Tag Archives: cooking

Australia, Bungendore, NSW

I finally found time…

3 Comments

Yep, it has finally happened.  And next year it will most certainly happen much earlier in the year when it is cooler!  Having the oven on for 6 hours on a day when it reached 30°C was not a great move.   What am I talking about?

Yep – it has finally been made.  The epic has been done.

It started with a disaster. I started picking over the fruit ready to get it soaked only to discover that the fruit wasn’t very good and didn’t taste very nice.  The default supermarket fruit, the only option available, isn’t nice.  What happened to those Australia Sultanas?  Those Australia raisins?  I have no idea but they tasted the same and were not very nice.  They were sweet, pure sugar and no flavour.  And when it came to one of them, they were dry, mostly stones and horrible.  Even Stuart didn’t like them.  And so everything went on hold.  Stuart would have to get to the health food shop and get some decent organic ones for the cake.  There was no alternative.  It was off for the time being.

A week or so later and we had the new fruit.  The unsweetened apple juice was still OK, it turned out to have a good shelf life – worryingly so actually!  The new cooker was in and working, and I was ready to make the cake.

I started again, the night before, picking over the fruit.  I hate biting into fruit bake and getting a grape stone or worse still a stalk.  And so I spend several hours the night before I make the cake, picking over the raisins, sultanas and currents to ensure that as many stones and stalks are removed as possible.  Once all of that is done, the fruit is washed in boiling water to remove the wax that is added to make it shiny and often sweetness added as well, and when clean, I set it to soak in unsweetened apple juice.  Failing that, a dry cider works as well, but usually we don’t have to resort to that.

Once it has been soaked overnight (1L of juice is all that is needed), it gets drained and pressed dry.  I leave it with weights on it draining in a colander whilst I prepare everything else.  I have to start early – and here is no exception.  Stuart leaves for work at 7am, so I can get the fruit draining before he leaves, weigh out some of the ingredients whilst I am waiting for him before or after breakfast.  Anything to save time later on.

Once I have finished with the chooks at 9am, it was all hands to the deck (I still had a broody hen sitting on eggs) so to speak.  Well, both hands to the deck…

All of the dry ingredients are weighed out and put into one bowl.  The fruit is in another, the lemon rind, the juice, and 2 glace cherries in another.  Finally the marg and sugar is ready, as are the eggs.  For once they are not a concern.  I know exactly how fresh they are and exactly where they came from.  I even know what they chooks have eaten (more or less… they are free-range after all!)

The Original and my adapted version.

I’ve just got to the point where I’m about to add the eggs to the creamed sugar mix.  I usually stop at this point and line the cake time.  Actually, normally it is done first, but the new oven takes less time to heat up, so I did it later in the sequence.  Only I didn’t.  I search the house high and low.  What do you mean we have no greaseproof paper?  Where can I have put it?  Of all the things to loose track of in the house move between continents I was expecting it to be the cake tin.  We have a set cake tin for this cake.

I can’t find the greaseproof paper and the only alternatives are not great.  I also only have olive, sunflower or rapeseed oil, no nut oils at all.  I’m stuffed.  I’m screwed.  I don’t have transport to get any and Stuart isn’t able to get any today, so I can’t even carry on tomorrow.  Stuart and I talked through the alternatives ranging from the ridiculous (A4 printer paper) to more viable options if and only if we had had a nut oil available (that alternative was a t-towel or old pillow case btw).  But that lack of nut oil was the killer.  We have tried olive oil, sunflower and canola (rapeseed) oil in the past and it just does not work.  The cake is best done with a nut oil so that the taste is masked buy the flavours in there and alkons oil is the best option available.

I reluctantly put all the dry ingredients into a bowl and converted it with clingfilm.   The two reserved glacé cherries (also now washed and the rest chopped and in with the fruit) went into the lemon juice and rind (note to self for future knowledge, cherries go pink when soaked in lemon juice!) and they too were converted and put into the fridge.   The fruit had the drained juice poured back over it and into the fridge it also went, covered with clingfilm.

Ready mixed and ready to go into the cake tin.put into the cake

Just getting to this point had been hard enough.  Some of the ingredients are not available in Australia.  Others I had to ask Stuart to try again with.  For instance, molasses and blackstrap molasses are not the same thing.  Usually they would be interchangeable, but only in one direction.  Blackstrap molasses is nowhere near as sweet as molasses and much nicer and over the years we have been making this cake, we have found that it is much nicer with blackstrap molasses.  Mixed chopped nuts and roasted chopped nuts (any variety) are also not available, so I had to make my own.  And as for our dried sour cherries, the really nice ones from Sainsbury’s, we couldn’t even find a semi sensible priced alternative, so they were omitted completely.

