Blood orange and walnut cakes

I was unbelievably excited to come across a bounty of blood oranges in the imperfect pick section (there is a special place in my heart for wonky produce) of my fruit and veg store last week. But the thrill of the find fast faded when I remembered that previous excursions into baking with blood oranges had ended in disappointment as their stunning colour is never replicated in the end product. At best you end up with something that just looks like you'd used regular oranges, at worst, baked goods the unappetising shade of a Band-Aid. So I scoured the internet searching for a recipe that promised to preserve that glorious kaleidoscope of red, pink and orange. 

I'd had some success before, with this upside-down cake. Clearly the key is keeping slices intact, so as to showcase the spectacular colour of the fruit in all its glory. This recipe for blood orange and walnut cakes, from Anneka Manning, uses a similar technique but goes a simple step further by first poaching the orange slices in a sugar syrup, which seems to even intensify the colour. The bright slices fit neatly into the bottoms of a muffin tin, the batter - ground walnuts, olive oil, sugar and the zest and flesh of a blood orange bound with a bit of flour - is dolloped on top and twenty minutes later, you have a dairy-free dessert (that can be augmented with ice-cream), an easily transportable treat and something to marvel at: sublime imperfection.

Blood orange and walnut cakes
Adapted from a recipe by Anneka Manning, via SBS Food 

Once the oranges are out of the sugar syrup, you could return the saucepan to the heat and boil the syrup five minutes longer til it's thickened then brush this on the cakes once they come out of the oven. I would have done this but I took my eye off the ball and burned my syrup so decided to do without - to no ill effect so if you can't be bothered, know that these are brilliant just as below.

Cake

75 g walnuts, toasted
1 blood orange
220 g (1 cup) sugar
100 ml olive oil, plus extra to grease
2 eggs, at room temperature
150 g (1 cup) self-raising flour (or 1 cup plain flour and 2 tsp baking powder)
cream or ice-cream, to serve, optional

Blood orange topping

220 g (1 cup) sugar
185 ml (¾ cup) water
2 small thin-skinned blood oranges (about 160 g each), thinly sliced (you need at least 12 slices)

Preheat oven to 190°C (170°C fan-forced). Grease a 12-hole 80ml (⅓ cup) muffin tin with extra olive oil.

To make the blood orange topping, combine the sugar and water in a saucepan and stir over medium heat until the sugar dissolves. Add the orange slices and bring to a simmer. Simmer over medium-low heat, without stirring, for 10-15 minutes or until the rind become translucent but the flesh is still intact. Carefully remove the orange slices and place a slice in the bottom of each of the greased muffin holes to line the base.

To make the cake, blitz the walnuts in the bowl of a food processor until finely ground. Zest the blood orange, then use a small sharp knife to remove the white pith. Roughly chop the flesh and discard any seeds. Place the orange rind and flesh, sugar, olive oil and eggs in the food processor with the ground walnuts and process until well combined. Transfer to a bowl and fold in the flour.

Divide the batter evenly among the muffin pans over the orange slices. Bake in for 20-25 minutes or until a skewer inserted into the centre of a cake comes out clean. 

Remove from the oven and set aside for 5 minutes before turning onto a wire rack.

Moroccan-spiced tea loaf

Once a year, in December, I make fruitcake. It's my grandmother's recipe. In my family, it was first made by her, then by my mother, now by me, and mainly for my dad, who's been eating it at Christmas for pretty well all of his life. It requires a truck load of dried fruit, soaking it liberally in booze, and a sleep after eating a slice. Sometimes, in seasons other than summer, I have a craving for fruitcake but just thinking about what making it entails - a trip to the supermarket, an overnight soaking of fruit, an enormous cake that takes weeks to get through - is enough to quell that desire... or at least it was until I came across this recipe in the newspaper last weekend.

Miraculously, this is a fruitcake in loaf form that can be whipped up semi-spontaneously (granted you still need to a trip to the supermarket and to soak the dried fruit but ingeniously, in hot tea rather than alcohol), contains only one egg, and no dairy at all. I was dubious, at first thinking there must have been a typo in the recipe, but no. It works wonderfully. The resultant loaf is rich and fruity, warm with spice, and scrumptious sliced thickly and slathered in butter. My grandmother would certainly approve, even if she might swap the unfamiliar Moroccan spice for something more standard like cinnamon, and write it up in her recipe book as Fast Fruitcake.

