The Elegant Sufficiency

A Poached Quince Cake

I ate the last of it for breakfast this morning, warmed in the microwave, a few blobs of butter on top. Took half into work last week and my colleagues approved – except for Frank who, with the, um, frankness you would expect, told me it was a bit dry. And, after all, this is a man who makes his own, very fine, quince paste, so I should be honoured, I suppose, that he deigned even to taste my far humbler creation. (The slice of paste that he gave me a month or two back mysteriously disappeared, as did some stinky soft French cheese, before I could reach for my camera.)
It’s a Quince Cake. A Poached Quince Cake. With raisins and toasted walnuts. Based on a recipe for Persimmon Cake I found in Chez Panisse Cooking (by Paul Bertolli with Alice Waters, Random House, 1988).
I was playing with fire I suppose, to fiddle with a recipe like that when I’m not a natural baker: I don’t think I’ve ever had persimmon, so have no idea whether its texture, sugar content, composition etc, is remotely similar to that of a quince. Not surprising really, that my cake with quince was good, but not great.
I work on the principal that I’ll only post recipes here that I’ve tested, which I know are great, and that I’m confident you’ll have success with and enjoy. I’d normally retest the quince cake until I was 100% happy with it. But, I’m going to make an exception with this: quinces are almost out of the markets for the season and, even if I can get hold of some, I may not have the energy to poach another batch – all that tough skin and core to peel and cut away, a sugar syrup to be made … quinces can be too much like hard work.
So I’m going to put this recipe out there, suggest it as an idea — and treat this post as a note to myself for next year, to remind myself of what I’d adjust, change, fiddle with to perfect my quince cake recipe. And please: hit me with your suggestions.
My notes to myself:

• It was a bit dry: I knew that would be the case the moment I opened the oven at the 50-minute mark. Perhaps they didn’t have fan-forced ovens in 1988? With 25 minutes to go according to Messrs Bertolli and Waters, my cake was well and truly ready. Next time, I’ll be checking it at 40 minutes and possibly pulling back on the temperature.
• I only had about 1 ¼ cup poached quinces left, so used a bit of the poaching syrup to get me closer to the 1 ½ cup mark. Next time, I’d consider taking that up to maybe 2 cups of poached quinces.
• Some interesting information I picked up during the week: for the magazine’s September food edition, I was editing a piece about the Royal Melbourne Show’s cooking competitions (an agricultural show). To check some recipe details, I had to call one of the champion bakers (her shortbread is a trophy-winner). At the end of our conversation, I asked her why my quince cake might have been dry (beyond the obvious reasons). She said that, because of Australia’s prolonged drought, she has found flour to be considerably drier and is having to add more liquid, be it eggs, milk or other, when she bakes.
• The Chez Panisse recipe calls for the persimmon to be pureed until there are no lumps of fruit; I had wanted to have some fruit texture in my cake, so left a few chunks, but they really weren’t noticeable. Nor did the cake have much of a quince flavour. Next time, I might try making an old-fashioned apple tea cake like this one – except with the poached quinces.
• The syrup addition below was mine; a desperate, last-minute inspiration drawn from my lemon cake recipe that saved the quince cake from being dreadful.
• I served it with a dollop of yoghurt: both to add moisture and cut the sweetness.

Poached Quince Cake

1 ½ cups poached quince, mashed with a fork*
1 cup coarsely chopped walnuts
2 ¼ cups plain flour
1 ½ tsp ground cinnamon
pinch salt
3 eggs
1 1/8 cups caster sugar
¾ cup pure olive oil
1 ½ tsp baking soda (bi-carb soda)
¾ cup dark raisins
½ cup quince syrup (from poaching the fruit)

Preheat oven to 350ºF (about 180ºC). Lightly toast the walnuts in the oven for 5 minutes, then reduce the oven temperature to 325ºF (160ºC) . Butter and flour a 9-inch (23cm) cake pan (it needs to be fairly deep.)
In bowl 1: sift together the flour, cinnamon and salt.
In bowl 2: mix together the eggs, sugar and olive oil.
In bowl 3: whisk mashed quince with baking soda until well mixed.
Add quince puree to egg mixture and combine well. Fold the dry ingredients into the quince mixture until well combined. Fold in the walnuts and raisins.
Pour the batter into the cake pan and bake for about 50 minutes, or until a skewer comes out clean. Warm the quince syrup and skewer the cake top in a few places. Pour syrup over the cake and allow to cool in the pan.

* I use Stephanie Alexander’s recipe for poached quinces in The Cook's Companion (Viking, 1996): 6 quinces (washed and peeled), 2.25 litres sugar syrup, 1 vanilla bean, juice of 1 lemon. The quince cores are not discarded; rather, Alexander ties them in muslin and they get poached with the fruit and syrup – in a large enamelled, cast-iron lidded casserole at 150ºC for up to 8 hours (I find 3 hours is plenty).

A Dead-Easy Cake, Mum is More Difficult

If only a relationship with a mother was as dead-easy as this cake below. We expect so much of our mothers. Unconditional, rose-coloured-glasses love; ever-present-understanding empathy; on-the-phone-at-a-minute’s-notice, sighing-and-comforting love. How hard it is when it doesn’t work out that way. When a mother’s love is not what the books, magazines, experts, tell you it should be.
I have house guests.
And the cake? It's a dream... I've made it in huts, in kitchens without utensils, in kitchens without ovens, in kitchens without scales, in kitchens when I've been more interested in dancing than cooking. A dream, every time. With ice-cream, a brilliant dessert.

Dead-Easy Tangy Lemon Cake

zest of one lemon
2 eggs
175g caster sugar
pinch of salt
150ml milk
175g sieved plain flour
1tsp baking powder
100g butter
Syrup:
6 tbsp icing sugar
juice and zest of 2 lemons

Have all ingredients at room temperature. Grease a square tin and line with baking paper. Preheat oven to 160°C In a mixmaster or bowl, combine all ingredients. Pour mixture into tin, making sure it's level and avoiding getting on the paper. Cook in 160°C oven for 55 minutes.
For syrup, sift icing sugar. Combine with lemon, bring to the boil, stirring, for a couple of minutes until syrup forms.
Leave cake in tin. While hot, pour syrup over the top. Let absorb for about 15 minutes. Tip out and let cool on a wire rack.

