Honestly, I thought I might be done with this blog. But then all of a sudden, the world turned upside down and all I can do to stay calm is cook. On Saturday I made hot cross buns. I left some outside the apartment of my 85 year old neighbour, tossed a ziplock bag containing four to a friend across our authorised divide of 1.5m on an exercise walk, and continued on to deposit another care package on the doorstep of someone dear to me who's self-isolating on the other side of the park. I can't do much in the face of a global pandemic, but I can do that.
I firmly believe there's no such thing as a bad hot cross bun. Squidgy or fluffy, sparsely fruited or dense with sultanas, I don't care, I like them all*. There may be, however, a superlative sort of hot cross bun and this is it. I'll say upfront I'm very partial to anything orange-flavoured - in colour and taste it's just so bright and friendly. These buns have not just a sweet citrussy glaze on top, but are made with a dough containing one whole puréed orange. The recipe comes from my favourite bakery, Beatrix, in Melbourne. As luck would have it, they just published a cookbook and it arrived in my letterbox as a gift on my birthday two weeks ago, back when everything was still sort of normal. I'm always nervous about anything involving yeast, but this worked out beautifully. Right now there's something soothing about a baking project that takes time: waiting for the first prove, and the second, then the immediate gratification of the buns freshly out of the oven. And the great pleasure that comes from sharing them, even when you can't do it in person.
If you're lucky enough to live in Melbourne, Beatrix is currently doing takeaway cake (as well as delicious sandwiches) so you might like to support them by ordering online and picking up, or popping in to see what's available. Check their Instagram for their latest offerings.
* Actually, not true! I have no time for chocolate chips in hot cross buns. I know the sultana-averse are fond of them but I guess I'm a purist.
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.
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.
There's a lot to be said for simple. Margherita pizza. Good-quality vanilla ice-cream. A plain croissant, fresh out of the oven, with a cup of black coffee. Less is more. And then there's Yotam Ottolenghi, the Israeli-born, London-based chef du jour whose recipes read like an encyclopedia of ingredients. Crazy combinations in odd quantities that echo cultures but aren't conventional, layering tastes, traditions, techniques... More is more. It shouldn't work at all but it does. Case in point: these chocolate spice cookies.
On my last visit to Hobart, one of my Tasmanian friends presented me with a jar of homemade cookies (is there any better gift?). She's a brilliant baker, and everything in that jar looked incredible but my eye immediately went to these - dark, mysterious, intriguing... They were plump, polka-dotted, glistening with glaze and garnished with gold. Like no other cookie I'd ever seen. I took my first bite and a million flavours exploded at once - bittersweet chocolate, bright citrus, warm spices... Together, they were spectacular. I immediately went home and researched the recipe because I knew they wouldn't last long. Last week, I made them as gifts for friends who'd cheered me up after a crappy day. There's something about these you feel compelled to share.
