The Thorngrove Table

Photo: Cassava Cake

Another delicious test recipe from Pat's forthcoming "The Asian Grandmothers Cookbook", this time using an ingredient I'd never tried before - cassava root. I won't go into my traumas in finding the stuff, which is actually quite easy if you skip the experience of 'Lack of English' meets 'Strong Kiwi Accent' and problems resulting thereof.

The condensed milk on top got a bit toasty (my fault), but still tasted fantastic (yes, I also like my toasted marshmellows "black as the Earl of Hell's waistcoat", as my dad used to say) and the cake is moist, coconut-tinged and a delightful texture. There's actually two variations - the piece in the middle had added grated coconut and no milk topping. I made another batch of this sort to take to a friend's place over Easter, where it was declared "the Win!".

Leaving off the optional topping, the Cassava Cake is wheat-, gluten- and dairy-free, so is excellent for coeliacs and the gluten or dairy-intolerant. It practically has my Mum's name written on it! Definitely one for the 'repeat' file.

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Cherry Cupcakes & Chocolate Sour Cherry Cupcakes

If it had been me in the Garden of Eden, I would have cheerfully passed up all other fruits for a cherry. Offer me anything from an August Heart to a Zweitfruhe, and the Apple of Knowledge doesn't even get a look-in.

One of my Christmas treats every year when I was a child was a bowl of cherries, which as Christmas in New Zealand is the height of summer, were stupidly expensive. Sadly I had to share the fruit with the rest of my family, but it was a foregone conclusion that I would end up eating half of them. My adoration even extends to those little sweetened balls of artificial colour, maraschino cherries (but not, I must assert, to Cherry Coke, which is an abomination to my tastebuds).

In my recent baking adventures I have, naturally, been baking cherry cupcakes. The two recipes I like the most are quite different, although both (obviously) have cherries. The first is like an abbreviated version of my favourite cake, Schwarzwalder Kirschtorte (Black Forest Cherry Cake). The second is a light, faintly-scented cake with little nuggets of sugary cherry goodness in it.

Both recipes originate in Feargal Connolly's "500 Cupcakes & Muffins" , but I've changed the recipes somewhat. They can be halved with few problems, as long as you increase the flour to make sure the batter isn't too runny. Personally I think these are both fantastic without icing of any kind except a light dusting of icing sugar, but YMMV, so I will leave you to decide for yourselves.

(and yes, the reason there are only 2 cupcakes in the photos is because I ate most of them before I remembered to take shots)

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Schwarzwalder Kirschkleinekuchen
(or, more easily remembered and with better grammar - Black Forest Cherry Cupcakes)
This is a truly decadent little cupcake. Brandied cherries are good also, but I especially like it with sour cherries, as the taste contrast with the sweet, sour and faintly bitter is deeeelicious!

225 g / 8 oz unsalted butter, softened
4 Tb Dutch processed (i.e. alkalised) cocoa powder - I use Green & Black's Organic Cocoa Powder
225 g / 8 oz caster sugar
225 g / 8 oz self raising flour
1 tsp baking powder
4 eggs
100 g / 3.5 oz sour cherries

1. Preheat the oven 175C/350F/GM4 & place 18 paper baking cases in cupcake/muffin tins, or - as I usually do - organise 18 silicon cupcake cases.
2. Sieve together the self-raising flour, cocoa and baking powder.
3. In a large bowl, cream the sugar and butter together until smooth.
4. Add the eggs one at a time, beating well.
5. Fold in the flour mixture and the cherries, and stir until well combined with as few strokes as necessary.
6. Spoon the batter into the cases. I find filling them to 2/3 is best.
7. Bake for 20 minutes.
8. Remove and check. A toothpick should come out clean from the centre. If there are any crumbs, put the cupcakes back in the oven for another 3 - 5 minutes. Repeat until cupcakes are cooked.
9. Remove cases/tins from the oven and let cool for 5 minutes.
10. Remove the cupcakes from the cases/tins and cool on a rack.
11. Dust with icing sugar (Connolly suggests a dollop of sweetened whipped cream), or decorate with icing if you wish.

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Very Cherry Cupcakes
This second recipe is quite light, sweet and kinda girly to be honest! Sure to be a hit with your inner diva.