And so the creamed sugar was destined for another round of oat biscuits…  It was all on hold yet again.

All in, but needing decoration

2 days later and 3rd time lucky.

Finally everything is ready.  I’ve lined the cake tin, actually I always double line it.  I don’t know why, but I always have with this cake.  I’ve creamed a new batch of vegan margarine and sugar and we are ready to go.  I have everything don’t I?  Yes, phew.  This time I really can make it. And luckily everything went to plan with the sole exception of the oven and what gas mark 1 should actually be.  It’s most definitely not 110°C.  It should be 140°C and over 5 hours that adds up…

Ready to be cooked.

Now I don’t like marzipan and Stuart doesn’t like icing sugar, so we decorate our cake  Dundee cake style, top and bottom so there are no arguments…

5 hours in and not looking cooked to me!

Some time later, one very hot Emma has a cake ready to cool and be wrapped for Christmas.

Our Christmas Cake

Next task is a Christmas pudding or two!

Australia, Bungendore, NSW

An Avocado, Chocolate Chunk Cookie/Scone Experiment

I was looking for something to do with a rather ripe avocado that Stuart had proudly presented me the day before. It was a ‘look what I have found you’ trophy that I had to accept, look pleased about and inwardly think about the 2 that had been sitting in the sun for the last 5 days ripening to the point of perfection…

img_6336
The second tray of cookie/scones which don’t look green in the photo but definitely did when I made them

And so began the thought process along the lines of I wanted a recipe for chocolate chip cookies today didn’t I? Yep. I wanted moist, chewie ones. I’m not overly happy with the current recipe. It has potential but I don’t like the expense of the ingredients, and well it is OK but I’ve made it twice now and not really been 100% about it. I have reached the conclusion that I don’t want double choc chip cookies. They just don’t work for me so it was a single choc chip cookie/biscuit that was needed.

img_6341
Nope, still not looking green…

And so I found a suitable recipe on the Australian Avocado (or was it the American Avocado) website strangely enough and went off to raid the pantry for the necessary supplies.

And promptly failed.

img_6349
A very fresh egg about to be scarified in the pursuit of biscuits. You can even see that 2 layers in the white, and the way it holds itself like a jelly! Wonderfully fresh.

What on earth is white whole wheat flour? How can whole wheat flour be white? It never, ever has been on the UK side of the pond and it certainly isn’t on the other side of the world, though it is less brown than I am accustomed to.

img_6335
So I wasn’t expecting them to rise quite like this! None of the others have done win the previous experiments with cookies… (note to self to write about those as well!)

OK, lets ignore that and settle on what we have. It then went on to say you can leave out the white whole wheat flour if you use this amount of all-purpose white flour. OK. I know all-purpose flour is self-raising flour. Good I have that, bad its only in the wholemeal variety. No problem, fibre isn’t an issue and I prefer the healthier side of life.

Next came the butter substitution. Can do that with the cooking marg in the fridge that I used all of yesterday when I was making the yoghurt pastry for our evening meal. OK… err perhaps not. What about the light brown sugar and the white sugar. Err, I don’t think we have even bought any of either of those yet since arriving in Australia 6 months ago. This isn’t going well is it?

Humm, they actually don't look that bad and they smell delicious
Humm, they actually don’t look that bad and they smell delicious

So what do I have?

  • Eggs – yes but I’m not using 2 yolks and (what :eek:) throwing the whites as it actually suggests you do!
  • baking soda – check. Purchased last weekend for the yoghurt pastry recipe
  • salt – check
  • a large avocado – nope, its medium, but if I only eat 1/2 of my remaining half for lunch, then I should have enough
  • vanilla extract – sort of. It turns out I have vanilla extract concentrate. Didn’t know it existed but there we go. Luckily seeing a syrup rather than a liquid last time I needed it (and the first time) I did a double take and read the side of the bottle – halve the quantity needed…. phew
  • 12 oz chocolate chips – no way. 100g of dark chocolate chopped into chunks. Nothing more. Stingy I know but dairy free cooking chocolate is not cheap and that is half an packet…

img_6360

So I have failed on 3 fundamentals of cookies, flour (OK not quite a fail), marg/butter – total failure and sugar, another total failure unless you count the small quantity of jaggery or coconut sugar I have… but I do have maple syrup – no I don’t. My OH saw a similar shape bottle and purchased maple flavoured syrup. Yep that’s going to taste good! :yuck:

