Orange Ginger Olive Oil Cake

People are going to think all I eat are cakes and desserts soon. People are going to think I look like all I eat are cakes and desserts; rolling about the place like a big, round cookie. But really, most of the time the meals I eat are simple and easy – salads, soups and what I call funny stove-top vegetable throw-togethers. There really are no boundaries with these sorts of meals. Last Tuesday night’s dinner was a fine example: Brussels sprouts halved, cooked in a tablespoon of oil and a knob of butter then two diced tomatoes thrown in, salt and pepper, fresh thyme and cubes of stale bread. The bread had been sitting on the kitchen table for a few days so I diced it up before I could think too carefully and threw it in with a “what the hell” flick of the wrist. Sometimes not thinking in the kitchen is a damn good idea; this dinner was very, very good.

The Brussels sprouts browned at the cut edge while the outer leaves softened into translucency and the tightly wrapped insides were sweet and toothsome. The tomatoes simmered down to a sauce, herbaceous and with a bit of tang. The pieces of bread, nestled amongst the red and the green, absorbed the sauce and the juices until almost cake-like in texture.

Occasionally I think people may want to read about these sorts of dinners; this funny, made-up on the spot sort of food. I could write about my mother and her funny, made-up on the spot sort of food. I think I learnt that brazen flick of the wrist motion from her. I love it when she says, while stirring a pot or searching through the spice shelf, “I have no idea what this is or what I’m doing, I’m just going with it.” I love that honesty in cooking, the thrill of being guided by instinct. Forget the recipe books for a while, I say, cook with abandon.

But then I bake a cake and it seems exciting and something of a revelation. The margin for error is greater in baking, I think, than simply throwing together vegetables and herbs in a pan. When a cake emerges from the oven golden and perfect there is a small sigh of relief and then a celebration to be had for this small victory. My kind of cooking, my week day throw-togethers, take place in the moment and without occasion so very rarely are they eaten by anyone but me. These meals are flavourful, yes, and healthy, yes, but they’re not pretty like a cake or uniform like a biscuit.

This cake, though, it’s a keeper. It has earthy, floral notes of olive oil and is sweetened with honey and fresh orange juice. The ginger and the orange and the honey; they go very well together. A honey sweetened cake is much more interesting than any white processed sugar counterpart. Honey feels balanced and produces a sweetness with a real flavour. Sugar is not a flavour. There are jubes of crystallised ginger in the batter and grated ginger throughout so there is a spicy warmth to the cake.

There appears to be a lot going on here – Orange! Ginger – ground, root, crsytallised! Olive oil! Honey! Wholemeal flour! But it works, perhaps it’s the wholemeal flours toning everything down a bit, maybe it’s the savoury of the olive oil. This cake is simple and honest. It’s wholesome, a quality I love in a cake. It feels approachable and user-friendly; it’s a scone cake, a Sunday morning tea cake, a snacking cake, a breakfast cake. It is not striving for centre stage or a grand feast, much like my on-the-spot dinners.

Orange Ginger Olive Oil Cake
I adapted this recipe from the Eating Well website – a very good reminder that sweet treats can be made and eaten well. I think this cake would almost be better with ground almonds instead of the mixture of plain flour and wholemeal. Let me know if you try this.

1/2 cup honey
1/4 cup mild flavoured olive oil
2 large eggs, separated
2 tablespoons freshly grated orange zest
1/3 cup fresh orange juice
1 teaspoon finely grated fresh ginger root
5 tablespoons chopped crystallised ginger
1 cup wholemeal flour
2/3 cup plain flour
1 teaspoon ground ginger
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt

juice of an orange
1/4 cup icing sugar

Pre-heat oven to 180°C. Grease and line a 20cm round cake tin.

In a small bowl mix together the honey, olive oil, egg yolks, orange zest, grated fresh ginger and the crystallised ginger.

Into a large bowl sift the flours, baking powder, ground ginger and salt.

In a third bowl beat egg whites until soft peaks form, 1 to 2 minutes. Stir the honey mixture into the flours then gently fold in the egg whites with a spatula until the mixtures are well combined. Pour the batter into the prepared tin.