My Brain is in India

Think I have a blogging block … struggling to turn my mind to ES … spent too many hours over the past few days at a computer … planning my India trip (there are frequent-flier points that must be used … after tossing balls in the air … Malaysia, Japan, Borneo, China … this time, India has landed in the palm of my hand), emailing contacts for ideas, endless web-surfing, agonising – should I take a group tour, easy, lazy, secure, herded around from one thing to another, unknown, possibly awful, travelling companions, or should I launch out on my own? Think I’m getting my head around the idea of the solo trip. (God I wish I was one of those bright happy people who say “hello” to anyone, chat about anything, fit in anywhere…)
So … maybe, a Singapore stopover to see friends, Mumbai to research article on Bollywood (I want to be an extra in a Bollywood film), then a flight to Kerala. Looking for cooking schools, food gurus, ayurvedic excellence, spice plantations, tea plantations, antiques, jungle (is there any in Kerala?). Any ideas?
As a result, the cooking spirit has been willing but the flesh has been weak and my kitchen has been rather neglected – unsalted butter and leatherwood honey on Dench grain bread the staple. (New hyped inner-city Melbourne Malaysian for dinner tonight with an old not-seen-for-ages friend that was EXTREMELY disappointing.)
So what else can I do but leave you with a fine new cake recipe discovery, baked for a fund-raising morning tea at work last week. It was good. Really good. Even if I had to pay $5 to taste it!
Now, back to the Lonely Planet, Taj Hotels, Times of India, etc websites…….

Raspberry and Lime Syrup Cake
(adapted from BBC Good Food)

225g softened butter
225 caster sugar
4 medium eggs
2 limes, grated zest and juice
250g self-raising flour, sifted with a pinch of salt
25g ground almonds
200g raspberries
Syrup:
8 tbsp lime juice (about four limes)
1 lime, grated zest
140g caster sugar

Line the base and sides of a round cake tin (NOT loose-based) with greaseproof paper. Butter the paper. Preheat oven to 180C.
Cream the butter and sugar until light. Gradually beat in the eggs. Beat in the lime zest, then fold in the flour and almonds. Fold in enough lime juice – about 3 tablespoons – to create a mix that will drop easily from a spoon.
Fold in three quarters of the raspberries and turn the mixture into the tin. Even out the surface then scatter the rest of the raspberries on top – they’ll sink deliciously as the cake cooks.
Bake for about an hour – if the cake starts to brown too much, cover with foil – until a skewer inserted in the cake comes out clean.
Make the syrup while the cake is baking: put lime juice, zest and sugar in a small saucepan and stir over gentle heat until the sugar dissolves. While the cake is still hot, prick it with a skewer all over and then pour over the syrup, which will seep through the cake creating a luscious sticky thing.

A Comment Is Worth a Thousand Words

Sitting here. Looking at the clock, wondering if the editor to whom I pitched the article I’m struggling to finish (on the subject of blogging) will ever again give me the time of day (I told her I could deliver before Christmas last year, seriously). Thinking about how my wrists and hands are hurting and perhaps I’m getting carpal tunnel syndrome or something. Thinking my lower back hurts too and I’d better hop back on the Swiss ball if I intend to stay laptop-bound all night. Looking at the bunch of silverbeet shining happily at me from its kitchen counter perch ready to give me a healthy meal (if I get off my bum and cook it in a soup with white beans – Lucy, it’s your greens influence). Thinking about how I need to clean up before the cleaner comes tomorrow. Thinking about how pissed off I am that a courier stuffed up and my new Mac laptop didn’t get delivered today as it should have been and how I’ll have to make a special trip to pick it up tomorrow and how my credit card is screaming in pain. Thinking about finding the time to deliver my Taste of Yellow contribution to Barbara before it’s too late. Thinking about a wretched, delusional 7am gym appointment tomorrow I made with my training buddy. Thinking about the book I’m reading (M.J. Hyland’s Carry Me Down) and how nice it would be to snuggle up under my duvet with it NOW. Thinking how the couch looks good too, and some American crime show or other. Thinking about Joanna Newsom (RRR radio playing her right now) and her unusual voice and how I’d like to get one of her albums. Thinking about all the blog-updating I need to do. And thinking about comments – comments on blogs.

Commenting
Have I discussed this before? I can’t remember. But the subject has come up in the course of my interviews for the blogging article (which, as you can see, I’m not thinking so much about if I’m writing a blog post instead). The extraordinary Shula at Poppalina (who deserves an OAM of her own for her courage this month in revealing her mother’s suicide in her blog and writing, poignantly, brilliantly, intelligently, on the subject of suicide) tells me she’s obsessed with stats and comments. “I really need to get a life,” she added in an email to me this afternoon. Obsessed as I am too with stats and comments (I’ve been known to check them many, many times a day), I replied: “Hate it when a post like my latest about Dad's award doesn’t get many comments and then I’m so busy (like with deadlines) that I simply don’t have the time to get back there and put a new post in … feel like everyone who comes by goes ‘look…look! She only got two comments!’ Feel like it must have been a crap post so don’t want to comment on anyone else’s blog in case they stop by mine and see the crap post!” (Did you notice that I’d accidentally left on my Tungsten lighting mode for a couple of those pictures at Government House?)
Earlier this year, with the blogging article weighing heavily on my mind, I noted down from Californian blogger and pastry chef Shuna Fish Lydon's Eggbeater: “We blog, you comment. Your comments are our fuel, our reason to go on posting, our food for blogthought … the salt on our meat, the eggs in our souffles, the chocolate sauce on our ice cream.” (I’d add, the sea urchin on my rice…) Madrid illustrator and blogger Ximena Maier, whose food blog Lobstersquad is a showcase for her irritatingly wonderful illustrations, wrote around the same time: “Someone leaves a comment, I feel very happy ... I am amazed that someone in Australia knows what I like for breakfast. If someone links to my blog, I feel a buzz that lasts for days. And every now and then, you start a flurrying correspondence with someone, and end up putting a face to a name.”

