One of my favourite cakes in my repetoire is a cinnamon teacake which takes a total of about 45 minutes from start to finish, and is the perfect accompaniment to a good cup of coffee or tea. The cake itself is very simply flavoured, but the cinnamon sugar on top provides crunch as well as a little spicy sweetness that seems to enhance the soft vanilla flavour of the cake itself.
This is one of those strange dense-but-light cakes in that it feels quite heavy, but upon biting into it you’ll experience a light, buttery, moist crumb which seems to instantly dissolve and leave you hankering for more.
Though I like this cake just the way it is, feel free to add a variety of fruits for different flavours – I’ve made it with strawberries and apples before and they were both wonderful (as well as being so loved by the family that they didn’t last 24 hours!)
Isn’t it beautiful? Browned and crisp outside, the inside is an entirely different experience…
Ingredients
Cake
120g butter at room temperature
2/3 cup caster sugar
2 eggs, lightly beaten
2 tsp vanilla extract*
1 1/2 cup self-raising flour
1/2 cup plain flour
1 cup milk
*Vanilla extract is not vanilla essence. Vanilla extract is made using real vanilla beans, whilst essence is made by oxidizing lignin, a waste product of the wood pulp industry, to make vanillin. Extract is, in my own opinion, a lot stronger in flavour and has less of an alcoholic smell.
Topping
30g butter, melted
1 tbsp caster sugar
1 tsp ground cinnamon
1. Preheat oven to 180 degrees C. Line an 18cm cake tin and set aside for now.
2. Using electric beaters, beat the butter and sugar in a bowl until light and creamy. Add egg gradually, beating well after each addition to prevent curdling (though it doesn’t really affect the cake at all). Add the vanilla extract and beat till combined.
3. Transfer mixture to a large mixing bowl. Using a metal spoon, fold in sifted flours alternately with milk and stir till smooth.
4. Spoon into the prepared tin and smooth over the surface. Bake for about 30 minutes or till a skewer comes out clean when inserted into the middle of the cake.
5. Stand cake in tin for 5 minutes before turning out onto a wire rack to cool.
6. Whilst the cake is still warm, brush the top with melted butter and sprinkle with combined sugar and cinnamon. If the sugar melts, then sprinkle some more on, you want the cake to look like it has a light sugar dusting on top.
Everyone knows that brussels sprouts aren’t exactly the most loved vegetable in the world. In fact, I’m fairly sure that most people have, at one stage or another (and usually during childhood) held some degree of loathing for these tightly furled little dark green bundles. I myself fell into this catagory…despite the fact that I had never actually eaten a brussels sprout before, the mere thought of them was enough to make me wrinkle my nose and make me turn my head in disgust.
That is, until they were served to me a few years ago at an ex-boyfriend’s mother’s house. They were served for lunch and I wasn’t quite sure what to make of them. I poked, I prodded, I cut one half and tentatively forked a piece into my mouth.
And quickly came back for more. It was delightful, containing the earthy ‘green’ flavour you get with greens such as silverbeet or brocolli, slightly nutty and even slightly sweet! Whoever would have thought that such a tiny vegetable could contain so much flavour.
However, this love was quickly forgotten in the face of my usual favourites and so brussels sprouts disappeared from my mind until last week, when, whilst browsing the aisles at my supermarket, I spotted these uber-cuties! Tight little heads, leaves furled, dark green and promising. I’d never cooked them before, but I couldn’t resist buying a small punnet.
So, I brought them home and started browsing for recipes. No particular one took my fancy, but I saw that onion and bacon seemed to feature in many recipes, so I took that as my starting point.
Mmmm, adorable little sprout halves!
Ellie’s Sprouts of Joy
Ingredients
12-15 brussels sprouts heads
1 medium white onion
2 tbsp balsamic vinegar
2 strips streaky bacon
1 tsp minced garlic
1/4 lemon
1. Prepare the brussels sprouts by cutting them in half and removing the tough outer leaves and carefully cutting out the core of the base as a triangle. Give them a good rinse to rid them of any dirt and put them aside for now.
