Individual greengage jellies

When I was little I had a picture book called 'The Delicious Plums of King Oscar the Bad' which was about a greedy king who had an orchard of plum trees and would never give anyone else any. From this I worked out that plums must be pretty awesome.

Possibly the most awesome of all plums is the greengage, and that's what this jelly is made from.

I only knew about greengages from King Oscar, and also from my Mum, who used to talk wistfully of having them back in England when she was growing up.




You never saw them in the shops in Melbourne so it was only when I moved to Tasmania as an adult that I discovered them.

I guess that they are not very attractive to the big supermarket chains because although they taste incredibly sweet, they don't keep very well and are soft enough to crush easily.


The googlemonster tells me that their name comes from Sir WIlliam Gage who brought them from France to England in 1724.

The label fell off the box he shipped the trees home in, so he introduced naming rights (he must have done that a bit because there are also plum varieties called purple and yellow gages).
In France they are called Reine Claude or La Bonne Reine (the good queen).

So back to the jelly. I started with about 600g of fruit in a small saucepan on a low heat just to warm it up and get the juices to come out. I added the juice of one lemon to it because the plums were so sweet, but in retrospect this was a mistake and made it too tart.

When it was soft I pushed it through a sieve and combined it with some gelatine (if you haven't worked with gelatine before, refer instructions below).

In the meantime I hunted through my new box of pastry equipment (thanks, downsizing Mum!) and found some mini jelly moulds. Yay!

I wasn't quite sure how to prepare the moulds so I consulted Nigella, who informed me that I should brush them with some vegetable oil.

I then put some halved greengages in the bottom of the moulds because I thought that would be pretty, but as you can see from the pic at the top, the jelly is too dark to really see them :-( This is one difference with home made fruit jellies compared to commercial ones, they have real substance and colour, so they tend not to be as clear as packet jellies.

So then I ladled the jelly mixture into the moulds while it was still warm and left them to set in the fridge for a couple of hours.

When they were firm to the touch, I unmoulded them by dipping the mould quickly into hot water, then reversing it onto a plate.

I think I held them in the hot water too long because I got a small puddle of 'juice' at the base when the jellies were unmoulded. So be sure to do the 'hot water dip' for no more than a few seconds.

This pic on the right does look somewhat radioactive but apart from showing that I'm addicted to photoshop it also shows the shininess of the jelly and the colour variations in it.The darkness on the top of the jelly is the half greengage set into the jelly.

The taste of the jelly was not perfect. It was too tart (refer lemon juice comment above). I didn't add any sugar because I thought the sweetness of the greengages would be enough. And it was almost, but not quite, enough. The texture was good though: firm but not rubbery. I HATE rubbery jelly.

All in all, for someone who is not used to working with gelatine it was a good experiment.







Greengage Jellies

600g fresh greengages, ripe if possible
sugar, if desired
1 sachet or 10g powdered gelatine
4 tbsp cold water
vegetable oil for brushing moulds - use a mild-tasting one like sunflower or canola

Halve and stone the greengages and place them in a small saucepan on a low heat until they are soft. Stir and crush the fruit with a wooden spoon. If you want a sweeter jelly, add a few spoonsful of sugar at this point and let it dissolve.
When the fruit has disintegrated, push it through a sieve. Discard the pulp (the bit that's left in the sieve). Set the juice/syrup aside. You should have about 500g of syrup. If you have more, or less, adjust your quantity of gelatine accordingly (10g of gelatine will set 500g of liquid).
Put the water in a small bowl and sprinkle the gelatine onto it, leaving it to 'sponge up' for a few minutes (it expands and appears spongy). Then place the bowl over a saucepan of simmering water for a few minutes to heat up the gelatine-water mixture, stirring so that the gelatine dissolves.
Take the bowl off the heat and add a ladleful of your fruit syrup to it, making sure that the syrup is still warm (if it's not, place the bowl of syrup over the simmering water for a few minutes to warm it up). Make sure the gelatine is incorporating smoothly into the syrup. Add the rest of the syrup to the gelatine and stir to combine.
Brush the moulds with a very small amount of vegetable oil and ladle or pour the mixture into the moulds. Set the moulds on a flat tray and place in the fridge to set for at least two hours.

