If you're a baker, words that will strike fear into your heart are "I'm a vegan". A cake without eggs or butter, or any sort of dairy at all seems somehow lacking in essential joy, not to mention texture or taste. At least that's what I would have said last week.
A good friend of mine recently had a birthday. She had also recently become vegan. As luck would have it, I'd just seen an episode of one of Nigella Lawson's cooking shows in which she'd made something she called a lemon tendercake. It looked absolutely delicious and amazingly, happened to contain no animal products whatsoever. Better still, it called for no strange substitutes, featured flavours I loved and honestly couldn't have been easier to make. The miracle ingredient here is coconut. The creamy milk binds the batter and a yoghurt made from it (you don't have to make it yourself - it's readily available in supermarkets) serves as a sort of icing, adding an thick tang to the lighter than air lemony cake below and the sharp sweetness of the blueberries above. All together, it really does look quite spectacular and it made my friend very happy. This is a great cake not just for vegans but for all of us trying to reduce our dependence on animal products in the midst of this climate crisis. And an extraordinary cake in its own right.
I made a cake. It's been a while. After meeting all my deadlines, the sun was out Saturday and so I baked. This recipe I'd had bookmarked for a while. It had a short list of ingredients, always a winner in my book, and came with authentic Italian credentials (likewise). It contained ricotta, of which I have a seemingly endless supply in my freezer (compulsively making it when milk is about to expire) and there's nothing I like more than being able to cook with pantry staples. So. I've made many a ricotta cake before - this one is a perennial favourite - but this distinguished itself from the others by by featuring apple among its ingredients. You can't so much taste the fruit itself, just its subtle sweetness. Leavened with a little flour, rich with ricotta and bolstered with butter, it's simple and decadent all at once. I don't know Louisa but her cake is excellent. Grazie.
Sometimes I stray across a recipe that I'm moved to make straight away. Such was the case last week when the ever-reliable Smitten Kitchen published a recipe for an Italian tea cake I'd never heard of called ciambellone. I have no idea really how to pronounce this but in my head it sounds like cymbals being smashed together as in look and taste that's its effect. Further cause for celebration - it's a one bowl affair, oil-based (so no melting or creaming of butter) and I had almost all of the ingredients already, including (as a bonus) eggs from my Dad's chooks he'd brought with him in his carry-on luggage for a weekend visit. We'd planned a drive and no road trip is complete without a thermos and a treat to have with it. We had ours at a point in a park looking out at endless water. And again, back at home, for afternoon tea.
Incredibly, this is the 200th recipe I've posted here. For a while, I wasn't sure if I'd post it at all because in my haste to carve up this cake and serve it I didn't get a great photo but if this isn't a celebration cake, I don't know what is. Nothing says decadence like a dessert containing a budget-blowing boatload of pistachios. Roasted and chopped, they're bound with eggs, sugar, lemon zest and a dash of rosewater and baked into what is essentially, in taste and texture, one large macron - a sweet, chewy centre cased in a crisp exterior... with mascarpone cream and roasted plums piled on top. The end result is elegant, effortless, gluten-free and most importantly, delicious. Especially on a sticky Sunday afternoon in Brisbane surrounded by friends.
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.
I'm sorry this post is so late. I can explain. You see, my cousin got married in London a week or so ago and I took advantage of being over the other side of the world to take a break and recover from the first half of the year, which has been - all cake, pies and tarts aside - pretty brutal. So I've been in my spiritual home, Scandinavia, eating my weight in cardamom buns and trying to sleep in for the first time in ages only to be in a particular place at a particular time of the year where the sun rises at 3.49am (after setting not that many hours earlier). But before that I
was in Hobart. Hobart where stone fruit weighs down the limbs of backyard
trees, where berries grow by the side of the road, free for the
taking... but not so much in winter. Which is where jam comes in - jam
made in the warmer months so even with coats and heaters on, it feels
like summer. At least in terms of dessert.
I made these bakewell tarts back in early July with the assistance of my favourite Tasmanian red-haired baker,
whose mum (an amazing cook in her own right) was responsible for the
incredible jam that oozed out of these like a lovely sweet surprise... which sadly I don't have any photographic evidence of. On the southernmost tip of the southern hemisphere we were fighting fast diminishing late afternoon light when these came out of the oven. So you'll just have to trust me that they're good. Very good. Fruity, with smooth frangiapane, the crunch of flaked almonds, and a crisp, crumbly, shortcrust pastry. Save yourself the airfare and the jetlag, making these conjures summer in the depths of winter. And afterwards you can sleep in.
December and January are - in Australia anyway - associated with one cake. Though it's often called Christmas cake, fruit cake straddles the summer. For me it's evocative of catching up with rellies in between present shopping and menu planning in the lead up to the 25th, and of morning teas in rest areas on road trips in the new year. It goes as well with bone china, as it does with tea from a thermos. My grandmother Irene, who I've talked about here before, many times, was famous for her fruitcake. When she died, my mother took up the tradition, and now, this year, it falls to me. In mum's cooking files, I found my grandmother's original handwritten recipe. Curiously, it listed only the ingredients, and no mention of method, but after a little internet research I was able to take a stab at how they combined. The key point of difference in any fruit cake, it seems, is whether or not the fruit is boiled. From what I gather, the boiling is a shortcut to allow you to make the cake the day you want to eat it, speeding the softening of the dried fruit. My grandmother did not believe in short cuts, so I elected to take the long road and soak the fruit the night before. Really, this took no time at all and required nothing more than a bit of measuring out. The next day, it was just a matter of combining the plumped, boozy fruit with the remaining ingredients to form a rich, robust batter, pouring it into a tin and baking it for three hours in a slow (low) oven. Though I didn't have either of my senior fruit cake advisers on hand, I did have the help of my dad's 16 year old neighbour William, a keen baker with 2nd and 3rd place wins in the fruit cake division of the Brookfield Show behind him. On the lookout for a prospective 1st place recipe, he offered his services and I gratefully accepted. I'm pleased to report it was a win for both of us, the cake pulled from the oven as good as I remembered my grandmother's and my mother's: deep brown, moist, and fragrant with citrus, dried fruit and the memory of those who'd made it before me.
