A helping hand with chocolate cake

We have a new addition to the family…



It's a Kitchen Aid…an incredibly overpriced but very sexy mixer. We have always walked through kitchen stores admiring them from afar (they are always placed on the top shelves) and mildly arguing about what colour we would choose if we ever won the lottery and could afford one.



But now a bright red mixer is sitting proudly on our bench. We don't technically own it … we are looking after it for a friend who has decided to move back to LA for a while but we will certainly be putting it to good use while it resides under our roof.

At first I was a little scared to use it…it just looks so good and I'm always ruining things much to Sim's eternal frustration…a little scratch here, a bit of food there that no matter how hard you try just can't be removed. But after a batch or two of dough for bagels, I'm starting to relax (and hopefully Sim is too!)

What I really like about it, is it's simplicity. It's solid and heavy and only has two levers. I hate it when you buy something and it feels plasticky and light and eminently…well…breakable…usually just as soon as the warranty has run out. This mixer feels like it will be around for a while. Which is lucky as Sim went and bought the pasta making attachments for it! We haven't had a chance to try them out yet, but look out for that post…we'll probably be singing it from the rooftops.

Sim did make a delicious chocolate cake on the weekend with the help of our new friend and in typical fashion muddied around slightly with the recipe and pulled out an absolutely stunning rendition. It was warm and delicious and comforting and just so…indulgent. I had four pieces in a row and now I feel like I have to go running every night for a month…but hell it was worth it.

Old fashioned chocolate cake
Adapted from the Good Taste Collection - Chocolate by Anneka Manning

185 g butter at room temperature, cubed
155 g dark brown sugar

1 tsp vanilla essence

2 eggs at room temperature

200g self raising flour

35 g cocoa powder

125 ml milk
50g dark cooking chocolate

Icing

1 ½ tblspoons cocoa powder

1 tbs warm milk

75g butter room temperature, cubed

125g icing mixture

1/2 vanilla essence

Preheat oven to 180 degrees celcius. Brush a round cake pan with melted butter to grease and line the bottom with baking paper. 

Use electric beaters (aka Kitchen Aid) to beat butter, sugar, vanilla essence until mixture is pale and the sugar dissolves. Melt the chocolate and add at this stage.

Add eggs one at a time, beat well after each addition. Sift cocoa and flour and add half to the butter mixture, then half the milk. Fold together [ no Kichen Aid required :( ] until well combined. Repeat with remaining flour and milk.

Spoon mixture into cake tin and bake for 40-45 minutes or until a skewer inserted in the centre comes out clean. Set aside for 5 minutes and then turn onto a wire rack to cool completely.

To make the icing, combine the cocoa and milk (in the Kitchen Aid!) Add butter, icing sugar and vanilla essence and mix until the mixture is well combined. Spread the icing over the cake and try not to eat too much in one sitting.

A decadant lunch

I love bread making … it doesn't really matter if it's in the machine or the oven or a combination of both; there is nothing like the satisfaction of getting the dough to rise and the smell of freshly baked bread….and I'm still only a beginner. I made bagels on the weekend (I've made a couple of batches before) but for the first time I began to understand how the dough should feel when you've kneaded it enough.

I don't know why, but I always though bagels would be difficult to make but they're actually not…a little bit fiddly maybe but not hard at all.

Ingredients:
6 cups of white flour
2 tablespoons of dry yeast
2.5 cups of warm water
2 tablespoons sugar
1.5 teaspoons salt
1 egg
Sesame seeds and/or poppy seeds

I usually mix the yeast and the water together for about 10 minutes to let the yeast activate…I have also read that this is an unnecessary step but I have found in my very limited experience that I get less failures if I do this step first.

While the yeast is activating, combine 5 cups of the flour, the salt and sugar in a bowl. Pour the yeast and water in and mix until a shaggy lump of dough forms. Put on a floured board and knead, adding the remaining cup of flour as required. When I first made these, the mistake I made was thinking that I had to add the whole cup…but I've since discovered that isn't always the case. What you want is dough that is smooth and elastic. (I actually only used half a cup of flour this time.)

Put the dough in a lightly oiled bowl, cover and leave to rise until it's doubled in size (about an hour).





Remove the dough from the bowl and divide into 12 even pieces. Roll each piece into a ball, flatten slightly and put a hole in the middle. Cover and leave to rise for another 20 minutes.

And now comes the fiddly bit…get a pan of lighlty salted water to a rolling boil. You need to boil each bagel for about 2 minutes, turning every 30 seconds. I used a fry pan and could fit three to four bagels at a time. When you boil them, they puff up slightly and hold their shape better…but don't boil them for too long or they'll deflate and then they're no good.

Use a slotted spoon to remove them from the water, brush the tops with the beaten egg and sprinkle with poppy or sesame seeds. Put them in a 200 degree celcius oven for 25 – 30 minutes or until golden brown.



We have been having the most decadent lunches with smoked salmon, cream cheese and capers on the bagels, or breakfast with toasted bagels with cream cheese and vegemite (and this is another of Sim's combinations I highly recommend).

From rock cakes to fig and walnut loaf

We invested in a breadmaker a few weeks ago and before we bought it we had a conversation about our potential use of yet another appliance. We have recently moved into a pretty small house and it has made us think about what we put in it. I guess we've finally realised that all these handy appliances are only helpful tools if you actually use them.

And I'm pleased to report so far we have been baking up a storm.

I have to admit to a few false starts; rock cakes that didn't rise and would have easily broken any window without much effort...we even gave them to the dogs who tried valiently to eat them but in the end even they had to admit defeat:

My first success (read: edible) attempt was a Fig and Walnut Loaf I adapted from a recipe I found on taste.com.au. It was also the first one I found that used honey as a sweetener rather than refined sugar. I only used the breadmaker to knead and raise the dough and have been baking it in the oven. I'm guessing this probably isn't the most energy efficient way to bake bread and one day I plan to do it all myself but I'm not the most brilliant person in the kitchen so it's still all a bit daunting.

So here's the easiest loaf to make:

Ingredients:

1 sachet of dry yeast (7g)

1 cup warm water

45 ml honey (3 tblspoons)

440g of bread flour (I've been using white but I think wholemeal would be tasty too)

1 tspoon ground cinnamon

1 tspoon salt

150g of dried figs, coursely chopped

100g coursely chopped walnuts

Small amount of olive oil

Place the yeast, warm water and honey into the breadmaker and leave for 10 minutes so the yeast activates. Then add the flour, cinnamon and salt and set the breadmaker to the dough setting. I've been adding a small amount of olive oil for a bit of extra moisture at this stage too. Our breadmaker beeps just before the end of the kneading process to add the figs and walnut so they don't get too mashed up.

When the breadmaker has done its thing, take out the dough and knead it for a couple of minutes (I usually have to mix the figs and walnuts in properly, then put it in a lightly greased bread tin and leave it to rise slightly for 10-15 minutes. Put the dough in the oven at 200 degrees for 10 minutes to brown the crust, lower the temperature to 180 and bake for about another half an hour. When you tap it on the bottom it should sound hollow and then it's ready.

Now I take fruit toast to work instead of buying it...and make everyone jealous as they smell the cinnamon toasting in the lunchroom!