225 g / 8 oz unsalted butter, softened
225 g / 8 oz caster sugar
225 g / 8 oz self raising flour
50 g / 1 ¾ oz maraschino cherries, chopped in half
1 tsp baking powder
4 eggs
2 tb kirsch

1. Preheat the oven 175C/350F/GM4 & place 18 paper baking cases in cupcake/muffin tins, or - as I usually do - organise 18 silicon cupcake cases.
2. Combine all ingredients except the maraschino cherries together in a bowl.
3. Beat until smooth.
4. Mix in the maraschino cherries, with as few strokes as necessary.
5. Spoon the batter into the cases. I find filling them to 2/3 is best.
6. Bake for 20 minutes.
7. Remove and check. A toothpick should come out clean from the centre. If there are any crumbs, put the cupcakes back in the oven for another 3 - 5 minutes. Repeat until cupcakes are cooked.
8. Remove cases/tins from the oven and let cool for 5 minutes.
9. Remove the cupcakes from the cases/tins and cool on a rack.
10. Dust with icing sugar, or decorate with icing if you wish.

Hummingbird Cupcakes with Cream Cheese Frosting

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Even the most devoted Musaphile must tire of eating banana bread eventually, and last week I realised I had reached the point where the prospect generated disinterest rather than delight in my heart. So, searching for a new cake + banana recipe ensued.

The wonderful Tastespotting photo-link blog (one of my favourite ways to waste a lunch hour) led me to Cheryl Porro's excellent food blog, Cupcake Bakeshop, which concentrates on (no prizes for guessing) cupcakes.

In addition to gorgeous photography, Cupcake Bakeshop does a very thorough job of inventing, testing and listing recipes. These range from the Americacentric (S'mores Cupcakes) to the exotic (Adzuki Bean Paste Filled Chocolate Cupcakes with Matcha Green Tea Frosting) to the healthy (Gluten-Free Chocolate Cupcakes with Salted Caramel Frosting - one for my mum) to the OMG-I-definitely-hafta-try-that-one (Lime Custard Cupcake with Meringue Frosting).

On the banana front I was tempted by the Peanut Butter-Banana Chocolate Cupcakes with Caramel Glaze and a Caramelized Banana Disk, but eventually decided to tone my ambitions down to match my abilities, and instead chose to make the Hummingbird Cupcakes with Cream Cheese Frosting, a banana, pineapple & nut mixture. Apparently this is a common Southern US recipe, but as a NZ/English cook I'd never heard of it before.

This was a nice quick put-together (unlike the banana bread recipe) and as specified, made about 24 cupcakes. Eleven of these were in my 1" deep cupcake tray, but the rest were in my 2" deep individual silicon cups. The only deviations from the recipe were the substitution of mixed nuts for pecans, and the baking time; rather than 25 minutes at 350ºF/180ºC/GM4, the cupcakes in the tray took 30 minutes to cook and the individual cupcakes took 45 minutes. As I've mentioned before though, I believe this is a problem with my decrepit oven rather than inaccuracy on the recipe's part.

I only made half the amount of cream cheese icing (ooh - cream cheese icing!) listed, and found that was quite enough to give each cupcake a generous topping and still have a spoon or so to lick from the bowl afterwards (oops, I'm not supposed to admit to things like that, am I?).

Taste-wise, I'm really happy with the cupcakes. The outside is a little sticky (I assume from the pineapple juice/banana mush mixture), but browned really nicely with a good even surface denseness. The inside is light and moist, and the little bursts of flavour from the pineapple bits contrast nicely with the overall 'banana-ness' - a combination I wasn't sure about initially, but am now totally sold on. It's a sweet cupcake, especially with the addition of the (very yummy) cream cheese icing, but it isn't sickly, and the nuts provide a bit of textural interest to offset it too.

So, in summary - quick & easy to make, and very tasty. Definitely a recipe to repeat and I'm sure Tanya, who ends up with half the baked goodies, will agree. Of course Mark, who's allergic to bananas and can't partake, might not! But I've promised to make him non-banana cupcakes for my next batch of baking. I just have yet to decide what...

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Raspberry Semi-Freddo/Parfait, Ginger Glass Cookies & Raspberry Sauce

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For the current WTSIM's theme of "Terrines" I have no historical recipes to offer you, as Terrines and Pàtes per se are absent from the repertoire of the medieval cook. There are dishes which might - with a rather large leap of the imagination - be considered forebears (in the same way primordial slime might be considered our forebear) but the earliest definitive reference I could find in my bookcase was in my rather battered 1911 copy of the redoubtable Escoffier, which leaves a rather gaping hole of several centuries. So I shall leave it to experts such as Carolyn of C.18th Cuisine to illuminate the mysteries of terrine genesis, and concentrate on the modern era.

I make chicken liver pàte with some regularity during summer. It's an excellent lunch dish, in addition to keeping well, and it's easy to vary the recipe to stave off taste monotony and tailor to my food obsession of the moment (capers, peppadew, jellybeans, etc). However chicken liver pàte recipes are a dime a dozen, so I decided to stretch my wings a bit and attempt as my terrine something I wouldn't normally. Which with me, usually equates to a dessert that requires more than just basic assembly.