Check the cake after 20 minutes, or bake until golden in colour and a skewer inserted into the centre of the cake comes out clean.

Let the cake cool for 10 minutes in the tin before turning onto a wire rack to cool. Mix the orange juice and the icing sugar together and drizzle over the warm cake.

Spiced Apple Cake

I’m not sure what else can be said about spiced apple cake that hasn’t been said before. I could follow suit of the northern hemisphere at the moment and talk about the latest windfall of apple picking, and how ever to use up 20 pounds of apples if not in a spiced apple cake, earthy and sweet and unequivocally autumnal? (Although they would say fall.) But it is not fall here, and apple picking, for all its romance, is not available.

I could write of the warming homeliness of cinnamon, allspice and ginger, of how it seems appropriate to bunker down, perhaps beneath a blanket and with a mug of black tea when eating spiced apple cake. But here, summer is finally waving hello. It is the time of year to stay outdoors, to eat ice cream and, in a few months, juicy stone fruit.

I could write of the nubbliness of rolled oats. Of how oats undergo an amazing transformation from plain cereal to soft and luxurious and worthy of the title sweet treat or dessert when mixed with butter and brown sugar. I could write about the contrast in texture with, perhaps, broken walnut pieces. But truth be told, this is a simple spiced apple cake, plain and sweet, no walnuts or nubbly oats, just apple, spice and a few raisins.

I could write about the spiced apple cakes my mother used to make, for there have been several. Our most popular apple cake has a strudel-esque topping that always seems to marble with the cake batter, ruining the effect, but is no less delicious.

Perhaps, like banana bread, we do not need any more words or recipes for spiced apple cake.

And yet, here I am.

For me the most surprising part of this cake is the preparation of the two apples. Peeled, yes. But rather than roughly diced apple breaking the surface of the cake and creating little pockets of soft apple within the batter, the apples are thinly sliced, as you would for an apple tart. The sliced apples are then covered with all of the sugar, not a modest few tablespoons while the rest of the measure is creamed with butter as we would expect.

The two apples go a long way. The thin slices fill the cake out nicely; no ounce of batter is left apple-less. The slices cook down to near nothingness, their fragrance seeping throughout the cake, but cut a slice and pale streaks of apple are throughout.

I may make apple cakes like this from now on – apples sliced over apples diced.

And there we are, those are my words on spiced apple cake.

Spiced Apple Cake

I doubled the measure of spices and reduced the amount of sugar by 25 grams; below is the recipe to my adjustments. I also used one Granny Smith and one braeburn apple as that’s what I had on hand, but any good cooking apples will do. If you are using a sweeter variety, or adding more dried fruit the sugar can be further reduced to 200 grams.

The cake is best served warm with crème fraîche.

2 apples (see note above)
1 egg
1 teaspoon nutmeg
2 teaspoons cinnamon
1 teaspoon allspice
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon baking soda
125 grams butter
225 grams sugar
185 grams flour
75 grams raisins

Pre-heat oven to 180°C. Grease and line a 20 cm round cake tin.

Peel and slice apples thinly. Place in a large bowl and mix in the sugar.

Melt butter then leave to cool for several minutes before mixing in the egg. Pour the butter mixture over the apples and stir well. Sift dry ingredients over the apples and combine until just mixed.

Pour into cake tin and bake 50 minutes to an hour or until a skewer inserted into the middle comes out clean.

Dust with icing sugar to serve.

Chocolate Berry Torte

September has brought clear days of high winds, the sort of wind that seems to be rolling and sweeping in the air above us, almost unnoticed, but will take you by surprise with the flick of a tree branch or the lift of a hat. See the blossom, dusky pink, before it is blown off the trees.

