baking

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/

Basic Lemonade Scone Recipe

- Alex Prichard 1 Comment

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I haven’t made scones for absolutely ages. I can remember the last occasion I made them but I can’t quite place a date, so that means it was a long time ago.

A friend back in England, let’s call him Chris THOR (apparently Chris wasn’t rock & roll enough!), has been quizzing me on scones and what better way to answer the questions than to make them myself?

I do actually have a Green & Gold Cookbook, which I’m sure has the be-all and end-all of scone recipes, but I couldn’t exactly email that off to the other side of the world so I found this simple lemonade scone recipe and suggested he give it a try.

Goodness me – hasn’t there half been a flurry of questions ensuing from that suggestion! Chris THOR was thrown off (quite legitimately, in my opinion) by the fact that the recipe uses cup measures, rather than ‘proper’ measures. But, it does redeem itself by not mix and matching its weights and measures … and baking is all about ratios.

For the benefit of anyone reading who finds themselves frustrated by the use of the cup measure, here’s a brief explanation.

1 cup = 250 mL
(that’s a metric cup, of course, your cup may be a US customary cup then it’s 237 mL … or perhaps it’s a US legal cup and then it’s 240 mL and if it’s an Imperial cup then it’s 284 mL)

For reference, whenever I say ‘cup’ in a recipe on Eating Adelaide (and I do try to use it only for wet ingredients) I mean 250 mL.

I’d prefer dry ingredients always be weighed out but a metric cup is approximately 120 – 150 g of flour.

However, in the case of this recipe, I think we can roll with the cup measure because there are just three ingredients and it’s all about the ratios.

The real trick with scones (and this is something the original post goes into in a LOT of detail – I encourage you to read it if you’re not feeling confident) is to work VERY VERY lightly. You do not need to crack out fancy kitchen kit. You need a bowl, a cup measure and a knife. Simply cut the mixture together, tip it out on to the bench and pull it together with a very light touch. If you can avoid a rolling pin, do. And keep the dough quite high – the Internet Chef says 2.5 – 3 cm – I didn’t manage quite that high but mine still rose well and were lovely and light.

The real bonus with this recipe (besides the fact that it’s just THREE ingredients – have I already mentioned that?!) is that there is no baking powder in this recipe so you don’t end up with that nasty metallic flavour/feeling on the back of your teeth … even if you do eat two or three!

This recipe makes about 10 scones roughly 5 cm in diameter.  It’s easy to scale up – just keep the ratios the same and maintain your light touch!

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Basic Lemonade Scone Recipe

Ingredients

  • 1½ cups self raising flour
  • ½ tsp salt
  • ½ cup lemonade
  • ½ cup cream

Instructions

  1. Preheat your oven to 220°C fan and place a small tray in to heat up.
  2. To make the scones, put the flour in a bowl, mix in the salt and then form a well.
  3. Add the lemonade and cream and mix it together by cutting through with an ordinary table knife.
  4. Once the mixture has come together (it will be crumbly), tip it out onto the bench and lightly work it together. You may not even need to put additional flour on the bench.
  5. Pat the dough into a disk about an inch thick (for the highest scones - thinner it will be OK but don't go flattening it out - it's not pastry!) and cut out your scones.
  6. Remove the heated tray from the oven, dust lightly with flour and put the scones on the tray.
  7. Place them touching each other for support as they rise.
  8. Lightly brush with milk (the original recipe suggests egg yolk and cream, but I already have egg whites which need using!) and bake for 12-15 minutes. In my oven, 12 minutes was spot on.
  9. Remove from the oven and allow to cool on the tray a little before moving to a rack.
  10. Eat warm with jam and cream or buttered.
https://eatingadelaide.com/basic-lemonade-scone-recipe/