Kitchen Alchemy

The word “tiramisu” literally translates as “pick me up”. This layered dessert probably earned it’s name because of the delicious coffee syrup soaked sponge that make up its base. It is believed tiramisu originates from Tuscany, which is famous for other layered cakes, however, it doesn’t appear to be a very old recipe. Tiramisu often includes a liqueur in the coffee syrup, which is why many people regard it as the Italian equivalent to trifle. The best tiramisus leak coffee syrup onto your plate, and always taste better the day after they are made. I came up with this recipe a few years ago when I was commissioned to write a children's international cookbook. Sadly, the book never eventuated, but this recipe has become legend in my house, with even my non-dessert eating husband slurping it up! 3 egg yolks ¼ cup caster sugar 1 tblsp corn flour 1 tsp vanilla extract 250ml milk 500ml marscarpone cheese 2 tblsp instant coffee powder 2 tblsp sugar 500ml boiling water 1

One of the odd things about being a part time baker is, while I'm busy supplying quality baked treats to cafes and customers, I then get a cafe cake from the espresso bar where I get my coffee at work. I always find the choice limited and the quality questionable. So this year, I've decided to be my own customer for cafe cakes. It means I get a treat to go with my coffee that I know will be good, I'll save about $3.50 a day which adds up to $17.50 a week. Plus I will keep my husband supplied with morning snacks too - although I think he eats the snackies I make him in the afternoon. So here is my first cafe cake for the year - chocolate coconut slice, which has yielded 18 slices. We only need 10 for the week, so eight can go in the freezer and be enjoyed some other time. Ingredients 2 cups plain flour 2 cups desicated coconut 1 cup caster sugar 4 tblsp dutch cocoa powder 370g butter, melted 1 tblsp vanilla essence 1. Pre-heat the oven to 180 degrees celci

When we moved to Penrith in 1980, the housing estate we lived in was brand new. We had lived in Newcastle all of my life until then, and we knew everyone in the neighbourhood. But in Penrith, everyone and everything was new. My sister made friends with a German girl in her school, who happened to live in a house kind of over our back fence. We had never met anybody from Germany before, and we were very lucky to be invited to afternoon tea, where Mum, my sister and I were served hot butter cake cut in thick rectangular slabs. Not long after, my sister was given a piece of her school mate's birthday cake. She said it was called Schwartzwalder Kirsch Torte - Black Forest Cherry Cake. This type of cake was unknown in Australia at the time. Now it is a staple of any cafe cake selection. We loved it, and I requested it for my birthday that year. In fact it became the standard birthday cake in our home for the rest of my childhood. And of course, I made sure I learned how t

This past week we have enjoyed watching the Diamond Jubilee celebrations of Queen Elizabeth II who is, in fact, the reigning monarch of Australia. How odd that, at the far end of the world, we are ruled by a monarch instead of being a republic. While I'm all for a republic I absolutely enjoy the pomp and pageantry the Queen and her family bring to our lives. Even more, I enjoy reading about her ancestors, most notably Henry VIII, his six wives (I am extremely fond of Catherine of Aragon and despite her behaving a shrew, Anne Boleyn). So much so, a few years back I was motivated to take a trip to Britain to trace Anne's footsteps and that of some even earlier kings who built their castle at Old Sarum. So for the past few months I have been thinking how I might pay tribute to the Queen, and the idea that sprang to mind was a cake version of Queen Pudding. It is a bread and butter pudding, with jam added to the equation, and meringue baked over the top. I don't like

I have been thinking about making a layer cake for quite some time now, but I just haven't had a good reason to get into it. Since it was Mother's Day today, I thought I would indulge myself - my excuse being that I wanted a piece of chocolate cake, and I should just make my own so as to avoid disappointment! Everyone has been making layer cakes lately with ribbons of icing piped up the sides of the cake. I am really glad I avoided this as it would have applied too much icing to what is already a sweet cake. Instead I went for a classic cake with a coffee twist. See what you think. Ingredients 2 cups water 250g butter 3 cups caster sugar 2/3 cup cocoa 1 tsp bicarb soda 4 eggs 3 cups self raising flour 1. Combine the water, butter, sugar, cocoa and bicarb soda in the biggest pot you've got. It needs to be at least four litres. 2. Stir until the butter is melted and the ingredients are combined, then bring to the boil. Do not take your eyes off the mix as

