Hot Cross Buns

This is the third attempt at this recipe, and I have to admit, that there is a world of difference between the recipe my forenannas prepared and what I ended up baking here. I first cooked this two Easters ago, when I was still in Brisbane. It was a very warm weekend, and I had very little to do but bake, and binge watch Game of Thrones on my newly purchased HD television. (My god what took me so long to make the shift from huge analogue to slim and light digital...?) The time spent at JB Hi Fi perusing all the shiny things meant I went home with a new digital radio and some DVD boxed sets as well... 

I had Easter dinner with my lovely friend Kylie, and I told her I'd bring hot cross buns fresh from Nanna's cookbook! Well. They ended up being Hot Cross Rocks, and not that great to look at. I did not bring them to dinner with me I was terribly embarrassed at my effort. So not great that I didn't take photos of them at the time unfortunately. The first recipe here is closer to a rock cake than a bready spicy bun, so maybe on some level they could work if you didn't cook them at Easter time. The second recipe, is what I cobbled together after reading a few other recipe books and googling many things, and is a much better version. I even gave some to other people to eat I was so happy with them in the end. 

Hot Cross Buns - Nanna's Recipe (the one that didn't work)

1½  plain flour

1 tsp. baking powder

¼ cup caster sugar

60g. butter

Pinch salt

1 tsp. allspice

60g. currants

2 eggs

2 tbsp. milk

Flour and milk for pastry cross

Preheat oven to 160°C

Mix the dry ingredients together, then rub in the butter and add currants. 

Add the beaten eggs and eggs to mixture.

Knead and then form into bus, 

Form into buns, laying four and milk mixure in a cross onto each bun (or cut with a knife). 

Lay on a greased baking tray and bake for 20-30 minutes.

While still hot, brush with a mixture of hot milk and sugar, dry in oven for a minute.

Hot Cross Buns - the recipe that did work (as pictured)

4 cups plain flour

14g dried yeast (2 sachets)

1/4 cup caster sugar

3 tsp. mixed spice

pinch salt

1½ cups mixed fruit 

50g butter

300ml milk

2 eggs

Crosses

½ cup plain flour

5 tbsp. water

Sugar Glaze

⅓ cup water

2 tablespoons caster sugar

Mix together flour, yeast, sugar, mixed spice, salt and currants. 

Melt butter in a small saucepan over medium heat, then add milk and heat for 1 minute. Add warm milk mixture and eggs to currant mixture. 

Mix together with a flat bladed knife until dough forms, then turn out onto a floured surface and knead for 10 minutes until smooth. 

Place into a slightly oiled bowl, cover with plastic, and leave it in a warm spot until dough has doubled in size (90 minutes or so)

punch dough until it returns to its original size, then knead again on a floured surface, until the dough is smooth and springs back when pressed. 

Divide into 12 portions, shaping each into a ball. 

Place balls onto a lined tray, around 1cm apart, cover with plastic and set aside for a further 20minutes. Preheat oven to 190°C.

At this point,you should make the flour paste, and just before putting the buns into the oven, pipe the paste on tops of buns to form crosses. Bake for about 20 minutes.

To make the glaze, heat the water and sugar in a saucepan over low heat. Bring to the boil and simmer (fast) for 5 minutes. Brush the glaze when warm over the buns when they are just out of the oven. Eat with lots of butter while still warm!

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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.

Pumpkin Fruit Cake

This is called Trombone Cake by my grandmothers. What is this you ask? What on earth is Trombone Cake? I asked myself this question too, then I asked my mum, who shrugged, then I asked Wikipedia™ and Google™. It seems that Trombone Cake is Pumpkin Cake. It's Gramma Trombone Pumpkin cake. It's a type of squash, very similar to Butternut Pumpkin (technically also a squash rather than a pumpkin...). Made into a cake. 

Hmm. It's by now that I should mention how much I hate pumpkin. It's an utterly despicable food, honestly. It's a running joke with friends and I how much I hate it. I don't care that it's sweet, or that you find it delicious and great as soup. I just don't, nor will I ever, like it. Mum, I feel now with benefit of time and distance, I can confess that when we lived in Kalgoorlie and I was very young and made to eat everything on my plate? Because think of the starving children in Africa? Remember? Well, I used to visit the chickens in the backyard right after dinner with whatever food I couldn't manage to eat (pumpkin featured a lot, sometimes scrambled eggs) stuffed into my cheeks like a chipmunk to empty into the chookyard for the chickens... I wish I was sorry, but my god it was pumpkin. Sorry. Pumpkin.

