Banana and Prune Loaf

Psych! I’m still here! I’ve been busy moving house and changing jobs, but I’ve still been baking! (Except that month where we bought take out almost every night and ate it in bed because we hadn’t set up the lounge room…)

Recently, I got some old bananas off my Buy Nothing page and I have discovered the joys of non-refined sweetners! At work the cook makes this date loaf that is SO SWEET but has no sugar! Totally blew my mind. So I thought I’d give it a go. I used this recipe from Yummy Addiction as a base, but guess what! I changed it. I’m good at this following the instructions thing. I’ve had prunes in my cupboard for over a year (back when I was gonna try more high fibre foods. Yeah that never happened…), so I substituted the dates for prunes. Waste not, want not!

I can’t comment on the difference because I have never made this recipe before (or cooked with dates/prunes). The loaf definitely had a different taste to ‘normal’ banana bread, less banana, more prune. Still pretty darn yum though, considering there’s no refined sugar 😀

So mix the dry ingredients. Ok flour… uh oh. I used all but a cup of flour for a different recipe not an hour ago. Bahh. Never fear! I always have oats, so I chucked them in my blender to try and make flour (this is how the pros do it right? XD ) It wasn’t terrible, but there were definitely large chunks of oats in the finished product. Ok, salt, powder, oh cinnamon? Easy. Oh I don’t have any, well, I’ll use a little extra nutmeg. Oh look, there’s the cinnamon. time to try and spoon out some nutmeg and replace it with cinnamon. *face palm*.

Right, so blend the dates and butter milk (ie. milk with a dash of vinegar, coz I don’t have space for another carton in my fridge!), till smooth… or not crazy chunky. My blender didn’t quick get it to the stage where I would call it ‘smooth’ but it turned out fine.

I added the other ‘wet’ ingredients to the blender (probably could’ve done it all at the same time) but replaced the butter with olive oil, fresh from the farm 2 weeks ago. I’ve never had an egg refuse to crack, but this one almost got the better of me.

Add it all together, but don’t overmix! Time to cook! No need to preheat the oven, what with my fancy (and very old, but new to me) gas oven. I’m not scared of it at all, what are you on about?

It looked and smelt gross going into the oven and coming out. But it actually tasted quite good. I honestly didn’t expect to enjoy it, but this morning I toasted some and put some butter on it an oh my goodness it was good. It’s stayed out on my bench for the past week and is still ok, still moist and ok to eat fresh.

It so strangely shiny… should it be shiny?!

Growing Ogres

Ogres are… like onions. Because they stink? No. Oh, they make you cry? No! Onions have layers! Ogres have layers. Onions have layers. You get it? We both have layers. Hmmm. You know, not everyone likes onions… What about cakes? Cakes have layers and everybody loooooves cakes!

Ok, so I’m not growing ogres. I’m growing spring onions. But… Who doesn’t love some good old Shrek and Donkey?

I love gardening. I love the idea of having all the fruit and veg I need right outside my door. So, now that I have a bigger place I decided to start a vege patch. I’ll have beans and tomatoes, corn and broccoli, carrots and potatoes…and spring onions! I’m always using onions, and to me, spring onions are quite often easily substituted. The benefit to growing spring onion as opposed to brown onions and the like is that they’ll regrow after I cut their heads off… I mean trim the tops. That way I won’t have to resow/harvest/dry and all the other finicky things needed for keeping onions. The plan is to have a constant supply of spring onions available.

Now we all need to start somewhere. Instead of using seeds, I decided to utilise the ends of my store-bought spring onions, which were destined for landfill. It was really easy. All you do is get spring onions with the white bulb and roots still attached. Chop that off about 2cm from the roots and use the green bits as your heart desires. Get a cup, glass or jar. Grab 2 or 3 toothpicks and insert them into the onion base at an angle. Don’t poke them all the way through, just enough that they are holding the onion. You want to have the toothpicks angled so that the roots will sit below the lip of the cup. Get the roots and make sure all of them go into the cup. Fill the cup so that the roots are fully submerged, but the bulb is not. At this stage, the onion is pretty forgiving. After a day you’ll see your flat topped onion start to bulge. Wait a few more days and there will be green leaves. You may need to change the water and top it up over this time. You may even notice the toothpicks changing angles as the onion grows (re-position it as needed). Congrats, you’ve just saved your spring onion from landfill!

At some point you’ll want to plant this into soil. This is where I killed my plants. Well, not at the transplanting stage, but at the over-loved stage. See, I think I buried the onions too deep. Instead of just covering the roots, I also put about 1cm of the bulb under the soil too. This caused my plants to rot and die 😥 But I soldier on and now have some new babies…onions… ready for transplanting! Wish me luck!

Bake on (?),

Beth 🙂

Sweet! Or hot…?