My final choice was a recipe from Gordon Ramsay's "Just Desserts" cookbook. Originally a guilty pleasure I bought just so I could read the recipes, look at the pretty food-porn pictures, and drool, I didn't actually expect to ever use this book. But I was wrong! I'm happy to say these are the fourth and fifth recipes I've now tried from Just Desserts (an astronomically higher number than from any other dessert recipe book I own!) and my first parfait recipe ever; the Strawberry and Vanilla Semi-Freddo.

The Parfait and the Pàte â bombe
This is a two-part recipe. First you make a pàte â bombe base (a mixture of 'hard boil' sugar syrup and egg yolks) and then you make the fruit and vanilla cream parfait, and put the two together. The recipe is for strawberries, however there was a box of raspberries in the freezer that were heading towards freezer-burn, so I thought I'd use those instead. I drained off the excess liquid and got about 300g solid weight fruit to use in the parfait. This was my only deviation. The pàte â bombe and parfait recipes were fairly straight forward and the end result was a gorgeously rich raspberry creaminess, quite heavy on the tongue.

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Strawberry [Raspberry] and Vanilla Semi-Freddo
1 quantity Pàte â bombe [see below]
250g hulled Strawberries & 125g Redcurrents or 500g box frozen Raspberries
200ml double cream
1 vanilla pod

1. Make the pàte â bombe. Purée the [fruit] in a food processor or blender until smooth, then sieve to remove the seeds if preferred. Fold the purée into the pàte â bombe. Cover and chill the mixture for 1 hour.
2. Pour the cream into a bowl. Slit open the vanilla pod and scrape out the seeds with the tip of a knife, adding these to the cream. Three-quarters whip the cream until softly peaking.
3. Fold the vanilla cream into the [fruit] mixture, then freeze in a 1.2 litre loaf tin or individual moulds.
4. To unmould a large parfait, dip the mould into warm water for a few seconds, then invert on to a board and soften at room temperature for 5 - 10 minutes before slicing. Turn out individual parfaits straight on to serving plates.

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Pàte â bombe
100ml Water
150g Caster Sugar
5 large free-range Egg Yolks

1. Heat the sugar and water until clear.
2. Beat egg yolks until creamy.
3. Bring sugar to 'hard ball stage' or 120°C.
4. Drizzle sugar into yolks, whisking all the while.
5. For ice creams and parfaits, whisk until mixture is a thick foam.
6. Use at room temperature or chill for up to 2 days, whisking again before use.
   
   Paraphrased from Gordon Ramsay's "Just Desserts" - buy the book! It's worth it.

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The Ginger Glass Cookies
I thought these pretty cookies would make excellent side pieces for dessert - they have a nice spicy kick to them. They're simple to make and the substitution of Golden Syrup for the Liquid Glucose/Clear Corn Syrup didn't go too badly. I'll try the other syrup another time. The recipe comes from "The Cookie Book" by Catherine Atkinson, and I've paraphrased it:

Ginger Glass Cookies
50g unsalted Butter
40 g Liquid Glucose/Clear Corn Syrup (I used Golden Syrup)
90 g Caster Sugar
40 g plain Flour
1 tsp ground Ginger

1. Put the butter and liquid glucose in a bowl over a pan of simmering water and stir until melted together.
2. Sift flour and ginger into the sugar.
3. Stir into the butter mixture.
4. Cover with cling film and chill in the fridge for at least 25 minutes.
5. Preheat the oven to 180°C/350°F/GM4.
6. Line a baking sheet with baking parchment, or like I did, use a flexible silicon baking sheet.
7. Roll teaspoons of the mixture into balls and place them on the baking sheet.
8. Flatten them to as thin as possible. The book suggest laying another layer of parchment/silicon on top and using a rolling pin, but I found flattening the second lot with my fingers worked just as well, didn't show in the end result, and was a lot less fiddly!
9. If you want, stamp the cookies into rounds with a cutter or glass.
10. Bake for 5-6 minutes, until golden brown and lightly bubbling.
11. Leave on baking sheet a few minutes to firm up slightly, then either fold over or leave flat.
12. Leave to cool completely, then store in airtight container.

Note that I found the oven temperature too low to properly bake the cookies and had to turn my oven up to 190°C/375°F/GM5 to achieve success. This is probably because my oven is old, decrepit and anything but airtight, so your mileage might vary. I suggest doing this in two lots, as I did, and adjusting the heat accordingly if necessary.

The Raspberry Sauce
The sauce was made using the leftover raspberry juice (waste not, want not!), a cup of sugar syrup base, a tablespoon of cornflour and a shot of Bramley & Gage's delicious Blackcurrant Liqueur. Tasty, and the colour, as you can see, was glorious!

