Peach, raspberry and almond cake

 

 

A few weeks ago I went to Brisbane. It was my first trip in over a year because of all the border closures that have characterised COVID in Australia. In the whirlwind of catching up with all the people I hadn't seen in so long in a short space of time, I spent a delightful afternoon with my friend's daughters (one a high schooler, one primary) making a cake. It's a tradition now - every time I come up we cook. Once it was these little Ottolenghi teacakes, a total hit. Another time it was this pie. This trip, it was a peach, raspberry and almond cake. 

 

 

To be clear, I actually do no cooking, only supervision. My friend sits back with a coffee and watches with amusement as I adjudicate fights over who gets to crack how many eggs, or fold in the flour. I get a swim or a gymnastics/trampoline/diving/clarinet show while whatever it is is in the oven, then - best of all - we eat it afterwards with their parents. This time I didn't take photos, so when I got home I made the cake again myself.

 

I've been trying to make the most of the stone fruit while it's in season, and this cake is an excellent vehicle for it. The juiciness of the fruit is soaked up by the ground almonds, and its softness contrasts beautifully with the sprinkle of chopped nuts on top. The orange zest rounds it all out and as my story attests, it's absolutely not difficult to make, as long as you fairly distribute the cracking of the eggs among all parties (one each for the girls, and I did the third). The reviews were excellent, from the Queenslanders, to the bush turkey who stole some slices I took on a bush walk on the weekend, to my 85 year old neighbour returning the Tupperware that contained a wedge I left on her doorstep. Couldn't put it better myself: such good cake.

 

 

 

Welsh cakes

Once upon a time, I went to Wales. Well, it was May to be precise but the faraway is for its fairytale feel. My memories are of lush green, soft sun and sea mist. There were single lane roads (taken up with travelling tractors), and leeks on toast and Sunday roasts and... Welsh cakes. They were everywhere in Cardiff and the countryside - in specialty shops, in supermarkets, pubs and road side stalls. Eaten equally by builders, children and toffs in tearooms, there's something charmingly democratic about the Welsh cake.

Like a cross between a scone and a pikelet, Welsh cakes are a friendly tea-time treat. The traditional type are studded with sultanas, but you can use whatever you like - chocolate chips, orange zest, or any sort of dried fruit... Easy to whip up at short notice, these will keep in a tin to sustain you through a week of school lunches, a month of middle of the night football matches, or indeed, just morning tea.

Ciambellone

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.

Cardamom crumb cake

When is it acceptable to eat cake for breakfast? 
a) when it's your birthday
b) when in Rome (or more literally, for me, in Stanwell Park, where I frequently stay with friends who strongly believe that cake is a legitimate breakfast food)
c) when the cake in question contains cardamom, walnuts, coffee and orange zest, all of which can be found in pastries traditionally eaten in the morning
d) when you are planning to get up at 4am for the next month to watch the World Cup and need some extra incentive to exit your very warm bed

The answer for me, obviously, is all of the above. But with the World Cup approaching, I've been stashing treats in the freezer like a manic squirrel. Because you really do want something in your stomach to help you wake up when you set your alarm for the early hours - nothing too intensely sweet for first thing, just a little morsel to comfort you in the cold. This fits the brief nicely - cardamom, coffee, and sweet orange cake topped with a nubbly, buttery walnut crumb. It's good eaten warm, whether freshly baked (and studying the form guide) or reheated (straight from the freezer to the oven) for kick off.

Spice cake

As I get older I have a greater appreciation for simple cakes - the sort that wouldn't turn a head in a display case beside chocolate extravaganzas, towering layers of cream, or pretty pastel citrus showstoppers. These runners-up in the great beauty contest of the cake world are homely to say the least but what they lack in looks they more than make up for in flavour. This simple spice cake from Sweet is case in point, its boring brown exterior belying its complexity. Each bite contains so many different tastes - caramel from the brown sugar, tang from the sour cream, zing from the orange zest and peppery punch of mixed spice to round things off. Plain is perfect.

