Coconut Mango Cake

This cake is both delicious and pretty. The mango gives it the most glorious gold colour and the taste combination of coconut and mango is sensational. You can use either fresh mango puree, or tinned at a pinch.

Ingredients

330g caster sugar
250g butter
4 eggs
160ml mango puree
2 cups desiccated coconut
375g self raising flour

Preheat your oven to 180 degrees. Grease and line a cake tin (baker's grease will work really well too... hmmm must post the recipe for that!)

Beat the sugar and butter in a mixing bowl until combined (not light and fluffy, just combined) then add the eggs one at a time - don't beat strongly, just to combine. Grab a wooden spoon and stir in the coconut and mango puree and then the flour. Spread into your prepared cake tin - the mixture is quite thick.

Bake for about 1 and a half hours. Stand for a few minutes in the tin before turning out on to a wire rack; flip so it is top side up to cool.

Icing:

1 and a half cups of icing sugar
1 egg white
2 tablespoons mango puree
3/4 cup desiccated coconut

Beat the egg white till foamy... gradually beat in the icing sugar a tablespoon at a time. Stir in the puree and coconut, and then spread onto the cake.

Strawberry and Galingale cordial

So, what do you do when you have a spare punnet of strawberries? Make cordial of course!

This cordial is super simple, smells exquisite while cooking and makes a delightful summer drink. The galingale adds just a little edge of spicyness without the bite of ginger:

2 cups water
2 cups caster sugar
1 tablespoon lemon juice
500g strawberries (washed hulled and halved)
2 pieces of dried galingale

Put the sugar, water, galingale and lemon juice in a saucepan . Cook, while stirring over a low heat, for 2 minutes or until the sugar has dissolved. Raise the heat and until the mixture thickens just a little (about 5 minutes).
Reduce to medium-low. Add the strawberries. Simmer, stirring occasionally, for 20 minutes.

Remove from the heat and allow to cool. Strain through a fine sieve (I used a muslin cloth as well to remove the seeds) and pour into a bottle. Keep in the fridge.

To serve.... just add water!

Yoghurt Cake

This recipe is from a non-food blog: french word of the day. I subscribed to Kristin Espinasse's list a few years ago when I moved to Geneva. Back in 2007 she posted up a recipe for a yoghurt cake which sounded really fun to make, but somehow I never got around to making it. Not sure why, guess because whenever I had yoghurt in the house, I ate it instead of baking with it!

After I had an operation two years ago, I have become oddly sensitive to yoghurt, to the point where I really can't eat it any more. Some friends of mine were emptying their fridge before they departed for a long trip and gave me some yoghurt. Rather than throw it out I thought to myself "ahah! I can finally make that recipe!".

Here's hoping that I can eat cooked yoghurt.

The funky thing about this recipe is its beautiful simplicity.

Ingredients:
- one small container of plain yoghurt (reserve for measuring the remaining ingredients)
- flour
- sugar
- vegetable oil
- two eggs
- 2 teaspoons baking powder

Instructions
Fill/empty the yoghurt container...
...3 times with flour
...2 times with sugar
...1 time with vegetable oil

First combine yoghurt, beaten eggs & sugar. Next, add flour and baking soda, stir. Add a pinch of salt... Pour in oil and mix well. Pour into a greased cake pan and bake for 45 minutes at 150°C (300°F).

How easy is that?

Cinnamon & apple cookies

With the delicious combination of oats, brown sugar, apples and cinnamon, these biscuits are like an apple crumble in biscuit form. This recipe isn't mine, but is adjusted from the ever reliable Australian Women's Weekly. Remember if you are cooking from this blog, my recipes are metric!

2 eggs
1 1/2 cups brown sugar (275g)
1 teaspoon vanilla essence
1/2 cup mild vegetable oil
2 tblspn golden syrup
2 cups rolled oats
1 1/2 cups chopped dried apples (135g)
1 3/4 cup plain flour (150g)
3/4 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp bi-carb soda
1 tspn ground cinnamon

Set your oven to preheat at 210 degrees.

Beat the sugar and eggs with an electric mixer until the mix becomes light in colour. Stir in the vanilla essence, oil and golden syrup. Then stir in the oats, apple and sifted dry ingredients. Cover and refrigerate for an hour.