Time for some experimentation and recording…

Now we don’t like things too sweet, so you may need more sugar/honey/sweetness in this recipe. We also don’t like things too fatty… so there is not a lot of fat in it, which is why it is no longer a biscuit/cookie and a cross between a scone and a biscuit/cookie.

img_6363
How bad can they taste? Well there is only one way to find out… all in the name of experimentation and science you understand!

 

 And so to the experiment…

Ingredients
1 large avocado, mashed
4 tbsp oil
200-250g honey (or other liquid sweetener, more if you like them sweeter, we don’t so I used 200g)
1 tsp vanilla extract
2 1/2 cups self-raising wholemeal flour
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp fine sea salt
1 tsp ground cinnamon (optional)
1 egg
100g dairy free dark chocolate chunks

Method

  1. Preheat the oven to 200C and have a couple of baking sheets handy. I don’t grease mine, they don’t need it – yours may.
  2. Put the mashed avocado, oil, vanilla extract and honey into a bowl – I used the same bowl to weigh out the honey. It saved honey and saved mess! And now whisk until thoroughly combined. You should have a green gooey sweet liquid!
  3. Add half the flour, the baking soda and the salt, plus the ground cinnamon if using, and whisk into the sweetened avocado mix.
  4. Next beat in the egg until thoroughly combined
  5. Add in the remaining flour slowly until you have a sticky dough.
  6. Now hand mix in the chocolate chunks.
  7. You will have a green dough, honest! Don’t worry. It changes colour when cooked and resembles a conventional cookie/scone colour.
  8. You have 2 choices now. You can lightly flour a surface and roll the dough out, using a biscuit cutter to make conventional biscuits from the dough. If you make it thinner, you will get a crisper biscuit. Thicker and you will get a more moist scone like biscuit. Make it 2cm thick and you will have a scone of sorts on your hands! Your other option is to use a desert spoon to cut off pieces and roll them in your lightly floured hands to form small golf balls, flatten them and have some rougher looking cookies like I did. Mine were 7-10mm thick and about 25mm diameter or so… Mine made roughly 35-40 or so I think… <goes off to look a photos to see if she can work it out>
  9. Put them in the oven for 20 minutes until golden brown. Do keep an eye on them after 15 mins, after all, all ovens vary and I know mine has issues at times!
  10. Transfer to a cooling rack and allow to cook.
  11. Try to freeze some of them – they are great directly out of the freezer… :whistling:

And so to the results…

Also they happen to smell really good and did as they were cooking – that has to be a really good sign.  They taste good to me, possibly need to be very slightly sweeter, but I can work on that.  Perhaps a touch moister (is that a word?) again I can work on that.  But I like them.

img_6366
Looks cooked to perfection as well….

And how about the person that counts?

When Stuart got home, I had frozen all but 2 of them.  His 2 were on a plate waiting for him. We tried to have a conversation about them but it was to prove rather hard.  He had put one whole into his mouth and was enjoying munching his way through it, slowly.  Savouring the biscuit/scone and enjoying it.  It wasn’t too sweet, too sticky, he had no idea it had an avocado in it and he kept coming across large lumps of dark chocolate.  What more could he ask for – it certainly wasn’t a conversation about them!  That really was the last thing on his mind.

img_6373

So we had a sign language come grunt and crossed with charades.

  • Did he like them?  BIG smile, positive grunt and thumbs up.
  • Too sweet – shakes head, still munching…
  • Not sweet enough – also shakes head…
  • Enough chocolate – pauses, mouth chewing stops, and  head/shoulders shrug…
  • Moist enough – head nods, munching resumes…
  • Can he guess the mystery ingredient – alarm on his face, a quick swallow and finally words are spoken “like thumb or finger?” NOOOO! I say trying hard not to cry… (mostly with laughter really!)

img_6374

And so the green dough turned into a brown biscuit/scone that can be repeated and will most likely.  What happens to it next depends largely on whether we decide we want a scone or a moist biscuit/cookie recipe but it seems we are onto a winner!

img_6375v2