To unmould: fill a bowl with hot water from the tap. Hold the mould by its rim and immerse it into the hot water up to the rim for a few seconds, then immediately reverse it onto a plate. If the jelly doesn't want to come out, hold the mould onto the plate and give it a sharp shake downwards, or tap the top of the mould with a spoon. If it still won'r come out, dip the mould in hot water again.

Serve with pouring cream.
Enjoy!

Valentine's Linzer Sables

A yummy Valentine's Day version of a very old European favorite!

One of my favorite cakes when I was growing up was Linzer Torte, an Austrian cake from the town of Linz which according to the interwebs is the oldest cake recipe known, dating from 1653. 


Linzer Torte is a really rich, dense cake with ground hazelnuts, cinnamon, cloves and lemon rind which has a latticed pastry top and a filling of blackcurrant jam.


There was an awesome Austrian cake shop in Melbourne called Fleischer's, it used to be on Chapel St and then moved to Glenferrie Road. They made the Linzer Tortes I know and love. 


Linzer sables are a biscuit version of the torte, same flavours, just a bit crunchier!

To get the best flavour from the hazelnuts, roast them in the
oven for 5 minutes and then rub the brown skin off. 

I'll put this out there straight away, these were a nightmare to make.

The pastry is very short (a large proportion of butter or 'shortening' to the dry ingredients) and this makes it incredibly fragile and prone to cracking and disintegrating when handled. It sticks to rolling pins, benchtops and just about everything else too.

It wouldn't roll out at all because it cracked and split immediately when I even waved a rolling pin in its general direction.

In the end I had to flatten it out roughly by hand and then smooth the top with a spatula. See the unevenness in the picture, pre-spatula :-(

Of course, while I was flattening the top out with the spatula, the bottom was busy sticking firmly to the bench.

So then the spatula had to be wedged underneath to loosen this soft, crumbly mixture from the surface underneath so that I could stamp out my heart shapes.

Half of the shapes were plain large hearts.

The other half were the same large heart cutter but I also stamped a tiny heart cutter to create a cut out space in the middle of the sable, see picture to the right.

This is so you can see the lovely dark jammy goodness inside.

It took a lot of time and patience to get the sables all cut out and onto oven trays :-/

After spending so long on rolling and cutting, I was paranoid that they would go wrong in the oven, but no! A quick ten minutes and VICTORY!!

They were very slightly puffed and still malleable when they came out of the oven, I was so fearful to disturb these temperamental baked goods that I left them on the trays for ages before being brave enough to transfer them to a rack to cool.

It's worth all the fuss, they are melt-in-your-mouth crumbly and hazelnutty and sweet. Happy Valentine's Day!






Recipe from 500 Cookies by Phillipa Vanstone

• 150g roasted skinned hazelnuts
• 300g plain flour
• 100 g granulated sugar
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 2 tsp ground cinnamon
• 1/4 tsp ground cloves
• 225g unsalted butter
• grated zest of one lemon
• 50g blackcurrant jam
• icing sugar to decorate

Set the oven to 175C. Grind hazelnuts in a food processor until fine, then add all other ingredients and pulse until the mixture clumps together. Flour a work surface and roll out the pastry (good luck!!). Cut shapes, making sure you have even numbers of each shape. Cut holes in the centre of half the shapes to make the 'jam holes'. Transfer the sables to trays lined with baking paper, handling them carefully to ensure they don't crack. Bake sables for 8 to 10 minutes. 

Sandwich the cooled sables together with blackcurrant jam, pressing down carefully to make the jam rise through the centre hole. Sieve icing sugar over the top just before serving. 

Filled cookies keep for up to 3 days, unfilled keep for over a week in an airtight jar. 

Kids DIY cupcakes at Festivale

At Festivale this year there was a wonderful stall in the kids area which can best be described as 'DIY Cupcakes'.

You paid your four bucks and got to choose one of about 8 patterns. You then were given a plain undecorated cupcake, you took this to the 'buttercream station' with your chosen pattern and they dolloped the right colour of buttercream on your cupcake...