Roll tablespoons of the mix into balls, and press down onto a silicone-paper lined baking tray. Bake for 10 minutes or until lightly browned. Cool on the tray.

Clementine Cookies

I had a fit of baking last night: we are doing some fundraising at work for the Australian bushfire appeals. I did a giant batch of anzac bikkies. I finished the anzacs at about 2am but by then the baking bug had bit me and I found myself searching through my cupboards for ingredients to make something, anything more!

My eyes fell upon the net of clementines in the big fridge (ie, on the balcony, which during winter becomes my second fridge). Grand. I would make something from them. Grand. umm... what??

From this 2am dilemma sprang this invention:

Clementine Cookies

2 dessert spoons of finely grated clementine rind
2 egg yolks
125 g butter
1 cup caster sugar
2 tablespoons clementine juice
2 and a half cups self raising flour

Turn your oven onto moderate (approx 170 degrees C) to warm up.

Beat the egg yolk, butter, rind and sugar until fluffy. Add the flour and then drizzle in the juice until it comes together into a dough. Knead gently on a lightly floured surface until the dough is smooth.

Take dessertspoons of the mixture and roll into balls. Press onto baking trays that are either lightly greased or have silicon paper. Bake for 15 minutes until lightly browned and allow to cool on the tray. Once cool ice and decorate - make up an icing with clementine juice and icing sugar.

This recipe makes about 60 biscuits.

Brie and Asparagus Quiche

Surprisingly, because it isn't the season for them, there were bunches of asparagus in the shops this week, and at a pretty reasonable price. No I didn't do terribly immoral things by buying asparagus from the other side of the world... no, these had a pretty ok carbon footprint having come from Spain.

So... what to make for a winter dinner with friends, using this delicious vegetable? I know...

Brie and Asparagus Quiche

1 cup cream or sour cream

1 bunch of asparagas (500g)

200g brie

salt & pepper
3 eggs
300g shortcrust pastry

• Roll out the pastry and line a ceramic or glass quiche dish.
• Lay out the asparagus and tuck slices of brie between.
• Mix eggs & cream till nicely blended. Season with salt and pepper
• Pour egg mix into the quiche dish
• Bake in an oven at 200 degrees C for 25-30 minutes until nicely browned.
  
• Serve warm or cold as you like... delicious!
  

Perfect Christmas turkey?

This year I was cooking a small Christmas dinner, just for 7. Last year, I did duck breasts with a port and fig glaze, which was glorious, but this year, I wanted to remind myself of home a bit, so decided to do a turkey. I had planned to do my prosciutto and leek stuffing, but when I heard that one of the guests doesn't eat pork, did a bit of a rearrangement. So it was roast turkey with a leek and chestnut stuffing instead.

I also decided to try brining for the first time. I used a modified Nigella recipe for the brine:

1 turkey (3 kilos)
1 cup sea salt
1 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup honey
1/2 cup vinegar
2 tablespoons Worcestershire sauce
1 tablespoon allspice berries
2 tablespoons black peppercorns
2 cloves garlic, peeled and lightly smashed

I mixed the brining ingredients, and, putting the turkey into a plastic food bag, poured the brine over it and sealed it. I kept the turkey in the fridge overnight.

The stuffing was pretty straight forward.

4 small cleaned leaks, sliced and then sweated in butter until soft
1 loaf of white bread, a little stale, torn up into small pieces
sage
oregano
500g cooked chestnuts
3 eggs

Mix the ingredients together and stuff into the bird. Easy eh? Preheat the oven to 200 degrees. Put a piece of baking paper on top of the bird in a deep oven tray, then cover the whole thing with foil and seal in.

Bake for 30 minutes at the higher temperature then drop the temperature down to 180 degrees. Total roasting time is an hour per kilo. I took off the paper and foil about 45 minutes before the time was up to allow the skin to brown. Rest a little before carving.

I was a bit cynical about whether brining really would make a difference, but some research came up with some scientific reasoning, and now having done it, I can confirm that it really does make for a moist and tender bird. The only negative is that I thought that the meat did end up a little salty and I can imagine my parents chucking a fit about the evils of salting food. (They keep no salt in the house at all... I can live with that but for two things: boiled eggs and gravy) None of the dinner guests found the bird salty I should add!

Photo courtesy of Ed