I made a pretty sweet cake for my birthday yesterday. You could say I was on fire 😛 I got my inspiration for this cake from the Women’s Weekly Best Ever Kid’s Cake book and used their dark chocolate mud cake recipe in the same book. It turned out to be a super dense, rich and delicious cake, but maybe I’ll have some cream on hand next time! I actually made the cakes themselves a few days in advance and froze them, which didn’t seem to affect the texture or taste at all. I also used spelt flour instead of regular wheat flour so I could eat as much as I wanted! Which wasn’t too much it turned out.

I followed the recipe in the book (written he re for your convenience) and poured the batter into 2 same sized round containers. The instructions were very vague on how to bake the cake, so I guess 180 degrees for about 20 mins. They turned out pretty good, but next time I might reduce the cooking time a bit to try and get an extra gooey (but still cooked) center. I also think that the cake may not need the extra cocoa as there are 2 blocks of chocolate in that cake! I’ll have to experiment. I cooled the cakes then popped them into a container in my freezer to keep.

I removed the cakes at the start of the day to give them plenty of time to defrost before the party. After going to work and while cooking all the other food for the party, I made the toffee (actually Mum made it and did a great job but don’t tell anyone). I followed the recipe in the Women’s Weekly Cooking Class Cookbook, but used apple cider vinegar instead of brown vinegar. This was definitely because I wanted to test it and not because I did not have the brown vinegar. Yup. It actually made toffee with a slight apple taste which was really nice! To get the colour of the flame we added 2 drops of yellow and 1 drop of red food colouring to the mix before it boiled. We needed the toffee to be the hard sort so it ended up boiling for about 20 mins. We spread it onto baking paper, allowed it to cool then broke it up to look a bit like flames.

Then came the icing and assembly. We made a basic buttercream and cocoa icing to go between the layers of cake and on top of the whole cake. I sifted some cocoa powder over the top of the cake to make it less shiny and look more like dirt (yum!). I used TV malt stick snacks to go around the outside (which made portioning the cake a dream!) and 1 milk and 1 dark flake to create the logs around the fire. Then shove the toffee pieces in artistically and some candles and voila! A yummy campfire cake 🙂 I used sparkler candles because… well… why not?

Bake on,

Beth

Guts of the cake. Note the two layers and density of the cake.

Dark Chocolate Mud Cake

This is a recipe adapted from the Women’s Weekly Best Ever Kid’s Cake book. The toffee comes from Women’s Weekly Cooking Class Cookbook.

Total Time: 2 hours 20 mins approx.

Time for cake: 40 mins

Time for toffee: 30 mins + 1 hour to set

Makes 1 cake, enough to feed almost 20 people (small serves due to richness)

Ingredients

Cake

360g Yummy Dark Chocolate
Butter
water
Brown sugar
Spelt flour
Cocoa powder
Baking soda
(I’ll find the exact amounts soon)

Toffee

3 cups sugar
1 cup water
1/4 cup apple cider vinegar
2 drops of yellow food colouring, 1 drop of red

Other for assembly

TV snacks
Cocoa Buttercream icing
extra cocoa
1 dark flake (85g)
1 milk chocolate flake (85g)

Method

Preheat the oven to 180 degrees C
Combine the chocolate, butter, sugar and water over low heat until smooth, stirring continuously (sugar will burn quickly).
Sift together flour, cocoa and baking soda.
Add the liquid mix and stir until combined.
Line 2 same sized round baking pans with baking paper and oil. Divide mixture between pans evenly.
Cook for 15-20 mins until a skewer inserted comes out clean.
Cool on a wire rack.

Toffee

Place all ingredients in the smallest pot they fit in (they should fill about half the pot).
On low heat, dissolve the sugar, stirring continuously. As sugar gets deposited on the side of the pot use a pastry brush dipped in water to wash the sugar back down. This helps to avoid burning of those small amounts of sugar.
Once all sugar is dissolved, bring to a rapid boil for 15 or so minutes. To test if the toffee is done, use cold (fridge) water, drop a small amount of mixture in. If it “cracks” then the toffee is ready. If not, continue boiling and testing every minute or so. Be careful not to over-boil and burn the toffee.
When ready, immediately place the pan in a bath of cold (tap) water. This stops the cooking process. After a few minutes, pour the toffee onto a large sheet of baking paper. You can make different shapes by allowing non-uniform edges to be poured.
Allow to set on the bench top. Do not place in the fridge and avoid humid environs. This will cause the toffee to go sticky.
When set, break into fire shaped pieces (triangular/ wavy…).

Assemble

Create a cocoa butter cream icing.
Place one cake on the cake board and cover with icing.
Place the other cake on top and cover with icing. Use a wet spatula to help smooth the top of the cake, but don’t worry about the sides (just make them neat).
Sift some cocoa powder on top of the cake to make it look like dirt.
Place TV snacks around the cakes as shown.
Creatively place the broken toffee in the middle of the cake.
Cut flakes into thirds and arrange around the flames.
Serve (I cut pieces that were 3 TV snacks thick).