Recipes

Easy Chocolate Cake

- Alex 4 Comments

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The world’s cookbooks (and the internet) are awash with recipes for complicated cakes that look stunning and will take a good couple of hours to put together.

Those cakes are fantastic for events where you might want to showcase some baking talent but they won’t do if you want a slice of cake to take for lunch, or if you need to whip up a cake quickly without a trip to the supermarket.

This cake fills that slot perfectly.  It’s quick and if you cook or bake regularly you should have the ingredients to hand.  The recipe comes from a friend of my grandmother and this was the first cake I ever made ‘on my own’.   It is my contribution to this month’s Family Recipes hosted by the Life and Loves of Grumpy’s Honeybunch.

I always bake the cake in a kugelhopf tin but I’m sure a 20cm springform tin would do just as well.

Preheat the oven to 180C bake and grease your tin well.

Cream 50g of butter and 1 cup of caster sugar.  When well combined, add 2 eggs and beat well.  Then add 1 1/2 cups of self raising flour and 2 tbsp of cocoa.  The mixture will be quite stiff.  Mix 1/2 tsp of baking powder (or bicarb) with 1/2 cup of milk and add to the batter.  Beat until combined and finish by beating in 2 tbsp of boiling water.

Pour into your cake tin and bake for about half an hour – the cake should be well risen and a skewer should come out clean.

Leave the cake to cool in the tin for 5 or so minutes before tipping out on a rack.  When the cake is completely cool ice with your favourite icing or just dust with icing sugar.

If you’re lazy (like me!) and use a food processor like a Magimix the whole process, including the cleaning up, will take under an hour.  To me, that is the perfect emergency cake!

Cupcakes for Cupcake Camp

- Alex Prichard 1 Comment

Cupcake Camp is coming to Adelaide on Sunday 22 November.  This means it’s time for me to start practising baking (and decorating) cupcakes.  What a trial!

Since I like messing around with recipes, I dug out my 1920s Handbook for Bakers by Albert F Gerhard.  All the recipes are given in commercial quantities, in imperial, using 1920s American ingredients … so there’s quite a lot of work that needs to be done before hitting the kitchen.  I decided to start with the first cup cake recipe and scale down from 12 dozen to just … one.

The result was a cupcake recipe that made good cupcakes with a fine, moist crumb.  That said – there’s nothing outrageous about the recipe!

Preheat the oven to 180C (160C fan).

Cream 100g of caster sugar with 75g of unsalted butter.  Add 2 eggs and combine well before adding 175g of self raising flour.  Flavour with 1 tsp of vanilla essence and finish by adding 1 tsp of baking powder dissolved in 1/2 cup of milk.

When everything is well combined, spoon the mixture into cupcake cases and bake … until done.  I had a massive fail with the oven so I can’t actually tell you how long the baking took!  The recipe suggests you’ll need to bake for about 10 minutes – but after 10 minutes the cakes weren’t cooked.  The oven then turned itself off.  About 10 minutes later, perplexed by the cakes still not being cooked, I realised this and turned the oven back on.

So … if you don’t know how to operate your oven, baking will take about half an hour.  Still, it gave me plenty of time to do the dishes!

Vanilla Cupcakes with Chocolate Icing

Once cool, I iced the cakes with a simple chocolate icing and finished with chocolate sprinkles.

And there are now none left!

Chicken, leek and hazelnut pie

- Alex Prichard 1 Comment

 

 

This recipe comes from the April 1995 issue of Australian Gourmet Traveller.  As usual, there are some deviations from the original …

Chicken, leek and hazelnut pie

This is reasonably quick to put together and you can always make the filling in advance, ready to bake when required.  Because we’re fatties we opted for a shortcrust pastry base and a flaky pastry top, but really only the top is essential.  Use your favourite bought or home made pastry:  the recipe suggests shortcrust, cream cheese or flaky, which I think is rather hedging one’s bets!

The quantity we made fed four easily for dinner with left overs good enough for lunch or supper for 2 people (or just 1 if the 1 is very greedy or hungry).

The recipe is very rich in butter and creams so if you prefer substitute a light olive oil for the butter.

Begin by heating 50g of unsalted butter in a pan and brown 7 chicken thigh fillets, cut into generous chunks.  Brown the chicken in batches and drain on kitchen towel.

When the chicken is cooked, gently stew 2 finely slicked leeks until translucent.  Turn down the heat so they don’t take on any colour.  Set the leeks aside.

Melt another 50g of butter in the pan and add 1 tablespoon of plain flour, allowing it to cook out for at least 2 minutes.  Again – keep the heat low so your butter and flour mixture doesn’t take on any colour.

Remove the pan from the heat and slowly add 1 1/2 cups of chicken stock.  Return the pan to the heat and bring the mix to the boil, stirring constantly.  Simmer for a couple of minutes before removing from the heat.

In a large bowl, mix the chicken, the leeks and 50g of toasted and coarsely chopped hazelnuts.  Mix through the sauce and follow with two tablespoons of sour cream.  When everything is combined, taste the mix and season as you see fit.  Allow to cool.

If using a pastry bottom, grease your pie dish and line with pastry.  Add the chicken mixture and top with a pastry lid.  Cut a hole for steam and brush with an egg wash.

Bake in a pre-heated oven at 200C for 10 minutes before turning down to 180C.  If you have no pastry bottom you will probably only need to bake for another 15 minutes or so.  With the pastry base with opted for another half an hour.

The ideal wine match for a dish like this would be a Chardonnay, with a hint of oak.  If your wallet can afford it, a white Burgundy (such as a Chablis or, more affordably, a Mâcon) would be an excellent match. If you’re a bit of an ABC* try matching a Chenin Blanc or even a lighter red, such as a Pinot Noir.

* Anything But Chardonnay