The Playground Theory
My theory is that the blogging world is a bit like a school playground (there is a chance here you know, that I could segue effortlessly in copy-and-paste mode between this post and my article about blogging and kill two pheasants with one stone, as it were … how good would that be?): The most popular girl in school=the blogger who gets the most comments and has the sexiest pics. The kid who is always putting his hand up and going “Miss, Miss!”=the blogger who comments on anything, everything to get noticed but still is ignored. The class nerd with big round spectacles=the bloggers who clearly put an extraordinary amount of work into their blogs and are meticulous in terms of accuracy, historical fact, and pompousness. The class dunce=the bloggers who can’t get through their first sentence without a spelling mistake. In food blogging terms, I’d say that Clotilde at Chocolate and Zucchini (with her petite, brunette Frenchish-ness) and Heidi at 101 Cookbooks (with her healthy glow and headscarf) are having daily playground catfights over the Most Popular Girl in school tag. I’ll be kind, though, and not go further with the analogy.
All that apropos nothing, except that I’d add: “Yes, yes, yes!” … Comments are gold, warmth, love, dynamite!

A Taste of Yellow
And instead of thinking about comments on blogs I should be thinking about Barbara's A Taste of Yellow, her contribution to the Lance Armstrong Foundation’s LIVESTRONG Day Day to raise awareness about cancer. Barbara asked bloggers to cook something, anything yellow for the day and post about it, and urged people to donate money here.
As anyone who has read my blog over time knows, this is an issue close to my heart. My father has an aggressive prostate cancer which was diagnosed very late (a story for another day … one that makes my blood boil). Armstrong’s book sits on the coffee table at my parents’ place (although Dad’s concentration is not so great these days and I’m not sure he’s read it). As I’ve written before, this personal experience of cancer has opened my eyes to a new world that millions around the globe know all too well. The cancer world of doctors’ and hospital visits; endless invasive, intrusive tests and the fearful waiting for their results; the awful indignities of treatments such as radiation therapy and chemotherapy; a sufferer’s tears and exhaustion and depression; debilitating, simply debilitating side effects. What becomes, effectively, a way of life.
My contribution to Barbara’s contribution to LIVESTRONG Day is for my Dad, who loves lemony things. I thought lemon delicious, lemon meringue pie, lemon sorbet, lemon souffle, but settled on this lovely recipe from that lovely, clever Englishman, Nigel Slater. In a food column in The Observer Food Monthly, he notes that the cake is “barely thicker than a quiche” and has a “light crunchy texture to complement the tartly creamy filling. (I cheated and bought a bottle of lemon curd, Forest Preserves brand, which seems to me to be from Dorset. Can anyone tell me the difference between lemon curd and lemon butter?)
Before I flew home to Melbourne yesterday from Queensland I reminded Dad that there was still some cake left in the fridge. “Do you really think I’d forget that?” he replied with a mischievous grin.

Nigel Slater’s Little Lemon Polenta Cake
Serves 6-8

3 large eggs
110g caster sugar
a medium-sized lemon
50g fine polenta (cornmeal)
30g ground almonds
For the filling:
300ml (a 284ml carton will do) double cream
250g lemon curd
To decorate:
crystalised violets or rose petals

Set the oven at 180C/gas mark 4. Line and lightly butter the base of a 20cm round non-stick cake tin. Separate the eggs, putting the yolks into the bowl of a food mixer fitted with a whisk attachment. Add the sugar to the yolks and beat at high speed until they are pale, thick and creamy. While this is happening, finely zest the lemon and squeeze the juice. Pour the juice, a little at a time, into the mix and continue beating until it starts to thicken. Mix the grated zest, polenta and ground almonds, then stir them into the eggs and sugar. Beat the egg whites till almost stiff, then fold the mixture into them. Be gentle but firm, so you manage to both mix the egg white in thoroughly yet keep a light, airy texture. Scrape the mixture into the lined cake tin. Bake for about 30 minutes till the centre is cooked and the top lightly browned. Remove from the oven, run a palette knife around the edge and turn out on to a baking sheet. Leave to cool. At this point it may look less than promising, but don't worry. When cold, slice the cake in half horizontally and place the bottom half on a cake plate. Gently beat the cream until it is firm yet still voluptuous. Fold in the lemon curd, then use almost to smother the bottom half. Place the second half on top, then use the remaining lemon cream to cover the top and sides. Decorate with sugared violets or rose petals, and serve with soft fruit such as raspberries.

The Génoise Failure

I’d intended to make lamingtons tomorrow morning; instead, my Dad, whose sweet tooth has no reason, is happily gnawing on chunks of my failure – with ice-cream, for heaven's sake. And the failure? A stiff, lifeless, inedible génoise “cake”. Not Margaret Fulton's recipe, not my Mum’s spanking new oven, not my aching arms from whisking eggs and sugar and vanilla in a bowl over warm water for what seemed like an eternity – none of it saved me from this miserable, plank-like failure. The only consolation? Searching for what went wrong, I came upon baking goddess Rose Levy Beranbaum's own génoise catastrophe. I’m in good company. (Any thoughts on what I did wrong?)

