The scents of a season


(Quince brown butter cake)

Two months into Autumn and I’m finally getting a sense of the season we’re in. Chestnuts are in the shops, along with fuzzy yellow quinces, mandarins and gorgeous ripe persimmons. It strikes me that chestnuts and quinces in particular are two things that require a bit of work before they bridge that gap between why-bother and food-nirvana. I couldn’t resist combining the two in a dessert for friends recently, and know just how laborious it is to cook with them.

Prior to being taught more about quinces, I’d only ever thought of them as the sugary rubbery stuff usually served with cheese. Now every year, I cook them slowly in a not overly sugary syrup, and store them in jars, to be folded into steamed puddings, ice-cream or baked as tarts. When the last bit of cooked fruit has been scooped from the jar, the remaining liquid is then used to soak a sponge, make a custard (Eliza Acton’s recipe for quince custard uses the poaching liquid, egg yolks and not much else. No dairy!) or even reduced to glaze a ham. If you don’t have the patience or the dessert gene, try the lamb and quince tagine from Alice Waters’ Chez Panisse Fruit instead. The fragrant fruit makes such a statement even in that simple savoury dish.

Today, I really wanted cake, so I made one based on a recipe by Claudia Fleming in her book, The Last Course. This cake is somewhat like an over-sized financier, and has a tight crumb with a deep caramel-like flavour of brown butter. You could serve it with cream or ice-cream, but really I think it’s perfect with just a simple cup of tea.

Quince brown butter cake :

115g butter, browned, strained and kept warm
120g icing sugar
130g buckwheat flour
pinch of sea salt
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon ground long pepper (if you don’t have this, use a spice of your choice)
1/2 teaspoon ground cardamom
150g egg whites
finely grated zest of 1 mandarin
1 large slow-cooked quince, sliced

Grease and line the base of a 7.5″ round pie tin. (see note below)
Preheat the oven to 190’C.

Combine the icing sugar, flour, baking powder, salt, spices and zest in a bowl. Whisk in the eggs whites thoroughly, then gradually whisk in the warm brown butter. Pour the mix into the prepared tin. Top with slices of quince. Bake in the oven for about 30 minutes or until a skewer inserted into the cake comes out clean. Once cooked, allow to cool on a wire rack. Brush the cake with some of the quince cooking liquid, and just before serving, dust the top with a little icing sugar.

[To cook quinces : Wash and peel the quinces, cut in half and place them into a pot with a solution of 3 water : 1 sugar. Add sliced lemon, 1 cinnamon stick, a few crushed cardamom pods, and a split vanilla bean if you wish, and bring to a boil. Once it comes to a boil, turn the heat down, place a cartouche (circle of baking paper) over the quinces and continue to cook on very low heat for several hours until the fruit is completely cooked through and have turned a deep ruby colour.]

[Note about baking tin : I used an unusual sized tin for this cake. You can use a larger one or bake individual cakes, and adjust the baking time accordingly.]

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Apple Pie Cake


(Apple Pie Cake)

I woke up yesterday morning with the words apple pie cake still lingering in my head between layers of sleep and a rapidly evaporating scene involving two turnips who twalked (talked and walked). Tip : cheese before bed, is rarely a good idea. Especially cheesecake.

Since twalking turnips are too challenging to conjure up, I settled on making the apple pie cake of my dreams. Rifling through the internet over a bowl of warm oatmeal revealed that such a singular thing did indeed exist. In its many forms, it is a well known Russian dessert, a Dorie Greenspan or Martha Stewart recipe, and also something that resembles apple pie filling between layers of frosting and butter cake. For the purposes of this dessert exercise, I chose the Dorie Greenspan route.

If you find the decision between having pie or cake a particularly taxing one, this recipe cleverly has a foot in each realm. The pastry tastes just so, but with a cakey consistency. Its baked craggy bumps and folds and that gentle lifting scent of warm cinnamon brought to mind the pies I never baked cooling on window sills of houses I never lived in. Seemingly heavy stuff, but not really. Just something incredibly easy to make, enjoyable to eat and pleasing to share. Below is the recipe, a down-sized version of the original which made 18 servings and seemed like overkill even to the two pie lovers of this household.

Apple Pie-Cake :
(a down-sized version of a recipe from Baking by Dorie Greenspan)

For the dough :
110g unsalted butter, at room temperature
1/2 cup sugar
1 egg
1/2 tablespoon baking powder
pinch of salt
juice of 1/2 lemon
1 1/2 cups plain flour

For the apples :
4 large green apples
juice of 1/2 lemon
3-4 tablespoons sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 generous teaspoon ground cinnamon

For the dough, place the butter and sugar in a mixer and beat until smooth. Add the egg, lemon juice and pinch of salt, beating to combine. Add the flour and baking powder and slowly mix until the dough comes together. Add a few more tablespoons of flour if the dough looks too wet. Wrap the dough and chill for at least 2 hours before using.

When you are ready to roll the dough, first prepare the filling. Peel, core and slice the apples roughly 1/4 inch thick. Toss with the lemon juice, sugar, vanilla and cinnamon, then set aside.

Cut the dough in half and roll the first half to fit a 8 or 9 inch pie pan. Line the pan with the dough. Pile the sliced apples on top of the dough, then roll the second half of the dough as a lid. Crimp or press the edges of the pastry together. Cut a few slits on top of the pastry and sprinkle with extra sugar and cinnamon if you wish. Bake in a preheated 180’C oven for approximately 1 hour, until the pastry is golden brown (cover loosely with foil if it appears to be browning too quickly, half way through the baking time).

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XXXmas baking


(Mini lime bundt cakes with poppyseed icing)

My childhood Christmas fantasy was always a Northern Hemisphere-tinged version of this ultimate holiday season. Mittens, snow, sleigh bells, mistletoe, roasted chestnuts and dried fruit puddings. It was a ‘traditional’ Christmas that made no sense in Sydney, soaked as we were in sun and sweat year after year as my father, with a paper crown lightly plastered to his forehead by effort, perspiration and steam, plunged a blunt bread knife into the roast turkey.

Even with an air-conditioning upgrade, I couldn’t stomach the idea of all that hot food. We could have been feasting on chilled oysters, prawns, cold ham and salad, followed by sweet cherries and mangoes. And I suspected we often suffered from dry turkey because the beast continued cooking in the blistering Summer heat long after it left the oven. These days, our family celebrates the middle ground. Cold food, plus some hot food that if served even only moderately warm, will be no cause for complaint.

But, for dessert?

People who still opt for the more traditional approach might make a concession especially when it comes to the last course. Stirring crumbled pudding into store bought vanilla ice-cream before setting it in the freezer again is occasionally made a little more fancy with the addition of booze or toasted spices to qualify it as a “recipe”. I must admit, I like this approach. Learning from past experience however, I’ve decided against transporting anything frozen to a family dinner since it often arrives in the form a puddle, forcing me to hastily reinvent my dish as a chilled custard or dessert soup.

This year, if Santa doesn’t bring a heatwave, I will bake. It’ll be a variation on one of my favourite recipes made extra small, extra cute and extra delicious with limes and blackberries – both of which are plentiful and cheap at the moment. Of course, there’s always a plan B, which I shall mention in my next post.

What will you be baking for Christmas?

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