CakeBlog

These tough cookies beat the pants off gingerbread men. For more pictures, see my Flickr ninjabread photoset. I’ve linked to appropriate photos in the set from various points in the recipe.

These little bastards take up a lot of room on a baking tray, so I spent about an hour swapping trays in and out of the oven until they were all cooked (I made a double batch). Luckily they only take 10 minutes to cook.

Ingredients

• 125g butter, at room temperature
• 100g (1/2 cup, firmly packed) brown sugar
• 125ml (1/2 cup) golden syrup
• 1 egg yolk
• 375g (2 1/2 cups) plain flour
• 1 tbs ground ginger
• 1 teasp mixed spice
• 1 teasp bicarbonate of soda
• Plain flour, to dust
• Royal icing packet mixture*
• 8-10 drops red liquid food colouring
• 1-2 tsp black food colouring paste*
• Silver edible glitter*

* These ingredients can be found at cake decorating supply stores

Method

1. Preheat oven to 180°C. Line 2 baking trays with baking paper.
2. Use an electric beater or blender to beat the butter and sugar in a bowl until pale and creamy. Add the golden syrup and egg yolk and beat until combined. Stir in the flour, ginger, mixed spice and bicarbonate of soda. Turn onto a lightly floured surface and knead until smooth. Press dough into a disc. Cover with plastic wrap and place in the fridge for 30 minutes to rest.
3. Meanwhile, make the royal icing according to packet instructions. Separate into 3 bowls. Add the red food colouring to one bowl and mix until bright red. Add the black food colouring to another bowl and mix until almost black (a little grey is okay, it will set black when dry). Leave the third bowl white. Cover the bowls with plastic wrap.
4. Place the dough between 2 sheets of baking paper and roll out until about 4mm thick. Use a 9cm gingerbread man cutter to cut out shapes. If your men are fat, trim them so they’re lean and mean. Use a spatula to place on trays about 3cm apart. Use excess dough to cut out star shapes using a 2cm star shaped cutter and a straw for holes in the middle.
5. Bake in oven for 10 minutes or until brown. Remove from oven. Using a spatula, transfer to a rack to cool (leave them on the tray for 5 minutes before transferring to the rack, or they will be too soft and may break on transfer).
6. Place prepared icings in small plastic bags. Cut a small hole in a corner of each bag. Pipe icing over gingerbread men to decorate. For throwing stars, spread the white icing over the stars (scooping icing out of the holes when necessary) and sprinkle glitter over them, then tap off any excess glitter. Attach the stars to the men using royal icing.

Last Friday, the day before Halloween, I delighted my workmates with some spooky green pandan cupcakes with spiderweb cupcake wrappers. They were a big hit! They’re really just a modification of the pandan chiffon cake recipe that I posted a few weeks ago – you just have to put them into cupcake cases and bake them for only about 30 minutes instead of the full large cake time.

I used spiderweb cupcake wrappers from Alfresco Emporium, which also allows online orders. They’re also available from the USA from Fancy Flours but the international shipping fees are horrendous, so stick with the local one unless you’re an American.

Happy Halloween!

I admit it – Adriano Zumbo is my new pastry hero. The man is a flavour genius. This is no chocolate-on-chocolate-and-what-goes-with-chocolate-oh-I-know-more-chocolate type of chef. This guy understands BALANCE. Sweets aren’t all about the sweetness. There’s sourness, tartness, even saltiness and all sorts of other things that are involved in making sweet things. And all of these have to be in the right balance, otherwise one flavour overpowers the others and you don’t get that beautiful complex flavour that you can savour.

So I was feeling pretty glum about not having won the famous Zumbo chocolate mousse cake lottery for the second time in a row, and certain friends were meant to visit me this weekend and revel in the sweet Zumboness of this patisserie with me and they didn’t show, so I made the pilgrimage to Zumbo Patisserie all by myself for consolation cake. Last time I went there they were completely sold out, so I got there a bit earlier this time.

It was packed. And when the people got in there, their eyes widened and they were just staring and drooling and LUSTING after the cakes. There were several people taking photos. This isn’t a big store – it’s like a corridor with a cake display case on one side. So I managed to get all the way to the end of the cake display stand where the good stuff is. I wanted ALL of it. The lady next to me was lost in a similar bewildered state of cakelust as we struggled to decide what to buy. But I managed to narrow it down to a few choices, before moving on to the macaroon section.