Sorting Right From Wrong

I’ve yet to work out what the protocol is when quoting or extracting others’ published works in this sort of online publication (which, at the moment, and indefinitely, is for my pleasure, not profit). I want to do the right thing and so, almost without exception, provide a link to either the original material or, in the case of a book, to somewhere a reader could buy it, such as Amazon.
I feel that, in such cases, I’m giving the holder of the copyright free publicity.
Is it OK for me to share, for example, quotes from Toni Morrison's Beloved? (Although it hardly needs publicity…)
There are so many extraordinary, terrible things in this book: In her foreword, she describes slavery as “a repellant landscape” and, only halfway through, I’m aghast at how little I have known of just how repellant slavery in the United States was. But there are delights here too, in the language, of course, and in one of the most enviable descriptions I have read of the pleasure of a food, of a flavour. The character “Stamp Paid” has gone searching for blackberries: “… for some private reason of his own, [he] went off with two buckets to a place near the river’s edge that only he knew about where blackberries grew, tasting so good and happy that to eat them was like being in church. Just one of the berries and you felt anointed.”
Is it OK for me to republish that quote? What if I wanted to republish an excerpt twice as long? I’d be so grateful for academic opinion on this…
And on this: is it OK for me to reproduce here the lovely cake recipe that has sent my father to the top of his nurses’ Favourite Patient List?

Nigel Slater’s Orange Frosted Marmalade Cake

175g butter
175g golden unrefined caster sugar (have never seen this in Australia: I used plain caster sugar)
a large orange
3 large eggs
75g orange marmalade
175 SR flour
Frosting:
100g icing sugar
2tbsp orange juice

Set the oven at 180 degrees. Line a loaf tin (I used a round one with no ill-effects) about 25x11x7cm deep. Put the butter and sugar in a food mixer and beat until pale and fluffy. Finely grate the orange zest. Break the eggs into a small bowl and beat them lightly with a fork. With the machine set at moderate speed, pour in the beaten egg a little at a time, beating thoroughly between each addition. Beat in the marmalade and the grated orange zest.
Remove the bowl and fold in the flour with a large metal spoon. Do this slowly, firmly but carefully, until there is no sign of any flour. Lastly, gently stir in the juice of half the orange. Spoon the mixture in the lined tin, lightly smoothing the top. Bake for 40 minutes, checking it after 35 with a metal skewer. Leave to cool in the tin – it will sink slightly. Then remove and cool completely on a wire rack.
Sift the icing sugar and mix it to a smooth, slightly runny consistency with as much of the remaining orange juice as it takes – probably just under two tablespoons. Drizzle the icing sugar over the cake, letting it run down the sides, and leave to set.

* NB: In his introduction to this lovely recipe in the The Kitchen Diaries (Fourth Estate/Gotham, 2006), Nigel Slater says that he sometimes uses orange blossom water to perfume each slice of cake. The recipe has set me off on my own trails of thought. Maybe it could have a mandarin frosting, or a blood orange one, or a guava one, or a passionfruit one. And perhaps instead of marmalade you could substitute a thick fruit compote – a Melba-ish peach and raspberry with a peach juice frosting perhaps? Or am I just delirious with tiredness?

Sticky Fingers

It wasn’t the most elegant cake, but the birthday girl didn’t seem to mind; on first glimpse of her first-birthday chocolate teddy-bear cake there were squeals of delight. Later, beside the harbour at Darling Point’s lovely, parched McKell Park, she interrupted her gnawing on a watermelon rind long enough to watch with some curiousity as the musical candle flickered and sang to her. Then she was off – to explore, bottoms up, the ice-filled drinks cooler.
And the grown-ups made kind noises about my efforts too.
At the last minute, I had turned my back on Elizabeth David’s flourless chocolate cake number as the foundation. The birthday girl’s far wiser mother gently suggested to me that espresso, almond-meal and brandy were probably not the ideal ingredients for a children’s birthday cake. With the oven on pre-heat in Sydney, I called on the big guns in Melbourne (yeah, that'd be Greg) and, with phone clutched to shoulder, took dictation for a more traditional chocolate cake recipe. Quantities were doubled and hasty advice given about trimming back on flour proportions. The two chocolate-cake-filled lamington trays that came out of the oven an hour or so later were respectable, if not somewhat unevenly cooked. Burnt, cracked bits were shaved off, then the Women’s Weekly Kids Party Cakes opened up. Its teddy-bear pattern, icing recipe and decoration advice were a time-consuming but straightforward follow-up.
The last word on children’s birthday cakes, at least for another year, goes to my oldest friend, Kim. She and I went to kindergarten together; now the oldest of her two little boys is at kindergarten and issuing instructions as to which cakes she should be making for him and his little brother.

"Doing a train for James’s second birthday taught me that humid pre-Christmas weather, butter icing, and complicated structures do not mix.  Sweaty and pregnant, I sat half in and half out of the fridge, trying to rescue the cake from disaster – helplessly trying to hold back the landslide of icing, liquorice fenders, mint slice wheels and jelly bean cargo. The sheer weight of the dripping sticky mess drove a wedge between the upright cake pillar of the train's cabin and the lengthwise jam-roll of its engine, requiring desperate reinforcing from wooden skewers. The results were rather tragic and I also learned of the truly horrendous quantities of food colouring required to achieve those bright icing hues – no matter how much of the specially sourced pillar-box red I added, I managed only to achieve a more lurid shade of Barbie pink. James liked it though."

Cake Crisis

Help...! I have been assigned the task of baking THE cake for THE niece's first birthday. One week to go. My brother and his partner's, sort of, ill-equipped Sydney kitchen next Saturday. A few hours to prepare. A quick web search reveals some pretty ghastly "Balloon Cakes", "Lego Cakes" and "Fire Engine Cakes". Let's face it, the niece isn't going to know if it's a good cake or a bad cake; it's really a cake for the adults. But, I figure something colourful is important ... to at least attract her attention ... then we can enjoy the rest. Ideas ... PLEASE!?

