A recent road trip of NZ’s beautiful South Island to take in the Autumn colours confirmed that cake doesn’t grow on trees. In fact, many parts of the country remain blissfully undeveloped and one has to be self-sufficient or perish. Fortunately Cake Girl had the foresight to pack a tin full of lebkuchen (German gingerbread), which was a sturdy traveller and aged gracefully into chewy yumminess.
At the Hermitage hotel in stunning Mount Cook, it was the buffet table that burst forth with sweet treats. Cake Girl is a smorgasboard snob - there’s something off-putting about eating masses of food that other people have picked over and, even worse, that children might have touched with their grubby mitts. So this left only the a la carte dining option in the more elegant restaurant, access to which entailed a passing encounter with the buffet table. The savoury offerings didn’t even register in Cake Girl’s vision but the dessert display called out to be admired.
And indeed the endless selection of pretty bite-sized treats was worthy of admiration.
Feeling content with the visual symphony imprinted in my brain, Cake Girl continued on to the proper restaurant and prepared to settle in for a delicious dinner.
However, it wasn’t long before the panic of forgetting the beauty of dessert buffet set in and the only solution was to rush back with camera in hand. Fortunately the diners in the buffet restaurant were too busy eating to notice my reappearance and snap-happy fingers. And Cake Girl was too happy to ponder the potential shamefulness of her actions.
Cake Girl has been a trifle slow to latch onto macaron mania. Put it down to chalky encounters with the fake flavours and sickly fillings that comprise the offerings to hapless tourists in Europe. But I have recently discovered that not all macarons are created equal and scrumptious ones do exist. The turning point was chancing upon this fine, immodestly-sized specimen. Made by Bordeaux Bakery, it was soft and chewy thanks to plenty of ground almonds with a ganache filling, creating an edible tipping point.
Clearly there is some mastery required to produce an aesthetically perfect macaron. Cake Girl’s first efforts tasted the part but fell a trifle flat …
… and the next, using a patty tin, not much better although compensated by lashings of ganache cementing the ragged wretches together. The recipe seems fine so more practice might be the answer.
Not to be confused with the coconut-laden variant known as macaroons, in Italy macarons are known as amaretti. Te Papa museum cafe apparently produces a very nice one using a beat-everything-together recipe that sounded too easy to ignore. The proof was in the pudding and did not disappoint. Crunchy on the outside, chewy in the middle and chocolate-ty on the bottom.
Cake Girl did attempt to acquire the real McCoy (strictly for comparison purposes) and waited (im)patiently in the queue only to be foiled by the cafe’s “no take-aways” policy. Clearly it was a mistake to assume one could pop into a Te Papa cafe to grab some sustenance and run. In the absence of a comparator, it seems only fair to declare my version superior and you can save yourself a trip to Te Papa by whipping up your own batch.
Post script (15 May): Cake Girl relayed her customer service experience to the Te Papa cafe manager, who remedied the matter by despatching this box of six amaretti cookies.
Cake Girl was most impressed and can now confirm the real thing rivals the homemade replica with its especially chewy interior.
But if these were sausages, they’d sell like hot cakes, or cookies really ‘cos these oh-so-professionally wrapped bundles contain lebkuchen dough. Lebkuchen are German gingerbread biscuits, usually made for festive occasions like Easter and Christmas.
The dough is normally blobbed out in balls onto the baking tray but Cake Girl found it easier to make the dough in advance and leave it wrapped in the fridge before slicing and baking later in the day. These cookies are definitely not jaw-breakers but instead slightly soft and chewy thanks to ground almonds and lots of honey. They can either be left plain or embelished with melted chocolate and even iced.
Cake Girl knows that Easter has been and gone but it’s a long haul to Christmas and Easter is blessed with such an abundance of festive food treats that it’s impossible to do them justice in four days. Added to this is Cake Girl’s discovery that there are dozens of variants on lebkuchen, including this cake version with its particularly more-ish damp chewy texture.
The recipe recommends leaving this lebkuchen to mature for up to a month before devouring but a couple of days was as long as Cake Girl could hold out. Besides, the recipe makes a decent quantity so at least some of it will get a bit longer to mature.
Cake Girl recently entertained not only adults but also kiddies for morning tea. It took a great deal of restraint not to go OTT with an extravagant and elaborate spread but previous experience of feeding children has taught Cake Girl that less is more.
Brief consideration was given to creating two different cakes until cleverness struck in the form of wee banana cakes featuring two different flavoured icings. Opting for lemon icing and chocolate ganache covered all bases in terms of the guests’ preferences. And it was the perfect opportunity to trot out that wonderfully easy, uber banana-ry recipe Cake Girl previously raved about.
As Cake Girl set about re-creating this recipe for Apple Streusel Cheesecake Bars something strange happened and - like the proverbial snowball - the streusel gathered more ingredients as it came together. The layers of diced apple and cream cheese were a given. But in the fridge, a jar of lemon curd beckoned to be blobbed into the cream cheese - and so it was.
