Category Archives: desserts

Recipe: Slow Cooked Quinces with Vanilla and Cardamom

Posted on March 27, 2013 | 4 Comments

quincesbowlI’ll just be honest and say that the main point of this recipe is to have quinces cooking in your kitchen all afternoon, making the house smell amazing.  But the end product is actually delicious too, though not quite as delicious as the aroma – it’s heady and sweet and fruity and all the things you want from quince, and it tastes fabulous with yoghurt and maybe some pomegranate seeds or pistachios sprinkled over the top, so it’s not solely a somewhat expensive room perfumer…

Also, you can use the syrup over ice-cream, or to poach other fruits, or probaby even as a basis for a sorbet.  It’s beautiful, perfumed stuff.  And wonderfully, glowingly red.

Your Shopping List

4 quinces
375 g sugar (plain white sugar is fine, and it’s generally the cheapest option, too)
750 ml water (which you can in fact get from the tap)
1 vanilla bean
1/2 tsp cardamom pods

Continue reading →

→ 4 Comments

Posted in dairy-free, desserts, egg-free, gluten-free, nut-free, Recipes, vegan, vegetarian

Tagged , , , , , , , , , ,

Recipe: DIY Lemon Curd Tarts, and other last-minute Christmas ideas

Posted on December 24, 2012 | 3 Comments

Yes, I know.  It’s three in the morning, and here I am on my blog.  I’d like to say that this is because my meringues are cooking, but that is sadly not true, because my meringues were a disaster, and I’ve decided to turn them into Forgotten Pudding (cheat’s pavlova) instead.

Actually, I’m online because it’s three in the morning and it’s still 30°C out there, and as it happens, I still have Christmas presents to make and wrap, and it isn’t as though I can sleep in this weather, so…

Anyway.  Since I am engaged in last-minute gift making myself, I thought I’d write about what I’m making for Christmas presents, and suggest a few other quick and easy recipes that can be made on Christmas Eve and will look as though you meant to do that anyway…

Continue reading →

→ 3 Comments

Posted in desserts, Recipes, Special occasions

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Recipe: Pretentious but actually sort of justifiably so strawberries and cream

Posted on November 20, 2012 | 5 Comments

I try not to do the foodie thing, really.  I mean, I don’t try to avoid the totally obsessed with food thing, because I am absolutely in favour of that, but the organic quail eggs with sea salt drifting like snowflakes over a bed of ethically raised zombie truffles (now you know why they smell like that) thing is a bit much for me. Good food is one of the great pleasures of life, and making it into a source of one-upmanship and anxiety is, I think, against its life-giving spirit.  And now I sound like I’m inventing some strange food-based religion, though one could argue that food is in fact central to most religions, not least because it is life-giving, and I got 5 hours of sleep last night so I really need to get this post under control before it rambles off into theology land.  Though a food philosophy post may be on the agenda soon.

ANYWAY.  Having said all that, this recipe is a bit food-snobby, because it really does require truly wonderful ingredients.  I’m sorry, but there’s no way around it – when there are only three main ingredients in this recipe, and basically no method, those three ingredients have to be really, really good.  So this isn’t a recipe to make with strawberries that are kind of blah but you are in a strawberryish sort of mood – it’s a recipe to make because you found these amazing strawberries and (ideally) lovely, fresh cream today at the market or the greengrocer or maybe even the supermarket, and you want to just sit back and let them do their thing without interference, because their thing is wonderful.

Of course, I will fiddle around and give this recipe a few frills, because that’s who I am – I like to sprinkle my berries with just a splash of kirsch or strawberry syrup or raspberry liqueur, but it’s fine if you don’t have those things.  And I think strawberries and cream want something a bit crunchy and waferish to go with them, but again, this is just decoration.  And speaking of decoration, everything tastes better when you pile it into a tall sundae glass and sprinkle it with little edible stars.  Or grated chocolate.  Or what you will…

Enjoy!