Then the most amazing thing happened. One of the macaroons broke. It was a salt and vinegar macaroon and the shop assistant said to me, “this one broke so I can’t sell it. Would you like to eat it?”

Free macaroon?

For me?

For ME????

So she started describing the other macaroon flavours to me, but I had already taken a bite of the free macaroon and I was far away on a distant planet called Planet of the Free Macaroon, a glorious place where salt, vinegar, sugar and macaroonness live in perfect harmony and dance and sing together. You should go there sometime, it’s awesome. So she had to repeat all the flavours to me again and I ended up getting two rice pudding macaroons because that’s all I could remember her saying.

Amazingly I left the store with only four items. I don’t know how I managed to resist all of these temptations.

I bought four things to try. Here they are, clockwise from top left :

• “Amanda Made The Cut” (4 layers of chocolate mousse, passionfruit marshmallow, coconut crunch and chocolate brownie, partially covered in lime creme),
• “Escape From A Columbian Rainforest” (if I remember correctly – chocolate mousse with a tangy rasberry filling covered in fizzy pink sugar with chocolate on top),
• citron tart (a lemon tart) and
• “Lukas Rides The Tube” (Macadamia praline mousse, macadamia docquoise, vanilla chantilly, pear tartin pallette, macadamia feuilletine).

My favourite was “Amanda Made The Cut”, which was an unusual combination but really well balanced in flavour – with the lightness of the marshmallow, the zest of the lime creme and the sweetness of the chocolate brownie and mousse – and also in texture – with the crunch of the coconut, the softness of the marshmallow and mousse, the chewiness of the brownie and the gooiness of the lime creme.

The “Escape from a Columbian Rainforest” was extremely rich, but the richness was tempered somewhat by the tangy jelly in the middle. Lukas Rides the Tube was very rich as well, kind of like an upper class vanilla slice. I liked the flavours but found the chantilly cream too overpowering in richness.

I didn’t try the citron tart – I left all of that to my husband, connoisseur of all things lemon. The result was surprising – he usually says when it comes to citrus tarts, the stronger the better. However this time he said it was a very good tart – one of the best he’s had – despite not being overly sour and lemony in flavour. High praise indeed from this man.

So there it is, my new favourite Sydney patisserie. Next time I must try the cafe. Frustratingly, it is always full whenever I go there. However, fear not – I will find a way.

Zumbo Patisserie, Balmain, Sydney.

It’s Sydney International Food Festival this month (previously called Good Food Month, which frankly was a lot easier to say), and one of my favourite events this month is the Sugar Hit. A Sugar Hit is a dessert created by an excellent restaurant, served with a glass of dessert wine (or something similar) – all for $20.

So last night I went to Azuma Kushiyaki for their Sugar Hit, which is an East-meets-West dessert platter. Unfortunately, when it arrived it looked so delicious that I ate it before realizing that I forgot to take a photograph. So I photographed the remains for a post-meal blog analysis. Here it is:

1. Cheesecake. This was a light and creamy vanilla cheesecake with vanilla ice-cream in the middle and a sponge cake base. The texture was so light, it was heaven. It was served with three raspberry halves and a blueberry arranged in a delicate pattern.
2. Chocolate mousse cake. There was a very rich chocolate mousse cake here, cut into a square and served with half a sliced strawberry fanned on top. It filled me up so much that I was unable to finish eating the cheesecake.
3. Nori biscuits. There were two wafer-thin vanilla biscuits with flecks of nori (seaweed) baked into them. It sounds strange, but it was actually really delicious. And not in an “acquired gourmet taste” way, just in a normal “wow that’s really delicious” way.
4. Green tea roll. You can probably tell by the remains that I didn’t like this one so much. It was like a regular sponge roll, but with green tea powder integrated throughout. The cream was very rich and the sponge tasted like green tea powder.
5. Syrup. This was a small glass of syrup to pour over the rice cake shot, so that you could adjust the syrup amount depending on how sweet you liked the dessert. A nice touch.
6. Rice cake shot. This was a shot glass with vanilla bean ice-cream (partially molten), seedless grapes and small rice cakes – the sticky paste Japanese kind. Husband found the flavourless rice cakes a bit strange. I really liked it – I liked the texture of the rice cakes and the sweetness of the ice-cream and syrup. The fresh grapes balanced it really nicely.
7. Dessert wine. This was a Brown Brothers Orange, Muscat and Flora. I’ve had it before and it’s a really nice dessert wine with a pleasing aftertaste. There was an option to have cognac instead of dessert wine.