A slight misjudgement when upping the quantity of crumble topping meant it was more akin to loose dust than crunchy nuggets. To provide welcome distraction, Cake Girl applied a generous scattering of dark chocolate chunks. Upon serving the much-modified streusel, the topping was still a tad dry and not quite sweet enough so a dollop of raspberry jam came to the rescue. All this added up to quite a whopper of an apple streusel and a sink full of dishes but really quite delicious.
It would be poor form to let Easter come and go without tucking into a few sweet spiced buns studded with dried fruit. Shop-bought hot cross buns can be hit and miss unless a decent sum of dosh is exchanged for a small six-pack. Yet making your own can chew up a goodly part of the holiday break - and that eats into precious time that should be dedicated to yumming up other Easter treats.
Cake Girl has found a pretty good compromise in a Ruth Pretty Easter Bread recipe that delivers homemade buns without kneading, just one rise (cunningly done in the oven) and ready to enjoy in under two hours. The other bonus is they stay fresh for a couple of days, freeze well and toast up beautifully. Sold?
Cake Girl even made a batch sans cinnamon due to a pantry oversight and the buns were still delicious. Less successful was leaving the dough to rise overnight in the fridge as the extra time resulted in the buns coalescing to form one giant Easter bun.
In a large bowl, dissolve 2 tsp honey in 3/4 cup boiling water, then stir in 1 cup cold water. Sprinkle over 4 tsp dried yeast and leave for 10-15 mins until foamy. Turn oven on to 80 degrees C. Give the mixture a stir then add 100g each of sultanas, currants and mixed peel, along with 3 tsp cinnamon, 2 tsp mixed spice, 1 tsp salt and 450g high-grade (strong) flour.
Mix until well combined (makes a very sticky, wet dough - this is normal). Line a 25cm square cake tin with baking paper and spoon into it 9 even-sized blobs of dough.
Put in the oven for 20 mins or until dough doubles in size. Then, leaving the tin in the oven, increase the temp to 200 degrees C and bake the buns for 40 minutes. If they start to darken towards the end of baking, cover with tin foil. Buns are cooked if they sound hollow when tapped. Remove from tin and let cool for 15 mins before munching.
Yes, yes, Cake Girl knows its Easter but something else special happens at this time of year in the Land of the Long White Cloud … the season of fresh figs, glorious figs … only here for a short while, which makes them all the more precious. For reasons including their delicate constitution and popularity with birds, fresh figs aren’t terribly easy to come by. By a stroke of good luck, last year Cake Girl spotted an elderly man selling figs from his garden. The bad luck was he lived an hour’s drive north, didn’t advertise his phone number and our unpredictable weather messes with the season.
Such was Cake Girl’s fear of blinking and missing out this year that extraordinary efforts were made to contact the marvellous man who magicked figs from his garden. It included phoning the Citizens’ Advice Bureau, who put Cake Girl onto the secretary of the Kapiti Horticultural Society, who then volunteered to stop by the house of the Fig Man to obtain his phone number. How is that for extraordinary kindness? As you might imagine (or not), when Cake Girl got THE phone call on Good Friday, giving the green light on fig feasting, all thoughts of Easter buns and chocolate treats were tossed aside and fig acquisition took priority.
Now what? Well, once Cake Girl has eaten herself silly and can’t bear to ingest another fresh fig, then the recipe books will be permitted to mingle with the figs. There won’t be any frivolous chutney or jam making ‘cos that’s not a responsible use of a precious ingredient. However, it’s appropriate that something cakey be conjured up and this fig custard tart could be just the ticket.
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Pooh always liked a little something at eleven o’clock in the morning, and he was very glad to see Rabbit getting out the plates and mugs. When Rabbit said, “Honey or condensed milk with your bread?” Pooh was so excited that he said, “Both,” and then, so as not to seem greedy, he added, “But don’t bother about the bread, please.” (A. A. Milne)
Winnie the Pooh knows best when it comes to good eats but if this bread was in Rabbit’s pantry, Pooh would have gone the whole hog. Clearly, this isn’t a cake but anything scrummy made with flour that can be slathered with butter is almost as good. What sealed the deal for Cake Girl was the speed and ease of this bread recipe. In less than two hours you can be tucking into your very own homemade loaf and not still be scraping bread dough from under your fingernails - because there’s no kneading required. Yes, yes, kneading dough is apparently therapeutic but it doesn’t satisfy hunger so getting the real point of bread - the eating - sooner is surely more beneficial?
Cake Girl will be honest - this isn’t bread for those of a delicate constitution who like to nibble on cucumber sandwiches sans crust. This bread is dense, hearty, packed with seeds and nutty in texture - all the attributes that make bread worthy of eating. As delicious as it is, it’s unlikely you will eat both the loaves this recipe makes. Fear not, because the bread is still perfectly edible the next day AND it makes particularly good toast.