The Leisure Dilemma

There are paragliders swooping past our veranda and surfers out there with wild eyes and broad freckled shoulders. Down on Noosa River there’ll be canoers and kayakers and sailboarders and others swinging around on catamarans. Fishermen will probably be finding a nice bit of whiting off the beach or in the river (at least that’s what I think I read in the local newspaper). Mackerel is running somewhere else, apparently.
I haven’t left the house all day.
Every year here, idleness takes hold of me. A good book, Vanity Fair, an afternoon nap, are so appealing.
But I’m the master of the “should”, so every year that idleness is stirred and disturbed and troubled by all the ideas of the things I should be doing. I should enroll in surfing school, I should inveigle Dad to take me out with the fishing rod he’s bought and never used and about which he knows as little as I, I should drag him to the golf course, I should go riding on the sands of Lake Weyba, I should do a diving refresher course, I should hike at dawn every day.
And the “shoulds” compound. I should cook X and Y and Z recipe. I should write X and Y and Z for the blog. I should work on the children’s story I’m writing. I should get out into Mum and Dad’s garden and try and tidy it up a bit. So instead, I wander, incapable of properly relaxing with the good book, Vanity Fair, or the afternoon nap. I do a bit of this and a bit of that. A bit of tidying after my messy family and the Vegemite-toast-wielding niece, a bit of chasing the niece around on the floor, a bit of catching up on newspapers, and almost nothing I really want to do. My guilt-ridden "should" problem might be personality-related. I also write lists when I’m on holidays.
I prefer though, to think that there are deeper, more insidious reasons why I can’t relax into “should”-free idleness. Something in my genetic makeup perhaps, passed down through generations of cussing women with washboard-hardened hands and aching backs. That old warhorse Germaine Greer set me on this train of thought. In a Guardian article published in May, she wrote:

“There are powerful historical reasons for women's imperviousness to the demands of leisure. The typical world citizen – who is still female, illiterate and an unpaid family worker – knows only too well that if she is ever to be seen with her hands in her lap, a job will be found for her. In traditional societies, the high days and holidays on which menfolk are permitted to straighten their backs and put on clean clothes are the days on which the women have to work the hardest, smartening up the house and putting together giant meals. It is not so long ago that on Sundays, while rest of the family frolicked, the woman of the house had to cook and serve a three-course Sunday lunch and clean up after it.
Many women these days would like nothing better than the chance to serve soup, roast and pudding to the assembled family once a week. If they don't do it any more, it is less because they rebelled against such hard labour on everybody else's day of rest than because nowadays there isn't anybody around to eat the food they cook. Everybody else is out doing leisure. Has the woman of the house grabbed a kitbag and followed their example? Apparently not. Women don't go fishing. Women do play golf, but not many and not much. Women don't buy sports equipment or season tickets. Women don't buy sports cars, boats, jetskis, trailbikes, guns, crossbows ... Women don't collect stamps, spot trains, buy music products.”

As ever, Greer’s view had its dissenters, including UK blogger Tim Worstall, who offered statistics to support his view that men and women have the same amount of leisure time. Maybe so, but the point Greer is making is about the way men and women use their leisure time. Right now, as I write, my Dad’s watching the cricket with a gin and tonic in hand, my brother is napping upstairs, my sister-in-law is washing the dishes and my mother has just finished baking the most divine little friands.

Orange and Poppyseed Friands
(makes about 30)

½ cup plain flour
1 ½ cups icing sugar, sifted
1 cup almond meal
1 ½ tbsp finely grated orange rind
1 tbsp poppy seeds
6 egg whites
180g butter, melted

Preheat the oven to 180ºC. Place the flour, icing sugar, almond meal, orange rind, poppy seeds, eggwhites and butter in a large bowl and stir to combine. Spoon the mixture into 30 lightly greased, 40ml capacity mini muffin tins. Bake for 15 minutes or until a skewer inserted in a friand’s centre comes out clean.

1948 Banana Cake

It was 1948. Mahatma Gandhi had been assassinated in New Delhi. The Cold War had begun with the Berlin Blockade. The State of Israel was established. In Australia, the pipe-smoking Ben Chifley was Prime Minister and the first Holden car, the beloved FX, had rolled off the assembly line. Australians were eating Maxam luncheon beef from a can, discovering the joys of The Hawkins, “America’s finest pressure cooker”, and sending in recipes by the thousands to The Australian Women’s Weekly ₤2000 Cookery Contest. The slim little volume that published the winning recipes sold for two shillings and featured on its cover a jug and glasses of punch, a bowl of daisies, and an odd brown-pink-and-green layered cake with a piped-cream-and-strawberry ornamentation.

A Novelty Cauliflower Cake
The ₤50 Champion Cake was a Snowflake Cake with Egg-Nog Filling. The poor Australian cook who devised the recipe and its not-unappealing filling of egg yolks, sugar, butter, lemon rind, chopped walnuts, citron peel, raisins and brandy wasn’t named.
Other cake recipes in the edition included a Novelty Cauliflower Cake (the ‘cauliflower’ being a swirl of meringue with green-coloured icing for ‘leaves’), a Jamaican Sultana Cake and the Tutti Frutti Cake. And then there were the savoury recipes, among them, a Creamed Lamb Shape, Curried Rabbit in Grapefruit Cases, and the Casserole Australis (a preparation not the for the faint-hearted of minced steak and diced kidneys with mushrooms, grated carrots and apple, onion, green pepper, celery and bacon, with a “fluffy scone” topping).

A Young Newspaperwoman
I go nuts for old cookbooks and my foraging mother (addicted, to a disturbing, compulsive degree, to garage sales, secondhand shops, charity shops) has instructions to watch out for anything pre-1965. I’m a sucker for their retro appeal (especially love the little black and white line drawings in this edition) and join the dots of stains and spills and thumbed edges to try to imagine who might have owned and cooked from them. My theory on the owner of The Australian Women’s Weekly Cookery Book (Prize Recipes from our ₤2000 Cookery Contest): she was a career woman, perhaps a young newspaperwoman assigned to the women’s pages in a smoky newsroom full of men. She had cheered when, in 1944, fellow Australian newspaperwoman (and later editor of the Weekly), Esme Fentson wrote the article “Who Will Do the Housework?”, predicting that when men came home from the war, women would want to “discard the duster and earn pay envelopes of our own.” She had sighed when her despairing mother had given her yet another cookbook in the hope that her daughter might start looking for a husband instead of a scoop. She had laughed uproariously when, the one and only time she flicked through that cookbook, she had come upon a recipe for a cake designed to resemble a cauliflower and another, a banana log with toffee chips, designed to resemble a tree trunk. And the reason I have this theory about the owner of my copy of The Australian Women’s Weekly Cookery Book (Prize Recipes from our ₤2000 Cookery Contest)? There’s not a stain, spill or thumbed edge to be found on it.