A couple of months back I told the story of the caramel cream sponge my dad used to buy us when I was a kid. And I promised I would try and recreate that cake and share it with you. Well this weekend I finally did that. It was a friend’s birthday, so I decided what better occasion to test that recipe and see if it worked. I found, in the process, that the toasted coconut on the side of the cake was a key player in the overall taste balance. So I've renamed the cake to include the coconut. It was a really fun cake to make and I hope you really enjoy making and eating this blast from the seventies past. Ingredients 6 large eggs 1 cup caster sugar 1 tsp vanilla essence ½ cup corn flour ½ cup plain flour ½ cup self raising flour 800ml thickened cream 1 tsp vanilla essence 1 tsp sugar 2/3 cup desiccated coconut 2 cans Nestle Top n Fill 12-20 pistachio nuts 1. Pre-heat the oven to 180 degrees celcius. Grease and line a 10 inch cake tin. The lining is very import

Back in the seventies, my sister and I used to sit down to a breakfast of puffed wheat every morning. If we were lucky, they were honey puffed wheats, served up with canned pears. Mum kept a lot of canned fruit in the cupboard, which seems odd now I think of it, because fresh fruit was plentiful, and not particularly expensive. Those boxes of puffed wheat always came with a toy in them - a Dutch figurine, and I used to marvel, firstly at how many of them my sister got and I did not, but also at the unusual shaped hats and shoes the figurines wore. Of they were not shoes, they were clogs, something which I later learned my Aunt who spent six months travelling around Europe. I used to make a lot of parfaits in the seventies, in which canned pears or canned peaches featured heavily. They were basically a single serve of trifle in a tall glass. They'd take all day to make because I'd set the jelly in the jar and couldn't add another layer until it not longer wobbled.

In 1702 Francois Massiolot, a chef in the kitchen of King Louis XIV of France, was the first to name an egg white and sugar confection he'd concocted for the King, “meringue”. Meringues are the little sisters of pavlova, a delicious dessert usually accompanied by whipped cream and fruit. The great thing about meringues is they are portable and they taste good on their own. Meringues can be found in patissieries all over France, often as large as a baker’s hand, swirled with the beautiful colours of fruit syrups. When we first started our market stall in 2008, we had a lot of requests for gluten free items. We just didn't have the time or resources to come up with a range of GF cupcakes, so each week I'd whip up a batch of chocolate meringues so I'd have something to offer the GF customers. These were the cheapest item on the table, selling for $1.00, and they were invariably always the first thing to sell out. If ever I have egg whites left over from another r

The weather over the Easter break in Sydney was unseasonablly warm this year. So when it came time to make cupcakes for Easter, I really had to rethink the buttercream icing that is synonymous with all my cupcakes. My standard buttercream icing has a high proportion of real butter in it, which is why it tastes so good. To me it is the key differentiator between a great cupcake and one that's just acceptable. But with the weather so warm, I knew I had to reduce the amount of butter in the buttercream icing if my Easter cupcakes were not going to melt into a puddle. We've seen this happen in the last of our market days back in 2008 when the spring weather arrived. The texture and consistency needed to be as good as usual to get the beautiful shape when piping. I think the result was fantastic! See what you think. Ingredients 500g pure icing sugar 50g butter 1 tbslp full cream milk 2 tbslp cold water colouring of your choice 1/2 tsp Wilton Icing White 1. Plac