Overall, I loved the presentation and the tasting platter idea. It was a fun meal to eat, exploring the different desserts. On top of that, it was very delicious and filled me up even though I hadn’t had a proper dinner. Great value for $20.

For more information on Sugar Hits at Azuma Kushiyaki, go to the Sydney International Food Festival website.

My husband and I are what you may call High Tea connoisseurs. To be more accurate, we have been spoiled by the exceptional standard of High Tea at the Stamford Plaza in Brisbane, and every High Tea experience we have is measured against it. To date, we have not found an experience to meet that standard in Sydney.

So bearing that in mind, it may come as no surprise to you that High Tea at The Victoria Room in Sydney was disappointing. There were positives – the décor was lovely, the setting was comfortable and the service was excellent. The selection of sweets were delicious and the tea refills were free (which is something other high tea venues in Sydney don’t often offer).

However, for the $38pp we paid, there was not a lot of food. On offer were eight finger sandwiches, eight sweet treats and only two scones to share between the two of us. Usually high tea is a decadent experience that leaves the stomach fit to burst, so we were hungry by the time we arrived, and we scoffed most of it within 20 minutes. High tea is generally about tea and scones, and the lack of scones was almost as disappointing as the quality of the scones. There was only one choice of jam, and it was runny.

The paper tablecloth was irritating, as it kept getting in the way as it hung off the edge of the table. And paper tablecloths at high tea? The Queen would not dine here.

I think this would be an excellent venue for a girls’ afternoon tea party, for those who would enjoy the novelty of a “posh” tea experience. To their credit, it is a beautiful venue and I think that cocktails and supper would be absolutely delightful there. But of all the High Teas we have tried in Sydney to date, this is not among the best.

This is a recipe I found in a recent copy of Delicious magazine. I wanted to bake something special for my husband on his birthday. He’s a big fan of lemon, and I mean a BIG fan of lemon – he’s famous for his lemon meringue pie which contains 3-6 times the recommended dose of lemon in every serve. So when I saw the recipe for these tarts, with whole lemon slices as part of the filling, I thought excellent, this will give him his lemon fix.

The pastry is super easy and cheaty because it’s a store-bought pastry, BUT, not the usual stuff you get from the supermarket. It’s Careme vanilla bean shortcrust pastry, available from selected gourmet stores (see their website for details). Yeah it’s a bit expensive but it’s extremely delicious, and saves you making your own. I know Jamie Oliver says it’s sooooo easy, but you roll, this, you chill that, you try to get it so it doesn’t all fall apart all the time…to hell with that, just buy this fancy gourmet pastry which is also available in butter, sour cream and dark chocolate flavours.

So anyway, the filling is way easy, but requires special tools. I had to buy a mandoline, which I’ve never thought to use before – it’s a thingy that lets you slice stuff really really thinly. It’s actually really cool and I hope to use it in the future to slice lots of other things really really thinly, like….yeah I can’t think of anything. Maybe more lemons and limes for cake or tart decorating.

So yes, you finely slice your lemons and take out all the annoying seeds, and then put them in a bowl with caster sugar and a split vanilla bean overnight. Yep, this is one of those two-day jobbies. But then the next day all you have to do is take all the lemon slices out of the sugar and whisk some eggs into the remaining sugar and vanilla mixture. Then that becomes your tart filling and you just layer the lemons on top. Super easy!

About now I’m wishing I had the actual lemon recipe to share with you but I figure since it’s out of Delicious magazine it will probably appear on taste.com.au eventually. So uh…keep checking back there.

The story ends with a very happy husband on his birthday. I got the eyes falling back in the head, “oh my GOD” reaction I was hoping for. I tried to eat one myself but it was kind of full-on with so much lemon, I could only handle about half a small tart. But that’s the way he likes it.

