Chews

I followed this recipe exactly, and I ended up with a really weird and crunchy slice. This isn't as horrible as the horrible scones, but I wouldn't give this to someone I liked. The taste is nice enough, but the texture is odd. I think the problem is in the cooking time — the recipe says to cook it for two hours. This seemed far too long and I kept checking it throughout, but it didn't seem to burn. It seemed as though it could be tasty, but it's simply the wrong texture. I could almost pour milk over these and have them for breakfast. I suspect this is where the differences between available technology (wood stove compared to modern fan-forced oven) could contribute to why this won't be included in my mental list of 'the delicious'. 

So, I've amended the recipe here, and suggest it only be cooked for 45-60 minutes to ensure it's more slice-like and less like breakfast cereal. Good luck... 

Oh, and another thing. The name 'chews' confounds me. It's not chewy at all. 

Chews

90g butter
¾ cup sugar
1 egg
1 tsp. baking powder
1 cup plain flour
1 tsp. vanilla essence
1 cup chopped nuts
1 cup chopped dates

Pre-heat oven to 160°C

Cream the butter and sugar. Add all remaining ingredients, then press into a greased slice tray. Bake for 45-60 minutes. Cut into finger slices and dust with caster sugar when cool. 

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For those of you who are not in Australia, please find here a selection of Measurement & Temperature Conversion Charts which should help with the accuracy of your own cooking. 

Girlie's Sultana Cake

A teacup of milk. 

I've been waiting for this measurement unit since first going through the recipe books some months ago, and here it is. Were all teacups in ye olden times exactly the same size? I can't believe that, however why else would this be used within a recipe? Who was Girlie and what was she thinking? It's not helpful. I went through my teacup selection and realised this ingredient would be included only after the most guessy of guesses. 

If Goldilocks were to come across my empty house in the woods and make a choice from my teacup selection, she too may have chosen the pink one. It seemed neither too large nor too small, however as it's not really a measurement, I have NO IDEA if it's right or not. The cupcakes seem moist enough, so I suppose I'll have to accept that it is close enough.  

Tomorrow is Cupcake Day for the RSPCA and a colleague has arranged for a cupcake extravaganza, and has invited everyone to contribute to this fundraising effort. Wonderful! Cakes, animals, charity goodness. A win for all concerned. I get to bake a heap of cupcakes AND I don't have to eat them all. My waistline is very happy about this. So, in my kitchen I have 30+ cupcakes ready to be frosted, sprinkled, and priced. I'll probably not charge so much, as I had left out the lemon essence, only noticing the little bottle on the kitchen bench as I was placing the cooked cupcakes onto cooling racks. See my previous post about memory issues. So, what we have here is a sultana cake. With very little flavour beyond butter, sugar and flour. Not necessarily a bad thing, but it's potentially going to be a little bland. I will put the missing lemon essence in the frosting, and this will hopefully ensure the correct taste is approximated. 

Girlie’s Sultana Cake

3 cups self-raising flour

225g. butter

4 eggs

1 cup sugar

1 cup sultanas

⅔ cup milk

½ tsp. lemon essence

Preheat oven to 150°C

Cream butter and sugar. Add the eggs one at a time, beating well. 

Add the flour, sultanas and milk to mix. Pour into prepared tin/cupcakes then bake until cooked, testing with a skewer after 30 minutes if baking in a tin, or after 12-14 minutes if cooking cupcakes. I cooked these cupcakes for about 18 minutes. 

Ice with topping of your choice.

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For those of you who are not in Australia, please find here a selection of Measurement & Temperature Conversion Charts which should help with the accuracy of your own cooking. 

Julie & Julia

A mere four years after its release date, I have finally seen Julie & Julia. Yes, I am hopeless when it comes to seeing movies in a timely manner. I really am. Ever since I started this blog, I've been asked if I've been inspired by the film. My answer? No. This post is proof I hadn't seen it until today. I recall seeing a trailer in which a woman is seen weeping while hunched on her kitchen floor. Perhaps I was not in the mood for that kind of viewing. Like many of the movies I intend to watch, it went by the wayside and I figured I'd watch it on TV sometime. 

I have many movies I intend to watch, however my memory for books and movies is beyond ridiculous, and often I never get around to seeing what I want to, or end up buying books twice because I've forgotten I've already read them. Given how much and how quickly I read, I really should be working on techniques to ensure I remember the literary and popular culture I take in. I am completely intrigued by the notion of developing a Memory Palace - a way of remembering items by imagining a physical location for it. Properly called the Method of Loci, it was a mnemonic device introduced in ancient Roman and Greece rhetorical treatise (Wikipedia knows everything). Contemporary usage of Memory Palaces seem to suggest one needs to 'create' large places, with many rooms, palace-like... Hence the name, obviously. Right now, I'm pretty sure my Memory Palace would resemble a half erected tent in a rainy and windswept paddock, post-it notes fluttering along the barbed-wire fence, ink forever washed away...

What did I think of the movie? It was lovely, very sweet and very funny. I see why people are thinking my blog is a little like that. It's not much, but enough like it to warrant the comparison. My favourite bit? Well, there was a moment of much belly laughing when Julia Childs' husband, Paul, walks in on her chopping a mountain of onions. His recoil as he meets the eye-watering miasma of the kitchen is just hilarious.

  

I'll be cooking more tomorrow, haven't chosen which cake yet, but I'm sure it will be delicious.

Old Time Ginger Cake

If you like sticky, almost caramelised cakes to accompany your fragrant black tea, then this cake is for you. If you have tea with milk, then...well, fine, you also can have some. I personally don't understand why anyone would spoil the taste of their tea with milk, but... it takes all sorts I suppose. 