When I was 16 years old my sister and her boyfrfiend took me for dinner at a restaurant called Zorba The Buddha. I was utterly thrilled with this outing as it was in the city, to be specific, it was in Darlinghurst which was in my opinion, edgey, and it was on a school night! Zorba The Buddha was in fact run by Orange People. Or to be precise, the followers of the Bagwan Rajneesh who was at the time embroiled in some kind of sex scandal. His followers dressed in robes dyed the same saffron colour as that of the Hari Krishnas and ran the restaurant presumably to raise money for their cult. Whatever the Bagwan was up to, it had no effect on the food served at the restaurant, or the jazz music played by the saffron clad staff. I can still hear the strains of the trumpet today. But recently when I watched a documentary about the origins of saffron, it wasn't the Bagwan and his cult that immediately came to mind. It was whether or not saffron could be incorporated into a cup

Straight out of school my first job was as a braille proofreader. No! I'm not blind! But I worked in partnership with a guy who was. He'd read a braille print out and I'd follow the original text and tell him if there were words missing or if there were punctuation problems with the transcript. We frequently stopped to chat because reading all day every day can get tedious. And one thing we chatted about was cooking. As it turned out, my colleague and I both had a thing for caramel fudge. So when I left that job and found the corner shop near my new job sold amazing home made caramel fudge, I naturally sent some back to my old work buddy. He didn't really like it - he preferred the Scottish tablet type of fudge which was a bit harder and more crystaline. But I liked the squidgey stuff. And I frequently was able to get fudge right after it was delivered while it was still warm. Years later I asked the guys who sold the fudge why they didn't stock it any

When my husband and I were in France in 2007, we found a hole in the wall vendor selling crepes in Montparnasse. I think she was there as part of the Night of Music Festival, where people come out on the streets all over Paris to listen to music, sing, dance, and eat a lot of food. This particular creperie was part of a pub. A girl with Suzi Quatro hair was stationed inside a little booth with a big black flat griddle, a jug of crepe batter, a wooden trowel and a bunch of fillings. We stepped up to the window and ordered: “un crepe avec jambon, fromage et champignons”. And she set to work. When the job was done, the girl used a giant spatula to fold the crepe into quarters, slip it into a little paper cone and hand it over. And let me tell you, that crepe was goooooood! I have finally perfected my own crepe recipe. Lately I’ve become a little obsessed with crepes. When you try this recipe, you’ll understand why. Ingredients 1 cup plain flour 1 large egg 375ml full cream

When I was little my mother always included a pavlova as part of our Christmas fair. She loved Christmas pudding with brandy custard, but it just wasn't the kind of thing that kids enjoyed. So she would always make a pavlova for my sister and I - of course she and Dad ate the pav as well as the pudding. That pavlova has legendary status in my mind. I remember watching Mum mixing the merignue in a steaming pot sitting in another filled with boiling water on the stove. She'd have her electric hand mixer working over time as the meringue thickened and began to crust around the edges of the pot. Mum always coloured the pav - pink or green were the only colours in the seventies. When the meringue was ready she'd draw the outline of a dinner plate on a tray covered in foil, spread some meringue around the shape, then pipe a wall of meringue around it. Mum would put the pav in the oven, we'd go to bed, and in the morning, there it would be, a pink confection, still coo

When I first met my husband his interest in fruit was limited mainly to watermelon and bananas. Considering the wealth of fruit that is available in Australia, it was hard for me to understand how a person could be so exclusive in their enjoyment of what I consider to be the best part of summer eating. Yes – watermelon is definitely a great summer fruit! As a kid I had a book called “Summer” which concluded with a broadly smiling girl eating a whopping big wedge of watermelon. But summer, to me, says mangoes, nectarines, peaches, cherries, lychees and passionfruit. None of which my husband would choose to eat, or even put into the shopping basket. Yes, he’d eat apples – a staple in winter. But I couldn’t even get him to eat strawberries, simple and yet exotic, in my book. So imagine my surprise, several years into our marriage, when my husband comes home from work and announces he now likes raspberries! How, I enquired, did this come about? He worked at a training company that