Your Shopping List (makes 3 glorious servings)

(No!  Not a shopping list!  This is serendipity – you make the dessert because you have the ingredients, you don’t buy the ingredients to make the dessert…)
 
Continue reading →

→ 5 Comments

Posted in desserts, egg-free, everyday cooking, gluten-free, low glycemic index, nut-free, Recipes, vegetarian

Tagged , , , , , , , , ,

Recipe: Overnight Rice Pudding for a Cold Winter’s Morning

Posted on July 2, 2012 | 14 Comments

By the time I post this, the UEFA Soccer Cup will be over, and we will know whether Italy or Spain has won.  I am not, in all probability, going to get up to watch it, even though I did cunningly pick Italy in the office Soccer Cake Sweep and did, it must be confessed, derive great delight from Italy’s victory over Germany.  It was suggested by my Milanese colleague that we should both get up at 4am tomorrow to go and watch the soccer somewhere central.  Alas, I do not have the youthful energy of my Milanese colleague, so the best I am likely to do is get up half an hour or an hour early tomorrow morning to watch the end of the game on my TV at home.

(I didn’t.  Which is a good thing, because Spain won 4-0, and that would not have been worth losing sleep for…)

Since it is currently *extremely* cold in Melbourne, this calls for a suitably warm and comforting breakfast.  And let’s face it, there’s nothing better in cold weather than slow baking.  It warms the house, and makes everything smell wonderful, and, ideally, you get something to eat at the end of it (note that I am not counting my chickens at this stage – I haven’t actually eaten the results of this recipe yet, though it is now in the oven).

I saw a recipe a while back for rice pudding cooked overnight,  and I had great plans for adapting it to my slow cooker.  Since my slow cooker has decided to take indefinite strike action, I’m returning to the oven idea.  I’ve changed the recipe a fair bit – I can’t face cream in breakfast food, and why have currants when there are raisins in the world?  And spices?

… Suffice it to say that this is my recipe now.  Here’s hoping it will be a good one! (It is – lovely and orangey and sweetly spiced, but not too sweet.  Very stodgy and soft and baby-foodish, but that’s pretty much the point of rice pudding.  Definitely good winter breakfast material, and I just wish I’d thought to stew some apples to go with it.)

Your shopping list

1/2 cup arborio rice
2 1/2 cups milk (low fat works fine, as does soy or coconut milk, I understand)
1/4 cup raw caster sugar (or any other sugar of your choice)
2 tablespoons of sultanas
1 tablespoon of raisins
zest of 1 small orange
1 tsp vanilla essence
1/4 tsp cinnamon
a shake of nutmeg
1 1/2 tsp butter

Continue reading →

→ 14 Comments

Posted in dairy-free, desserts, egg-free, everyday cooking, gluten-free, nut-free, Recipes, vegan, vegetarian

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Recipe: Lemon and Kaffir Lime Delicious Pudding

Posted on June 9, 2012 | 8 Comments

It’s bitterly cold in Melbourne at the moment.  We don’t usually get seriously cold here in June (and I’m sure you Europeans and Americans reading this would laugh at my definition of seriously cold, since it doesn’t involve snow, or even frost).  I actually really like the cold, but there is a different quality either about it or about me this year, because I don’t remember ever having such constantly cold feet before (NB: an alternative hypothesis might involve failed central heating, but we had that a few years ago, so I know exactly how that feels, and this is something different).

Anyway, it will come as no surprise to anyone to learn that I view hot desserts as the absolutely best way to deal with cold weather.  And so here I was with this Margaret Fulton baking cookbook and a glorious farmers’ market lemon and I though, I know, I’ll do lemon delicious pudding.  Only I don’t have butter.  I will do dairy-free lemon delicious pudding!  And then I thought (and I’m a little embarrassed to admit this), actually, I haven’t posted much in my blog this week.  How can I change this recipe so that I can write about it?  And then my eyes fell on the scary, wrinkly little kaffir limes I bought at the market and I thought, why not?

I’ve never cooked with kaffir lime or even kaffir lime leaf before.  I find the scent of it like a more floral and astringent version of lime, so it makes sense that one uses the zest and the leaf in curries.  I can see that working well.  The stallholder told me not to use the juice, but not why, and I wanted to use the juice, so I sent Andrew off onto the internet to check that it wasn’t poisonous.  It isn’t, so we were good to go!