There have been mild days with warmth in the sun. There has been a grey wet day, a freezing cold day, a torrential rain day. It’s only day 7 of September. Welcome to Spring in Wellington.
This chocolate berry torte is rich, dense and the chocolate sits squarely in the front row, so to speak. It is perhaps more appropriate to dark winter nights, maybe in front of a fire, with a glass of dessert wine or a citrus-y bourbon. But here we have it in Spring and I’m sure you won’t complain.
Like I said this torte is rich, dense and deliciously fudgey. It’s brownie meets ganache truffle. The sort of cake where you take a bite, smile in delight at how good it is, and you may very well have chocolate on your teeth. Every second spoonful or so there is a berry tartness, a smash of raspberry or blackberry or blueberry. It adds a freshness to the cake, but not a lot of sweet. The bitter-sweet of the chocolate is the leading flavour here.
This cake is gluten free, taken from the same book as this recipe. I’ve realised that in our house we often make gluten free desserts not because we fool ourselves that they are healthier, or because we are dangerously gluten intolerant, but because the understated disc of a cake that these recipes produce suit us perfectly. They are clean and simple to look at, nothing much really, but the flavours, whether citrus or chocolate, hold their own.

Chocolate Berry Torte

Any berries would be fine in this cake, fresh or frozen. We used frozen mixed berries which lend a bumpy texture and add more colour.

200 grams dark chocolate
50 grams butter
3 eggs, separated
50 grams caster sugar
50ml cream
110 ground almonds plus extra for dusting tin
150-200 grams berries

20cm spring form tin

Pre-heat the oven to 180°C.

Line the base of the tin with baking paper and brush the sides with melted butter. Dust with ground almonds.

Place the chocolate and butter in a heatproof bowl over a pan of simmering water, until melted and smooth.

In a large bowl beat the egg yolks with the sugar until pale and creamy. Add the chocolate mixture to the egg yolks and mix well to combine. Stir in the cream and ground almonds.

In another bowl beat the egg whites until stiff. Gently fold the egg whites, a third at a time, into the chocolate almond mixture. Next fold through the berries. Pour into the prepared tin.

Bake in the oven for 25 to 30 minutes. The sides should be cooked but the centre slightly underdone. Leave the cake to cool completely before removing from tin.

Dust with icing sugar and serve with whipped cream and more berries.

Sweet Pumpkin Cake

Pumpkin is an ever versatile vegetable so why is it often in a roast, soup, mash rotation? Roast, soup, mash, roast, soup, mash. Perhaps, in New Zealand, this a nod to our Sunday roast, meat-and-three-vege traditional fare. Pumpkin should be treated more like the apple or the carrot, something that closes the gap between sweet and savoury, compliments the savoury or brightens the sweet.
I made this cake following the instructions of a banana yoghurt cake, but changing quantities and ingredients on a whim, hoping for good things. The colour is quite startling, as you would expect from a cake made with pumpkin. It’s autumnal, perhaps a shade of rust. The flavour mellows out; there is a whisper of nutmeg and cinnamon, and not a lot of sweetness. The pumpkin sits on the back burner, not saying a great deal, instead bringing a certain warmth and richness to the cake.
You could easily ice this cake, an orange drizzle icing could be nice, or make it up like carrot cake with a cream cheese frosting. Although, I feel icing takes away its ability to be a light snacking cake, perfect for breakfast.

Next I’m thinking pumpkin bread; savoury, light orange in colour, perhaps of the yeasty variety. Bread and butter pudding with sweetened pumpkin purée, brandy soaked raisins, cream and nutmeg. Cannelloni stuffed with pumpkin and feta; a savoury crumble with pumpkin and parsnip – a crumble laden with walnuts; maybe grated pumpkin will work in a rosti. May winter continue long enough for me to try all these ideas.

Sweet Pumpkin Cake

1 1/4 cup sugar
100 grams butter, melted
3 eggs
1 1/2 cups pumpkin puree (I cooked about 2 handfuls of pumpkin in sugared water until tender, drained the water and blended with a dash of cream)
1/2 cup natural yoghurt
2 cups self raising flour
1 teaspoon nutmeg
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1 teaspoon baking soda

Pre-heat oven to 160°C. Grease a large rectangular or round tin.

Beat the butter and sugar together until smooth. Add eggs, one at a time, beating after each addition, until thick and creamy. Stir through the pumpkin puree, then the yoghurt. Sieve dry ingredients into the bowl and fold together until just combined. Pour into tin and bake for 35-45 minutes, depending on the size of your tin, until a skewer inserted comes out clean.
Leave in the tin for 10 minutes before turning onto a wire rack to cool.

Serve with yoghurt, delicious afternoon tea cake.

