Victoria Sponge

I'm back! After celebrating my temporary retirement with a blog reading session, Marlene inspired me with her "healthier take on victoria sponge" (thanks Marlene!) Whilst I admire her healthier treats, I would personally prefer to go all out with fat and sugar content and attempt to eat less of it or go to the gym more (note the use of the word attempt). Don't get me wrong, my mother also used to try and reduce sugar content in cake and I followed suit for years  - until, one day my meringue batches collapsed as there wasn't enough sugar in it.

Since that day, I'm back to full sugar and full fat. I never realised the Victoria Sponge was such a "thing" here until I started noticing them in shops and Marlene / wiki confirmed it was a British thing - seriously I thought it was just a regular sponge cake that my mum made out of the Australian Women's Weekly, and that Mrs J had a real knack for sponge cake. I've been burnt by sponge cake in the past, and my biggest failure in memory is making my own birthday cake as a tweenie. After loads of hand held beating, the batter went flat because I made the rookie error of beating in the melted butter instead of folding. To top it all off, not knowing how to make buttercream properly I later doused the cake in a runny glaze ... you can imagine the results right? Never again. In any case I'd like to think I have improved over time :-)



So I need to make another confession - having tried several Victoria Sponges, and read a number of recipes, I'm not a mega fan of the British way of making the sponge. Its just not fluffy enough for me and in these situations I prefer to go back to my favourite Aussies - Maggie and Simon, Stephanie Alexander, and Mrs J. Yesterday Stephanie Alexander won on the sponge cake base, with a delightfully simple recipe called "Jackie's mum's Genoese sponge cake" which I must say has never failed me or been temperamental, despite huge swings in oven temperature using my unreliable oven.

What you need

Cake: 5 eggs, 3/4c sugar, 150g flour, 60g butter

Filling: Berry jam (usually strawberry or raspberry I think, but can really be whatever you want), whippable cream, vanilla, icing sugar.

Note: the process will be a lot easier if you have a stand mixer.

How to for a 9" round cake tin.

1. Preheat oven to 180 deg and line a cake tin with paper

2. Put 5 whole eggs and 3/4 cup caster sugar into the stand mixer bowl and beat at medium speed for 10min until the texture becomes mousselike.



3. While the stand mixer is doing its work, melt 60g butter in the microwave and cool, and also measure out 150g plain flour.

4. Then gently fold in the flour into the batter.

5. Trickle the butter in the side of the bowl, and fold in as well (make sure it's cool and that you fold in gently - mine is never very thoroughly folded after my tweenie disaster, but it doesn't seem to make much difference).

6. Cook for about 15-20 min until golden on top and skewer comes out clean. Do not open the oven door until at least 15min is up. 



7. Once the cake has cooled, slice in half and fill with whipped cream, jam and strawberries (I like to put icing sugar and vanilla in my whipped cream , if you overwhip do not fear, just add milk and mix it in to soften to a spreadable consistency).



8. Dust the top with icing sugar.

By the way, the Victoria Sponge tastes even better today - think its because the wonderful fruity flavours have sunk into the cake, but the cake hasn't become dense.  The cake has definitely worked its way back into one of my favourites!  Less than 24hrs and its half gone already....

Till next time, happy caking!

Afternoon tea at the Landmark Hotel (Marylebone)

If you have known me for a long time you will know that I love tea, and particularly the concept of afternoon tea. My favourite place for afternoon tea is Gunners Barracks in Mosman - on the verandah on a sunny afternoon you can check out the water, be away from people and surrounded by trees and grass all at the same time.

Unusually, in my 3 previous visits to London plus and having lived here for more than a year I still have not been to afternoon tea. One reason is the formality of it all here (whilst Gunners Barracks isn't exactly a shorts and thongs kind of place, I never felt the need to fully dress up); and the other reason is that the amount of scones and tea I've eaten here (especially at National Trust cafes) means I've never felt the need to expand this to a full on a meal like afternoon tea which always seems to be the case these days. Anyway it was time to break the afternoon tea drought and on this occasion Mr T and I paid a vist to the Landmark Hotel in Marylebone. Of all the places we could have gone, why this particular one?

1. I wanted a swanky hotel just to see what it was like, but I didn't want anything that was in a stuffy and opulent but ugly room (yes I'm fussy!) The Landmark has an atrium type thing (photo below courtesy of Here is the City) which looked pretty light and airy so that was a tick for me.

