Snow Balls

As I sit here on a very warm spring evening, sipping my beer, I realise I chose this recipe to cook because of the name. Snow Balls. Such coolness is evoked. It is forecast to be 30°C tomorrow, and the idea of snow right now is enough to make me lean my head into the freezer sighing in envious delight. Instead, I am here in my summer pyjamas, shooing the cats with their ghastly body heat away from me, wondering what it is I will say about these biscuity things. 

Let's start with very sticky, as being the best way to describe my Nannas of yore Snow Balls. When I first read this recipe, I thought it would be quite simple, and I had an idea that these might be kind of like lamingtons, but with a pink coating. It was a hasty first reading I might add, as you will soon see these are absolutely nothing like lamingtons. Making and baking the biscuits didn't take long at all, however be warned this mixture makes a lot. Again I will have a battle on my hands trying to force-feed those around me the biscuits I have left over. As is much the norm, I only have eaten one in order to taste it, and will decide tomorrow if I have more. 

Who am I kidding right? Of course I'll have more. Waistline be damned. 

Back to the sticky biscuits. Once I'd constructed the two halves of each biscuit and stuck them together with jam, I realised that I was to roll the whole thing in jam and coconut. My friends who know my disdain for eating with my hands, will not be surprised at my small feeling of horror at putting together a deliberately sticky thing like this. Quite simply, the idea of picking up a jam covered biscuit is revolting. I'm not particularly bothered by the idea of 'germs', but I just don't like my fingers covered in sticky food. I just don't. When I travelled in India many years ago, I gave the whole eating with my hands a go. It was a necessity as I was with ex-family-in-law, and ended up in houses that simply didn't have cutlery for me to use. Thankfully there were napkins. I would end up with a veritable mountain of crumpled paper napkins all around me after each meal as I desperately tried to remove food from my hands after pretty much each mouthful. I'm sure if I were to do that over, I'd have a little plastic fork in my back pocket for all emergencies...

So, the photo below shows the only complete Snow Ball I'll ever make, it was super sweet, and super sticky. Far too sweet actually. I think the biscuit halves with a smear of jam and a few sprinkles of coconut as a middle layer is more than enough. 

 

Snow Balls

4 eggs

¾ cup sugar

1 cup plain flour

1 tsp. cream of tartar

½ tsp. Bicarbonate of soda

Coating

Raspberry or strawberry jam (or jelly)

Desiccated coconut

Pre-heat oven to 160°C.

Sift flour, bi-carb soda & cream of tartar thrice. Beat eggs & sugar until thick and creamy (around 5-8 minutes with an electric beater). Fold in flour. 

Place teaspoon sized portions of the mixture onto a baking tray, then cook for around 10 minutes. Remove from oven and cool completely. Join two biscuits together with whipped cream or jam (I used jam). Roll in more jam, then coconut.

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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.

Biscuit Fudge

An easy recipe! No weird measurements or mysterious ingredients. Although I had quite the moment of staring blankly at the dairy shelf in the supermarket trying to figure out what and where the copha might be. That was a fun ten minutes. I'm sure by now though, the people who work at my local supermarket are used to me wandering around confused and lightly dusted with flour, peering at the shopping list crumpled in my hand. 

I had a couple of days off work this week, which was just lovely. I managed to get this recipe completed, hopped down to Byron Bay for a day, stood in and stared at the ocean, saw dolphins, whales and stingrays. Thoughts of work emails and my to-do list just washed away. Having a bit of a beer with a weekday lunch was also quite a special treat. There has to be something said about sitting in a beer garden on a warm day, eating great food and having a tasty ale; I may have slept extraordinarily well that evening. The house is still a mess, there are lizards under the bed that have been kindly deposited there by my cat, and the dishes remain successfully ignored. But frankly my dears, I don't give a damn. Everyone should have a day off in Byron Bay.  

Biscuit Fudge

170g copha

115g icing sugar

1 tbsp. cocoa

1 tbsp. cornflour

1 egg

1 tsp. of vanilla essence

225g milk coffee or arrowroot biscuits, crushed into small pieces

1 cup chopped walnuts

Line a loaf tin (20 x 25cm) with greaseproof paper.