2. Put a large pot of water on to boil and once the water is at a boiling roll, add the sprout halves and boil for about 5-10 minutes, however long it takes for the sprouts to become a bit soft but be wary of overcooking. Once they are cooked, quickly remove, refresh under cold running water and set aside.
3. Roughly dice the white onion and the bacon. Toss the chopped bacon into a frying pan and fry till nice and crisp, then remove from the pan, leaving behind the bacon fat. Fry the onion and garlic in the bacon fat till it has caramelised and become soft, then add the balsamic vinegar and stir through and fry till it has absorbed.
4. Toss in the sprouts and mix through till the juices from the onion and bacon have soaked through, squeeze the lemon juice over the top and serve 
Look at how pretty those little sprout halves are!
[tags]brussels sprouts, onions, garlic, bacon[/tags]
Though I’d never actually tried beef stroganoff before, I’d always had a mental association of it with winter and comfort foods, the creaminess of the sauce teemed with flavoursome beef and mushrooms seemed ideal for cold winter days.
So, when I bought this month’s edition of the Delicious magazine, they had a recipe from Jamie Oliver for a creamy beef stroganoff (p31) and I thought this would be a great opportunity to give this a try.
This doesn’t look anything like Jamie’s mouth-watering photo.
Ingredients
Olive oil
50g unsalted butter
500g beef fillet steak, cut into thin strips
1 small onion, finely diced
1 garlic clove, finely chopped
300g mushrooms, thickly sliced*
125ml whiskey
3 gherkins, finely chopped
Pinch of smoked paprika
300ml light sour cream
*Jamie suggests using oyster, chestnut or chanterelle mushrooms. I just used field mushrooms as that was all I had.
Pasta or rice to serve.
1. Heat a wide, heavy-based frypan over medium-high heat, then add a splash of olive oil and half the butter.
2. Season the beef well with salt and pepper, then working in small batches, briskly fry the beef for 1-2 minutes to brown all over. Transfer to a plate and cover to keep warm.
3. Melt the remaining butter in the pan, reduce the head to medium-low and cook onion and garlic gently for 5-7 minutes till soft. Add mushrooms and cook for 1 minute. Add whiskey with cooking juices from the rested beef.
4. Bring to the boil and cook for 2-3 minutes. Add the gherkins, paprika and sour cream, and reduce the sauce slightly over medium-high heat for 7 minutes, then stir in beef and warm for 1 minute. Season, sprinkle with chopped parsley, and serve.
This tasted fine, but I hadn’t actually expected it to be sour. Clever right, especially considering that the recipe called for gherkins and sour cream. DUH. It was very indulgent and tasty, but I think I felt the kilos adhering to my thighs with every bite.
Would I make it again? Perhaps, if for a large group of people. My sister was the only other person who was interested in it, and I found that when this was reheated, there would be little pools of oil floating on top of the cream, which wasn’t particularly appetising….
Mm, winter comfort foods…
[tags]pasta, rice, beef stroganoff, pasta sauce[/tags]
This salad dressing has been in my mother’s repetoire for many years, and comes from a little clipping from a Korean magazine that she got whilst we were living there years ago.
It’s highly unusual in that it’s a little bit like mayonaise in it’s consistancy and quite thick, but it’s extremely fresh and great to dollop over a mixed leaf lettuce salad.
Looks weird, but looks are very deceiving.
Ingredients
2 ripe kiwi fruit
1/3 medium sized sweet pineapple, thorny skin cut off and roughly chopped*
1/3 red onion
1/4 cup vinegar
4 tbsp sugar
1 tbsp olive oil
*If you can’t get to ripe, sweet and fresh pineapple, use 4 rings of tinned pineapple.