This is the second cake I cooked last night, along with Chocolate Cake, which I hope is a resounding success at the school fête on Sunday! This one I had intended to bring to work — I had a meeting at 3.30pm Friday afternoon and figured it would go a lot smoother if I brought in a cake. It is also concocted using much ginger and I am one of many ginger aficionados at my workplace. I even gave the spice jar an extra shake into the cake mix. 

It was quite runny and I wasn't sure I'd be able to fit it into the cake pan I had prepared without spilling over while cooking. It did get a bit of muffin top so I'd suggest using a larger cake tin for a more even and faster cooking time. I suspect mine would have cooked a lot quicker without the edges getting as brown as they did. The cooking time for me presented another issue which I think became a positive upon tasting. The sultanas in the cake mix sank to the bottom of the cake tin (not unexpected given the liquidity of the mixture), and they caramelised into quite a sticky chewy layer. You can see this in the photo below. Maybe this is a deliberate feature, however I suspect it's a happy accident.

Back to the cake-filled meeting. It really did help. As did the cup of Lady Grey tea which appeared in front of me as if by magic. The cake was left outside the meeting room, and sampled by quite a few people. I must say receiving quite a few emails from colleagues telling me how much they'd enjoyed the cake was really nice and made for an excellent Friday, thanks guys! I am constantly thinking you all tell me the cakes are tasty because it's the nice thing to do, but these really seem to be genuinely enjoyed by everyone who eats them, with the exception of course of the Scones of Horror. 

Old Time Ginger Cake

1 cup sugar

1 cup butter

2 eggs

1 cup treacle

2 level tsp. bicarbonate of soda

1 cup hot water

2½ tsp. ground ginger

1 tsp. mixed spice
1 cup sultanas

2½ cups plain flour

Preheat oven to 150-160°C

Cream butter and sugar, add eggs one at a time, beating well into the mixture. 

Dissolve treacle, bicarbonate of soda, ginger and spices in the hot water. 
Add sultanas and then add to creamed sugar. Finally, add sifted flour to mixture.

Pour into large greased cake tin, and bake for 50 minute, checking regularly from around 40 minutes.

Icing

I used a mixture of mascarpone cheese, with icing sugar, a little bit of lemon juice and some ground ginger.
You could ice with simple icing, or simply dust with icing sugar. 

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For those of you who are not in Australia, please find here a selection of Measurement & Temperature Conversion Charts which should help with the accuracy of your own cooking. 

Chocolate Cake

I was talking to a friend about how this baking project is going for me (good!) and I realised that I have prepared 24 recipes from my Nanna's cookbooks so far. You may (or may not) have noted that I've not blogged all of these. Some really haven't worked and require a bit more practise before I decide they're fit for human consumption.

I have 36 recipes to go from the original selection of 60 and if I want to finish this by the end of the year as hoped, I really have to get cracking with the cooking. This need to increase my output leads me to wonder how on earth I'm going to offload them all. I am not eating 36 cakes. I can't eat 36 cakes. A colleague of mine mentioned in passing today that she has to cook some cakes for her local school fundraising fête. As a public service to the education system of this state, I am donating a couple of my cakes! It's a win:win.

Chocolate Cake

3 tbsp. butter

2 level tbsp. cocoa

1½ cups of self-raising flour

1 cup sugar

½ cup milk

2 eggs

½ tsp. vanilla

Preheat oven to 160°C

Melt the butter, set aside. 

Place all the ingredients except for the butter into a large bowl and mix well.

Pour the melted butter into mixture, and beat for 3 minutes.

Pour the mixture into a prepared tin — the baking time will depend on the size of the tin — be careful not to overcook this cake.

(For example, 10 minutes for cupcakes, 25-35 minutes for a 20cm round tin)

Icing

1 cup icing sugar

10g. coconut

A little vanilla essence

Hot water as needed

Mix all ingredients together, and smooth onto cooled cake. 

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For those of you who are not in Australia, please find here a selection of Measurement & Temperature Conversion Charts which should help with the accuracy of your own cooking. 

Coconut Ice Cake

This one was the most straightforward cake yet; there were no mysterious measurements, no last-minute ingredients not listed, nothing that made me clench my wooden spoon in bafflement and frustration. In fact, it was almost dull in its simplicity and ease. A white cake with pink icing. A Barbie™ cake. I had a Barbie™ when I was about eight years old, and she got a haircut pretty quickly. 

Back to the cake. It seemed very runny when I was pouring the mix into the cake tin, and I thought I'd have to remake it using a smaller amount of milk. To my surprise it turned out perfectly okay, the cake is fluffy, soft and its texture quite silky. A great late night snack with my evening cup of herbal tea. 

I'll probably have dreams of Barbie™ and pink.  

Coconut Ice Cake

1½ cups self-raising flour
¼ tsp. salt
2 cups milk
½ cup desiccated coconut
½ tsp. vanilla essence
½ cup sugar
60g. butter
2 eggs

Preheat oven to 160°C, grease and line a baking tin. 

Sift flour and salt. Set aside.
Combine milk, coconut and vanilla. 
Cream butter and sugar, add eggs then add half the flour, blending well. 
Add the coconut mixture then the remainder of the flour. 
Pour mixture into prepared tin and bake for 40 minutes. 
Allow to cool completely before icing. 

Coconut Ice
1 cup sugar
1 cup milk
2 tbsp. butter
2 cup coconut
2 tsp. vanilla essence
A few drops of food colouring (optional)

Boil the sugar and milk for 8 minutes. Remove from heat. 
Add butter, coconut and vanilla, beating until thick. 
Add food colouring, and spread over the cooled cake. 

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For those of you who are not in Australia, please find here a selection of Measurement & Temperature Conversion Charts which should help with the accuracy of your own cooking.