Apricot season

The apricots I've bought this year seem to be particularly good.  But nice as they are eaten fresh, the full flavour comes out best when they're cooked.
So far I've used them in two different recipes. One is Apricot Suédoise, a superbly simple dessert that tastes purely of apricot. You can see how to make it here.

The other is even simpler - roasted whole apricots. Here's the recipe.

Small apricots roasted whole

12 small rosy apricots

200 g runny honey

1 Tbsp brown sugar

Juice of ½ or 1 smallish lemon

100 ml water

1 tsp cinnamon
whipped cream and/or yoghurt, to serve

Preheat the oven to 170ºC fan forced (180C without fan).

Place the honey, sugar, lemon, water and cinnamon in a small saucepan. Cook on a medium heat, stirring, until it comes to a boil. Turn down to a simmer for 3 minutes and remove from the heat.

Place apricots into a small ceramic or glass baking dish. You want them to be sitting neatly together without too much extra space around them.

Using a sieve (to filter out the cinnamon), pour over the honey liquid.

Gently turn the apricots over in the liquid to coat them.

Put in the oven and roast for 10 minutes, then take out the dish and spoon the liquid over them again.

Put them back in the oven for another 10 minutes approximately. Remove them when they are cooked through, but not collapsing - you want them to stay whole.

Carefully take out apricots one by one with a spoon and transfer to serving dish or small individual dishes. (I made small dessert servings by putting three apricots in each of four pink glass Arcoroc teacups, with a dessert biscuit in each saucer.) 

Pour liquid back into small saucepan and gently reduce to form a syrup. Pour syrup over fruit and leave to cool. 

Serve with either whipped cream, or yoghurt, or a mixture of both (this is very nice). If you want to, you can flavour the cream with a dash of orange liqueur. Remember to warn your diners that there's a stone in each one.

I forgot to take a picture! Sorry. Here's one of the cups I used, only with an incredibly easy to make chocolate cream in it. You'll have to imagine it with apricots. Come to think of it, apricots and chocolate have a marvellous affinity, so you could try a shallow layer of this chocolate cream with apricots on top...

Chocolate truffle cake

My son was born on 12 December, a bit close to Christmas, but of course he likes to have his birthday properly celebrated.  This year he planned to have friends round for afternoon tea. As it happens, I was at my friend Joan's birthday afternoon tea a few weeks ago, and she had made a remarkably delicious chocolate cake - not one of those great big high ones, but a much denser, fudgy, chocolatey creation I knew my son would love. (After extensive research, he has decided his favourite cafe chocolate cake is Aro Street Cafe's Chocolate Nemesis - another dense, fudgy number.)   
            So I asked for the recipe. In the usual fashion, it was given to Joan by Chris, who knew it as Lilly's Truffle Cake, so it's clearly been passed on to a number of eager bakers. Not that I ever really call myself a baker - what attracted me to this recipe, apart from its deliciousness, was how easy it looked to make. On Saturday, I made it for Sunday afternoon.  

Lilly’s Chocolate Truffle Cake

(Joan's comments in brackets, and mine added in italics. Easily doubled to make a larger cake. In fact I added one third of each quantity, making a cake 25% larger, to fit my 22 cm tin - my quantities in brackets.)

200 g (270g) dark chocolate (Whittaker's Dark Ghana, what else!)

180 g (240 g) sugar

180 g (240g) butter

3 (4) rounded tablespoons ground almonds (almond meal); or flour; or for a slightly lighter cake, self raising flour
(I used 3 rounded Tbsps almond meal and 1 Tbsp self-raising flour - this worked well.)

3 (4) eggs

Icing sugar to dredge

Set oven to 200 degrees (190 fan bake).

Break chocolate into squares and place in microwave suitable bowl.  Add the butter and sugar.  

Heat by pulsing in the microwave until it just melts, stirring between pulses to even the heat.  Stop as soon as it melts so it doesn’t get cooked.