Fresh ginger and molasses cake

I had a traumatic week last week. Not world-endingly traumatic, just the kind that could be cured by cake. So I made one. During a heatwave in southern California a few months ago, I came across this recipe while flipping through my friend's cookbooks, laying low, sapped of energy by the sun. Molasses is such a fantastic sounding word and conjured up how we all felt at the time, sticky and slow. It wasn't the weather for it then, but now in November, during these days of crisp, cool, sunny Sydney weather, the time was right. The fresh ginger sings in this not-too-sweet, incredibly soft, dramatically dark cake, which goes perfectly with a cup of tea. The original recipe is for a layer cake, vanilla cream slathered between the layers and atop, but I just halved the quantities, made a single layer, dusted it with icing sugar and called it done. Delicious.

Chocolate midnight cake

This week I made two chocolate cakes. Both were oil (rather than butter) based. One was a triumph and the other... the less said about it the better. The big difference in the recipes was in the choice of chocolate. The flop used melted dark chocolate, the success story cocoa.

This cake - from former Chez Panisse chef Samin Nosrat's Salt Fat Acid Heat - is deliciously dark and amazingly, dairy-free (should you choose to serve without the cream). It's brilliant for birthdays and celebrations, and easy enough for weekday cooking. Because of the oil, it keeps beautifully so can always be made ahead of time. Not that it's at all labour intensive. Including cooking time, it takes about forty minutes. So simple. Spectacular. Sold.

Almond cake

When I moved to Sydney and, ultimately, out of home, my farewell present from my friends was a food processor. The same one is still going strong today, pulverising and puréeing like the day I got it, about eighteen years ago now. I used it last week to make an almond cake for a friend who's dairy-free. A little like a Middle-Eastern orange cake in that its keystone ingredients are whole, boiled citrus (in this case, lemon as well as orange) and almonds - both of which necessitate sharp blades to blitz and blend - it also incorporates olive oil and a small amount of flour, for leavening. Something a bit different for a kitchen work horse that I'm grateful remains exactly the same. 

Norwegian crispbread

It's been way too hot. On days where the only way to survive is to seek out a cinema or shopping centre and its air-conditioning, on nights where the temperature doesn't drop below 30 degrees (86F), I can't even contemplate turning on the stove. In such times, these crispbreads have been my salvation. Topped with whatever you like - blue cheese and pear paste, goats' cheese and salmon, butter and Vegemite - they offer up something substantial and stunning for times when you don't even have the energy to eat. And they conjure up cold with their Scandi sensibility when you're in the middle of a stinking Sydney summer.

Calabrian walnut cake

Sometimes, words are hard to come by. And for those times, there's cake. This one happily requires very few words as there are but four ingredients: walnuts, eggs, sugar and lemon zest. Brilliantly simple, deeply delicious and gluten and dairy free to boot. Make it and marvel.

Calabrian walnut cake (torta di noci)
Adapted from a recipe on Food52 from Ada Boni's Regional Italian Cooking (1960)

This is the sort of cake that gets better with age, so is improved by being made ahead of time.




3/4 pound (340 grams or about 3 cups) shelled walnuts
4 eggs, separated 
1 cup (225 grams) caster (superfine) sugar
zest of one lemon
icing (confectioners') sugar for dusting (optional)   


Pulverize the walnuts in a food processor until you have a coarse meal, the texture of sand.

Grease and line a round 9-inch cake pan.
 
Beat the egg yolks with the sugar until pale and creamy. Add the lemon zest and walnut meal and stir to combine. 

Whisk the egg whites in a separate bowl until they form stiff peaks. Fold the whites bit by bit into the walnut mixture until well combined.  

Pour the mixture into the prepared cake pan and bake at 375º F (190º C) for about 50 minutes, or until the top is firm and browned nicely. Let cool completely in the pan before removing and dust with icing sugar to serve.
 

Forgotten cookies

Some things are worth making just for the name alone. Or in this case if you're travelling north to work with a colleague who's gluten-free and you need something sweet to power both of you through two days of script meetings. I was tossing up between lime polenta cake (made in a bar tin) or little lemon polenta cakes (small, stackable) when I remembered forgotten cookies. This recipe, from Chicago chef Sarah Gruneberg infuses beaten egg whites with sugar, cardamom and vanilla and winds through sour cherries, dark chocolate and toasted pecans. The dough - such as it is without flour or even, miraculously, dairy - is dolloped into spoonfuls onto a baking tray, sprinkled with sea salt, baked for five minutes and left in the oven overnight. In the morning, you're rewarded with little boulders of meringue. Crisp on the outside, with a chewy, marshmallow-like interior containing crunch, combining sweet and sour... once tried, never forgotten.

