Vanilla Bean Bundt with Strawberry Glaze

Bonjour mes amis.

Well, Easter is over. Boo. I love the colours and happiness of everybody at Easter time. I wish everybody was in such good spirits all of the time. Easter certainly says one thing:

CHOCOLATE MAKES EVERYTHING BETTER.

But, I don't know about you lovely folk, but I am a teeny bit over it. GASP! Now don't be like that. It's just that it's been everywhere and supposedly Australians are the biggest chocolate-consumers at Easter in the world and I JUST NEED A BREAK OK?!

So with that in mind, I have decided to steer away from the chocolate until I have recovered somewhat from the mayhem that has encapsulated the citizens of the world.

So in order to escape the Easter craziness, I turned back to Christmas (such logic!). Most of my Christmas presents, I admit, were to do with baking. Cupcake cases, an icing bag set, cookbooks, and... A bundt tin!

I have never made a bundt cake before, but looking at different blogs around the place, they photography beautifully, and the possibilites are endless! So I knew that I had to have one. I had a bit of bundt fever.

Even the word 'bundt' is addictive. Go on, say it.

...'bundt'.

Bundt bundt bundt.

The word is looking extremely strange to me as I type now.

Anyway, my grandparents' birthday's are about a week apart from each other, so I made them a Birthday Bundt! It was the first opportunity I had to use my new tin, so I was a bit nervous. But the cake turned out pretty well, I think! I pinched the recipe from Always With Butter, one of my favourite blogs, except I eliminated the almond flavouring because I don't really like that distinct almond essence flavouring. I replaced it with vanilla essence, which, combined with the vanilla bean paste, made for a simple and utterly delicious cake. I did, however, want to reproduce the design of Julie's cake, because the photos were just stunning. The vanilla, the pink of the glaze, and the contrast of the blueberries just took my breath away. If it ain't broke, don't fix it,  right?

Right!

I think I'm in Bundt-Love. That's a thing, I'll have you know. Expect more bundts coming your way from FBC!

Vanilla Bean Bundt with Strawberry Glaze

{Recipe adapted from Always With Butter}

Ingredients:

3 cups plain flour

1 tsp baking powder

1/2 tsp baking soda

Pinch of salt

250g unsalted butter, softened

1 3/4 cups caster sugar

1 tsp vanilla essence

2 tbsp vanilla bean paste

4 eggs

1 cup buttermilk

3 strawberries

Icing sugar

Blueberries

Method:

Preheat the oven to 180 degrees celsius. In a bundt pan, grease the inside surface evenly with butter, and then dust with flour.

In a large bowl, sift together flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt.

In a separate bowl, cream butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Add the vanilla essence and vanilla bean paste and mix until well-incorporated.Add the eggs in, one at a time, mixing well.

In alternating batches, gradually pour the flour mixture and buttermilk into the butter-sugar mixture bowl. Pour the batter into the bundt pan, smooth the top, and bake in the oven for 1 hour.

Wait to cool completely, then invert onto a wire rack.

Strawberry Glaze:

In a food processor, puree the strawberries until smooth. Gradually add sifted icing sugar until the glaze comes to the desired consistency (thicker will make it run nicely down the cake). Process until smooth, and pour over the cooled cake. Sprinkle with blueberries.

Lamington Icecreams

Happy Almost Australia Day everybody!

Well, my life has been pretty boring of late. It's pretty much been a case of rowing and napping, repeated a billion times. Oh, and baking of course :)

As I'm writing there are angry clouds in the sky, and gusts of wind rattling the poor trees, who are sick and tired of being pushed around. They've had to endure the less-than-lovely climatic conditions for the past few days (and let's face it, most of the summer), and it looks like they will have to put up with the mean, wild weather for another week or more!

 This doesn't bode well for Australia Day, which is this Thursday for all you non-Australians out there. Australia Day is usually a time of hot, sunny, clear days, so most people would have had barbecues planned, or spending a nice, peaceful day out on the lake or at the beach...  But perhaps not this year!

Perhaps a 'Christmas in July'-type event would be more appropriate. Australia Day-in-July?

Maybe I'll create a sandy beach inside my house, and turn all the lights and heaters in the house on, and play backyard cricket indoors, with all Mum's breakable vases around. Sounds good, right?

I thought I was being really clever by making these chilled-icy-treat versions of the traditional Australian lamington. I thought they could be enjoyed on an ideally sunny, outdoorsy kind of Australia Day.

But aargh damn you unpredictable 2012 weather! It would seem that you have tried to rain on my parade again! (See what I did there? With the weather pun? Hm?)

But nay! These will taste just as yummy inside my house, on my fake beach.

But seriously, people, I am pretty proud of my little Aussie invention here. Lamingtons (for those of you who are not Australian) are traditionally a small cake made out of two layers of vanilla sponge, sandwiched together with a layer of strawberry jam in the middle, and coated with a layer of chocolate icing and dessicated coconut. So I thought, hey, this could taste super good in icecream-form!