Transfer to a food processor. Blend again by whirring for 30 seconds, then add almond meal, or flour, and whirr again.   

Add eggs one at a time, whirring until everything is mixed.

 Grease a 20 cm (22 cm) round cake tin and flour.  (I lazily use cooking paper.)

(I lined my loose-bottomed tin with baking paper and it worked perfectly.)  

Pour the mixture into the centre of the tin, spread towards edges, and bake in preheated oven for 10 minutes.

Reduce heat to 150 degrees (140 fan bake) and continue cooking a further 30 minutes.  
(Joan: In my oven I do it for only  20 minutes, as the longer time dries it out too much.)
(Anne: As I was making a larger, slightly thicker cake, I found it did take close to 30 minutes.) 

The centre shouldn’t dry out, and the top should be a little cracked and crusty. 
Undercooking is better than overcooking. An inserted skewer or thin knife should come out with a little bit of sticky inside clinging to it.

Leave in tin to cool.  

Transfer to plate by inverting onto one plate and then onto the cake plate. Dredge with icing sugar.  
(Jonathan insisted on having ganache icing, made with 150 ml cream heated just to scalding point, then poured over 150 g of broken-up chocolate pieces (more Whittaker's) in a bowl and stirred thoroughly until chocolate has melted and ganache is dark. Leave to cool in fridge for about an hour until thick enough to spread over cake.)

Joan: Raspberry coulis is great with this ... as well as, of course ... cream!  (Or yoghourt!)

Anne: Jonathan had both, and he also spread sliced strawberries over the top of the iced cake. His friends were very impressed and asked if he had bought it - but of course he pointed out that his mother had made it.  It's extremely rich, so only slender pieces were required - which was just as well, because there was some left for me later (he knew this was a condition of my making it!). Definitely worth the effort...

Super Simple Sydney Special

I've got the book group coming here tomorrow night, so today I made an old-fashioned slice, Sydney Special. I have no idea where the name comes from. I got the recipe close to fifty years ago from Chris Else's sister Bridget - she and my sister, Susan, were the bridesmaids at our wedding. It used to be a great stand-by for hungry children. I haven't made it for years, partly because I don't usually have any cornflakes, but there was a small bag of them in the pantry so I thought I'd give it a go. It's so easy, it would be a good thing for kids to make themselves.

Sydney Special
(Bridget Else, now Gill)

1 cup cornflakes
1 cup dessicated coconut
1 cup plain flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
2 dessertspoons cocoa
3/4 cup brown sugar
150g melted butter
Your favourite icing - chocolate is good (as long as it's made with real chocolate), but peppermint or coffee would work well too.

Set oven to 180C/170C fan bake.
Mix all dry ingredients together. Add melted butter and mix well.
Press into a sponge roll tin/shallow baking tin lined with baking paper.
Bake for 25-30 minutes.
Near the end of the baking, mix icing - for chocolate, melt squares of Whittaker's Dark Ghana in the microwave  and mix it with enough icing sugar, and a little milk, to give a thick but fluid consistency, ready for spreading.
Take out slice, cool a little and cut into squares or little bars.
Spread some icing on each square and leave to cool and harden before putting away. (This is less messy than icing the whole block before you cut it up, and marginally healthier, as it uses about a third less icing.)

So there you are. I actually made double the quantity so I'd have enough for me, Jonathan and our neighbour Frances, as well as for the book group. I think I slightly over-baked it - it was a bit crunchier than I remembered - but yummy all the same. Why are there three missing in the photo? Because we had to test them, of  course, and Jonathan needed two to be sure they were okay.