1. There was a chocolate afternoon tea menu which I was busting to try. We were able to order one chocolate afternoon tea and one regular afternoon tea, and there was waaaaay too much food (even if we had planned to eat this for lunch!) Looking around we were the only two people with a stand each which was slightly embarrassing, but then the waitstaff told us that if we wanted anything else (more pastries, more sandwiches) just to let them know and they would bring out. Also the afternoon tea is priced per person so its basically all you can eat afternoon tea (not that you'd want to).

General comment on high end food - is it just me or does high end food (whether it be afternoon tea or dinner or lunch) typically seem to involve a lot of oval shaped mousses made from complicated ingredients?



The sandwiches 

This was a fairly standard selection with a choice of: egg, mayo and cress; chicken with tarragon crème fraîche; and smoked Scottish salmon; cucumber.

Mr T commented that they were really really tasty - probably due to the lashings of butter which we would never put on sandwiches at home :-) I do really like cucumber in a sandwich though; I think my fave was when Mrs P fed me cucumber, cream cheese and dill sandwiches for afternoon tea once. They were completely and utterly delish!!!

The pastries and sweets

We only ordered one chocolate afternoon tea for fear of being all too chocolate-d out. There is just too much chocolate, even for someone like me who likes nothing better than to sample a bunch of different flavoured and textured things to make and eat (and dream about). I think our strategy of alternating sandwiches and sweets was as effective as could be expected - even so Mr T claimed to be all sugared out by the time he finished his third pastry! I got a little further but probably only because I only sampled each sample size pastry before deciding if I liked it (and therefore went back for more). All of them were so rich it would have been impossible to eat all of them!! Here are some of the eating highlights.

Manjari chocolate mousse brownie; and Chocolate ganache with milk chocolate Chantilly and coconut nougatine

Both like eating mouthfuls of dark chocolate and I couldn't really detect much coconut                       

White chocolate mint shot; Star anise and milk chocolate panna cotta; and classic fruit cake with rum and Caraibe chocolate glaze

Really enjoyed the white chocolate mint shot; not such a big fan of the panna cotta. Interestingly though, there was marshmallowy texture in both the top layers, whereas they looked a little more foam like. Mr T was a fan of the fruit cake, despite it being fairly chocolatey.

     

Flourless pistachio sponge, fig jam and pistachio mascarpone;  Lime cheesecake with vodka cranberry truffle.

The highlight of this for me was the pink vodka cranberry truffle, despite being a non-alco fan. The cheesecake was pretty easy to eat; by the end of it I was on the lookout for sweet treats that were a bit more airy or liquidy in texture.

Coco mango: coconut macaroon with mango bavarois;  Chocolate and passion cream “financier”

I thought this is a great idea for a macaron. Macarons are so sweet the zing of the mango cut through nicely. Not sure what a mango bavarois is (besides another moussey thing) but Mr T thought it was a little like the mango pudding you get in chinese restaurants at yum cha... The green triangle on top is just a piece of white chocolate.



Scones

Miss M's mum taught me to make scones and I remember Miss M laughing at me for the delicate way that I rubbed butter and flour at the time (I didn't want to get knee deep in the stuff so I just used fingertips ... now I cheat and use a food processor though it doesn't come out quite as nicely as by hand). Needless to say we have moved on since then and after many years of scone making, I have pretty high expectations of scones. Mr T took the first bite and said "yours are better" - although this did give me a sinking feeling I did beam happily that Mr T prefers my scones, so it is a bit of a twisted win I guess!. The scones were a little too floury and dense and they just didn't taste fresh. I did like the strawberry conserve though which had big chunks of strawberry in them.




There were a few more things but I was too full to try them so I gave up at this point and we decided to have a rest for 10min, after which we were no better and decided it was home time.

Till next time, happy eating guys!



 

Tiramisu (one of many ways to make it!)

There are no rules when it comes to Tiramisu, which is one of the reasons I like it so much. It can be as fancy or as cheat's way as you like, and as long as you have the core ingredients / blend of flavours it'll taste pretty good anyway. I think what would generally be considered the essentials are:

• Sponge cake / sponge finger biscuits


• Marscapone cheese


• Coffee (instant coffee or espresso, whatever you have on hand)


• Cocoa powder


• Marsala or sherry (personally I think this is a nice to have rather than an essential, but I'm sure there are people there who know better that would probably correct me)

Some extras that I tend to throw in as well if they are conveniently in the kitchen already: crushed nuts, and a bit of vanilla extract or vanilla bean paste to add to the marscapone. Note that these are optional extras (even more optional than the marsala) and don't tend to affect the "tiramisu-iness" of your final product too much.



