Hi Every-one,
I'm in Brisbane at the moment visiting my family. I drove up last Sunday by way of Dungog where I stayed with my brother, Farmer Andrew. It's been a while since my last 'In the Garden' post from Dungog. Due to travel and family commitments I haven't been to Dungog since March. In April Dungog was badly flooded and this was my first time back since then. We went for a little drive around the streets that had been most affected. Many houses are still boarded up; some have been demolished and there are more 'to let' signs in the shops fronting Dowling Street than ever before.
I took these photos last Saturday, which was a lovely spring day in Dungog.
So how was the garden? As it's spring in the Southern hemisphere, the garden was in full bloom. As you may remember I have bit of a thing about wisteria and it was everywhere!
I'm no horticulturist, so I don't know the names of many of these plants but I do spy a little patch of violets and some bluebells amongst the wisteria.
When I was a little girl, my Dad used to buy a posy of violets for me when he'd visit the florist, so violets have always had a special place in my heart.
The garden was filled with blossoms as well, both peach blossoms and nectarine blossoms.
They're so pretty, aren't they?
and a quiet corner of the garden.
The bees were wild for this tree but we don't know what it is. Can any-one out there help us?
The veggies were going mad in the veggie patch under the watchful eye of this handsome chap
and the chicken ladies were laying up a storm. I took a dozen eggs home with me to Brisbane.
A last photo from the garden for you.
Have a great weekend and I'll be back again next week with some more baking from my kitchen.
Bye for now,
Jillian
Whenever there's a celebration in our family we serve Mum's famous almond cake. Today I'm sharing a recipe for a chocolate almond cake that's very similar to my Mum's almond cake. I made the cake in my sweet little 17 cm cake tin but if you want to make a 23 cm cake, just double all the ingredients and keep the baking time the same.
It's a Dutch Chocolate cake heavily adapted from a recipe in Das Neue Kiehnle-Kochbuch, which uses eggs as the raising agent so there are a scary number of eggs in the recipe.
The finished cake is nice and moist and has loads of texture. There is no flour in the cake just dried breadcrumbs and ground whole almonds and the cake is flavoured with lemon and chocolate. When I was growing up Mum and I would hand grate the chocolate and use a mouli mill to grind the almonds. These days I use a food processor to grind the almonds but if you can buy whole almond meal that will save you a step.
Once the egg whites are beaten you need a gentle hand to fold them through the batter otherwise the cake won't rise. I like to make the cake the day before it's served to allow all the flavours to develop.
The original recipe topped the cake with a chocolate ganache but we've always served the cake with lashings of whipped cream. As I made the cake to celebrate Farmer Andrew's birthday, I made some chocolate shards to top the cake.
Here's the printable recipe for you.
Dutch Chocolate Cake (makes one 17 cm cake)
100 gm softened unsalted butter
100 gm caster sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla essence
4 large eggs, separated
60 gm dark chocolate, grated
1 small lemon, rind grated and juice strained
60 gm ground whole almonds
60 gm dried breadcrumbs
1 extra tablespoon caster sugar
To serve
300 ml whipped cream
chocolate curls
Grease and line a 17 cm spring form tin with baking paper. Preheat the oven to 180°C/350°F.
In a medium size bowl, cream the butter, 100 gm caster sugar, lemon rind and vanilla until light and fluffy. Beat in the egg yolks one at a time until thoroughly mixed. Add the ground almonds, grated chocolate, breadcrumbs and lemon juice in 3 batches, mixing thoroughly.
In a clean dry bowl, beat the four egg whites until stiff peaks form. Add the extra tablespoon of caster sugar and beat until the sugar dissolves, then gently fold the egg whites through the cake batter. Gently spoon the cake batter into the prepared tin and bake for approximately 1 hour at 180°C/350°F until the cake tests cooked and the edges pull away from the sides of the tin.
Allow the cake to cool completely on a wire rack before removing from the tin. Serve with lashings of whipped cream and chocolate curls.
The cake disappeared in a flash as you can see by the photo and it tasted just like my Mum's cake. I do hope you enjoy the recipe.
I'll be back next week with a shopshoot for you.
Bye for now,
Jillian
My readers often email me asking for recipes. One of the most requested recipes, has been for the Lemon Tart I made using a recipe from the Australian Gourmet Traveller Perfect Match cookbook. Passion fruit are in season at the moment so I decided to reinterpret the recipe using passion fruit juice. I made the tart with farm fresh eggs laid by 'the girls'.
I pureed the passion fruit in my food processor at home in Sydney before driving to Dungog. I was running a bit late so I didn't have quite enough time to make the 90 mls of passion fruit juice needed, so I topped it up with some lemon juice.