Classic treats - Mrs Cake's Afghan biscuits

I don't usually buy cornflakes, but a while ago I needed some to eat for medical purposes (don't ask). They come in an enormous box, so I had lots left over. So naturally,  my mind turned to Afghans, or as they're now known, Afghan biscuits - although I don't think there was ever anything genuinely Afghan about them...
        Edmonds does, of course, have a recipe, but when I had a look at my online stash, I found a more interesting one by Mrs Cake. I followed the biscuit part exactly, except that when I went to soften the butter in a warm oven, ready for creaming (which I lazily do in the food processor), I left it too long and it melted. I wasn't going to waste all that butter, so I went ahead anyway. The good news is that it didn't seem to make any difference at all - the texture was perfect.
        The icing had to be adapted a bit because I didn't have enough icing sugar, I don't like ti too sweet, and (IMHO) it has to contain real chocolate. So I cut the quantities back by two-thirds, and added about six little blocks of Whittaker's Dark Ghana, plus a dash of vanilla. That provided more than enough icing for the 15 smallish biscuits I made.

Afghan biscuits 

from Mrs Cake, 27 November 2011, http://www.mrscake.co.nz/

(makes 15 smallish ones or 12 a bit bigger)

Biscuits

180g butter, room temperature (but see my note about melted butter above!)

½ cup/100g brown sugar
1 tsp vanilla essence or extract
1½ cups/180g flour

3 Tbsp cocoa

½ tsp baking powder
2 cups/60g cornflakes

Icing
2 Tbsp water
30g butter
30g caster sugar
1 cup icing sugar
2 Tbsp cocoa

6 squares Whittaker's Dark Ghana chocolate
walnut halves or coffee beans

- Preheat oven to 180 C. Line a baking sheet with baking paper. 

- Cream the butter and sugar until light and fluffy. (Processing it works fine.)

- Mix in the vanilla, then sift in dry ingredients and mix together. (You can process it all again gently until mixed.)

- Use your hands to crumble the cornflakes into the mixture so they are in smaller pieces, then mix in with your hands.
- Form into balls, place on baking sheet and flatten (either with the palm of your hand or with a fork). - Bake for 12-14 minutes. (Mine took 15 minutes, on fan bake at 170C.)\ Put on a rack, on their paper, to cool.

- While the biscuits are cooking, mix together the water, extra butter and caster sugar in a small saucepan. 

- Heat until butter is melted, then simmer for a minute to form a syrup. Add vanilla.

- Melt chocolate into the syrup over a low temperature, mixing well.

- Add the icing sugar and cocoa, and whisk or stir very thoroughly to combine. 

When the biscuits have cooled, crown each one with a dollop of icing (it should sort of pool on top - if you need to warm it slightly, either heat it again very gently in its saucepan, or give it 10 seconds in the microwave). 

Press a walnut half or 2-3 coffee beans into each one.  I think these go extremely well with a cup of spicy Chai tea.

Brownish

I had a friend coming for lunch today. We'd agreed that we'd just go down to Gamboni's (my friend ahd never been there) and buy salamis and cheeses. But I finished my work a bit early yesterday, so I decided to try out a Healthy Food Guide recipe from Sunday's paper for healthy(ish) brownies, made with apple puree instead of eggs and butter.

         I had all the ingredients, sort of. I had dark chocolate, but no white (I don't like white chocolate anyway, it has no right to be called chocolate at all), so I used milk chocolate buttons instead. And I had no pecans, but I did have a few walnuts. (When I looked it up on-line, the recipe did use walnuts, and didn't mention white chocolate.) 

         It was extremely easy to make, and it worked pretty well. I think my mixture was a trifle drier than it should have been (which is odd, because I had fewer nuts), because it didn't exactly "pour" into the tin, as instructed, and it came out with a lumpy top instead of a smooth one. But it was beautifully dark, and while it didn't have the amazing melt-in-the-mouth texture of a really good traditional brownie, it was well worth the (very slight) effort. My friend thought so too, but she suggested it really shouldn't be called "brownie". So I thought maybe "brownish" would be better. This recipe is a combination of the online version here and the one in the Sunday Star-Times, 10 April 2012, plus my own variations.

