Everyday cake is not so much cake to be eaten seven days a week, but one that can be made in a pinch with pantry staples. If you have unexpected visitors or a sweet itch that needs to be scratched. Or feel like making a cake, but not going to the shops. This is that cake.
Butter, honey, flour, milk, and eggs are things most of us have on hand at any time. Most fruit bowls will contain a lemon. Rhubarb, I'll concede, isn't a regular in anyone's shopping basket but any fruit will do, though the more tart types - like raspberries - will balance out the sweetness of the honey... as does a dollop of Greek yoghurt.
The honey (in place of sugar) gives the finished cake a beautiful burnished gold exterior, and the rhubarb a pretty pop of pink. Every day should be this good.
On Saturday I made a cake. On Sunday I went on a picnic. I wrapped a chunk of cake in foil, and packed it and a pocket knife. With friends, I caught the ferry across the harbour and walked along a shady, gumtree-lined path hugging the water til we reached a perfect picnic spot, with shade and views of white sailboats skating across the blue. The cake was approved by picnickers and ants alike. And tasted just as good the next day at home.
This cake is similar to some in my citrus repertoire but different in subtle ways. Unlike lemon yoghurt cake, it's made with olive oil, not butter. It kind of ressembles the lemon polenta cakes, but swaps a coarse yellow grain for a fine white one. It's got the nutty flavour of Middle-eastern orange cake, but the tang of yoghurt and fragrance of honey. So it's a bit of everything. And tastes better for it. Inside, outside, anywhere.
In January this year, I did a road trip with a friend down Highway One, on the west coast of the US. The starting point for our trip was San Francisco and before leaving, we stocked up on snacks at the Ferry Plaza Farmers market down at the waterfront. In addition to the many stands outside selling the most amazing fresh produce (and Blue Bottle coffee), there were permanent stores inside just as incredible - cheeses, meats, and bakeries galore... which is how I found myself at Miette, a San Francisco institution, surrounded by delicate pastries, decadent cakes and countless other dazzling sugary treats. My fellow road-tripper Christina, a New Yorker, but frequent visitor to San Fran and Miette, pointed at a downright homely looking cookie - brown, flat, and round. That, she pronounced emphatically. That is what you want. I looked around at the other more obviously enticing choices - pretty pastel macarons, chocolate sablés glittering with salt crystals, elaborate multi-layer cakes - then at Christina's face, which said trust me and I ordered the graham crackers. I'm so glad I did.
I'd read about graham crackers for years. They were always in American recipes as the biscuit base of a cheesecake, or in children's books as an after school snack. What were they, I wondered? Like a milk arrowroot? A gingernut? A shredded wheatmeal? Or maybe they were savoury, as the name cracker seemed to imply, like a Vita-Wheat or a Salada. (It occurs to me as I write this how oddly-named every country's traditional biscuits/cookies are) It turns out there is no Australian equivalent.
Graham crackers are basically buttery, honey-flavoured cookies made with wholemeal flour.
As noted, they're nothing to look at, but their homeliness is their greatest strength. There's something incredibly comforting about this unassuming cookie. They're warm (honey! brown sugar!) and delicious and easy to make, the sort of everyday cookie you can rely on. You know what else is everyday? The sunset. I saw plenty of those that trip, as I ate my way through that box of graham crackers. And both were spectacular.
I didn't mean to post - or bake - another pie so soon. But this weekend was the first one off I'd had in the last three weeks and I wanted to celebrate. I'd been invited to my friend Elizabeth's place for dinner on Friday night, I'd offered to bring dessert, and this recipe had been calling me ever since I got my hands on The Four & Twenty Blackbirds Pie Book early in the new year. Other than a dip in the ocean (which I also indulged in), what better reward could there be?
Salty/sweet is a truly magic combination. Here, the creamy custard of the honey filling is offset by fat flakes of sea salt so that the two flavours mingle in your mouth and draw you back for more, like siren song. That's what happened to us on Friday night. After consuming modest slices, we each went back in for just one more sliver...
Be warned: this pie is not for the faint of heart. There's a serious sugar component which is less a hit as it is a knockout punch. If this pie were a person (in contention for an Oscar next week), it would be Jennifer Lawrence's character Rosalyn in one of my favourite films of last year, American Hustle: seductive, surprising... and crazy dangerous. Don't make it in the science oven.