... giving you an icy pole stick to spread it, and a little bag of pre-cut decorating items like marshmallows and licorice. 

The picture shows my chosen pattern which was a very cute bunny with scary black whiskers. 

So I took great pleasure smoothing my buttercream to the smoothest smoothness possible and sticking on the little bits 'n bobs of decorating things... the result I achieved was pretty much what the picture indicated... if anything the whiskers were scarier than advertised. :-/

I undertook this activity with two small friends of the O'Byrne variety who were equally as excited as me at making their cupcakes, and equally careful in their decorating skills. 

In fact they had the jump on me because their little fingers were the right size to handle the tiny ingredients. 

 I loved this design of two teddies marooned on a desert island, complete with a cocktail umbrella to protect their delicate teddybear fur from the hot sun. They look pretty happy with their tropical paradise.

The happy trio with their decorating efforts.

Their mum, my friend Michelle, tells me that this DIY cupcakery idea is starting to take off at little people's parties... there is a whole scene out there that I have been unaware of up until now!!

Thanks girls for sharing your DIY cupcaking experience with me and thanks Michelle for the photo!

Lots 'n' lots of piggywig cupcakes!

A whole STY of piggywigs for morning tea at work this week!

"And there in the wood a Piggy-wig stood, with a ring at the end of his nose, his nose, with a ring at the end of his nose."

Although I love this quote from The Owl and the Pussycat it makes me wonder if I should have put little rings in the noses of my piggywig cupcakes.

Farming question: do piggywigs have rings in their noses these days??

These piggywigs are waiting expectantly for Tuesday morning tea at work. I chose this design because it's simple and quick, an advantage because on this occasion I needed to make a fair few of them and had limited time.

Piggywig uses one large round cutter to cut out the face. His snout is hand shaped by rolling a ball of fondant, then flattening it a bit top-to-bottom and upward-downward. The snout is stuck on to the face with a few drops of water, and you can use the end of a little paintbrush to make the dents for the nostrils.

The eyes are tiny balls of black fondant placed in tiny holes made by the smallest size of ball tool and moistened with a drop of water to stick them down.

The ears are stamped out with a little triangle cutter, but if you don't have one you could cut triangles with a knife.

This is the production line of piggywigs getting their snouts and ears and eyes put on.

I also brushed some rose petal dust (diluted with cornflour) onto the cheeks, to give them that rosy blush. I put a little on the tips of the ears too but it's a very subtle effect that is hard to see in the pics.

A warning, I cut the ear triangles and left them to dry for a short while because they were so soft that it was difficult to stand them up. But when they had dried a bit, they were much more likely to crack and have an uneven surface. I'm not really happy with the ears, would welcome advice?





A note on colouring the fondant, start off with a really tiny amount of colour. The amount of colour shown in the pic below left was actually too much for this quantity of fondant - I had to add that much fondant again to get the colour down from a very hot pink to a piggy pink. That's why the fondant seems to have 'expanded' in the pic below right.

Oink oink, happy eating - and if you were wondering, OBVIOUSLY all these piggywigs are free range.

Coconut macaroon madness

No macaroony blog would be complete without coconut macaroons! 

When I think of macaroons, I always think of French macaroons, which I guess we should all call 'macarons' except it sounds a bit poncey. But there are other types as well and coconut ones are often found in England, Scotland, the USA and Germany. 

The interwebs tells me that Australians put jam in the middle of their coconut macaroons but I think they're just trying one on - I've never seen that. 

By the way, the interwebs also tells me that the word 'macaroon' comes from the Italian maccarone, or maccherone, a verb meaning to crush or beat - because you need to crush the almonds so finely. Before food processors were invented this would have been a bummer of a job, no wonder they named the end result after it. 

Anyway, coconut macaroons start off with a basic meringue of whipped egg whites and sugar.















You add a bit of almond meal, a lot of coconut and get a sticky, moist mixture that you shape roughly into balls. It's hard to do neatly because the coconut bits stick out everywhere.

I used Nigella Lawson's recipe from How to be a Domestic Goddess, thanks Nigella.

She gives quantities for 8 largeish macaroons... I needed about 30 small ones, so I doubled the mixture... and ended up with 66!!