A Banana Crisis
Despite Australia’s banana crisis (the continuing, devastating effects of a vicious cyclone on the North Queensland banana crop that has seen banana prices hit $12 a kilogram and more), I had bananas to burn. Long before the cyclone, someone had mentioned to me that bananas past their use-by-date freeze well. So my freezer was full of them. And how could I resist a recipe for a banana cake designed to resemble a tree trunk?
According to The Australian Women’s Weekly Cookery Book (Prize Recipes from our ₤2000 Cookery Contest), the cook of this banana cake should “rough the icing with a fork to represent bark”. Presumably the bark effect becomes even more pronounced with the addition of the toffee chips. Still, hard as it was, I fought the overwhelming temptation to make a cake that looks like a tree trunk. The truth was, I simply wanted to use up some bananas. And the result? Not especially memorable. I’m not sure whether it was because my conversions from imperial to metric were off (see below), or too late I forgot to adjust cooking temperature and time in accordance with the firepower of a modern, fan-forced oven, or perhaps it was just a so-so recipe. Whatever, I’m on the prowl now for a better banana cake recipe to use up that freezer-full of bananas. And it doesn’t have to resemble a tree trunk.

Your help will be greatly appreciated. Please send emergency banana cake recipes.

Banana Log with Toffee Chips

Cake:
4oz margarine or butter (113g)
4oz sugar (113g)
Pinch grated lemon rind
2 eggs
8oz self-raising flour (226g)
3 bananas
¼ pint milk (½ cup)
1 teaspoon bicarbonate soda
Icing:
3 dessertspoons butter
2 cups icing sugar
1 dessertspoon cocoa
Pinch salt
1 dessertspoon coffee essence
½ teaspoon vanilla
Toffee Chips:
1 cup sugar
1 cup water
1 teaspoon lemon juice

Cake: cream shortening with sugar and lemon rind. Add beaten eggs. Lightly fold in sifted flour, then thoroughly mashed bananas. Lastly fold in soda dissolved in milk. Turn into greased log tin or loaf-tin, bake in moderate oven 50 to 55 minutes.
Allow to stand in a tin a few minutes before turning on to cake-cooler.
When quite cold, spread all over with icing, rough up with fork to represent bark; decorate with toffee chips.
Icing: Beat butter until soft and white, gradually add sifted icing sugar, salt and cocoa. Continue beating until well-mixed. Gradually add coffee essence and vanilla.
Toffee chips: Place sugar, water and lemon juice in saucepan, stir over low heat until sugar is dissolved. Bring to the boil, cook until a pale amber colour. Pour into buttered tin; when cold and set, break into pieces.

An East Meets West Afternoon Tea

Guardian writer Simon Mills unearths some brilliant material in his recent article about the return of afternoon tea. There is, he says, “actually something distinctly zeitgeisty, hip, even subversive about afternoon tea at the moment”.
Among other startling facts, Mills reports that Moby, the shaved musician, has a teashop, Teany, in Manhattan “where the trendies can select their favourite brew from 98 different varieties of leaf. And in Los Angeles, tea aficionados Matt Damon, Renée Zellweger and Jodie Foster like to hang out at the Elixir tea bar.” (The tea-as-fashion-statement is also explored in a piece headed "Tea with Madonna" on the to-be-investigated-further Tea Muse website.)
Mills meanwhile, also reveals that The Ritz London has four daily sittings of its £35 afternoon tea starting at 11 o’clock in the morning and finishing with a fifth sitting – a champagne tea (which sounds like me). For any of the sessions there’s a six-week waiting period.
And then I remember. I have my own tea fetish. Two days ago I drove across town to my favourite tea shop to stock up on a blend I have come to love from the Japanese tea company Lupicia (in Melbourne, it’s at 199 Toorak Road and on level 2 of the QV building). The tea I love is Momo Oolong, which I gather is oolong infused with the fragrance and flavour of white peach. (Lupicia’s Japanese-language website isn’t illuminating on how this is done, or on much else for that matter.) Momo is sublime to sniff and a little less overwhelming than some of Lupicia’s other flavoured teas, including a walloping cherry-infused number. I’m sipping now another Lupicia purchase – a “plantation specified” unadulterated oolong from Taiwan – that I’m just as tickled with. If nothing else, there’s something wonderful about the way the leaves unfurl to the touch of the water – a little like wakame?
If you take your afternoon tea at The Ritz London, you can order a Taiwanese oolong which, in a quaint, colonial way, is described as being from “Formosa – Taiwan”. Unlikely though, that you’ll find the brilliant Italian Castagnaccio cake (below) on The Ritz’s menu which, bless its British heart, sticks with egg mayonnaise sandwiches and scones with clotted Devonshire tea.
A pity really, because the dense, chestnut-flour-based Castagnaccio is a wonderful, unlikely surprise. From what I can gather, it’s a cake of ancient origins that is found in the mountainous, chestnut-growing regions of Tuscany (although one source I found said it has regional variations – anise or fennel seed on versions made in Emilia-Romagna, for example, instead of rosemary in the Tuscan model.)
The simple, superb recipe here, adapted by my friend Meaghan, gives a slightly lighter result than might be found in Tuscany. It's brilliant for breakfast, lunch, dinner or afternoon tea and may be even better with a cup of Taiwanese oolong.