Last week, I flew halfway around the world to make a cake with my friend Linus. Linus is four and the son of my extremely talented and very dear friend Dorka, who I was at film school with in Brisbane what seems both a long time ago and just yesterday. She and Linus and his dad Kevin now live in New Orleans, which is a long way from Sydney, which means I can't see them as much as I'd like to. This is the case with so many of my good friends who are scattered all over. Many of them have kids now and it's hard not to be more a part of their lives, to be there for things like birthdays and growth spurts and school concerts. So when I do get to hang out with them, I like to bake. It gives us something to do together, a way to get to know each other, and something for us both to remember. I know every time I make this cake, I'll think of Linus, and hopefully when he (and his mum or dad) make it again, he'll think of me.
Linus is American, of
Hungarian-Chinese heritage. I'm Australian, of Scottish-Irish stock.
We came together in New Orleans, a Southern US city with distinctly French
Creole influences. So naturally, we made a Polish cake. It's a melting pot this city, what can I tell you? Only about streets lined with grand timber houses and long-limbed, leafy trees, thunderstorms that go on all day (and all night), catfish po'boys in bars in back streets, slow-moving streetcars, the bottom of a bag of beignets filled with (I swear) about a pound of powdered sugar, fork lightening on the Mississippi, and, of course, jazz - on street corners, in bars, in the very rhythms of this place...
But back to Linus' cake. That's what I'm going to call it anyway. Just like its namesake, it's a keeper. Lightly sweetened with honey (and very little additional sugar), its flavour is rich and deep, its top crunchy with almonds and its exterior deliciously sticky. If you can't make it with a friend, at least share it with some... or be warned: you may eat the whole thing yourself.
Food is my favourite way to remember people. This week it's my grandmother's birthday. My father's mother Irene was a huge figure in my life growing up. For good reason. She was glamorous, she was indulgent (as all good grandmothers are meant to be), and she was a wonderful cook. As a kid, I spent most Saturday nights at her house,
which, as a bonus, meant I was often there on Sunday for her morning tea, a weekly spread attended by her immediate family - her brother and his wife, her sister and her husband - as well as my grandfather. And frequently, my brother and I. By necessity, it was a big table and each week it was laden with delicious food and steaming cups of tea. My grandmother was famous for her fruitcake, but I used to like helping put bits of gherkin or corn relish atop cheese on Jatz crackers, and fancied myself quite talented at arranging them pleasingly on any one of her many decorative platters. The real golden age of morning tea however, was before my time. A time before cholesterol (and the more beige era of oat bran and polyunsaturated oil). My dad remembers fondly the treats his mother routinely turned out when he was a boy: homemade Monte Carlo biscuits, pineapple meringue pies (she was a Queenslander, after all) and these, his favourite: honey cakes.
These predate cupcakes, and muffins, and other such airy, modern tea-time fare. They're nicely dense, which is these days, a rather unexpected texture in a baked good. And the honey imparts a lovely flavour and a beautiful fragrance to both cake and icing. As it's my Dad's birthday this month too, I thought I'd make these to remember my grandmother, and celebrate my dad. I love them both. And take my tea exactly as they did and do: weak, black, no sugar. The legacy of morning tea lives on, just a little further south.
I never got French toast. The appeal of soggy, milky, eggy fried bread was lost on me. Everything changed when I was introduced to this distant cousin of the original by my own distant cousin on my first trip to the United States. The difference here was that the bread was soaked not in milk, but orange juice (though an egg was still involved). It was not fried, but baked. And even better than that, the underside crisped and caramelised as it cooked, with no supervision required. I've made this French toast for years now and it has many converts, including my parents, who have been known to break with their routine porridge/muesli breakfast for it on my visits home. It's a great way to use use odd ends of stale bread, or oranges after you've used the zest for something else. I like to serve it with a dollop of yoghurt to undercut the sweetness, some raspberries and pistachios for texture (other combinations of fruit and nuts would work just as well I'll bet), and maple syrup for tradition. Any old ovenproof dish will do to bake it in but in my experience it tastes best (like most things) cooked in a cast iron frypan.
I first posted this recipe in September last year but somehow - in one of the great mysteries of the internet - it got knocked back into the draft section of my blog. So I'm reposting it, with better photos taken from this weekend, when I had the honour of making it for its creator - the one and only Ann Darling - who is visiting Australia and staying with me at the moment.
