Recipes

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/

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/

The Sweet Swap: Honeycomb Recipe

- Alex Prichard Leave a comment

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Last year my participation in the Sweet Swap was chaotic and disorganised. At the time, I had a super sick toddler so that was, in some ways, justified.

This year, I have no such justification. None at all. Sure, I had the flu and spent a couple of days in bed gobbling pain killers … but if I’d been organised and on top of things that wouldn’t have made a difference. So the date for ‘latest dispatch’ of the sweets came and went and I was still feeling poorly and still hadn’t made up my mind what to make …

My initial plan was to make florentines and I actually got my act into gear and made them. They tasted amazing so I will post the recipe anon … but they were so fragile there was no way they would survive the post. And then I realised that they contained butter and one of my swappees was lactose intolerant …

Good grief. I’d got to the point where I had one afternoon in which to make something and take it to the post office and put it in an express post bag in the hope that it would arrive on Friday.

And therein lies the great challenge of the Sweet Swap. It’s not making the sweets but it’s creating something and then packaging it so that it comes out the other end looking and tasting OK. I settled on making honeycomb (or cinder toffee, which is what I’ve got into the very un Australian habit of calling it!) because it’s quick and I love it but I’m not convinced it would have travelled well. It sets super hard but after a little bit of exposure to air it starts to get sticky. Which is lovely when you’re stuffing your face with it at home but it might not be so good when you open a package of it …

Andy helpfully suggested that this could have been solved by dipping it in chocolate. Well, yes it could.

And while cinder toffee is perfectly good to eat as a snack on its own, it’s also a sweet that works perfectly with other things. Crumble it through ice cream, across the top of chocolate cake or chocolate mousse. Or yes, dip it in chocolate and just scoff it.

There are several subtly different approaches to making cinder toffee. Do you add water? Well, I don’t but this is apparently a good way of ensuring that the sugars don’t heat up too quickly. The temperature to which you heat the sugar before adding the bicarb will determine how hard or chewy the finished product is (if you’re familiar with a sugar thermometer that shouldn’t come as a surprise). If you’re interested in the science of cinder toffee, then read this article in the Guardian. I was going to use a James Martin recipe but it required runny honey and we had none in the house, so I used this recipe, from Sweets Made Simple, a fun (and recipe heavy) programme hosted by confectioners Kitty Hope and Mark Greenwood.

Making this has reminded me how much I enjoy cooking with sugar. Of course, any time you start to cook with sugar you need to remember that it gets HOT. Don’t stick your finger in to the toffee mixture, no matter how appealing it looks because you’ll get burnt. Leave things to cool for at least an hour and always approach with caution. Your life will be easier if you have a sugar thermometer.

 

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Honeycomb (Cinder Toffee) Recipe

Ingredients

  • 75g caster sugar
  • 100g liquid glucose
  • 25g golden syrup
  • 15g bicarbonate of soda

Instructions

  1. Gently heat the caster sugar, liquid glucose and golden syrup until the sugar is dissolved. Then increase the temperature and heat the mixture to 150°C. Use a sugar thermometer - and be patient.
  2. When the mixture hits 150°C remove from the heat and either whisk through the bicarb or stir it through vigorously. The mixture will froth up. As soon as the bicarb is mixed through, pour the toffee on to a baking sheet or tin lined with baking paper.
  3. Set aside to cool.
  4. When cool, break into chunks and ... eat. And make an appointment with your dentist!
https://eatingadelaide.com/sweet-swap-honeycomb-recipe/