Chestnut Flour, Raisin and Rosemary Cake
(Castagnaccio)

125g chestnut flour (from good Italian food stores; should be stored in the fridge as it goes rancid quickly)
125g SR flour
¼ tsp salt
150g butter, chopped
240g brown sugar
1tsp bicarb soda (baking soda)
1 cup milk
1 egg
55g raisins (1/3 cup), soaked in hot water for 30 minutes then drained
2 tbsp rosemary leaves
40g (1/4 cup) pinenuts
2tbsp olive oil

Line base and sides of an 18x28cm lamington tin with baking paper. Preheat oven to 180°C (350°F). Process flours, salt and butter in a food processor until mixture resembles fine breadcrumbs (or do it the old-fashioned way and rub butter into flours with your fingertips until the same result is achieved). Add brown sugar and process until combined. Press half the flour mixture over the base of prepared tin.
Whisk bicarb soda, milk and egg in a bowl until well-combined. Add remaining flour mixture and raisins to egg mixture, mix well and pour over base.
Scatter with rosemary and pinenuts and drizzle with olive oil.
Bake for 40 minutes or until cooked when tested with a skewer. Cool in tin. Keeps well in an air-tight container for two days.
Serves 8-10.

Alice and Amy

Alice Madden was born on April 24, 1896, in Sydney. Her little sister, Amy, arrived about four years later, although no one can be sure exactly when. Their father, William James Madden, was a clerk and a stickler for discipline, education and elocution. Until she died at the age of 99, and even with her mind long gone, Alice would parrot “how do you do?” when someone greeted her, the vowels rich and voluptuous.



Alice and Amy’s brother Charles was sent to university and became an architect. Brother Edwin became a trade union leader. (He would have been Prime Minister, people said, had he not died prematurely; Alice maintained that his kidneys failed because he was always too embarrassed to ask where the toilet was.)
Alice, who admired silent-screen siren Theda Bara, wanted to become an actress, but William James put his foot down. Alice and Amy were sent to secretarial college. Alice became secretary for the manager of a large music shop in booming Sydney city, had manicures (never cut your cuticles, she would say) and bought expensive silk undergarments and books. In 1935, she married Charles Hadorn, a gruff workaholic Swiss immigrant, and moved into an Art Deco house designed by her brother in Sydney’s still-rural outskirts. In her fine white house, she buried herself in books for the next 50 years.
Amy fell in love with Matson-Oceanic Line sea captain Theo Iverson, married him, and moved to San Francisco, where she wore the latest fashions, entertained frequently and had a waffle iron and a fancy electric fruit juicer.
On January 30, 1938, Amy took out her pen and ink and wrote in an elegant hand on the end paper of a book called Any One Can Bake (compiled by the Educational Department of the Royal Baking Powder Co., 100 East 42nd St. New York City).
This is what she wrote:

Dear Alice,
The following pages (if you ever get round to digesting more than the pretty pictures) may prove beneficial to you and to those for whom you day by day perform the necessary labour pertaining to the grand art of cookery.
However, much flour has passed through the sifter since that day (on one of Mother’s rare absences from “No. 29”) you besought Mrs Shirley to divulge the secret of properly cooking a 5lb hunk of corned meat. Nevertheless, if you can follow step by step instructions on any one of these recipes so that same may look like so much as a second cousin to the particular picture represented, “you are a better man than I am Gungha Din”. (Am not quite sure if Kipling would recognise the spelling.)
Here’s to your success,
Amy
San Francisco, California

PS: I feel it is my duty to inform you that this book was, for a limited time only, given away with a 30 cent can of the said baking powder – hence the act of generosity in passing same to you.

I know Alice used Any One Can Bake  because on page 16 (“Royal Biscuits with Variations”) she has written in blue ink:

What the Australian terms a ‘scone’, the American calls a biscuit.
What the Australian terms a ‘biscuit’, the American calls a cookie.

And when I rub my fingertips across page 69 (“Tropic Aroma and Other New Cakes”), they come away gritty with the remnants of 50-year-old flour. I don’t know whether Alice cooked any of the recipes on page 31 (“Crumpets, Gems and Muffins”), but I have no doubt that if she had – perhaps the pecan muffins – she would have had the sense, unlike me, to know when to stop eating the results of her labour.
Because Alice Hadorn, my darling grandmother, always knew when to say, “No thank you, I’ve had an elegant sufficiency.”

1938 Pecan Muffins

1 cup graham flour
1 cup flour
4 tablespoons brown sugar
¾ teaspoon salt
4 teaspoons Royal Baking Powder
½ cup chopped pecan nuts
1 cup milk
1 egg
4 tablespoons shortening

Mix together dry ingredients; add nuts, milk, egg and melted shortening and beat well. Put one tablespoon batter into each greased and floured muffin pan or small muffin ring; put half pecan on each muffin and bake in hot oven at 425°F, eighteen to twenty-five minutes, depending on size of muffin. Makes twelve muffins, or twenty-four if baked in small muffin rings.

For the sake of historical authenticity, the recipe above is written exactly as it is in Any One Can Bake. I’d add these notes:
• Graham flour is coarsely stone ground, whole wheat flour – plain wholemeal worked for me.
• Any baking powder will do.
• Add an extra 12 pecan halves to your pecan quantity to adorn the muffin tops.
• I used melted butter for my shortening.
• 425°F is 220°C and, if you’re using a modern, fan-forced oven, far too hot for this purpose. I’d keep your temperature at 180°C (350°F). (I didn’t follow my own advice, as you’ll see from the swarthy pecan nuts in the photograph.)
• These muffins should be eaten fresh out of the oven; keep them until the next day and they’ll disappoint you terribly.

A Chocolate Debate

Monday, Day 1, WeightWatchers Bid Number 145

(Points permissible per day: 20)

8am, breakfast:

2 slices Irrewarra Sourdough casalinga, no butter (2 points)

1/4 avocado (approx 1.5 points)

salt, pepper

1 cup Irish Breakfast tea with low-fat organic milk (.5 points)

10.30am, morning tea:

1 Pink Lady apple (1 point)

1 cup coffee with low-fat organic milk (1.5 points)

1pm, lunch:

Homemade vegetable and Polish sausage soup (approx 4.5 points)

2.30pm:

Creamed butter and sugar clinging to Sunbeam Mixmaster beaters (7 points)

Brownie mixture left in Sunbeam Mixmaster bowl (10 points)

4.30pm:

Orange pecan brownie(s) plus crumbs (12 points)

11.30pm:

Orange pecan brownie (15 points—going to bed with a full stomach)

A declaration that may offend: I’ve always been ambivalent about chocolate. I always choose a fruit-based dessert over a chocolate one. Popcorn beats a choc-top at the cinema any day. My preferred junk food is fries or chips. (Shhhh...)

