the Bratwurst dog. A bratwurst with … kimchi and kewpie mayonnaise. There are three things that improve pretty much any savoury dish and these are sambal oelek, hot lime pickle and kimchi. Kimchi and rice is the highest form of breakfast, in my opinion. If kimchi is on the menu, the chances are I’ll order it.

My friend had the cheeseburger and ordered a green salad. The burger was a good size (we’d already spied on another table’s order) but neither burgers nor dogs come with fries (yes, that’s chips) as standard. My position on salad dressing is that it is mostly wrong and while this salad was dressed, at least the dressing didn’t have an overpowering vinegar flavour to it – it was much more subtle.

The hot dog (which you can see above) was excellent. The sausage was meaty, the kimchi was hot and packed a good vinegar punch and the kewpie counterpointed that perfectly. The bun did a good job of holding it all together and the napkins, while not cloth, are large, solid and more than up to the task of dealing with the inevitable mucky fingers.

Service was efficient and the food came out promptly – which at lunch time is a definite plus. I didn’t suss out the drinks menu but we did wrap up our meal with a caffè latte which also gets the seal of approval.

The bill came out at just under $20 a head which is certainly not the cheapest hot dog lunch you’ll find in Adelaide. However, you do get table service and an interesting and varied menu for your money. And considering that a sandwich can easily push the $10 mark, I personally would rather invest the additional money in a slightly slicker lunch.

I’d love to pretend I’ll go back and try the remainder of the menu … but … did I mention the kimchi?

Bread & Bone Wood Grill
15 Peel Street
Adelaide SA 5000
phone: 08 8231 8535
open from 11:30am

Mary Berry’s Florentine Biscuit Recipe

- Alex Prichard Leave a comment

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The Great British Bake Off is in full swing yet again. I love this program (you can follow along here in Australia as the Guardian has a weekly live blog of the action) because it is so much more gentle than any of the other reality cooking programs (and yes, that includes you, Great Australian Bake Off, with your nasty Big Brother style approach of making the contestants live together and your snippy female judge). Mary Berry is the grandma everyone should want to have and both Mary and Paul take the time to offer constructive criticism. There’s very little nastiness in the show at all (let’s leave aside Bingate and the fallout from that).

A couple of weeks ago the technical challenge was Florentines. Personally I really like the idea of Florentines but find that when you buy them in a cafe they are plate like, thick, and sometimes contain both peanuts and glacé cherries. One of those is bad, both is awful!

On the show, Mary impressed upon the competitors that they should be aiming for lacy, delicate biscuits and there wasn’t a peanut in sight! The real challenge on the program was that the bakers had to temper chocolate for the decoration and that they weren’t told what that decoration should be. I was surprised by how many were really uncertain about this – eat more biscuits, people!

I originally made this as a candidate for the Sweet Swap. However, they were far too delicate to survive in the post, I didn’t do a brilliant job of tempering the chocolate (it was late, I did it in the microwave …) and I’d also neglected to note that one of my swapees was lactose intolerant and these biscuits contain butter. The following recipe (thanks BBC Food) is egg free but does contain flour. I love that Mary uses dried cranberries as a cherry substitute – definitely the way forward – they offer a necessary sour counterpoint to all the sugariness from the caramel biscuit base. Be sure to use baking paper on your trays and handle the biscuits very carefully when they come out of the oven. They are perfectly good to eat without their chocolate back (if you feel that might be a bit too much faff!)

 

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Mary Berry’s Florentine Biscuit Recipe

Ingredients

  • 50g butter
  • 50g golden caster sugar
  • 50g golden syrup
  • 50g plain flour
  • 25g dried cranberries (you might find them labelled as 'craisin')
  • 50g dried/candied peel
  • 25g slivered almonds
  • 25g walnut pieces (you can buy these but if you are using whole/part walnuts, finely chop them)
  • 200g dark chocolate

Instructions

  1. Heat oven to 180°C and line three baking trays with baking paper.
  2. Weigh butter, sugar and golden syrup into a small pan (preferably a non stick one - it will make cleaning up easier!) and heat gently to melt the butter. Remove from the heat and add the dry ingredients.
  3. Mix well.
  4. Drop teaspoonfuls of the mixture on to the prepared baking trays. This recipe makes roughly 18 - so 6 biscuits per tray. It's important to allow plenty of space between biscuits as they spread a lot!
  5. Bake for 8-10 minutes, or until golden brown.
  6. Leave them to cool on the trays for a little before using a broad palette knife and lifting them very gently and carefully onto racks to cool. You won't be stack them so make sure you have plenty of rack space.
  7. If using the chocolate, break half the chocolate into a bain-marie and heat to 53°C. When it hits this temperature, remove from the heat and stir in the remaining chocolate (grated or chopped) and stir gently to melt until the temperature drops to 26°C. Using a sugar thermometer can be tricky for this (they're designed for high temperatures!) so if you think you'll do this more than once, a chocolate thermometer might be a worthwhile investment.
  8. Spread the melted chocolate over the base of each biscuit and leave to cool slightly before creating the signature zig-zag pattern using a fork. If your biscuits are sufficiently lacy you will end up with very chocolatey hands!
  9. Allow to set completely and then store in an airtight container.
https://eatingadelaide.com/mary-berrys-florentine-biscuit-recipe/