Today was tiramisu day, since I had leftover sponge cake from yesterday when I made lamingtons. Stupidly, I didn't take any photos (and almost cried when everyone had left and I was planning my Oz day blog post, only to find I had no photos). I was so busy making food and eating that for some completely odd reason photos didn't even occur to me! Talk about being sidetracked. On the upside, it did mean that the food was wonderful since I got so distracted...

Mr T wasn't feeling the love for whipped cream and strawberries on his leftover sponge cake today, and so was kind enough to go and source some marscapone for me. As implied by the title of this post, tiramisu can be made in many many different ways and this is just what I did:

One way of tiramisu

1. Slice the sponge cake into two. Note: it would probably have been better to slide into 3 layers but since the cake was a little too soft light in this case I decided to avoid a crumby mess on my bench.

2. Instant coffee. Add a couple of splashes of hot water from the kettle to a couple of teaspoons of instant coffee. Nestle 43, Carte Noire, again whatever you want.



3. Dip the sponge cake into the coffee. I wouldn't recommend soaking - you could also brush the coffee on or use a spray bottle if you have the energy - or you can dip the pieces of cake (or sponge finger biscuits if you are using these) straight in the coffee for a second and that would work just fine too.

4. Marscapone mixture. I used equal parts marscapone (about half a small tub) and icing sugar and added in a tiny bit of vanilla. The marscapone was quite hard so I thinned it down with a little milk and a instant coffee mix. Basically this is just a taste test and you can be the judge of how sweet you want it. Texture wise I like mine a bit mousse-like since its easier to spread. 


5. Assemble. Cake (coffee side up), marscapone, dusting of cocoa powder, and repeat! Voila!

Other things you could do...

I've listed a few different things you could do with tiramisu; and I'm sure you'll see from this why I prefer an easy no-fuss way. After all, as long as its tasty and I don't brand it as authentic Italian tiramisu its ok right? (by the way, am I the only one who used to think that tiramisu was a Japanese word and therefore dessert?)

• Sponge finger biscuits could be used instead of the sponge cake. This would be my normal option but I had leftover sponge cake in this case.


• Marscapone mix ingredients. Recipes sometimes call for whipped egg whites to be folded into the marscapone, presumably to lighten it. Other recipesI have read call for whipped cream instead of egg whites.


• Tiramisini (individually portioned), like Nigella Lawson's recipe. Great for parties or any occasion which calls for individual servings. I did this for a birthday at work once, and it was wonderfully mess-free. The lightness of each portion meant it wasn't too heavy for each person to eat a whole thing (I did the whipped cream trick to lighten the marscapone).


• Tiramisu ice cream cake, Bill Granger has a great one. This is my all time favourite - it has ice cream instead of marscapone! And chocolate shavings instead of cocoa powder on top. An ice cream monster like me will surely choose ice cream over cheese every time...


• Tiramisu cupcakes, Hummingbird has a recipe which involves scooping out the middle of the cupcake and filling it, then reassemble and frost (way too much work for my liking, I'd rather the tiramisini option).

Till next time, happy eating

Food diary: Toronto

It feels like forever since I've posted, but realistically its actually only a little over a week. Since meeting the lovely Nigella Lawson a month ago, I have managed to accumulate 7 lots of photos to sort through! A symptom of the Christmas season, with parties, food, food and more food, New Years ... and of course the list goes on. I'm actually at a loss as to what would be the most interesting to read / write about, so I'm going in favourites order.

The Toronto days have definitely been my favourite in recent memory. Mr T & I went to visit the family for a week, and there was so little stress, so much to eat, and so much freedom to do, well, nothing that it was completely awesome. Day 1, I even managed to unintentionally wake up way too early at 7.30am and take photos of the sunrise outside my window.



I got so over excited by the food that I even forgot to take my camera at times, I was so busy eating  - so unfortunately this is only a sample. And then there was the day where the SD card disappeared from the camera temporarily so I missed a WHOLE day of photos... but anyway, I won't talk about that.