I made two types of ice cream - vanilla, and strawberry jam, and they taste just like the traditional cake, except smooth and creamy and cold! I put them on paddlepop sticks and coated them in the chocolate and coconut, and then WOW THEY LOOK REALLY SIMILAR TO

LAMINGTONS!

I was extremely happy with the way they turned out. They look so similar to the real thing on the outside, and then you bite into the middle and get the surprise layered hit of vanilla and strawberry jam and it's so delicious and fun to eat and gah I love them so much!

Yay for foods that look like other foods!

I hope you make them and enjoy them, whatever the weather.

{Vanilla Icecream and Strawberry Jam Icecream recipes adapted from David Lebovitz' Vanilla Icecream}

Lamington Icecreams

Makes about 12

Ingredients:

 2 cups full cream milk

A pinch of salt

1 1/2 cups caster sugar

2 tsp vanilla bean paste

4 cups thickened cream

8 large egg yolks

2 tsp vanilla essence

1 cup strawberry jam

About 12 paddlepop sticks

350g dark chocolate

150g unsalted butter

3 tbsp milk

1 cup dessicated coconut

Method:

Heat the milk, salt, and sugar in a medium saucepan.When the sugar is dissolved, and the mixture is starting the bubble at the edges, add the vanilla bean paste and stir. Take off the heat.

Let's make a little ice bath! Place a big (2-litre capacity) bowl inside an even bigger bowl that is partially filled with iced water. Pour the cream into the top bowl.

In a separate bowl, whisk together the egg yolks. Pour a little of the warm milk mixture into the yolks, and whisk to combine. Then add the egg mixture back into the original milk mixture in the saucepan, and combine again.

Cook over low heat, stirring  and scraping the bottom of the saucepan constantly, until the mixture has thickened enough to coat the back of a metal spoon.

Through a seive placed over the top of the bowl on top of the ice bath , strain through the custard mixture. Stir over the ice bath until cool, add the vanilla extract, and then divide into two smaller bowls 3/4 of one mixture in one, and 1/4 in another. Cover the larger portion of the two with cling wrap, and chill in the fridge for minimum 2 hours.

In the smaller portion bowl, mix in the strawberry jam until evenly distributed throughout the mixture. Cover and chill, minimum 2 hours.

After 2 hours, remove the vanilla mixture from the fridge and churn in an icecream maker according to the manufacturer's instructions. Once frozen, but still soft, pour half of the icecream into a lined (cling or baking paper) rectangular or square slice pan, of about 25x20cm dimensions. Even out with a spatula, and freeze until hard. Freeze the remaining vanilla portion in a bowl or airtight container until ready for use.

Remove the strawberry jam icecream from the fridge, and churn in the icecream maker according to the manufacturer's instructions. (You will need either a second, fully frozen freeze bowl to do this immediately, or you will have to fully refreeze the first one.) Spread a thin layer of the strawberry jam icecream over the frozen vanilla layer in the tray, and freeze again.

About 10 minutes before bringing out the layered icecream, allow the remaining vanilla portion to soften. Then, spread evenly over the strawberry layer and refreeze, minimum 1 hour.

Once frozen, take the icecream layers out of the tray, and, using a sharp knife, divide into 4x4cm squares. Work quickly! Stick a paddlepop stick into the middle of each one (as below), place back on lined trays or containers, and refreeze.

In a heatproof bowl over a saucepan of boiling water on the stove, melt the chocolate and butter until shiny. Let cool for a bit, stir in the milk until combined and thinned out, and transfer to a tall and wide glass or jug. Line a baking tray, and shae out the coconut into a thin layer.

Again working quickly, remove the pops from the freezer, dip in the melted chocolate mixture, and then in the coconut, coating all sides. Place back onto the tray, and then quickly back into the freezer.

Fading Chocolate Layer Cake For A Very Sweet Sixteenth

Happy January everybody!

How are you liking 2012 so far? I hope it's treating you well. Me? Oh, well I am currently loving this year because four days ago I SAW THE FLEET FOXES AT THE SYDNEY OPERA HOUSE! Oh, how glorious they were. They are my absolute favourite band, and they exceeded all my expectations entirely. It was like they were heavenly beings sent down to earth to sing for us wee human beings.

Here you can find a link to a video of one of my favourite songs of the night, Blue Ridge Mountains. This video was from 2008, so Robin Pecknold's hair was a lot shaggier than it was the other night, but the performance was just as beautiful as this one, and even better because of the amazing acoustics in the opera house.

So I'm still kind of on a high from that concert. It was just the best thing ever!

Ok Angela, stop and breathe. Whew.