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And last, but definitely not least, Happy Birthday Johanna!

Idiot-proof Coconut & Lime Macaroons and what not to use in Meringues

I call these macaroons 'idiot-proof' because, well, not the world's greatest baker here, but these turn out beautifully.

One of the problems with making Tart de Bry is that you have heaps and heaps of egg white left over. Meringues and macaroons seem the natural solution and this recipe has one of my favourite taste combinations - the tangy sourness of lime paired with coconut (yes, I'm a big fan of Piña Coladas too). The texture is also wonderful - a crunchy and crumbly exterior melting into a moist interior.

As well as the lime icing over the coconut macaroons, the original recipe suggested topping them with chopped pistachios. However I personally don't usually have pistachios in the pantry (plus it also struck me as being a bit of a taste overkill and somewhat twee). The original recipe was in "The Cookie Book" by Catherine Atkinson, but I've fiddled around with the amounts a little:

Coconut & Lime Macaroons
Macaroon ingredients
3 large egg whites
2 cups shredded dessicated coconut (sweet)
1/2 cup sugar
2 tsp vanilla essence
2 Tb flour

Icing ingredients
1 cup icing sugar
1 grated lime - rind thereof
2 Tb lime juice

1. Heat the oven to 180F/350C/GM4.


2. Mix all the macaroon ingredients together.


3. Put in a pan over a low heat and cook for about 6 - 8 minutes, stirring continuously. 


4. Remove when the mixture has the consistency of thick porridge.


5. Put down baking parchment or (best still!) silicon baking sheets on an oven tray.


6. Dollop a large tablespoon of the mixture onto the sheet and mould into a little mound. I got 12 macaroons from this amount.


7. Bake the macaroons about 15 minutes or so, until they turn golden brown.


8. Leave them to cool completely while still on the baking sheets.


9. In the meantime, mix together the icing ingredients. You want the icing to be the consistency of extra thick cream.


10. Dribble a couple of teaspoons of the icing over each cool macaroon (if you do it whilst they are still warm the cookies are saturated too much with the icing).


11. Leave icing to harden (if you have the patience) then eat! Totally scrumptious.

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I also made some Almond Macaroons, from Nigella Lawson's recipe in "How to Eat" (p.20). These turned out tasting - as well as looking - pretty darn nice, which pleased me.

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Just to break my winning baking streak however, the Meringues (also Nigella Lawson's recipe which I have previously made with great success) were a disaster. I wanted to make brown sugar meringues, but had no brown sugar. Oh well, thought I, I'll just powderize some Demerara sugar and use that instead. Should be prettymuch the same result.

BZZZZZZT!!! Wrong!

The sugar sunk the beaten egg whites. I ended up a spooning brown eggwhite liquid the consistency of cream into tin tartlet cases. They came out of the oven with a wonderful little hollow tent of crunchy meringue - and at the bottom of the case that soggy mass of sugar which anyone who's flunked Meringue School is familiar with. Blah.

A quick search of the web gives me a probable reason for the failure:

"...Demerara sugars [are] unrefined or raw sugar coated with molasses and processed into crystals or cubes of sugar during the first crystallization of the cane syrup. As a crystal particle its size is larger, the texture is coarser and it is stickier than refined sugar... When using the refined demerara sugar in baked goods, be aware that it has similar properties of honey, slowing down the reaction with the yeast during the early stages of the dough rising."

"This type of [soft] Brown Sugar... is basically a refined white sugar or sugar syrup with molasses added in varying amounts to produce a darker colored and stronger tasting sugar. The various colors (light to dark) of this sugar will contain from 1% to 4% cane syrup that has not been refined out of the sugar contents. The lighter the color of the Brown Sugar, the less syrup contained in the sugar. Thus, the ligher colored sugars will have a texture that is more granular and less moist. The flavor of the lighter colored sugars will not be as complex as the darker colored surgars and will be sweeter tasting. As a rule, the lighter the color, the less intense the molasses flavor in the sugar. However, lighter or darker soft Brown Sugars can be substituted for each other as long as the recipe does not require more than 1/4 cup of sugar.

Brown Sugar can be substituted for white sugar, resulting in a more moist baked good providing a flavor with a hint of butterscotch. It is not advisable to substitute liquid or granulated brown sugar for soft Brown Sugar, since the moisture content of soft brown sugar is higher, providing a different texture in the baked goods than can be achieved using other types of Brown Sugar." - Recipetips.com

We live and learn! Soft Brown Sugar only next time. Though the little tented parts were delicious, so it might be interesting to see if I could repeat the result, using a thin layer of the meringue liquid over some sort of fruit or curd tart.