Brownish

1 cup unsweetened apple purée or sauce

1/3 cup cocoa powder (I used Dutched cocoa)

3/4 cup self-raising flour (next time I might try a little less and see what happens)

1/2 teaspoon baking soda

1/2 cup sugar

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/2 cup dark chocolate chips (I used little chopped-up bits of Whittaker's dark Ghana)

1/2 cup milk chocolate buttons

1/2 cup walnuts, chopped

icing sugar for dusting

Preheat oven to 175°C. Line a 20x20cm baking dish with baking paper.

Place purée in a medium-sized bowl. Sift in cocoa, flour and baking soda. Add sugar and salt. Mix until just combined (do not over-mix as this will toughen the brownies). Gently fold in the two kinds of chocolate and the walnuts. 

Transfer to prepared baking dish. Bake for about 25-30 minutes, or until the centre feels set and fudgy when a skewer is inserted. Cool in pan for 5-10 minutes before turning out. Cool completely before slicing into squares. Dust with sifted icing sugar before serving, if desired.

It looked darker and richer than this in real life. The bits of dark chocolate didn't melt much, but I liked it like that.

Small pleasures

Last week ran away on me, with many visitors and lots of household sorting out (see Elsewoman). While I did do a lot of cooking, everything I made had either already been posted here or else had no good pictures (usually because it got eaten).  So this week I thought I'd just put together a few of the small food pleasures that have come my way lately.
    

First, this beautiful new-laid egg. My friend Fiona grew up with hens and chickens, and says she can't believe how old the eggs in the supermarket are (you can tell by putting them in water and seeing if they float). She gave me this one, fresh from her hens, to bring home for my breakfast. Harvey bought me the pink cat egg-cup nearly thirty years ago in Auckland.
         Second, this very simple first course: mild sopresa salami freshly cut for me by Tony at Gamboni's in Karori, and small red Peppadew peppers stuffed with my homemade boursin. The combination of mild, smooth, sharp and salty was very good.

And third - this is really cheating - this sensational selection of chocolate blocks, chocolate truffles and marzipan, a belated birthday present from Ulrike, Matthias and Lisa in Germany. Naturally, I'll be sharing it around. Well, some of it. To some extent. Of course I will.

Honouring Lois Daish

In my pantry (they won't fit on the bookshelf) I keep two battered folders. Their plastic sleeves hold pages torn out of the Listener – Lois Daish's food columns, which she wrote for 23 years. One is for meat and savoury dishes, the other for desserts and sweet things. I have her book A Good Year too, but many of my favourites aren't in it, so the folders are essential. It's not just the recipes, wonderful as they are – it's the context she puts them in. She always seems to manage to be both down-to-earth and inspiring.
           Last Friday, Lois was honoured by her peers, who made her a Life Member of the New Zealand Guild of Food Writers (which she had helped to found in 1987). She's only the third Life Member to be elected – her predecessors were Tui Flower, former Women’s Weekly Food Editor and author, and Sue Wakelin, a past Guild President and retired food writer.
           The award was presented at a high tea at Wellington's Museum Hotel, on 25 June, by Lauraine Jacobs, who says she regards Lois as her New Zealand food hero. “Lois is an inspiration to many other food writers. She has always cooked and written with sincerity and simplicity, and empowers people to cook well every day...Her contribution to the New Zealand food scene has been outstanding." Hear hear.

From right to left: Mary Daish, Lois's daughter; Mary's husband Paul Schrader; Lois; and Kelda Hains, who runs Nikau Cafe with Paul.

To add my own small tribute to Lois, here's a stand-out recipe from my collection – a simple winter dessert with remarkably rich and complex flavours, using the beautiful tamarillos in season now. You need to make it several hours before you want to serve it. If you don’t like prunes, just make the syrup to have with ice cream. The combination of that distinctive tamarillo flavour with the port and chocolate is amazing.