The result?  A surprisingly rich, mysteriously-flavoured citrus pudding.  The lime has kept its floral, slightly shocking flavour, but it doesn’t overwhelm the pudding.  I almost want to pair it with a spice, but I don’t know which spice would fit with it (I just don’t know my Thai flavours, and I think that’s the direction to go in).  Also, I don’t know whether it was the eggs or my new-found ability to make sponge cake, but the lemon sponge was far and away the best I’ve made – so fluffy and light!  And very warming on a cold winter’s night…

Your Shopping List

100 g softened butter or nuttelex
grated rind and zest of 1 lemon
grated rind and zest of 1 kaffir lime
150 g caster sugar
3 eggs, separated
1/2 cup self-raising flour
1 1/4 cups milk (soy milk works here)

Continue reading →

→ 8 Comments

Posted in baking, dairy-free, desserts, nut-free, Recipes, vegetarian

Tagged , , , , , , , , ,

Recipe: Unnaturally Blue Curaçao Tart for Eurovision

Posted on May 28, 2012 | 5 Comments

Well, that was really rather a satisfactory Eurovision.  I actually liked Sweden quite a bit, and while I still feel that Turkey and Iceland were robbed, there was a very pleasing mix of the truly bizarre (moonwalking bagpipe players?)  with the unexpectedly good, and not too many power ballads, either.  And for once neither Italy or France embarrassed me (and I did approve of France’s decision to garnish their number with attractive and topless gymnasts).  No costume reveals, but other than that, it was a very good effort, and definitely one of the best Eurovisions I’ve seen

I’m in the throes of a horrible lurgy, so I haven’t been feeling very inventive, culinarily (hence all the desserts with nary a savoury dish in sight.  Savoury is much harder to be creative with).  This meant no painstaking research of Azerbaijani cuisine with a view to feasting thematically.  Instead, I made up a giant pot of vegetarian chilli, cooking the beans in my new pressure cooker (and this deserves a post of its own, because I am so very excited about being able to cook beans without soaking them first), baked a lot of potatoes, and put out salsa, guacamole, grated cheese and corn chips.  Simple.

Still, a Eurovision gathering, however small, requires a suitable dessert, and I believe I may have found, if not the perfect Eurovision dessert, certainly one of the most apt.  This dessert was born when I looked at Nigella’s recipe for Grasshopper Pie and thought – yes, but how can I make this *more* unnatural? (I suspect I am the only person in the world who would ask that particular question…)

For one thing, it’s quite unnaturally blue.  For another, it is exceedingly alcoholic (thus obviating the need for a drinking game – you can simply take a bite of the tart any time there is a key change, or an all-white costume, or a wind machine…).  For a third, it is ridiculously sweet, a bit tacky, and has absolutely no redeeming nutritional value.  (I will leave the parallel to the reader). In short, it embodies the magnificent excess, silliness, sweetness, artificiality and need for alcoholic stimulation that encapsulates Eurovision.  And, in case that wasn’t enough,it has a costume reveal!  Not a very good one, but I can’t blame Eurovision for that.

Also, it’s really easy to make.  And rather tasty, in a my God, I am eating blue curaçao mixed with marshmallows and coated with chocolate kind of way…

Oh, and one last thing.  I should probably confess that I actually like Eurovision.  I even watch it sober (blue curaçao tarts aside).  You may all feel free to laugh at my terrible taste now.  But it’s not about the singing – it’s about the outrageous performances and the sheer strange variety – you really never know what you are going to get – baking grannies, red-cordial-fueled twins, or bat-dancers forming themselves into a boat.  It’s sheer delight, even when it’s horrific.  How could anyone not love that?

Your Shopping List

300 g chocolate ripple biscuits
200 g granita biscuits
75 g dark chocolate (Lindt 70% cocoa cooking chocolate is my favourite) + 125 g for topping
100 g softened butter
200 g white marshmallows!
165 ml milk
185 g blue curaçao
500 ml double cream
smarties, sprinkles, silver cachous, or any other colourful sweets to decorate the top

Continue reading →

→ 5 Comments

Posted in desserts, egg-free, nut-free, Recipes, Special occasions

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , ,

Recipe: Pudding Brownies with Cream Cheese and Cherries

Posted on May 11, 2012 | 4 Comments

I had such grandiose plans for this anniversary post!  I was going to make macarons!  I was going to make a gluten-free *and* vegan number 1 cake in best Women’s Weekly style!  I was going to have a party and make *everything*!

But it’s the end of a long week, including half a day of interminable computer training, and by the time I got home all I wanted to do was sleep.And eat chocolate cake.  Not necessarily in that order.