Melt the copha in a saucepan, then add the sifted icing sugar, cornflour and cocoa. Stir in biscuit crumbs, beaten egg and vanilla essence.

Press the mixture into the tin, and sprinkle with the chopped walnuts. Allow to set firmly before cutting into squares.

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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.

Honey Cakes

Halfway! We are halfway with the recipes! This is the 29th baking effort, and I have 29 to go. There is light at the end of the buttery, sugary, cake-filled tunnel! 

In response to the increasingly vocal dismay of my colleagues/tasters about their ruined eating habits as a result of my cooking (all your diets are belong to me), I promised to look for a cake that was as close to the principles of 'clean eating' as possible. 

No, really.  

Anyway, Honey Cakes is it. Almost. While I'd never suggest this is the healthiest of snacks, there is very little refined sugar in this recipe and the ingredient list is pretty minimal. Yes, I know honey is sugar, but it's better. With organic flour and lovely fresh oranges used, it's not so bad. Of course I always use lovely tasty proper butter - there is nothing like it. This cake is actually quite tasty, honey should be in everything. It's so fragrant and adds a lovely density to cakes. 

Honey Cakes

½ cup butter

1 tbsp. sugar

1 tsp. orange zest

½ cup honey

2 cups self-raising flour

2 eggs

½ cup orange juice

Icing to decorate

Preheat oven to 160°C

Cream butter, sugar and orange zest, while gradually drizzling in the honey.

Add a few tablespoons of flour, then add the eggs one at a time, beating well. 

Add the remaining sifted flour, alternating with orange juice. 

Spoon into patty tins and cook for 15 minutes.

Ice and decorate as desired. Or just eat straight from the oven. Did I tell you how fragrant the honey is? 

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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. 

Sultana Apple Tea Cake

I made this cake because I thought I needed to have a Tea Cake in order to make cake crumbs for this Spicy Apple Tart recipe. Sometimes cooking with Nanna is a lot like cooking with a Matryoshka doll. As I unpack each recipe, two more are called forth. Now, if only I knew of a place where I could get a recipe for tea cake...? Oh. 

This looks nothing like any tea cake I've ever eaten. And, if one would care to review the recipe method, I think the question of why this cake needs to be kneaded into shape has to be asked. It's cake-bread, bread-cake, I don't know what it is really, but I'm going to call it Sultana Apple Tea Cake because that's what it's been called for the past 90+ years. It is tasty enough, and disappeared from my desk swiftly. Of course, the usual flood of praiseful emails and phone calls followed, for which I am ever grateful. I love so much that these recipes are working (most of them anyway), and are found to be tasty by everyone who tries one of my (Nanna's) cakes. 

Sultana Apple Tea Cake

3 small/medium apples

2 cups self-raising flour

¼ tsp. salt

1 tbsp. butter

1 tbsp. sugar

1 egg

145ml milk

½ tsp. vanilla essence

¾ cup sultanas

¼ tsp. mixed spice

2 tbsp. chopped walnuts

1 tbsp. brown sugar

Egg for glazing

Preheat oven to 190°C

Peel, core and slice apples thinly. Place into saucepan with a little water and simmer for about 10-15 minutes. Drain and cool.

Sift the flour and salt, then rub in butter, adding the sugar at this point.

Beat the egg, milk and vanilla essence together then add to the flour, forming a soft dough.  

Turn onto a floured board and knead lightly. Divide into three pieces, rolling each out to approximately the size of the sandwich tin being used. 

Press one third into a greased sandwich tin and cover with half the apples, sultanas and mixed spice. Cover with the second piece of dough, then spread the rest of the apple, sultana and mixed spice mix.

Cover with the third piece of dough, glaze the top with egg and sprinkle with brown sugar and chopped walnuts.

Place into hot oven, bake for 10 minutes, then reduce the heat to 160°C and bake for a further 20-25 minutes.

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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. 