Lois Daish's prunes in tamarillo and chocolate syrup
(NZ Listener, 5 July 1997)
2 tamarillos
1/2 cup water
1/4 cup sugar
splash of port or marsala (Lois kindly says this is "optional", presumably to cater for non-drinking cooks, but take no notice)
1 tbsp cocoa
12 pitted prunes

Plunge the tamarillos into a pot of boiling water, leave for a minute, drain and peel. Slice finely and put in a pot with the water, sugar and port or marsala. Simmer for 10 minutes, then strain, pressing some of the tamarillo pulp through the sieve. Put the cocoa in a small pot and graudally stir in the syrup. Bring to the boil and add the prunes. Simmer for 5 minutes, then leave to steep for several hours. Reheat and serve warm with vanilla ice cream. Serves 2-3.

PS - 6 June 2011 - Susan (see last comment below) asked for the recipe for Gina's No-Knead Bread and I've managed to get it, so here it is:

GINA’S NO-KNEAD BREAD
Lois Daish ((Listener Food Column 17 September 1994 - This recipe came from Gina Jelaca who worked with Lois at Brooklyn Café and Grill)

YEAST FERMENT
1 tablespoon dried yeast granules
2 teaspoons golden syrup
300 ml warm water

DOUGH
4 cups white bread flour
2 cups wholemeal flour
Half cup wheatgerm
Three-quarters cup bran
Half cup kibbled wheat
2 teaspoons salt
Half cup or more, sunflower or pumpkin seeds or mizture
600 ml warm water

Warm a small mixing bowl by rinsing with hot water and place in it the yeast ferment ingredients. Leave in a warm place until it starts to bubble. Meanwhile take a large mixing bowl and combine the dry ingredients for the dough. Mix thoroughly and make a well in the centre. Pour in the yeast mixture and the water. Use your hand to combine just until all the dry ingredients are thoroughly wetted and mixed. The less mixing, the better. Lightly butter 2 large loaf tins and scoop the dough into them. Let stand in a warm place for about 40 minutes until well-risen. Bake in a preheated 180C oven for about 40 minutes until firm and hollow sounding when loaves are lifted from the tin and tapped on the bottom. Tip out and cool on a rack. Best eaten when completely cold. Even better the next day.

Fun with fudge

About the first thing I ever tried to make was chocolate fudge. Ever since I'd been old enough to go to school fairs by myself, I'd loved buying little cellophane packets of it. When it was good - not too sugary or too hard, no crystals, just pure smooth melt-in-the-mouth chocolateyness all through - it was sensational.
         At high school I made it with a friend at her place - she was an expert. But the first, second and third times I tried it at home, the wretched stuff would never set properly. It still tasted good, but I had to eat it with a spoon. So, as I tended to do whenever I encountered anything that I couldn't master, I gave up trying. After all, I couldn't cook anything else, so why should I be able to cook fudge?
         In fact fudge is just not that easy to get right, unless you happen to have a confectionery thermometer. It's also not that safe, since it involves coping with a whole pot of boiling sugar.  Heaven knows why it's supposed to be something really suitable for children to make.
          But one of the things I've decided to do this year is go back to recipes that I've tried unsuccessfully to make in the past, and see if I can get them right, now that I'm a lot older and definitely a bit wiser, at least in terms of cooking. We had a fudge-respondent friend coming for dinner on Friday, so that afternoon, once I had the venison casserole in the oven, I set about making plain chocolate fudge, using a basic recipe devised for Kiwi kids, for "afters". Here's the recipe, with notes of what happened.

Chocolate fudge
(Adapted from recipe by “Boris” for Kiwiwise)
2 cups sugar
25g butter
1/2 cup milk
1 tablespoon cocoa (I used "dutched" cocoa)
1/8 teaspoon vanilla essence (I slurped in just a little more)