I have this new, wonderful Margaret Fulton Baking book (which, incidentally, I highly recommend), and had about decided to do something directly from that, even though I then wouldn’t be able to blog about it (that’s the disadvantage of food blogging – you never get to follow a recipe properly.  Says she who has never followed a recipe properly in her life, but apparently still feels that she would like to…).  My gaze was drawn to cranberry chocolate brownies with cream cheese topping.  No worries, I thought; I’ll make it gluten-free, and then it’s mine!  Only I didn’t have dried cranberries.  Dried cherries it is, then!  Oh, and maybe some cacao nibs, because they work in everything.  No worries. 

So I started making the recipe and promptly broke one of the eggs directly onto the floor.  There was no way I was going to the shops at this point, so I decided to see what plausible ingredients were in the fridge, and realised I had half a jar of cranberry jelly…

… Let’s just say that this recipe is definitely a Cate’s Cates recipe now, and leave it at that…

(Oh, and if you are wondering why ‘pudding brownies’, well, it’s because I was just a bit impatient about wanting to get these brownies out of the tin and photographed and, more importantly, tasted before it got too far past my bedtime.  So it’s possible that they weren’t really set yet – they are magnificently moist, which is a polite way of saying they fell apart when I tried to serve them, but they tasted so good I didn’t care.  I suspect they will hold together better when properly cool, but I make no promises.  I will, however, update this post in the morning when I know the full story.)

(Edited to add – actually, they are really good cold.  Very dense, but they hold together beautifully, and as a chocolate delivery system they are extremely effective)

Your Shopping List

200 g dark chocolate, preferably Lindt 70% cooking chocolate
250 g butter, cubed.  Trust me, this saves time in the long run.
2 eggs, plus 1 egg for the topping (4 eggs would have been excessive anyway.  I was right to drop the extra one on the floor.)
3/4 cup caster sugar + 1/2 a cup for the topping
1/3 cup cranberry jelly
1/4 cup cocoa powder
3/4 cup almond meal
1/4 cup cornflour + 2 tablespoons (40ml) for the topping
a pinch of salt
1 cup dried cherries
1/4 cup cacao nibs
250 g cream cheese at room temperature, but the microwave is your friend if you had it in the fridge
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
 
 

Continue reading →

→ 4 Comments

Posted in baking, cakes, desserts, gluten-free, low fructose, Recipes, Special occasions, vegetarian

Tagged , , , , , , , , ,

Recipe: Moroccan Snake Cake

Posted on April 24, 2012 | 9 Comments

This recipe is adapted from a Claudia Roden recipe (which I think turns up in different forms in several of her books).  It’s fairly heavily adapted, actually.  For one thing, my version is vegan, though yours doesn’t have to be.  For another thing, she claims that this amount serves 30 – 40 people, but I’ve fed this cake to hungry scientists and believe me, 30 people barely got through half of it, largely because it is very rich.  I usually halve the recipe and still wind up taking the recipe to work.

This cake isn’t as tricky as it looks, but I’m warning you now that the central section *is* tricky – your filo sausages will not want to coil tightly around themselves without breaking.  Fortunately, once you get past the middle few coils, the outer ones help to hold them in place, and the cinnamon and icing sugar will cover all the breaks anyway…

Your Shopping List
1.5 kg ground almonds (I find this works well with half almond meal, half whole almonds processed into coarse crumbs)
1 kg caster sugar (this tells you all you need to know about the glycemic index of this recipe)
2 tablespoons of cinnamon
150 ml rosewater
100 ml orange blossom water
500 g filo pastry (refrigerated, not frozen.  This would be a nightmare with de-frosted frozen pastry)
olive oil spray
(optional: 2 egg yolks for glazing, but since I never remember this, I can promise you it works without)
icing sugar and extra cinnamon for decoration

Continue reading →

→ 9 Comments

Posted in dairy-free, desserts, egg-free, pastry, Recipes, vegan, vegetarian

Tagged , , , , , , , , , ,

Recipe: Rocky Road for Timon

Posted on March 18, 2012 | 12 Comments

I’m in mad cooking mode for Shakespeare tomorrow. At this very moment, something that I hope will turn into Turkish Delight is glooping away, jellyfish-like, in a saucepan, so imagine, if you will, that this post is punctuated by mad dashes out to the kitchen to see if the mixture has achieved ‘very thick and golden’ yet.  Since we’re doing Timon of Athens, it would actually be appropriate to just serve hot water and rocks, but that would be mean, and I can’t bring myself to be quite that evil.  Besides, I have much, much nicer friends than Timon does, so they certainly don’t deserve Timon’s feast.