Chocolate orange date truffles

Food presents are my favourite. Among the best I've received in recent years: vanilla beans from Bali, a catering-size container of corn relish from Tasmania, biscotti baked in one hemisphere and mailed to another, home-roasted coffee beans, a dozen hot cross buns from my favourite Hobart bakery, a tin of homemade biscuits to last through Christmas and beyond, my mother's green pawpaw chutney (which I'm lucky enough to have a lifetime supply of thanks to her obsessive need to bottle everything she ever grew), and last week, a huge haul of premium grade cocoa from my American cousin Amy, transported across the Pacific Ocean and lugged halfway around Australia by her parents, who've been out here visiting. To thank them for being such good-natured cocoa-mules, I wanted to make them something with it to say thank you. I wanted to make something the gluten-free giver of the gift could eat, even if she wouldn't get to taste this particular batch (her folks are heading home on a three week cruise). Something to showcase the cocoa, in all its dark, bitter beauty. Happily I had just the recipe. It required only a handful of ingredients, all easily available: dates, orange, walnuts and cocoa. Blended together, rolled in extra cocoa to make an elegant truffle that just so happens to be gluten-free and dairy-free too. There's no refined sugar but the natural sweetness of the date and the orange in combination with the richness of the nuts and the cocoa create a taste not unlike the very best dark chocolate... which if you've recently OD'd on supermarket-grade milk chocolate Easter eggs, you will appreciate all the more. Just like a thoughtful gift*. 


* special shout out to my friend George too, for the beautiful plate these truffles sit on, which may not be edible but makes anything that goes near it infinitely more so.

Sichuan celery with beef

I don't cook a lot of Asian food. It's not because I don't like it. The problem - such that it is - is that I live somewhere it's possible to get a good pad Thai for less than $10. And whenever I have made Asian dishes, I not only end up with something that's often inferior to what I can get cheaply within walking distance, but a million bottles and jars that forever after just clink around mostly full in the door of my fridge. But this! This is a relatively recent discovery that requires the purchase of only one jar you're not likely to have already, and is so good and so simple you'll be making it with such frequency that your problem will likely be that you run out, not it's never used. This dish started out as a way to use up leftover celery and quickly became the reason I bought the bunch. It's crunchy and spicy, satisfyingly meaty yet light (it really is celery with beef, not beef with celery). It's got a short list of ingredients, needs barely any prep and takes about five minutes to cook. With the addition of a fried egg on top, it's comfort food that sustains instead of sending you to sleep... or to the local Chinese takeaway.

Whole chicken and leek soup

This week, it got cold, and I got a cold. Let me start by saying I am no good at being sick. By this I mean I am not stoic in suffering. Because I know this, and don't like to be around sick me as much as anyone else, I throw everything I can think of at getting better. This means gargling with salt water, drinking copious amounts of ginger tea and grapefruit juice, swallowing spoonfuls of Manuka honey and raw garlic, dabbing dots of tea-tree oil at the back of my throat, steaming my bowling ball head with Vicks Vapour Rub, and soup. Lots of soup. 

The restorative powers of chicken soup are well-documented. It's clear, and comforting and well, clean, which, when your body feels like it's been overtaken by germs, is no small thing. This recipe, by Australian cookbook doyenne Margaret Fulton, poaches a whole chicken in an onion-infused water or broth, then takes it out to remove its skin and bones, chops its white flesh into bite-size pieces and adds it back to the pot with fat rounds of leek and carrot. With a bit of parsley torn on top and a few grinds of black pepper it's simple and satisfying and just feels like it's making you better. At the very least, it makes you stop, and sit and savour, while you peruse the official FIFA World Cup Guide and decide which team you will support after Australia (Argentina!) and flip through cookbooks deciding what you will cook when you get up at 2 and 4am for a month to watch matches. It's going to be a busy June/July. Lucky I got the cold out of the way. And some soup in the freezer. Whether you're sick or well, or just crazy enough to forgo sleep for four weeks of football once every four years, it's always good to have on hand.

Honeyed rhubarb with blood orange

In this, my first week in Denmark, I've become a little obsessed with skyr. I first became aware of it when I saw it on the menu at Grød, a cafe on the street I'm staying in, where it was offered as an accompaniment for porridge. Intrigued, I returned to my apartment and did a little research. It turns out skyr is a cultured dairy product from Iceland, dating back to medieval times. If that wasn't enough to make me go out in search of some immediately, it's also made with skimmed milk, so has an extremely low fat content but somehow the same delicious tang and texture as Greek yoghurt. On the way back from the supermarket with my Icelandic treasure, I passed one of the Middle-eastern fruit and vegetable stands scattered all over this neighbourhood and spied quinces for sale. Poached in a sugar syrup til ruby red (if you want the recipe for that, click here), with the skyr they were incredible. So incredible they were gone all too quickly. And that's where rhubarb came in. 