I also made the pastry at home and took it up with me in a little cooler bag. It's a 3 hour drive to Dungog and I didn't think the pastry shell would arrive in one piece so I rolled it out and lined my favourite rectangular tin once I arrived.
It's always challenging baking in an unfamiliar oven. My old gas oven is quite low with no known hot spots. Farmer Andrew has a fan forced oven and even though I lowered the temperature, I discovered the oven has 2 hot spots.
Even though I cooked the tart at 150°C, if you look really closely you can see a few bubbles in the tart filling, a sure sign of a too hot oven. I was assured it still tasted fine, despite the bubbles.
Here's the original Andy Harris Lemon Tart recipe for you from Gourmet Traveller. To make a passionfruit tart, instead of 90 mls of lemon juice I used 70 mls of passion fruit juice and 20 mls of lemon juice.
Gourmet Traveller Lemon Tart
printable recipe
Pastry
250 grams plain flour
125 grams cold unsalted butter
75 grams icing sugar, plus extra for dusting
3 egg yolks
3 tbl water
To make pastry, process flour, butter and icing sugar in a food processor until mixture resembles coarse breadcrumbs. Add egg yolks one at a time then gradually add 1-3 tablespoons water until pastry comes together. Turn onto a lightly floured surface then knead for 30 seconds. Wrap in plastic wrap and refrigerate for 30 minutes. Roll out pastry onto a lightly floured surface and line a 24 cm round flan tin with a removable base trimming excess pastry with a sharp knife. Prick base with a fork and refrigerate for 30 minutes.
Preheat oven to at 160°C. Line pastry with baking paper and filled with dried beans or rice. Place tin on an oven tray and bake at 160°C for 10 minutes then remove paper and beans and bake for another 15 minutes until pastry is dry and golden brown.
Filling
5 eggs
150 grams caster sugar
90 ml lemon juice
2 tbs finely grated lemon zest
150 mls double cream
Place eggs, sugar, lemon juice and rind in a bowl and whisk to combine, then whisk in cream. Heat lemon mixture in a saucepan over a medium heat for 5 minutes or until warm, then pour into prepared pastry case and bake at 160°C for 25 minutes or until just firm. Cool tart for 1 hour, then serve dusted with icing sugar.
Time for me to get some dinner. I'll see you all again next week.
Jillian
Each month the Delicious magazine arrives at work and I look through it for recipes to try. I saw this recipe for a spiced zucchini and pecan cake and as I was about to go to Dungog for the weekend I knew it would be the perfect thing to make.
I visited the girls and gathered a few eggs to use in the cake.
I'd just bought a large bag of walnuts so I decided to use those instead of pecans.
The recipe made a huge quantity of lime sour cream icing so I didn't use all of it, but it tasted very yummy.
Here is the original recipe though I did slightly adapt it to my taste. I used a 24 cm springform pan because that's all I own. Apart from swapping walnuts for the pecans, I also reduced the oil content and left out the sultanas. There wasn't any nutmeg in the cupboard in Dungog so that was omitted but no-one seemed to notice it's absence...
SPICED ZUCCHINI AND PECAN CAKE
2 cups (300g) plain flour
3 tsp baking powder
1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
2 tsp ground cinnamon
½ teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg
300g caster sugar
1 vanilla bean, split, seeds scraped
3 eggs
1 cup (250ml) sunflower oil
2 cups (300g) grated zucchini
100g sultanas
1 cup (140g) pecans toasted, chopped
Preheat the oven to 180°C. Grease and line a 22 cm springform cake tin.
Sift the flour, baking powder, bicarbonate of soda, cinnamon and nutmeg into a large bowl. In a separate bowl, whisk the sugar, vanilla, oil and eggs together. Fold the egg mixture, zucchini, sultanas and 1 cup pecans into the flour mixture.
Pour into the prepared pan and bake for 1-1¼ hours until a skewer inserted in the centre comes out clean. Transfer the cake to a wire rack to cool completely. Remove cake from the pan when cooled. I placed the cake in the fridge before icing.
Sour cream and lime icing
1½ cups (225g) pure icing sugar, sifted
1½ cups (360g) sour cream at room temperature
Finely grated zest of 1 lime
½ cup (70g) pecans toasted, chopped
For the icing beat the icing sugar, zest and sour cream together until smooth. Remove cake from the fridge and decorate with the icing and the reserved pecans.
The light was just gorgeous that day, so I couldn't help but take a few more photos than usual.
I'll be back again on Wednesday with a shopshoot, so until then,
Jillian