N.B. This is a large mix.

Nana’s Boiled Sultana Cake

On 7 June my dear Nana passed away. She was 5 months short of her 90th birthday. I think she was holding out for this milestone; Nana loved any chance to get dolled up. She was a beautiful, graceful and elegant woman. Even when ill in hospital she wore lipstick and had brightly painted nails. The nurses would comment on her smooth, unlined skin, and I like to think they asked her the secrets of her beauty regime. It broke my heart to see her hands, to which she had so diligently applied moisturiser all her life, bruised and blackened with needles and IV entry points.

Until I was fifteen and we moved into Wellington, Nana had always been there, just a short bike ride away. She was simply my Nana who gave us biscuits, always had sweeties and let my sister and I play with her make-up. She was as fit as a fiddle, and as long as she drank gin and played bridge once a week, everything was as it should be. It wasn’t until I grew older that I began to wonder who Nana really was. Who was Nana to her friends? What did they talk about while they drank their tea and played cards? What was Nana like as a girl, a young woman, a new mother? What did she dream of and hope for?

Sadly, it wasn’t until she became ill and we spent hours at her bedside that I began to put pieces of her life together. She was a woman who fiercely loved her husband, Ken. He was tall and handsome with blond curls, and as the story goes, women used to stop and stare at him in the streets. A few months ago, while lying in her hospital bed, Nana told Mum and I of the day her and Ken got married. Her eyes were closed as she spoke, and her voice was slow. They were married at St Andrews on the Terrace at 11a.m on 6 September 1947. Nana said no one came to their wedding; it was a quiet, private ceremony.

Her and Ken returned to the church for their 25th wedding anniversary. They signed the guest book and the chaplain saw they were married in his church 25 years before; he gave them his congratulations. I have walked past St Andrews on the Terrace many times, but now it means something different to me.

Just after Nana died my auntie Barbie came to stay. She told us a story that will inspire the romantic in all of us. My nana was a nurse in Wellington Hospital for a few years while her and Ken were courting. Ken worked on a dairy farm in Otaki, a small town an hour (by modern car, on modern road) north of Wellington. Every Sunday, after rising early for milking, Ken would bike into Wellington and take Nana out for a picnic lunch. After a few precious hours Nana would go back to the hospital and Ken would cycle back to Otaki ready for the evening milk.

On the night Nana died, when mum and I had cried our tears and called the people who needed to be called, we opened dad’s bottle of whiskey. We cooked steak and drank whiskey on the rocks; Nana would have approved. Mum and I started chatting, sharing our thoughts about Nana just to fill the quiet, really only the things we already knew – how she died without having had a gin and tonic in months; and that she would most certainly not miss the hospital food. But then mum told me that Ken taught Nana to cook. When they began their married life Ken showed Nana the basics: soups, stews, how to re-use leftovers, and maybe a basic cake. I like to think of a young newly-wed couple in their farmhouse kitchen cooking, of both donning an apron and preparing a meal together.

When I think of Nana in the kitchen I think of her boiled sultana cake: plump sultanas held within a dark, loose-crumbed batter. It is a satisfying cake, warming and hearty and seems to hark back to farmhouse kitchen days. But, dare I say it, a slice for breakfast would be a good idea; this cake is light and sweet from sultanas. One day when I was 9 or 10 I biked over to Nana’s house to ask for the recipe. She handed me a piece of paper, brown with an illustration of kitchen instruments along the top. Nana dictated the recipe to me and in my newly learnt cursive, I wrote it down. I’m not sure why I remember this so clearly, perhaps it seems like a definitive grandmother-granddaughter experience: the sharing and passing on of recipes.

And so now I share it here. This cake is perfect for a large crowd, a cut and keep sort of cake. We made this cake a few weeks ago when we had friends over to honour Nana. She would have like it: we drank bubbles and gin and tonic. There were beautiful cheeses and red grapes, little sandwiches and savouries. Nana would have held court at one end of the room, gin in one hand and probably my hand in the other.