So Nigella's macaroons must be the size of a small Shetland pony.

2 large egg whites
1/4 tsp cream of tartar
100g caster sugar
30g ground almonds
pinch of salt
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
250g shredded coconut

Set oven to 170C. Beat egg whites until frothy, then add the cream of tartar and beat to soft peak. Add the sugar gradually until the mixture is at hard peak and glossy. Fold in all other ingredients and spoon onto baking trays lined with baking paper. Bake for 20 minutes.

Coconut joy!

Portrait cupcakes

It's a small step from doing 'people' cupcakes to doing actual portraits of people you know. This is an off the wall idea for thank yous, birthdays or other occasions where you really want someone to feel special.

Warning, they may just end up thinking "What the?!.... my face isn't that round... and is my nose really that pudgy??!"

So pick your audience, but hopefully they will get a laugh out of it.

Quick tip is that it really helps if they have some distinctive feature, like long dark hair or massive eyebrows or glasses or a beard... there are limitations to portraiture accuracy on a cupcake so you need to have some simple feature that stands out and says to them that this isn't just a random 'face'.

I did these because I wanted to say thank you to some very talented and generous people who opened the amazing MONA (Museum of Old and New Art) in Hobart. It was a question of what do you give someone who has everything, I thought a set of cupcakes with a picture of each of the prime movers and the lettering that makes up the MONA branding would maybe raise a smile. Who can say no to a cupcake!

This is the final presentation. I stuck the bases down with museum gel (this was not a deliberate reference to their museum, just an old curators trick of using it whenever you want something to stick fast but be removable).

Oddly enough the faces weren't the most difficult bit. The lettering was. This was because I wanted to copy exactly the particular font and colours of the MONA brand.

I ended up tracing them from a MONA catalogue onto baking paper, then placing the baking paper on top of rolled fondant and scoring through it very gently with a knife. Then I removed the paper and cut the scored lines.

One tip is leave the letters half cut out - as in the picture - to harden up a bit before you try to remove the void spaces. Otherwise they will stretch and deform.

The 'O' was cut using two sizes of circle cutter.

Melting moments and ricciarelli: flour and butter v almonds and eggs

If we put macaroons on one side for a minute – I know it’s hard – my other favourite bickies are melting moments and ricciarelli.

Melting moments are apparently an Australian invention based on Scotch shortbread, they were first mentioned in an Australian cookbook from 1928. 

 

 They contain the same ingredients as traditional shortbread (flour, cornflour, sugar, butter) but whereas shortbread is baked in slabs or ‘cakes’ and stamped with a pattern, melting moments are small bite sized drops.

At some stage after the 1950s they began to be sandwiched together with jam or icing.

I like using a vanilla flavoured biscuit with a sharp lemony icing/filling. The icing is butter, icing sugar and lemon juice. It needs to be spreadable but stiff, so that it dries hard and sticks the bickies together. 

My recipe is from a book called '100 Cookies' but you can google recipes, they are all pretty similar. 

Ricciarelli (pronounced ‘richie-a-RELli’) are a type of macaroon I guess. They are Italian biscuits made of ground almonds, sugar and egg white and they are moist and chewy rather than crisp’n’crunchy. They can be flavoured with lemon rind which works really well. 

 

I just googled the name and I found out they are named after an Italian prince, Ricciardetto della Gherardesca from Volterra, who apparently invented them when he came back from the Crusades in the 14^th century. 

I am now imagining a knight in full armour clanking around a massive castle kitchen trying to grind almonds really finely while Baldrick beats the egg whites. 

Anyway, here in the 21^st century there is a great recipe for them in Nigella Lawson’s How to be a Domestic Goddess cookbook, thanks Nigella. You get a very sticky mass that you need to hand-shape into diamonds (using icing sugar to stop them sticking to your hands) and place on a baking tray to harden up before baking. 

You are supposed to leave them overnight but I always get impatient and try to bake them same day. 

Here is Jade helping out in the process by trying to speed up the drying with a hairdryer.

Unfortunately it didn’t really work and while you still end up with yummy biscuits, they look swollen and malformed, not the little neat diamonds that you want. So, always best to follow the recipe – sigh.