* Lightly butter a tin – a shallow loaf tin is good. It should be the right size to give you a good thick layer of fudge, rather than a thin one.
* Combine all the ingredients, except vanilla essence, in a saucepan, preferably with a heavy base.
The one I used had a good copper base and a double pouring lip, but turned out to be a bit too small – you need to allow enough depth for the boiling fudge to stay well below the rim.
* Gently bring to a light boil. Set the heat low enough to keep the fudge at a light boil for about 20 minutes, stirring occasionally with a wooden spoon.
I have a gas hob, and I think this was partly why I had problems in the past too. Even on a modern hob, using the smallest burner on the lowest setting, I found the mix kept trying to boil over the top of the pan (see above). So I had to keep moving it aside, waiting for it go down, then putting it back. I tried using one of those metal simmer plates, but that slowed it down too much. So I boiled it for an extra 5 minutes, to allow for all this toing and froing.
* Start testing the fudge by dropping a little into a glass of cold water. When it forms a soft ball, instead of just streaming down to the bottom, then it’s ready.
This is the part that used to baffle me. But you can sort of see when it’s reached this stage by the way it drips off the spoon, in solid round drops rather than a little stream, and then it does make a little ball in the water, sort of, though it still plummets to the bottom - somehow I had always imagined it would float.
* Remove from the heat, add vanilla, and beat until thick. Pour into prepared tin and leave to set.
You can use a hand beater, as I did in the past, but it's really hard work, and I probably gave up too soon. This time I did panic mildly, thinking I hadn't cooked it long enough - I'd forgotten how long it took to get thick - but with an electric beater it was much easier. Even so, it needs beating for quite a while, maybe 10 minutes, until it’s obviously getting really thick. Then it's a race to get it into the tin before it congeals. My tin was a bit too large, so I tried to sort of push it back to form a thicker layer. Then I tried to get the rest of the rapidly setting panful out, and spoilt the lovely smooth shiny top the fudge in the tin had when I first poured it.
* Once it’s set, cut in careful lines, using one steady cut, with a knife heated under the hot tap.

Yes, well. It took at least 3 hours to set properly, and even then the middle pieces were still a bit soft. Unlike my mother I have anything but a "straight eye", so the pieces ended up neither square nor even. But I consoled myself by eating all the by now well-hardened scraps out of the pan and off the beaters. It was definitely a success at dinner - even Harvey had a bit. And as you can see, mine looks no messier, and if anything a bit better, than the fudge on the website (below). Next time I'll try Russian fudge.

Dark chocolate

Buying two blocks of dark chocolate on special before Easter, I saw the woman ahead of me at the checkout had three. We looked at each other and she said, "It's a basic food group!" My friends divide into any kind, milk only, dark only, and fair trade only. I waver between the last two.

Tomorrow, Easter Sunday, we have friends coming for lunch. Diane is bringing a dish of rabbit (of which more later) and I am in charge of the rest. It seemed fitting to have a chocolate dessert, so today I made Jo Seagar's chocolate creams. She suggests making them in little espresso coffee cups - they're so rich that the servings need to be kept small. But my little coffee cups are really tiny, so I used glass teacups instead.

Providing you have a food processor or blender, this recipe takes all of five minutes, but you do need to make it in the morning, or preferably the day before, so it's well set.

Espresso Cups of Chocolate Cream (adapted from Jo Seagar)
250 g dark chocolate
(It works just as well with 150g. You can use flavoured chocolate - orange, peppermint - but I prefer plain dark)
3 egg yolks
3 tablespoons of matching flavouring - liqueur, brandy (my favourite), strong sweetened black coffee
(I use 2 tbsps if I'm using less chocolate)
A few drops of vanilla if liked (and I do)
300 ml cream

Put chocolate (broken up if you're using a block) into food processor or blender. Add egg yolks and flavouring.
Heat cream until just about to boil.
Pour cream into chocolate, yolks and flavouring.
Run the machine until the racket stops.
Pour into espresso cups or ramekins or small teacups. It serves 4-6, depending on how much chocolate you use and how large the servings are.
Cover with clingfilm and chill in fridge for at least 4 hours, preferably overnight.
Take out of fridge about 15 minutes before serving.

I made three teacups plus a small ramekin for Harvey, who may or may not eat it - he probably won't have any room left after the rabbit. But it won't go to waste...