Boiled Sultana Cake

450 grams sultanas
225 grams butter
3 eggs
2 cups sugar
2 1/2 cups flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
a few drops vanilla essence

Pre-heat the oven to 180°C and line a large round tin. Place sultanas in a pot and cover with water. Bring to the boil and simmer for 5 minutes. Pour off most of the water, leaving a few tablespoons. Chop the butter into the sultanas and leave to melt.

In a separate bowl beat the eggs with the sugar for a couple of minutes, or until slightly thick and pale. Stir in the vanilla. Add the egg mixture to the sultanas and butter, then add the flour and baking powder. Stir until well combined.

Bake 1 hr 10 minutes, but no longer than 1 hr 15 minutes.

New Books and Sponge Cake

One day I hope to live in a house with a library, or the very least, a decent shelving unit. I have been buying a lot of books this year. Investment shopping, I call it. I do not have a lot of time for reading at the moment. But one day, when I have those floor to ceiling wooden shelves, I will read every day. In the meantime, an artful stack to look at will do.

The wonderful thing about investment book shopping is the anything-goes rule. One day, I will read this! Short story collections, yes; crazy whacky poetry, yes; books of essays, yes; cookbooks requiring ingredients I can’t yet afford and kitchen ware I don’t yet own, yes; food writing, yes; novels, yes. Do you see how this game works?

This week has been a stand out week for buying books. There was a Vic Books sale, a clearance sale, books for as little as $2 I has been told. It was miserable weather and Francesca and I were feeling slightly sorry for ourselves. We trudged up the hill to Victoria where there was the promise of coffee and quiet book shopping. We bought poetry books, novels, a book of plays, a book of essays. And then, almost as an after thought, I picked up a pretty pink french cookbook called Taste Le Tour.

It has a padded cover with pink stripes and looks quite uncharacteristic of french cuisine. Where are the beautiful pictures of french markets and countryside, teeming with rounds of cheese, hanging sausages and plucked poultry? Instead there is a sketch on the front cover and the motif of a lurking black cat. It could be mistaken for a children’s picture book. My collection of querky french cookbooks is growing. I’m realising I buy french cook books because the stories between the pages, rather than the list of ingredients on them, is worth more to me.

But each cook book needs testing. I made the Gateau de Savoie from Taste le Tour, mainly because I had all the ingredients, but also, I feel a certain loyalty to the Savoie-Alpes region after living there for a while. I don’t think I ever tried this sponge cake while there, but I wish I had. I imagine it would be feather light in France. The recipe calls for six eggs, separated. A little daunting really, especially as personal experience tells me the risk increases exponentially as the quantity of eggs increases. I was worried. But, lo and behold, my cake rose like a soufflé with a crisp shell, almost biscuit like. Beneath this was soft sponge, almost plain but for the slightest whisper of lemon. The author of the book says his grandmother used to serve this cake with fresh fruit and runny custard. I would have liked some berries to macerate in a little sugar, maybe a dash of rum, and wait for the ruby juices to soak through the pale sponge. Instead, we ate ours in the fading afternoon sun with whipped vanilla cream and glasses of Pimm’s, admiring our books.

Savoie Sponge Cake
From Taste Le Tour

Note the size of the cake tin; this is a large mixture. My cake rose above the sides of the tin, threatening to spill over, hence it developed a little muffin top.

90 grams plain flour
90 grams cornflour
6 eggs, separated
grated zest of 1 lemon
300 grams caster sugar
a pinch of cream of tartar
icing sugar for dusting

Preheat the oven to 180°C. Butter a 25cm round cake tin.

Sift the two flours together and set aside.

Beat the egg yolks, lemon zest and 150 grams of the sugar in a bowl until very pale and mousse like. Wash the beaters well.

Beat the egg whites with the cream of tartar until stiff peaks form. Slowly add the remaining 150 grams of sugar and beat slowly, or whisk, until well incorporated. Gently fold the egg whites into the egg yolks, followed by the flours. Be careful not to over mix.

Pour the cake mixture into the prepared tin and smooth the surface. Dust the cake with icing sugar and bake for 35-40 minutes. Remove from the oven and cool for 10 minutes before turning onto a wire rack. Cool completely before serving.

Orange and Almond Cake

My mother is tightening the reigns in her house. No more treats for a while. Time to cut back, to exercise a little restraint. Less carbs, more protein, she says. That sort of thing. My father sighs and pretends to hate every minute of it.