The combination of chocolate and orange, though, is quite another thing. Chocolate and orange mousse cake. Dark chocolate and orange tart with toasted almonds. Orange peel covered in dark chocolate. Chocolate Almond-Orange Cake. Boyajian orange oil truffles. I'm interested then, in the emotive debate that rages on the letters’ page of April’s Waitrose Food Illustrated magazine.

Under the headline ‘Agent Orange’:

‘I can only describe the combination of chocolate and orange as rancid.’ Jannah Britt-Green, Harpenden, Hertfordshire

‘Together, they repulse me.’ Samantha Craig, Great Malvern, Worcestershire

‘I’ve had to squash my feelings about this terrifying combination for some time.’ Joanne Coleman, London W3

‘It should be considered criminal.’ Charlotte Jones, London SW20

I tend to agree with Mary Grant, of Tilehurst, Reading, from a chorus of letter-page dissenters, who says:

‘Get a grip. If you must get in a rage, let it be over something more important than chocolate orange cake.’

The debate seems to have been sparked by a recipe for a chocolate orange cake in the previous edition of the magazine from Sophie Grigson, daughter of Jane and a great food writer. (I still have clippings of her old column in The Independent stashed away somewhere.)

Besides, there’s a fine, if mass-produced, tradition of the chocolate-and-orange combination. Think of Allens Jaffas, the iconic Australian confectionery of red-food-dye-covered chocolate balls, rolled down cinema aisles for decades, and Terry’s Chocolate Oranges, a ‘unique shaped ball made with real orange oil’. At the other end of the scale, the venerable Swiss brand Lindt is currently heavily advertising its new chocolate-orange product, I think called Excellence Orange. On a page headlined ‘Guilty Pleasures’ in the same Food Illustrated as the chocolate-orange argument, there’s a recipe for ‘Chocolate orange croque’: ‘Butter two slices of brioche and grate 4 segments of Terry’s Chocolate Orange onto the unbuttered side of one slice. Sandwich together and fry both sides. Press with a spatula until melted. Serve with crème fraiche.' (Incidentally, the recipe for Chocolate orange croque comes under one titled ‘Nigella’s deep-fried Bounty bars with pineapple’. Perhaps those letter writers should have held their adjectival fire for something more deserving.)

Alison Wall, pastry chef at Mo Mo restaurant in Melbourne, puts the chocolate-and-orange debate in context. ‘I  don’t really get into milk chocolate and orange,’ she says. ‘But done with consideration, it’s a beautiful combo. I love orange and dark chocolate, which can have those really tropical overtones.’ She points to dark chocolates such as Valrhona's Manjari that ‘get a sort of tanginess in the top register that goes beautifully with orange’. She confesses also, to sneaking a little of the Belgian orange liqueur Mandarine Napoleon into chocolate petit pots.

My orange and chocolate indulgence is a recipe that's humble enough for my modest pastry skills to master, but still has a flash of brilliance. The basic brownie recipe is drawn from English food writer Nigel Slater’s delicious new book, The Kitchen Diaries (Fourth Estate, 2006) and then embellished. I've done it once with pistachios and the zest of three oranges; another time with freshly cracked pecans, the zest of four oranges and, as an experiment, about quarter of a teaspoon of finely diced Guangdong Jiabao Group Corp preserved mandarin peel discovered at the back of the pantry and bought during a trip to southern China. Each time, a luscious result—the second time, cooked for less time, even more so, the citrus tones offereing a lovely, lifted note.

It occurs to me that for a kooky result, you could add Allens Jaffas as well or instead of the orange zest. Or, to be a little haughtier, try Boyajian Pure Orange Oil. It’s tricky to get the cooking time right. I find it needs more than 30 minutes but too much more and you risk burning it.

Oh, and who else was going to lick those beaters?

Orange Pecan Brownies

300g golden caster sugar
250g butter
250g chocolate (70% cocoa solids)
3 large eggs, plus 1 extra egg yolk
60g plain flour
60g finest chocolate cocoa powder
½ teaspoon baking powder

1 cup shelled pecan or pistachio nuts

Zest of four oranges

You will need a baking tin, about 23cm square, preferably non-stick, or a small roasting tin. Set the oven at 180 degrees. Line the bottom of the baking tin with baking parchment. Put the sugar and butter into the bowl of a food mixer and beat for several minutes, till white and fluffy. You can do this by hand if you have to, but you need to keep going until the mixture is really soft and creamy.
Meanwhile, break the chocolate into pieces, set 50g of it aside and melt the rest in a bowl suspended over, but not touching, a pan of simmering water. As soon as the chocolate is completely melted, remove it from the heat. Chop the remaining 50g into gravel-sized pieces.
Break the eggs into a small bowl and beat them lightly with a fork. Sift together the flour, cocoa and baking powder and mix in a pinch of salt. With the machine running slowly, introduce the beaten egg a little at a time, speeding up between additions. Remove the bowl from the mixer to the work surface and mix in the melted and the chopped chocolate with a large metal spoon. Add the nuts and orange zest. Lastly, use a large stainless steel spoon to fold in the flour and cocoa mixture, gently, firmly, without knocking any of the air out.
Scrape the mixture into the prepared cake tin, smooth the top and bake for 30 minutes. The top will have risen slightly and the cake will appear slightly softer in the middle than around the edges. Pierce the centre of the cake with a fork; it should come out sticky but not with raw mixture attached to it. If it does, then return the brownie to the oven for three more minutes. It is worth remembering that it will solidify a little on cooling, so if it appears a bit wet, don’t worry. Leave to cool for at least an hour before cutting into squares. Enough for 12.