I ended up making this cake a little differently than the original recipe suggests. It asked for a 'packet of mixed fruit'. I spent a very long time in the supermarket aisle staring at the 'packets of mixed fruit' hoping for clarity and enlightenment as they were, predictably, all of varying size and volume. I had a tiny sad moment as I thought to myself that this would have been a perfect excuse for me to call my Nanna and ask what size a packet of mixed fruit she or her mum meant. I decided to buy just a one kilogram bag of dried fruit. I left that on the tram home by accident, so it was a great start to the evening of cooking yes it was. 

I dug through my pantry and found two already opened boxes of currants and a few of those little snack-sized boxes of sultanas. I figured that given I'd never really know what amount of dried fruit I needed, it wouldn't matter that I randomly threw in whatever I found into the mix. I measured it all of course, so in case the recipe worked I'd have a good reason why! Further down I then read that I need to cream the butter and 'a small cup of sugar'. A small cup of sugar. It really was one of those days. But you know what, it all came together in the end, so I present to you my Nanna's Trombone Cake Pumpkin Fruit Cake. I ate only a few crumbs of it before deciding that I could still taste the pumpkin (the cooking and mashing of which stunk my house out no end by the way, it was a nauseating affair). From all accounts, it's quite delicious. 

Trombone Cake

1 cup of sugar

115g. butter

2 eggs

1 cup warm mashed pumpkin (butternut squash)

1 tbsp. of golden syrup

2 cups self-raising flour

450g. mixed dried fruit

1 tbsp. vanilla essence

Pinch salt

Preheat oven to 170°C

Beat the butter and sugar, then add the eggs and mix to a cream (ready when pale and aerated). 

Add golden syrup, mashed pumpkin and mix with an electric beater for 5 minutes. 

Add the dried fruit, sifted self-raising flour, salt and essence. 

Pour into a greased and lined round cake tin, and bake for about 60 minutes, but check it from 45 minutes with a skewer to see if it's ready. Turn out from tin after about 15 minutes, and leave to cool on rack. 

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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.

Pineapple Cake

This Pineapple Cake was called Pineapple Bake in my Nanna's recipe book, however I have decided to call it a cake, as it really is a cake. I honestly thought I needed to bake a pineapple, but instead I found out that I just needed to add some chopped pineapple to a cake mixture. A very nice cake mixture mind you however I was quite taken with the idea of actually baking a pineapple. 

Ironic Pineapple Hedgehog (unknown photographer)

I might just do that anyway, just to see what it would taste like. Maybe it would taste like Queensland in the 1970s. What? Oh, come on, you know what I mean, there is something very 1970s AND very Queensland about pineapple. Look, I know I'm not the only one to have come across a non-ironic pineapple hedgehog. I really have a pineapple craving now. I think I need to make a pineapple hedgehog soon, and it being 2014 there will be a hefty pinch of irony thrown in. 

How does it taste? Well, I took this cake to work, left it in the kitchen, and it was gone within 20 minutes of the all-staff email, so I guess that's what it tastes like. I found it light, fluffy and almost refreshing with the occasional piece of tangy pineapple. The very sweet and buttery vanilla icing was—literally—the icing on the cake. I wish though that I'd taken a bit more time to thematically decorate it to look more pineapply. Oh well, next time...

Pineapple Cake

115g butter

170g sugar

230g self-raising flour

3 eggs

80ml milk

75g pineapple (tinned or fresh), finely chopped

Preheat oven to 150°C.

Cream butter and sugar.

Add the egg, flour and milk.

Mix pineapple through mixture, then pour into greased and lined round cake tin. Bake for one hour (check it at 45-50 minute mark though, depending on your oven).

Decorate as you desire, I prepared a basic vanilla frosting which was a perfect sweetness against the slight tanginess of the pineapple.

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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.

Ginger Pudding

I’m sitting in a kitchen in Warrnambool typing this up. It’s cold and I am sitting in a warm kitchen with a head cold and throat thing that makes me sound like a man on the phone. Like a man with a blocked nose. Not so blocked that I can’t smell the delicious soup being prepared for me. Honestly, where better to spend a weekend in the depths of winter, than a small ex-whaling town facing the Antarctic, smelling soup and writing out cake recipes.

Why am I in Warrnambool you ask? I am taking a study break, free of kitteh distractions (and they are many thanks to Clingy McVelcro aka Mini, who cannot leave me alone for one second when I am on my computer or reading a textbook), and thought that I could combine this with my need to catch up with my friend Sarah. We decided while I’m here, we could both go and see the sights of Warrnambool. We had a pub meal at The Warrnambool Hotel. Delicious. We went to the whale watching lookout. We saw no whales. We went to the breakwater where I obligingly gasped in awe at the size of the waves crashing up and over it, and doubted the effectiveness of the breakwater when even mild waves crashed up and over it. We went Cheeseworld. Cheeseworld is a large cheese shop across the road from one of the two milk factories in the area. It isn’t necessarily the rollicking tourist destination I was expecting (it's a cheese shop), although there is a local museum of Old Dairy Farm Equipment which was interesting, however the wide selection of local cheeses made it really worth the visit. Really it did. I am in cheese heaven right now. The leek and potato soup being cooked will contain a piece of cheese and I am yet to decide which of the five I bought it will be.