“No sugar in my coffee,” he grumbles, “no cream, just black. No alcohol, except on weekends. No chocolate, no baking, no more cheese and crackers before dinner. Carrot sticks and hummus. Hardly any bread, and no butter on it anyway.”

I took great delight in telling them about the latest food writer and food entreprenuer I had found, Nina Planck. Her philosophy is to reclaim the traditional whole foods of our ancestors; the red meat, full fat dairy products, whole grains, vegetables, lard and butter! My father sighed again, in an if only sort of way. But then he turned to my mother and said, what was that dish you made last week, like the stir fry? What else was in the salad today? We had a great lunch yesterday, didn’t we?

The thing is, my mother could make a pack of rubber-like tofu and bean sprouts taste fantastic. So any eating regime, not matter how severe, is no struggle. Especially not when she decides she simply must do some baking. It looks like a great recipe, she justifies, and it’s gluten free. Pretty much a health food I tell her. And this is how our conversations go.

Regardless of its nutritional make up, this is one of the nicest cakes I have had in a very long time. It is so very moist and light it is similar to a citrus moose. You can feel the air escape between your teeth. It is lovely with yoghurt – full fat, cream top, I say.

Lady Dundee’s Orange Cake
Adapted from Healthy Gluten Free Eating

2 medium orange
200 grams ground almonds, plus a little extra for dusting
3 eggs
200 grams caster sugar
1 teaspoon baking powder

Scrub the oranges and place them, whole, in a saucepan with enough water to cover. Put a lid on the pot and simmer for 1-2 hours or until the oranges are tender. Change the simmering water up to 3 times to ensure the orange skins are not bitter.

Preheat the oven to 180°C. Brush a 20cm spring form cake tin with butter and dust with ground almonds. Place a round of baking paper in the base of the tin.

Halve the cooked oranges, remove the pips and puree the flesh and the peel in a blender until smooth. Beat the eggs and sugar until pale and light. Combine the baking powder and ground almonds, then gently fold into the eggs. Fold in the orange puree. Pour the mixture into the prepared tin and bake in the centre of the oven for 1 hour, or until a skewer comes out clean when inserted into the midddle of the cake.

Cool on a wire rack and remove the paper.

A Simple Cake Base

 My mother is not much of a sweet dessert person. She enjoys the flavour of ginger, vanilla, lemon, raspberries and blueberries. If my mother has chocolate it is dark and bitter with cocoa. She would be perfectly happy with a strong piece of cheese, a few oat crackers and maybe a handful of grapes or slices of firm pear.

When it comes to cakes, simple is best. Fruits are the stars of these cakes: pears, plums, oranges or apples. They are very rarely big cakes, never the sort with a few centimetres of icing on top. They are of the understated flat variety, like wide discs. Perhaps with a drizzle icing, a shake of icing sugar, or nothing at all.

For my mother’s birthday last week I made Nigel Slater‘s English Apple Cake from his book, The Kitchen Diaries. This is perhaps my most loved cook book. It is simple in its progression through the year. A northern hemisphere year but easily translated. In February there is slow roast lamb with chickpea mash, a treacle tart, a recipe for sausage and black pudding with baked parsnips. In May there are orange and ricotta pancakes, a white bean and tarragon soup and salmon and dill fishcakes. The book is written like a diary, each recipe has an introduction; the inspiration for the recipe, or what occasion it marked. Some entries contain no recipe at all but are titled “A feast of plums” or “An extravagant supper of rare beef, red salad and cheeses.” I love that the word supper describes nearly every dinner dish in the book. Let’s have supper.

The English Apple Cake I made for my mother was perfectly fine. It was light and reasonably moist. The cake itself had the pleasing taste of a simple butter cake while the apples on top were slightly stewed and sweet all of their own accord. But I wanted something a little bit more. There is a reason why most apple cake recipes call for cinnamon, mixed spice, or ginger, or chopped dates, broken walnuts, or rolled oats and brown sugar; apple cakes are better with these flavours.