Even though I'm bundled up in winter clothes, signs of spring are everywhere in Copenhagen: flowers pushing up through the frozen ground in the Assistens Cemetery, people sitting at sunny tables outside cafés, and at the farmers' markets at Torvehallerne, where I purchased the most stunning stalks of rhubarb I've ever seen: slender, pale pink, perfect. I wanted both a recipe that didn't mess with their natural beauty too much, and - of course - something that would go nicely with skyr. Nigel Slater had just the thing. The rhubarb is cut into short lengths, and roasted in a low oven with the honey, cinnamon, star anise, and the juice and squeezed halves of a blood orange. Thirty minutes later, dessert was ready. Or breakfast. Sweet and sharp, gently warm in spice and shade: the taste of spring.

Ann's biscotti

Certain food I associate with certain people. Chutney, for instance, is my mum's domain. My friend Tammy is famous for her croissants. And my cousin Ann for biscotti. I first had her version of the sweet, dry Italian biscuit on my first trip to the United States, back when I was just twenty-one. When I had an Arts degree with a double major in French, a suitcase full of borrowed winter clothes, and no clue about what direction my life was to take. I didn't know much back then, but I knew I liked those cookies. Previously, the only exposure I'd had to biscotti was the wafer-thin kind found (mostly crushed) in packets in delis where I'd worked. These were the polar opposite - chunky, generous, studded with thick slivers of almond, and perfumed with the aroma of anise seed.

This part of the world with all its mountains and water holds many memories for me. Learning how to make biscotti one rainy winter afternoon - watching hands I know so well make something I love - adds another. I hope sharing the recipe doesn't mean Ann will stop making them for me. I'm priviliged to be on the receiving list at all. It's an exclusive club this biscotti one, comprised of a select few. Some of us with international membership. 

When she bakes them, Ann usually makes a double batch. She's tried tripling the mixture but doesn't recommend it (all works to keep things exclusive). What she does recommend is dunking them in vin santo... or coffee, or tea, as their structure is hardy enough to absorb the liquid without disintegrating into a soggy mess. That's their genius. This cookie doesn't crumble. Not even packed in a suitcase. Lucky me.

Meringues

In Australia, the closest we get to anything white at this time of year is pavlova, a show-stopper dessert made with egg whites and sugar, served cold in place of pudding on Christmas Day. Topped with cream and summer fruit it's perfect for our stinking hot late December weather and curious custom of eating smack bang in the middle (ie: the hottest part) of the day. Meringues are like pavlova's little sister(s). Sweet, snowy and swirly with the same crunchy exterior and pillowy, marshmallow-like interior, they're great anytime, anywhere and for almost anyone - an easy solution to dinner party dessert dilemmas if you have gluten or dairy-intolerant guests.

Meringues are good all by themselves of course, but better still topped with complementary tastes and textures: soft cream, tangy yoghurt, fresh fruit, crunchy nuts...  really, you can dress them up any way you like. My favourite is with a dollop of cream, some lemon or lime curd and a sprinkling of chopped pistachios. 

Happy Christmas. Happy holidays. Happy summer. Winter. Wednesday. Whenever. Just happy.

Tahini and date syrup cake

My mother used to bribe us with food. Neither my brother or I had much interest in learning the piano but we had boundless enthusiasm for the treats we'd get for afternoon tea at the deli cafe next door to the music school where our lessons were held. I'm pretty sure it was there I first had halva, the dense, sweet and crumbly Middle-eastern confection made from sesame seeds. It was halva that came to mind when I tasted this cake, relatively new to my repertoire. I've made it three times now, in quick succession. I'd never used tahini before in anything sweet and it was a revelation. Though this cake looks complicated, it's easily one of the more simple I've ever made in both ingredients and technique. It's excellent with tea or coffee, sophisticated enough for a dinner party, humble enough for morning tea, enjoyed equally by kids and adults, and the sort of thing that if you make once, you're sure to make again and again. It's chewy and moist, sweet and sesame-y and entirely dairy-free.

Eventually we gave up the piano. My grandfather was disappointed. He thought it a good skill to have for parties. To date I have not attended a gathering where piano playing was called for but every day I'm grateful to my mum for teaching me to cook. No matter the age, or the social occasion, cake is perennially popular.