Back to the food and my over excitement, the stand outs:

1) The standard Chinese place just down the road there's nothing particularly special about it but Mr T was raving on about the free soup that came before the meal, and I ordered my favourite spicy eggplant and pork and devoured the whole thing myself.

2) 4 lunches in a day - maccas, pho, ramen, donuts ... then going home for dad's big birthday dinner!

Here's some delicious ginger/spring onion crab and sesame glutinous rice balls in a ginger tea, that we had at home (don't ask me why there's peking duck written on the spoon).




Ramen from Ajisen. I am not usually a ramen fan (Miss B is) but this white soup based "tenderous ribs" ramen was pretty darn good. I was particularly thrilled that they had soy sauce eggs! (surprisingly hard to find in London). So thrilled I had to have two.



Then some turkey, stuffed clams (the stuffing was mixed with the clam then put back in the shell - you did wonder where the clam pieces were, but it definitely was tasty), escargot (family favourite for all except me) and a variety of western and asian sides for dad's birthday dinner. Yes peeps, that is choy sum you see next to the beetroot and sweet potato! We even had fried rice!



The birthday cake was a champagne mousse cake. Interesting and had a few different textures; the middle one was like a berry compote but in a jelly form; I must try making this.



Dinner was followed by presents, Mr T got another Lakers hat which I've stolen for the purposes of this picture. Oh and I must mention the junk food we ate on Christmas day. Whilst waiting for the evening party to be catered, we went to Popeyes since KFC wasn't open. I am loving their slogan! and the chicken was pretty good too. Being Christmas, the guy at the counter was feeling generous and gave us a free coke. I finished this off with some of my favourite popcorn of all time - Kernels. I can't find it in the UK and it shut down in Australia awhile ago so I was pleased to find it again.



 

Finally, something which I've never eaten before but were particularly good - deviled eggs (also known as eggs mimosa or stuffed eggs). These bad boys had the yolks taken out of them which were mixed with mayo, then piped back into the white and with a sprinkling of bacon and herbs on top. Yum! I'll definitely be making these as a snack next time we have a party.

Pavlova

Is there anything that screams out Australia more than pavlova? I've not made a pavlova for almost the whole year (pavlova and / or lamingtons were on my list for Australia Day baking) as my last place just didn't inspire me to cook that much. Its also another one of those things where you can't really make a small pavlova (else you just end up with meringue) so the key is actually having people to eat it. Apparently in this case I was meant to pile up the mango on top instead of creating a jigsaw ... oops.



Anyway since we were feeding 5 people, one of which is mega pavlova fan, I thought it was high time to put into action:

• The silicon baking mat. Ermahgerd (I think I heard some young person saying this so I'm adopting it ... is this a ridiculous way of writing omg?) ... I love how this is non stick and doesn't require the annoyance of baking paper!!!


• My cake turntable, courtesy of Miss L. Icing cakes suddenly just became sooooo much easier.


• New scrapers, courtesy of Miss L again (although I do love my palette knives still ... see the small collection below)


• Convenience of egg whites in a tetrapak - see my post here

The other thing of course is that pavlova is another easy recipe with minimal ingredients - though I do suggest making this at least several hours ahead of time (or the night before) to allow time for the pavlova to cool down. Here's the one I used which is adapted from Stephanie Alexander:

Pavlova ingredients

• 4 egg whites at room temperature (or 8 tablespoons of tetrapak egg whites or a combination)


• Pinch of salt


• 220g-ish castor sugar (recipe states 250g, but I tend to reduce this. Having said that don't reduce by too much, else the pav won't "set")


• 2 teaspoons of cornflour


• 1 teaspoon vinegar (recipe calls for white-wine vinegar but as I didn't have any I went for rice vinegar... it made no difference)


• Spoon of vanilla

Topping is just whipped cream (a tub of whipping cream will more than suffice .. if you have a tendency to overwhip cream like I do, no panic as you can always pour in some milk and regain a nice whipped consistency) and whatever fruit you like. In my case, I had raspberries and mango. I think in my ideal pavlova world I'd have strawberries, passionfruit, mango, kiwi, banana... but alas its the middle of winter in the UK. Summer fruit fail.

Method

1. Preheat to 180 degrees and put baking paper on a tray (or use a silicon mat if you have one).


2. Beat egg whites and salt until soft peaks form


3. Gradually add in sugar and keep beating until stiff peaks form


4. Add in cornflour, vinegar and vanilla and fold into the mix


5. Put it on the baking tray in a circle (or whatever shape you want) and smooth sides and top with a palette knife or scraper.