So I made another cake. The equal parts of butter to sugar to flour is a simple cake base to work with and embellish as you please. Apple and Ginger this time, perfect for a blustery autumn day. The warming smell of ginger and the sweet scent of apples was almost overwhelming. It was maple syrupey and slightly heady with spices. This cake was for our friend Jason on his birthday. We had a wonderful birthday dinner on Monday night: a Pegasus Bay riesling with blue cheese and brie to start, then Ollie and Jason’s famous roast chicken and this little cake for dessert with sloppy whipped cream.

We lit birthday candles, Jason made a wish, and then it was gone. This cake barely touched our plates. My mother (and Mr. Slater) would enjoy it.

Apple and Ginger Cake
Adapted from Nigel Slater

130 grams butter
130 grams brown sugar
2 eggs
130 grams plain flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 tablespoon ground ginger, plus 1 teaspoon for apples
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1 small knob of fresh ginger, finely grated
2 medium apples, un-peeled & diced
juice of half a lemon
2 tablespoons sugar, brown or white
1/2 cup roughly chopped crystallised ginger

Pre-heat oven to 180°. Line a small, shallow round or square tin of about 24 cm. Cream butter and sugar together until lighter in colour, about 4-5 minutes. Add eggs, one at a time. Beat well after each addition. Sieve dry ingredients and stir through the mixture until just combined. Scrap mixture into tin. Set aside.

In a separate bowl toss together diced apples, lemon juice, sugar and the extra ground ginger. Sprinkle apples on top of the cake with the chopped crystallised ginger. Bake for 45-50 minutes until the batter is golden at the edges and the centre is no longer gooey.

Serve warm with thick yoghurt or whipped cream.

Christmas

Christmas truffles with tea

My father finishes most meals in our house in much the same way. If one of us says, “oh, I’m quite full.” He will reply with “You’re not a fool, Harriet.” We respond with a comment about our hilariously witty father and everyone has a chuckle and rolls their eyes. A strange family joke that secretly I hope will continue for many years to come. My father will then turn to my mother and sort of shake his head in disbelief at his empty plate and say, “We do eat well in this house.”

Christmas, for us, is a celebration of not only beautiful food, but the beautiful food we eat all year round. Simple, seasonal ingredients prepared in a relatively straightforward way – never too much of a stretch from what we would eat on a normal weekend.

One of my earliest food memories of Christmas is eating croissants with butter and raspberry jam and freshly squeezed orange juice for breakfast. Even for just the four of us we drank our orange juice out of the crystal flutes and the jam was spooned into a little white dish. We set the table with the damask cloth, my sister and I taking great care to not let jam dollop onto it. Normally we were still in our pjs, wrapping paper strewn across the floor and the Mariah Carey Christmas album humming softly in the background.

The day moved slowly from one meal to the next. One year for an entrée we had avocado halves with smoked salmon draped around the dip in the middle. I must have been one of the only children to look forward to Christmas day if only to eat avocado and smoked salmon.

At about 2 o’clock we sit down to lunch: a ham, with orange marmalade glaze; sometimes a beef fillet or a piece of lamb; new seasons potatoes dripping in a minty butter; and a green salad, often with the first cherry tomatoes of the season and crisp, peppery radish. I do love a summer Christmas.

Cake mix in the summer sun

There is dessert: a trifle, or cheesecake, or tiramisu. Or simply raspberries and chopped strawberries left to macerate in icing sugar for a half hour served with citrus-spiked, softly whipped cream.

But the real event, the part that truly welcomes Christmas into our house is the cake. It is an historic event – my mother has been making this cake since 1976. It is an Alison Holst recipe and the book includes other such 70s delights like mock chicken savouries and a scramble eggs with a tin of spaghetti. The pages are brown and slightly faded with grease stains in the top right corners.

Every year my mother tells the story of the year she forgot the raisins. She had meticulously cut the papers to fit the tin, measured all the ingredients and mixed everything together. She placed the cake in the oven only to turn around and find the bowl of raisins sitting on the bench. She pulled the cake out of the oven, scooped the mix out, scraped the gooey batter off the paper and stirred through the raisins. It worked out fine; the cake is a keeper.