So we’re having a lot of Greek food, and also rock cakes, and, as you have possibly guessed by now, Rocky Road.

The trouble with commercial Rocky Road is that people always put pointless stuff in it, like peanuts, or really bad jelly lollies, or marshmallows that don’t  even taste like marshmallows.  And they don’t use proper chocolate, either.  This is where it becomes really pleasing to make your own Rocky Road, because you can put whatever you like in it!  Also, it takes about ten minutes to make, and most of that time is waiting for the chocolate to melt.

This is, in my view, the best ever Rocky Road.  Of course it is.  I made it precisely to my taste – inasmuch as the shops would let me.   I was hoping for a lot more freeze-dried fruit, preferably raspberries and apricots.  But you know what?  That just means I can make this even more perfect next time…

Your Shopping List

500 g really good dark cooking chocolate.  This is all about the chocolate, so you might as well go Lindt 75%
150 g marshmallows.  The ones which actually have a bit of flavour to them.
85 g roasted unsalted almonds.  Need I say more?
50 g glacé cherries.  But if you can get glacé pineapple instead, I say go for it!
50 g freeze-dried fruit.  The snappy, crunchy kind.  Trust me, this is an absolute winner, especially if you can get something good and tangy, like strawberries or raspberries.
50 g good quality turkish delight, or better still, pectin jellies! Did I mention I still have some mis-shapen ones left over from Christmas?  Well, now I have 50 g fewer…
 

Continue reading →

→ 12 Comments

Posted in confectionery, dairy-free, desserts, egg-free, gluten-free, Recipes

Tagged , , , , , , , , , ,

Recipe: Decadent Eggless Strawberry Mousse Tart

Posted on March 12, 2012 | 8 Comments

Still drowning in grants, but the last of this lot is due on Thursday, after which I will be able to *sleep*, hopefully without dreaming about grant applications.  It was Andrew’s birthday recently, and we had his family around for lunch on Saturday.  I rang Andrew from work at about 7pm and asked him to look up Nigella’s recipe for Grasshopper Pie, on the grounds that it was chocolatey and minty (his favourite flavours) and, being Nigella, it was unlikely to be too tricky for my tired brain.

Despite the unlikely ingredients, it turns out to be absolutely gorgeous (and rich), with a lovely light texture from the marshmallows (yes, I’m eating marshmallows even though it’s Lent.  This is very bad, I know, but I really am not feeling sufficiently imaginative to operate around them just now).  The only drawback is that one is then left with about 150g of pink marshmallows (since one really cannot use pink marshmallows for a bright green mousse, and all the packets come variegated in pink and white), and must therefore think of something suitably pink to do with them.

Fortunately, my lovely potato man is still selling his strawberries at $10 for 3 punnets, and for once I have a use for three whole punnets of strawberries.  Of course, that would make Nigella’s filling far too wet to set, so I added a block of white chocolate to help stabilise things, and then threw in some raspberry liqueur, because why not?

The results are quite pleasing – while this looks very cheesecakey, it’s much lighter in texture (though certainly not light in any other sense), and the strawberries really shine through.  It is a little on the sweet side for my taste, and I think next time I would serve it with a really tart raspberry sauce to add some acidity, since I don’t think one can add lemon juice or vinegar to that amount of cream and have good results.  Just be warned – this is one rich dessert.  And this quantity will make enough for at least twelve people, maybe more.  I suspect I will be feeding leftovers to hungry scientists and stressed out grant officers come tomorrow…

Your Shopping List

300 g choc wheaten biscuits, or chocolate ripple biscuits, or just granitas and add extra chocolate
50 g dark, dark chocolate
75 g butter, softened a bit and cut into cubes.
3 punnets (approx 750 g) strawberries
2 tablespoons (4 ml) milk
180 g white chocolate
250 g pink or white marshmallows (mini marshmallows probably work best, but I used a mixture of both)
60 ml raspberry liqueur, or kirsch, or cassis
450 ml double cream

Continue reading →

→ 8 Comments

Posted in cakes, desserts, egg-free, gluten-free, nut-free, Recipes

Tagged , , , , , , ,