I made this cake for a small dinner party and I think it was quite good, but it wasn’t a huge hit with the other diners. It was a very dense, moist cake with a crumbly texture and it was made with 70% cocoa solids dark chocolate (Lindt brand) so it wasn’t overly sweet. I think it would have gone well with coffee, especially a nice Irish coffee to compliment the Irish whiskey that went into the cake.

I served it with grilled orange slices (which weren’t grilled as much as I’d hoped) and Maggie Beer vanilla bean and elderflower ice-cream. The cake was so rich that the subtle flavours in the ice-cream were completely lost. So if I were to make this cake again, I would serve it with cream or a less gourmet vanilla ice-cream. Or maybe just with fresh strawberries.

The chocolate was definitely the dominant flavour in this cake, with the occasional whiskey hit from the raisins. So it would be easy to adapt this into a milk chocolate cake to make it sweeter. The texture isn’t exactly cakey, because it has no rising agent and is made with roasted almond meal, so maybe it falls under the category of mud cake, or something else.

All in all, a good cake for dark chocolate lovers, but I probably won’t make it again unless someone who adores dark chocolate and coffee has a birthday.

The recipe was a Maggie Beer recipe from a recent issue of ABC’s Delicious magazine.

Howdy all, hoo-eee, do I have some mighty purdy links for you.

First up, there is 31 Awesome Cakes to Celebrate Your Divorce. A lot of these are pretty gruesome, I guess divorce makes people a bit homicidal. Just as long as they’re channelling that feeling into making delicious cake and not into stabbing people, then that’s okay with me.

Then there is Cupcake Day for the RSPCA – baking delicious cakes for a worthy cause. A friend of mine is participating in this, which I think is just grand. I like the creative cupcake ideas, although I’ve always regarded marzipan modelling for decorations as cheating, mainly because I don’t like the taste of marzipan very much and most Aussies I know generally don’t like it much either. Anyway it’s way more challenging to use other stuff. I once saw a Donna Hay sheep cupcake made with popcorn for wool, which was kind of inspired but a bit weird looking.

Finally, we have Cake Wrecks, some kind of online museum of cake horror. It kind of reminds me of two cake horror stories I heard. One was a cake ordered over the phone with a special message on it, and when the cake turned up the message literally said something like “Susan best wishes then underneath something like we will miss you and good luck or something along those lines”. The other horror story was of a bride who showed a photocopied picture of a cake to her cakemaker and so the cakemaker made her a black and white wedding cake (the photocopy was in black and white).

Pandan cake is a popular cake originating in Malaysia. The key ingredient is the juice from the leaves of the pandan plant, otherwise known as screw pine. Most people in Australia know it as “that green cake that you get in Asian supermarkets sometimes”.

The pandan juice makes the cake a light green colour, but green food colouring is added to the pandan paste, which gives the cake that “radioactive” look. I guess some people like that hue because some of the recipes involving the juice also call for green food colouring to be added, just in case you weren’t sure it was really a pandan cake. I reckon this would make a really great halloween cupcake. In fact, I have some black cobweb-shaped laser cut cupcake wrappers and October is coming up so….

anyway…

I’ve found it really hard to get an authentic-tasting pandan cake here in Australia, and I suspect many of the cakes here are just regular chiffon cakes with green food colouring. Also all the ones I’ve bought here have been pretty dry and spongy, like it would bounce if you threw it. So I decided to make my own.

The hardest part about making this cake was finding the damn pandan. It’s really difficult to get the pandan juice, let alone the actual leaf, and even the paste and the essence is pretty hard to find. Your best bet is to hunt down an Indonesian supermarket. I found some pandan paste in Randwick Oriental Supermarket (Randwick, Sydney).

Okay so the next hardest part was finding a chiffon pan. I ended up getting one of those silicon pans shaped in a “cathedral” shape (think “pointy doughnut”) and it wasn’t a great idea. The cake ended up sticking to the bottom of the pan and nothing I could do would unstick it. I just had to rip the pieces off and try and reassemble the cake without anyone noticing. It probably worked, too bad I didn’t have any pandan icing.

Making the cake itself was not hard. I looked up heaps of recipes on the internet and it seems that chiffon cakes have a reputation for being really difficult to make. Well my theory about this is that the people finding it difficult don’t know how to deal with egg whites. Here’s the thing about egg whites – they’re stubborn bastards. Get any little bit of moisture in their way and they will refuse to beat into stiff peaks. The important thing is to keep the bowl and beaters *clean* and *dry* and make sure that no egg yolk ends up in the whites.