Spicy Apple Tart

If you want a tart that looks like an apple pie, I have just the recipe for you! I had wanted to make this earlier in the week, but upon reading my notes, realised I didn't have, as the original recipe asks, a tea cup of cake crumbs. Who has cake crumbs just hanging around? Who has leftover cake in order to make cake crumbs?! Well, not me. When I read 'tea cup of cake crumbs', I have to admit I hastily misread and thought I needed to have a cup of teacake crumbs. So I made one. (See next blog post). I thought I'd take half to work and use the other half to make the bread crumbs. Not so. I ended up buying a small apple teacake and tossing half of it into the blender. The other half is sitting on my kitchen bench, rather unappealingly. For this recipe, any plain (leftover!) cake would do. 

Back to the tart however, it looks like an apple pie! I think it is an apple pie. I followed the recipe to the letter but am not really convinced it's a tart. I think if one latticed the pastry on top it would be more tart like? It was lovely though, so well worth making and eating all the same. No leftovers I might add.

Spicy Apple Tart

Filling

½ kg apples (approx. 5 medium apples)

85g sugar

Zest of 1 lemon

½ cup water

1 cup cake crumbs (pop a slice of cake into a blender to ‘crumb’)

Peel, core and slice apples thinly. Place into saucepan with sugar, lemon zest and water. Simmer on very low heat for about 15 mins. Drain and cool.

Pastry

85g plain flour

85g cornflour

85g butter

55g caster sugar

1 tsp. mixed spice

1 egg yolk (keep egg white aside for brushing onto pastry)

Pinch of salt

A little water

1 tbsp. sugar for sprinkling onto pastry.

Sieve dry ingredients together, then rub in butter. Stir egg yolk and a little water. Knead until free from cracks. Roll out until 5mm in thickness.

Preheat oven to 150°C.

Sponge tin and line with Pastry, sprinkle over half the cake crumbs, half the apple pulp and the remaining crumbs and apple. Roll out the remaining pastry to put on top. Brush with beaten egg, sprinkle with sugar. Bake for 1 hour.

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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. 

Raisin Ring Cake

Today, I went to a friend's mum's place and helped out at a working bee to tidy up the yard and gardens in order to ready the house for sale. Because I went to Art School, I was given the illustrious job of painting the front stair support posts. This was fiddly, soothing in its monotony, and oddly satisfying to finish and see the difference a coat of paint makes to stair posts and hair. Exterior enamel paint in my hair, yes. According to my friend's uncle, I did a good a job as "one of those bought painters". Grand praise indeed. 

In addition to my physical labours and charming presence, I brought along a cake for afternoon tea. A Raisin Ring Cake to be precise. I'm sure this cake would be great with a cup of tea or coffee, but I can't tell you this for sure. I can tell you that it was pretty damn tasty with a beer in the afternoon after a few hours of sweeping dirt (so much dirt), spiders, cockroaches and lizards out of a garden shed. I may have more than once danced my way out of the shed, flapping my hands and shrieking — breathlessly, silently — in fear.    

Everyone got to eat this cake, so I'm more than a little pleased that it was a recipe that worked, unlike those Chews and Scones of Horror. Tasty. This was very tasty, and much more moist than I thought it would have been. There are no eggs or milk (and if one didn't use butter, but margarine instead, it could be be completely dairy free). The subtle addition of the sweet spices really made this potentially plain and 'nice' cake, just...lovely. It was soft but filling, and had great height. This one is definitely going onto the list of delicious. 

Raisin Ring Cake

115gm butter

1 cup sugar

2 cups self raising flour

1 tsp. bicarbonate of soda

½ tsp. salt

½ tsp. nutmeg

½ tsp. mixed spice

1½ cup grated apple (about 3 apples)

1 cup raisins

½ cup chopped walnuts

Extra ½ cup self-raising flour

Preheat oven to 160°C

Cream butter and sugar. 

Fold in sifted dry ingredients, alternating with grated apple. 

Mix the extra flour with the raisins and chopped walnuts then add to the mixture. Mix thoroughly and pour into a greased/papered ring tin. Bake for one hour. Once cooked, remove from oven, but leave to cool slightly in tin before placing onto cake rack. 

Dust with icing sugar to serve.

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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.