Get all the ingredients, throw them into a food processor (or into a bowl and use a stick blender as I do) and pulverise till completely smooth. This makes about 500 ml of salad dressing, and you can pour it into a bottle for use. It’s good for about a month 
[tags]salad, salad dressing, fruit[/tags]
Well, mung bean’ed at any rate For the opening of my parent’s new business we had to prepare a whole lot of food, and this particular food was made in great quantity.
Made with a base of pureed mung beans, it’s called ‘bin-dae-dduk’, it is another of those foods which appear at most feast day tables in Korea, and for very good reason! It’s one of my favourite dishes and I think I can speak without bias to say that my mother’s recipe is the best I’ve ever tasted!
Topped with a little thinly sliced thai red chilli, their crisp brown exterior hides a world of delights inside their crispy shell
Ingredients
250g dried mung beans with skin removed *
250g pork mince **
250g bean shoots
135g kimchi, all liquid squeezed out and roughly chopped ***
1 bunch of spring onion, well rinsed
100g dried fernbrake (called ‘gosari’ in Korean), boiled to rehydrate then drained
1 tsp ground ginger
2 tsp minced garlic
10 thai red chillis (the small ones about 1 inch long), seeds removed and thinly sliced
1 cup water
* Trust me when I say this is an important thing – if you don’t then you’ll have skins from the beans floating around in the mixture which are difficult to blend, chewy and generally icky.
** To make a vegan version, you can replace the pork mince with ‘dry’ tofu, an extremely firm tofu that has had almost all the liquid squeezed out. Just mince it by mashing it with a potato masher.
*** Kimchi can be bought in small containers from any Korean grocery store, but failing that you could always try and make it yourself 
1. Soak the dried mung beans overnight, the next morning they should be soft enough to squish between your fingers without too much force. If you haven’t gotten skinned mung beans, then after the soaking you’ll need to lightly rub the beans to remove the skins and manually remove them from the water.
2. Use a food processor or stick blender to process the mung beans with 1 cup of water, blend till completely smooth otherwise you’ll have chunks of raw mung bean in the pancakes and it’ll be strange.
This is the processed mung bean, see how smooth the mixture is?
3. Put the blended mung beans aside, and put on a pot of water to boil. Blanch the bean shoots to slightly cook them, but don’t leave them in any longer than about 2 minutes – you want them to be kinda floppy, but still retain a little bit of crunch when you bite into them. Refresh them in cold water and strain all water from them.
4. Cut the spring onions (scallions) into 2-inch lengths and put them aside, then lightly fry the rehydrated bracken fern in a tsp of oil till fragrant. In a large bowl, mix the chopped spring onion, bcracken fern, pork mince, kimchi, ginger and garlic till well combined.
Aww, the lovely mix of flavours and textures!
5. Pour the mung bean puree into the pork mince and mix till everything is once again well combined.
Look at the consistancy of this mix – thick, not too watery, when you scoop it up with a soup ladle and pour it back it should be ‘gloopy’ (yeah, I’m all about the technical terms here!)
6. Heat up a frying pan or griddle over a low-medium heat and make sure it is extremely well oiled, then pour the mixture into small pancakes, about one soup ladle scoop per pancake. Place a few thin slices of chilli on top of each pancake – it is mostly decorative, but also provides some warmth when the little pancakes are being consumed
These are a little over 1/2 an inch high, when you flip them over you should lightly press down with a spatula to help flatten and even them out.
7. Fry till the underside is firm, crunchy and golden, then flip and fry the other side till it’s also crunchy and golden.
See the oil bubbling around the pancake? I guess they really should be called fritters as they should be fried in about 3mm oil to make sure the sides of these thick pancakes is cooked also.
8. Leave them to drain on some paper kitchen towels. These can be fried and lightly refried before serving, but they do need to be served warm otherwise they are a bit tough.
By the time me and mom had finished, this wooden basket was piled high with these crispy little bundles of joy
Thanks to the kimchi, these don’t require any dipping sauce, but you can make a simple one of vinegar and soy sauce in a 1:1 ratio with a 1/2 tsp of dried chilli powder mixed in.
[tags]korean food, fritters, mung bean[/tags]
