For this week’s WHB which Anh of Food Lover’s Journey is hosting, I thought of making something with lemon verbena. There is a thriving pot of the herb on the balcony that hasn’t truly been utilised yet. But somehow when I went to the grocery store for inspiration, I ended up with a selection of pears instead. Being Autumn, it seems quite appropriate to be making something pear related. The William and Beurre Bosc pears are my favourites to use when baking.. or snacking. B’s mom always has a few Beurre Bosc pears in a fruit basket in her kitchen. I love them when they are still crisp, but they’re also great when very ripe and you can sink your teeth into them like you would a peach. The Red D’Anjou on the other hand is a bit of a poser. It has a gorgeous deep red coloured skin, and is just as juicy, but doesn’t quite have the depth of flavour as say, the William pear.

These pears, being quite ripe, were diced and scattered on top of a buttery cake batter, which was then topped with almond meal and a cinnamon butter coating, then baked. Sounds utterly butterly, I know, but it really doesn’t taste like it’s all that bad for you! This recipe is an adaptation of one by chef Daniel Alps. He recommends having the cake warm, with custard or whipped cream… that is, if you can wait that long for the cakes to cool down to ‘warm’, before attacking one with a fork 🙂

Mini Pear and Cinnamon Cakes :

275g + 65g unsalted butter, softened
250g + 50g caster sugar
50g brown sugar
200g plain flour, sifted
5 eggs, at room temperature
100ml milk
2-3 small pears, peeled, cored, cut into large dice
80g almond meal
1 tsp ground cinnamon

Grease and line the bases of a 12-hole muffin tray. Preheat the oven to 180’C.

Beat together 275g butter and 250g of the sugar until pale and creamy. Add 3 of the eggs one by one, beating well to combine. Fold in the flour and then stir in the milk to achieve a smooth batter. Spoon the batter into the muffin tray, and top with the pear pieces. Sprinkle the almond meal on top of this.

Heat the 65g butter with the remaining caster and brown sugars in a pan until the butter melts. Whisk in the 2 eggs to combine. Spread this evenly over each mini cake mixture and bake in the oven for approximately 25 minutes, or until the cakes are cooked.

We finally made it to Zilver! I’d been wanting to try this restaurant in awhile, having read many glowing and enthusiastic reviews. A good excuse (not that we really need one, to go out and eat) came along when B was recently officially accepted as an Australian citizen. Instead of celebrating with a round of Vegemite sandwiches, we decided to go chinese! Doesn’t really make obvious sense, but a meal is a meal, and besides, I think it’ll take a lot more years of being a citizen before B would even so much as stand next to a Vegemite sandwich.

On our first visit to Zilver, we order off the menu – a task which in itself takes a considerable amount of time because everything sounds so good. Their salt and pepper calamari and whitebait is truly something. The tender calamari is very thinly sliced and coated in the crispiest batter, with just the right amount of seasoning. The whitebait is equally crispy, but fried just-so, such that it’s not dry inside, despite being very small morsels of fish. The crispy skin chicken is also incredible. Under a thatch of shredded shallots and coriander leaves, are pieces of chicken with beautiful lacquer-brown, crackly skin and super succulent flesh. The only let down for me was the eggplant and pork mince hotpot – which B and I always order whenever we go to a chinese restaurant. Zilver’s version is slightly sweet ‘n’ sour, with a tang reminiscent of canned pineapple, which isn’t bad, but also isn’t what I look for in an eggplant hotpot.

If you’re coming here for yum cha, don’t do what we did, and arrive on a Sunday morning with an empty stomach. The hour+ wait it took us to finally get a table had me almost wanting to gnaw on the arm of the lady announcing the numbers through a microphone. Come oooon, number 92! Finally, bingo!

The wait is definitely worth it; the atmosphere, fantastic. As you enter, the dining room before you is just a sea of tables, around which gather heads bowed over rice bowls. An army of smartly dressed waiters flit between tables, clearing empty steamer baskets and refilling pots of tea, while trolleys of goodies make their slow circuit of the room. Highlights include the salt and pepper spanner crab, vegetarian dumplings and the egg custard tarts we had to finish the meal. Some people judge their entire yum cha experience by these tarts alone. I don’t, but these warm, incredibly flaky and intensely yellow morsels are definitely one of the best I’ve ever tasted.

Zilver Restaurant
Level 1, 477 Pitt Street
(snr of Hay Street)
Haymarket 2000.

A very Happy Easter to everyone! I trust no one has overdone it yet, with their chocolate consumption? I must admit, I’m a bit cheap. B and I usually wait until after Easter before we start foraging for chocolate eggs. Half-price chocolate eggs, that is. All that surplus from the easter bunny’s basket usually makes it’s way into our shopping basket a couple of days after the event.

To tide us over til the egg hunt, I decided to bake a cake. As serendipity would have it, I recently picked up a packet of Herbie’s fragrant sweet spice. This spice mixture is an exotic blend of coriander, cassia, cinnamon quills, nutmeg, allspice, ginger, blue poppy seeds, cloves, cardamom and rose petals. It added a touch of intrigue to a batch of mini spiced cocoa cakes last week, and I couldn’t wait to find another excuse to use it again.

Enter Lynne Mullins’ recipe for an apple custard cake. As if the words ‘apple’ and ‘custard’ weren’t enticing enough (rhubarb and custard, possibly the only other two words that could beat that), she uses the aforementioned spice mix to evoke a sense of Easter; cinnamon in particular, being one of those must-have ingredients in hot cross buns or simnel cake. The result is a soft and warm buttery cake topped with spicy apple slices and with a thin layer of vanilla custard running through the middle. In other words, a cake perfect for Julia’s Easter Cake Bake.

Fragrant Apple Custard Tea Cake:

Custard
1 cup milk
3 large egg yolks
55g caster sugar
30g plain flour
2 tsp vanilla extract

Cake
200g soft butter
110g caster sugar
2 eggs
225g self-raising flour, sifted
2 small apples, cored and thinly sliced (about 140g each)
1 tbsp butter, melted
2 tsp caster sugar, extra
1 tsp fragrant sweet spice

For the custard
Place milk in a small saucepan and bring to a simmer over medium heat. Remove. Whisk egg yolks and sugar in a small bowl until thick, then add flour and whisk until smooth.

Pour hot milk onto egg yolk mixture and stir until smooth. Return mixture to saucepan and stir over low heat until mixture comes to the boil.

Stir constantly for 1-2 minutes until thick, then remove from heat, stir in vanilla and chill, covered in the fridge.

For the cake
Preheat ove to 180’C. Mix butter and sugar in a bowl and beat with an electric mixer until pale and fluffy.

Add eggs, one at a time, beating well after each. Fold in flour. Spread half the mixture into a 22cm greased and base-lined cake tin, add custard and smooth with a spatula. Add spoonfuls of remaining cake mix and spread carefully with a spatula to cover custard. Arrange apples on top of cake mixture and brush with melted butter. Combine sweet spice mix with extra caster sugar and sprinkle over apples.

Bake for 60 to 70 minutes or until cooked with tested with a skewer. Cool in pan before turning out.