Due to a freak weather moment that affected much of Victoria yesterday, I even saw a little bit of snow on my way here. This was both enchanting and alarming, as frankly, I have no idea how to drive with snow. There wasn’t that much on the road by the time I drove through, but there clearly had been judging by the number of cars I saw resting in ditches and against trees and fences. So

Back to this cake. I wish I had made this cake yesterday to have brought with me. It’s such a good wintry dessert, and served with the orange sauce, you too will find it difficult to resist the second, third or eighth slice. Or that could just be me. I press the softness of my middle. Yes, maybe just me. This cake is on my ever growing ‘cakes to cook again’ list.

 

Ginger Pudding

½ cup All-Bran

½ cup milk

¼ cup butter

¼ cup brown sugar

1 egg

1 cup plain flour

½ tsp. baking powder

¼ tsp. bicarbonate of soda

1 tsp. ground ginger

Pinch salt

⅔ cup golden syrup (or honey)

½ cup raisins

Preheat oven to 160°C

Mix All-Bran and milk, set aside.

Cream butter and sugar, then add the egg and beat well. 

Stir in golden syrup, raisins then the milk and All Bran mix.

Sift the flour, bicarbonate soda, baking powder, ginger and salt together three times, then add to the mixture.

Spoon into a greased square cake tin and bake for 25 minutes.

Serve with orange sauce.

Orange Sauce

1 tbsp. cornflour

½ cup honey

1 cup orange juice

1 cup water

½ tsp. butter

1 tsp. grated orange rind.

Over a low heat, mix cornflour with honey, and gradually stir in orange juice, water until it thickens.

Stir in butter and orange rind.

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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.

Currant Tart

After a busy day at work last week, followed by a quick catchup drink with a friend at a really lovely bar in Northcote that apparently has been open for years and years but I've only just heard of, I raced in the front door through the lounge-room past my flatmate and straight to the kitchen. I think I still had my handbag over my shoulder as I was putting all these ingredients together. Apart from the pastry, which can be done ahead of time if one is being very organised (I am not organised), this is a very quick tart. 

Now, the recipe calls for finely chopped nuts but unfortunately the actual nut required is unspecified. Peanut? Walnut? I didn't have nuts (see above comment re organisation) so had to race out to my local IGA and grab a pack of gourmet mixed nuts...which were salted. They were the only nuts I could find, but once I'd washed the salt off, using mixed nuts was probably the right thing. They added a lovely texture, without being overpowering at all. 

Currant Tart

Tart Filling

4 tbsp. currants
4 tbsp. apricot jam
1 tbsp. sugar
2 tbsp. finely chopped nuts
grated rind and juice of 1 lemon

Preheat oven to 180°C.

Mix together all ingredients, place into prepared pastry cases and bake for 15-17 minutes. Remove carefully from tins once cooled, top with cream or custard. 

Shortcrust Pastry

⅔ cup plain flour
pinch salt
120g. butter
cold water to mix (in hot weather, use iced water)

Sieve dry ingredients into a mixing bowl, and rub in the butter very lightly using your fingertips. With a knife, mix rubbed in ingredients with just enough cold water to bind the pastry together. Finish mixing with your fingers and press into pastry moulds, then blind bake for about 15 minutes or until lightly cooked and firm. You can also roll the pastry if you're concerned about evenness of the crust. 

Tip: to ensure the pastry doesn't go out of shape, make sure you place baking paper and baking beads in the mould.

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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.

Apple Cakes

I'm keeping this recipe aside for future pastry needs, it has the perfect amount of sweetness, is perfectly short, and is the best accompaniment to large portions of custard. My personal recommendation is to have a cup (or large bowl, whatever) of warm custard and dunk these apple cakes into them. Oh wait not everyone is a glutton like me.

These apple cakes, on the face of it, could resemble Hot Apple Pies™ from a restaurant that I'll not McName on this blog. But they are better—not difficult I realise—but I really mean that mine are better.  

Apple Cakes

125g Self-raising flour

Pinch salt

3 tbsp. Sugar

115g Butter

1 egg

3 tbsp. Milk

1 Large apple, grated

Preheat oven to 160°C 

Sift flour, add the pinch of salt and sugar. Rub in butter until mixture is crumbley. Add the milk and beaten egg and combine until a smooth dough is formed. 

Turn onto a floured board and roll out as for biscuits (3-4mm thick). 

Cut into small rounds, put a teaspoon of grated apple onto half the rounds and cover with the remaining rounds. 

Press edges together. Bake in a moderate oven for about 10-12 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.