Here is the recipe I followed. It had a few errors, so I’m going to remedy those and add my own notes here, but I give all credit for the original recipe to the author of that site. My cake turned out deliciously moist on the inside, with that real pandan flavour throughout, while still being light and fluffy like a chiffon. Because I guess it is a chiffon.

Here’s how my cake turned out. Not the most beautiful cake you’ve ever seen, right? But it tasted great.

Ingredients
150g plain flour
2 tsp baking powder
150 ml coconut cream
8 egg yolks
10 egg white
200g caster sugar, separated
3 Tbsp corn oil (or vegetable oil)
1 tsp vanilla essence
a pinch of salt
1 tsp cream of tartar
1 tsp pandan paste

Method
1. Preheat oven to 175 C (350 F).
2. Sift the flour and baking powder three times. This aerates the flour and helps to make a fluffy cake.
3. Using  a separate mixer to the one you’ll be using later, cream egg yolks and 140g sugar until it is creamy and thick. If you do not have two electric mixers, use a whisk instead. It is important to keep the other mixer clean and dry.
4. Add in sifted flour and baking powder, vanilla essence, coconut cream, corn oil, and pandan paste into the egg yolk mixture. Mix well.
5. In another clean dry bowl, use your electric mixer to beat egg whites on high speed. When egg whites are whisked to soft peaks, add the remaining 60g sugar, cream of tartar and a pinch of salt. Continue to whisk until stiff peaks form. The mixture should be stiff, thick and glossy.
6. Fold the egg whites into the flour mixture. Start by adding 1/3 egg whites into flour mixture and using a balloon whisk, fold until just combined. Mix the remaining 2/3 egg whites in until the mixture is just combined, taking care to fold gently to keep volume.
7. Once incorporated, (don’t worry if there are a few streaks of white left) pour into the chiffon cake pan. If you have used a whisk to fold the mixture, you may find a pool of thick green sludgy looking cake mix at the bottom of your bowl. I do not recommend you add this to the cake, just throw it away. Bake 45 mins, or until the cake is brown on top and springs back when prodded.
8. When cake is baked, invert it immediately and cool down for 2-3 hours. Once cooled, use a knife to cut around the sides and bottom before removing.

This is what it looks like when you have eaten half of it:

Glorious, no?

This was my wedding cake. It was made by the amazing Welsh Lady (Brisbane). When I started planning my wedding, the cake was the first thing I planned. People kept asking me about the dress and rings and stuff – to hell with that! I knew what was important. The design went through a few incarnations and I worked with a few different bakers, and finally Gwen (aka The Welsh Lady) and I came up with this amazing design. When I saw the finished result, I couldn’t stop looking at it. There’s a picture of me telling my bridal party to rack off because I’m busy looking at the cake.

I wanted a wedding cake made of cupcakes, but I didn’t want it to look like a kid’s birthday party. The cupcake wrappers and the roses really helped to make the cakes elegant. The cupcake wrappers were from Fancy Flours, but I recently found a place in Sydney called Alfresco Emporium that also sells them, which is great because shipping to Australia from the US costs heaps. And for any Aussies cursing all the good stuff being in Sydney, the good news is that you can order the wrappers from Alfresco Emporium online.

Each cake was a delicious chocolate mud cake with chocolate mousse piped into the centre. This was topped with fresh cream and a fresh rose on top. One of the guests was sure that the rose was edible too, and he proved it by eating one. Yes, I guess technically they are edible, but….yeah don’t eat them. When it comes to event cakes, edible flowers made from sugar are beautiful and impressive, but you can save heaps of money by using fresh ones instead.

The top tier of the cake hid a lemon cake covered in fresh cream, with a white chocolate pattern on the outside designed to match the cupcake wrappers.

I knew that the guests would be stuffed after the rest of the meal, so I provided decorated noodle boxes when the cakes were served so that guests could take their cakes home for later if they wanted to. This seemed pretty popular with the guests, although some guests couldn’t wait. One guest even received a cupcake to the face from her fiancee, much to her confusion. Although she did tell me later that it was delicious.