Semolina, coconut and marmalade cake

There are certain cooks whose recipes you trust unreservedly. Yotam Ottolenghi is one. Though he's famous for elevating the vegetable to the main course at dinner parties, it's the sweet chapters in his books I'm most drawn to. Perhaps because they have fewer ingredients than the others, or maybe because of my memories of visiting his delis in London, where you're greeted with Alice in Wonderland-style displays of dessert: little lime polenta cakes, massive meringues, spice-infused cookies... It's a cacophony of colour and flavours and as such the antithesis of the traditional English afternoon tea. No wonder his new cookbook focuses solely on sweet. Til it's released in September, I'll make do with the slim non-savoury sections in his other books. From Jerusalem comes this cake - ideal for making ahead (always a bonus) as it keeps well, and tastes even better the next day. It's a good one to have in your repertoire if you're catering for anyone with an intolerance for dairy - just leave off the Greek yoghurt when serving. And in loaf form it makes for the best sort of carry-on cake - whether you're boarding a flight or transporting it to the park for a picnic.

Orange blossom, yoghurt and cardamom cake

 

If you like to bake, birthday cake is the best. There is nothing nicer than making one for someone you love, unless that person is under ten and the cake in question has to resemble a Disney character or something similarly complex requiring graph paper, a work plan and multiple tins. I'm in awe of my friends with kids who routinely turn out these marvels. This cake was not for a kid but for a very good friend with a big double digit birthday, but there's no need for birthday cake to be grown up. All that matters is that it's sturdy (to hold up all those candles), sweet, and good enough to go back for seconds...

 

This one succeeds on all scores. As I gave as a birthday present, Hetty McKinnon's first cookbook Community, it was fitting that this recipe comes from her second, Neighbourhood. It's full of all sorts of good things (pistachios! orange blossom water! cardamom! yoghurt! cream cheese!) and presents the prettiest palette of pale orange, pink and green. I'm predisposed to orange as a cake flavour for birthdays - it's not just sweet but somehow joyful in its brightness, both in flavour and hue. 

 

Though fittingly celebratory, this is actually quite a modest cake, requiring only two eggs, a small (but sufficient) amount of icing and seriously, no technique at all - the butter is melted, so it's just a matter of combining the wet ingredients with the dry and bundling the resultant batter in the oven. Minus the candles, it's an effortless everyday cake, good for lunchboxes and picnics, easily cut and carried. Equally suited to forks or fingers.

Cranberry orange brownies

At times of high stress, sometimes the only solution is chocolate. The fastest way for a fix - other than buying a bar or a block - is the brownie. One bowl, no need for softening of butter or room temperature anything, just melt, stir, pour, bake, slice and serve. This Smitten Kitchen recipe doesn't even require you to have dark chocolate in the house - it uses cocoa instead - and so can be whipped up from pantry staples. My friend Joanna had recently made these with orange zest - to great acclaim - and I further freewheeled by substituting walnuts for cranberries. I used dried, but fresh or frozen would work just as well for that pop of sour among all the sweet. Serve warm, at room temperature, refrigerated or straight from the freezer. It all works.

Marmalade cake

Some tastes you grow into. When you’re little, you want sweet, plain and simple. With toast you want jam. Specifically, you want strawberry – something straight-forward and sugary: reasonable, red, familiar. Then you graduate to something a little more sophisticated, a gateway fruit, maybe a raspberry. You come to like that slight sharpness with the sweet, and from there you start contemplating that most grown-up of grown-up spreads: marmalade. You never would have entertained the idea of chunks of tart chopped-up orange on your toast some years ago, but now, that citrussy sour-sweet is somehow what you crave each morning. How did that happen?

Though strictly speaking, cake is not for breakfast, this particular one is actually kind of perfect as the first meal of the day - soft and golden as the sunrise, its bittersweet bite as good a wake up as a cup of coffee.

Come to think of it, cake for breakfast is kind of a childhood fantasy, so maybe you aren’t as grown-up as you thought after all. Phew.

My grandmother's fruit cake

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.