As the cake goes in the oven Mum always says, “Go get the brandy.” I like the pop as the cork is pulled out. I like the feel of the glass bottle: it is like beach glass washed smooth by tides. I lift the bottle to my nose and inhale deeply. I like to feel my torso shake and my neck stiffen with the strain of breathing brandy fumes so intensely.

When the cake comes out of the oven we gather around. We meausre a quarter of a cup and pour it on the piping hot cake. The alcohol fizzes and bubbles. We all lean over the cake, inhaling so deeply our nostrils feel singed and we all stand up spluttering and coughing. We lean in for another hit; Mum pours on another slosh of brandy. Mariah Carey continues to fill our house…

two year old, brandy infused fruit mince

We do eat well in this house! Merry Christmas

Apple Crumble Cake

*I started writing this post about a week ago, but due to technical difficulties it’s been a while in the making.

I’d like you to think back to last Sunday, when it was considerably warmer than it is now. Do you feel that mid morning Sunday sun warm against your curtains? Can you see your coats, hats, scarves and gloves hanging empty on hangers and hooks? Can you feel a hint of spring?

As my friend, Francesca, and I walked to the market, there were rowers on a near-flat harbour, children on scooters and roller-blades and the waterfront cafés spreading out along the boardwalk. People wandered back from the markets, green market bags in one hand, coffee in the other. It was the very definition of a perfect Sunday morning.

On our way to the market I let myself think, for only a second, of spring pasta with fresh asparagus. I thought maybe winter had released her grip and we could start to think about storing our woolen jackets, unplugging the electric blankets and, of course, fresh asparagus.

Upon arrival at the market, the winter staples sat smugly in their crates, confident of their position in our kitchens for at least another month. My hopes of new asparagus dashed, Francesca and I bought winter greens: petite broccoli heads, spinach bunched roughly with an elastic band, half a savoy cabbage with a scorpion shaped core and a tall leek with leaves perfect for poking out of a market bag; you’re a proper market goer with a leek sticking out of your bag. We wore sunglasses and made summer plans for barbeques on the balcony and long, icy drinks with Pimm’s.

Then, later in the afternoon, the deep clouds rolled in, the hail started and flurries of snow hovered in the half darkness. And now, this week: snow in the city centre, the pine covered hills behind Thorndon are speckled in white and the roads resemble cookie and cream ice cream.

We still have a while to go until blossoms and tulips. I’m ok with that.

Because what this polar blast really means is hearty stews, thick soups, a dozen cups of tea a day, steamed puddings, warm bread rolls hiding meltey butter and, apple crumble cake. Thrashing storms, house-shaking thunder and slushy rain are really the only conditions in which one should eat apple crumble cake.

An apple crumble cake spiked with spices, the slight tartness of apples and the maple, caramel flavour of butter and brown sugar. This cake cum crumble cum strudel has a slight nutty texture and taste, as if made with soft chips of walnut. Instead, rolled oats slathered in a bit more butter and sugar.

Francesca made this cake using her Mum’s tried and true recipe. It was not intended for our flat, but when the snow and the hail forced us to bunker down inside we were glad to have this apple crumble cake. It is best eaten warm with yoghurt or ice cream, but it lasts for days, perfect for a lunch time baked treat.

So, forget the Pimms and new season asparagus. Tuck your trackpants into your socks; relish wearing two merinos, a hoodie and a dressing gown; pull a blanket up to your chin and simply let apple crumble cake work its winter magic.

Apple Crumble Cake

Cake ingredients:

125g butter, softened
2 medium apples
1 cup sugar
1 egg
1 1/2 cups flour
1tsp baking soda
2tsp cinnamon
1tsp allspice
1tsp salt

Topping ingredients:

25g cold butter
1/2 cup rolled oats
1/4 cup brown sugar
1tsp cinnamon

Cake:
In a food processor put butter, apples (unpeeled), sugar and the egg. Mix briefly until the apples are roughly chopped. Sift in the dry ingredients and mix until just blended.
Pour into a 23cm baking dish lined with paper.

Topping:
Clean and dry the food processor well before making the topping. Mix cold butter, oats, brown sugar and cinnamon in food processor until just mixed.
Sprinkle the topping on top of the cake.
Bake at 180°C for 40-45minutes.

N.B The topping mix will spread through the rest of the cake.