Kitchen Alchemy

For years I have been avoiding the cult of meringue buttercream.  I've done this mainly because it just seemed to hard to be bothered.  I tried French buttercream years ago, and I found while I could make it on my old Sunbeam Mixmaster, it just never worked on my Kitchenaid. But I have been watching my old school friend, Gail Turner, using Swiss Meringue Buttercream on many of her creations, and I thought, if Gail can do it, so can I.  I humbly asked for her recipe and she shared it with me.  Being ever the adventurer, I thought I'd use it for the very first time on my best friend's wedding cake - because living dangerously is fun! The process of making the meringue buttercream was relatively easy, although there is a point where you think it's gone horribly wrong.  Look away at that point, and by the time you turn your head back, a miracle will have happened! Ingredients 300g egg whites 375g caster sugar 675g unsalted butter (room temperature) 1 tsp vani

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

There are many different sweets the people of Finland enjoy, but when it comes to birthdays one of my colleagues, who hails from that part of the world has told me, no celebration is complete without a kermakakku. ‘Kerma’ means cream and ‘kakku’ means cake. Together they mean cream cake – a layered sponge cake decorated with lashings of whipped cream and favourite fruits found in Finland. Raspberries, strawberries, blueberries, lingon berries and cloudberries are all common flavours for this indulgent dessert cake. I wanted to try making such a cake last year, and decided my birthday was a suitable occassion. The sponge cake was very easy to make (although when my colleague sampled mine he said the Finnish version was much more dry, thanks to their use of potato flour amongst other things). I worried this would be a cream heavy cake, but the piped cream up the sides was deceiving. My son and his friend scoffed this cake in minutes. And there was more than half a cake left o

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

Well I haven’t gotten around to making the Caramel Cream Sponge yet. But I did have a chance to invent something new and special for a friend of mine who was celebrating a very special birthday. As her birthday guests snaffled the decorations off the side of her cake, I was reminded of my fifth birthday, where my friends did exactly the same thing. A lot of people ask me how I learned to make cakes, and I think that birthday would probably be the first time I was exposed to the art of sugar craft. My mum and Aunty Liz spent many nights hand moulding delicate pink sugar roses to decorate my fifth birthday cake. Back in those days a fondant decorated cake was normally white, but Mum decided mine would be pink. And usually the cake underneath was fruit cake, but Mum thought we could try chocolate and see how it worked out. I don’t remember if there was marzipan – there certainly wasn’t any chocolate ganache between the fondant and the cake. The thing I remember was being sung happy

I've just come out of a meeting where I was day dreaming about a cake my dad used to buy when I was a slip of a girl. I'm going to call it Caramel Cream Sponge Cake. It was sold at a bakery a Greenhills Shopping Centre near Maitland, Newcastle. We didn't go to that shopping centre often. In fact, when I was a girl big shopping centres like Westfield or malls like Stockland weren't very common. I only remember going there a few times - one time being with my Aunty Liz when my little cousin stole a chocolate from the self select chocolate stand in Kmart. But that's a story for a different day. Dad took us to Greenhills once or twice during the time when Mum was working on the chicken farm as an egg collector. It was an awful job, and he'd buy a cake to have ready for when Mum arrived home. He had a thing for coconut and caramel, so the caramel cream sponge was the obvious choice: a double sponge with caramel and whipped cream in the middle sandwiched tog