Chocolate orange cake

Last week it was my friend Joanna's birthday. So I made her a cake. When I'm cooking for Joanna, the stakes are high. She's an excellent cook...  and an adventurous one. She has a piping bag and a blow torch - for brûlée not welding - and the ability and patience (and need with two small daughters) to make cakes in the shape of barnyard animals and geometrically difficult numerals involving multiple tins and creative assembly. I can't compete with that. So I went the other way, with my limited craft skills and a fail-safe recipe.

This cake - a variation on the Middle-Eastern orange cake - couldn't be more simple... or delicious. Here, cocoa is added to the traditional mix of boiled orange, eggs, sugar and almond meal, resulting in a stunningly light chocolate cake - nutty, citrussy and incredibly moreish. It's brilliant as a light dessert at a dinner party (when you've probably already overfed your guests), as something decadent for those who don't eat gluten or dairy, a treat to take camping (it's so moist it keeps for days), or with a cup of tea on a sunny Saturday morning to celebrate a birthday of a friend... who liked it so much she asked for the recipe. Here it is!

Date, cashew and coconut truffles

I eat everything - meat, dairy, gluten, sugar... everything that is, except what those with food allergies, dietary restrictions or particular ethical beliefs routinely eat (and enjoy) because they can't eat those things. I'm squeamish about soy milk. I'm suspicious of margarine and other chemically-manufactured substitute products (though I'm grateful that whatever that is my dad spreads on his toast is lowering his cholesterol). To me, TVP sounds more like a disease than something I'd ever feel like tucking into, and as for tofu ice-cream, I'm not the slightest bit curious. Quite possibly this prejudice of mine is a problem. But I'm not inclined to work on it - not even remotely - when there are recipes like these featuring everyday, natural, wholly delectable ingredients that allow me to cook for the people in my life with dietary restrictions and myself at the same time. We all win.

These truffles contain neither butter nor cream yet they're rich, decadent and delicious while still being gluten-free, dairy-free and even vegan. A lactose-intolerant friend tried one and remarked that it tasted "like it should be much worse for you than it actually is", which was about as high a compliment as it could have possibly received. So go on, have another. I'm going to.

Middle Eastern orange cake

If you’re in your thirties, live in Australia and like to cook, odds are that prominent in your kitchen is a fat orange tome.  Stephanie Alexander’s The Cook’s Companion is the cookbook of my generation.  Arranged by ingredient, it goes from A-Z with more recipes and cooking advice than you can possibly imagine.  Got a surfeit of asparagus and no idea what to do with it?  Ask Stephanie.  Want instructions for how to roast lamb?  Look under L.  Wondering what dill goes with?  You know the answer.  I’ve made many things from it over the years, but none more than this cake.  Maybe because in colour it matches the book.  Or maybe because it’s so effortless (apart from the boiling of the oranges, which you can do ahead of time, it's merely a matter of combining a small number of ingredients).  Maybe it’s because it’s made with almond meal, and therefore able to be served to my growing number of gluten-free friends and family.  Maybe just because it’s so good.   

So from an Australian classic, a Middle Eastern recipe that made two Americans very happy when I made it as their wedding cake last year.  Amy and Ewan, this one’s for you.

Chocolate puddle cookies

So I had some egg whites to use up.  The last few weeks I've been running down my supplies, eating my way through the contents of my freezer, the bulk of which is surplus stock of whatever meals I've made in the last week, or month or (more likely I suspect) months, plural.  In theory I should enjoy - not to mention find convenient - retrieving something delicious that's available to me instantaneously (or at least, in the time it takes to resurrect it in the microwave) but the truth is, I miss cooking.  Food somehow doesn't taste the same when it's prepared with a bing rather than a hiss or a chop or a bubble.  So imagine my excitement when I found, tucked away behind the catering company quantities of chicken soup (prepared for a monster cold that never eventuated) and solid blocks of Bolognese, a little ziplock bag labelled EGGWHITES X 2.  As it happened, just that week, in a bout of serious food blog procrastination to fill the cooking void, I'd come across a recipe for chocolate puddle cookies.  

The name alone was enough to make me look, the accompanying image further encouragement.  Having made them, I now know it was no false advertising.  These cookies are seriously good, their crisp, cracked exterior giving way to a moist, chewy centre.  Miraculously, they manage to have an intense chocolate flavour without the usual heaviness that accompanies such an indulgence because they're made without butter or flour.  Not that I'm averse to either but some people are, so it's good to have a recipe up my sleeve that satisfies their needs without compromising my own sense of identity (as an eater of all good things).    

My freezer is empty now, my little kitchen a hemisphere away.  I won't be cooking for a while but I've got lots of recipes stored up to share in the weeks ahead.  Hopefully it'll be as therapeutic as finding those eggwhites.