6. Put in oven and reduce heat to 150 degrees and bake for 30 min. Then reduce to 120 and cook for 45 min.


7. Wait for it to cool then top with whipped cream and fruit.

Note to step 5: because my oven is really dodgy, even with an oven thermometer I wasn't able to calibrate the heat properly, and I'm totally bad at keeping time (but not bad enough for me to justify buying a kitchen timer since I just monitor the food more closely instead). Make sure you watch your pavlova so it doesn't burn on top; if its looking a bit too tanned turn the heat right down (or off if its been baking for awhile already) and just leave him in there until the oven cools down.



 

Happy eating everyone!

Seven layer vanilla cake

Layer cake, and not a regular one. I don't even know where to begin with this, except to say that Mr T's belated birthday party gave me the perfect opportunity to go all out and do something a bit different from the norm. I'd read about Zumbo's V8 cake (8 different vanilla flavoured layers) somewhere on facebook when a lucky person was surprised with such a cake! Me being me, time to adapt it - I wasn't even going to try and make a replica because....

• I can't follow recipes to the letter. Zumbo has far too many complicated and weird sounding ingredients which I don't think are required for my home baking. I mean, titanium dioxide? gellan? Definitely the too hard basket - if I need to get it from a super specialty store then its not gonna work for me.


• Time constraints - I had the birthday dinner to think about as well as the cake!


• I needed something foolproof and wasn't really willing to gamble with things that had a high potential for fail (I know I'm crap at stuff like custard and creme chantilly so just had to find a substitute layer instead)


• I'm not really into total replicas anyway since it doesn't have a "me" stamp on it!


• I'm into shortcuts,e g. using vanilla bean paste instead of scraping out vanilla seeds from the pod saved me washing extra knives, a chopping board, wasting all the actual pods themselves

The other option was the 8 texture chocolate cake by Quay, as suggested by Miss G, however Mr T isn't really all that into chocolate, and I thought that doing alternate chocolate / vanilla layers might still just be a bit too chocolatey. However, I will try a version of the 8 texture cake as well. Recipe is here if you're interested in what that looks like.

 

I ended up with 7 layers (no recipe posted since I don't have one for 4 of the 7 layers - though I have put a * where I borrowed the recipe from Zumbo):

1. Dacquoise* - not sure if this is a fancy way of saying meringue; the method of making it certainly made it feel meringue like. This was the bottom layer and had to be sufficiently dense to hold up the layers on top.


2. White chocolate ganache - white chocolate version of regular ganache. Mine wasn't setting properly in the time given and was too runny to spread properly, but the internet suggested I whip it up with electric beaters to stiffen it, and I ended up with wonderfully whipped thickened ganache. No idea why I didn't think of this before... if my ganache has whipped cream in it of course it will whip! Duh...


3. Brown sugar crumble - regular crumble you'd put on a bog standard apple crumble, except with brown sugar.


4. Chiffon cake* - lovely smooth textured cake, but a pain to make. Next time I'll go with a regular vanilla cake and slice it up.


5. Macaron* - almond meal, icing sugar, egg whites, similar to the dacquoise. Isn't it amazing that the same few ingredients can yield a whole bunch of different textures???


6. Cream cheese frosting - since I was in a hurry I didn't have time to be precise in measuring out perfect circles for every single layer and making sure everything was exactly the same height. Unfortunately this also meant the cake looked a little like a dessert burger so I needed the cream cheese frosting to cover all the gaps. Unfortunately I didn't make quite enough and so the sides of the cake are not perfectly regular.


7. Piped whipped cream roses - Mr T thought the top of his cake was looking rather bare. I was going to pipe a picture of the Sydney Opera House but he wanted something that would provide more coverage.. so I pulled out my trusty Wilton 2D and he ended up with a lot of roses and flowers instead. It looks a little wedding cake-ish (that was not the intention!) since I got slightly carried away. Oops.

All in all it was a pretty tasty vanillery (is that a word?) concoction. I would really have liked to reduce the sugar level, but frosting wouldn't be frosting and the macaron / meringue layers won't set without sufficient amounts of sugar.

Happy Birthday (again) Mr T and I hope that you enjoyed it as much as your carrot cupcake.



Ideas for the next cake experiment anyone?