Anyway, onto some of my other favourite things! Birthdays, cakes, baking, yay! Yesterday I had the privelige of baking a cake for my sister Lizzie's birthday party - she's turning sixteen! Gasp! She's going for her L's and gah she'll be able to drive and how did this happen? Ahh, they grow up so fast.

She had a really cute picnic thing up in the Hunter Valley, and I got to bake!

She loves chocolate (and hey, who doesn't?), so I decided to jump on this food blog fad of making "fading" layer cakes. People also do those ones where they make each layer a colour of the rainbow, so when you cut into the cake, a dazzling spectrum of colours peeps out at you! So instead of doing the colours using mountains of food colouring, I decided to attempt to make a cake where dark chocolate faded into creamy vanilla. The layers worked really well, and were really defined - they went down a treat at the party. I also used my brand new piping set that I got for Christmas to pipe on the vanilla bean buttercream on the outside.

This was my first attempt to make a full-on massive layer cake with smooth icing, so I am pretty damn proud of myself! It took the whole day and I was absolutely covered with sticky sugary substances, but it was so worth it! It's not perfect, but I love it!

Also, I had heard of crumb coating before, so I gave it a shot, and found that it was totally necessary to catch any naughty crumbs that wanted to be stuck in the outside layer of icing! I still got some stuck in there, the little fiends, but my buttercream was vanilla bean, so the crumbs just look like little vanilla seeds! Yay, I'm so sneaky!

{Here's the recipe - inspired by the Purple Sprinkles Ombre Cake that Steph from Raspberri Cupcakes made, except with chocolate! Initial chocolate cake recipe adapted from 'Chocolate Magic' by Kate Shirazi, basic buttercream from Raspberri Cupcakes.}

Fading Chocolate Layer Cake with Vanilla Bean Buttercream

Makes one hell of a birthday cake - 5 layers, serves about 20.

Ingredients:

For the cakes:

450g unsalted butter, softened

900g caster sugar

3 tsp vanilla essence

6 large eggs

450ml milk

10 tbsp sour cream

400g self-raising flour

6.5 tbsp cocoa powder

250g dark chocolate

100g unsalted butter, extra

For the icing:

900g icing sugar

450g unsalted butter

2 tsp vanilla essence

2 tsp vanilla bean paste, or the seeds from 2 vanilla bean pods

[Optional:]

Milk/Dark chocolate freckles

Royal icing - 1 large egg white, 1 cup icing sugar, food colouring

Method:

Preheat the oven to 180 degrees celsius. Grease and line however many uniform cake tins you possess (20cm  diameter would be ideal).

In a large moxing bowl, beat butter, sugar and vanilla together until thick, pale and fluffy. Add the eggs, one at a time, and beat well after each addition. Add the milk and sour cream and beat well (it may look curdled, but don't worry, that's what it's meant to do). Sift both flours over the mixture , and fold until combined.

Divide the mixture into 5 separate bowls. In one bowl, sift in 3 tbsp of the cocoa, in the next, 2 tbsp, in the next, 1 tbsp, in the next, 1/2 tbsp, and leave one plain vanilla. Now, in a heatproof bowl over a saucepan of boiling water, melt the butter and chocolate until smooth and glossy. To the darkest cake batter, add about 1/2 of the melted chocolate, and to the second darkest, 2/3 of the chocolate that remains in your bowl. To the third darkest, add the remaining chocolate. The mixtures should have a defined gradient of shading. Bake 2 (or however many cake tins you have) of the mixtures in the oven for 45 min, or until a skewer comes out clean. Cover the rest of the mixtures with cling wrap. Once the first batch is cooked and transfered to a wire rack to cool completely, repeat with the other batters until all are baked and COMPLETELY cooled. With a breadknife, trim the tops of the cakes so they are flat and level.

To make the buttercream, sift the icing sugar into a large mixing bowl, and add the softened butter. Mix with an electric whisk until fluffy and light. Add both the vanilla substances and mix well.

Stack the cakes on top of each other, darkest first, and in between each layer, spread a thin layer of buttercream, spreading almost to the edges.

Once all the cakes are stacked, crumb coat the cake - using a spatula, thinly coat the whole outside of the cake so you can still see the crumbs. See how they get caught in the icing? Refrigerate for 15 min.

Once refrigerated, spread a thicker layer of buttercream evenly over the cake. I used a spatula which I intermittently dipped in warm water, and ran vertically up the cake. Place freckles around the base of the cake.

To make the royal icing - whisk eggwhite until slightly frothy, then sift in enough icing sugar to make a stiff, yet pliable paste. Colour as desired, and, using a piping bag, pipe whatever the hell you want onto your cake!

Vanilla Bean Rice Pudding with Baked Apricots

WOW! I AM SO VERY VERY EXCITED RIGHT NOW!

It's because... today I got a brand spanking new Canon EOS 550D Camera! A mouthful to say out loud, but hey, who cares, because I have it in my hot little hands right this very minute! I am just so damn obsessed about how much I am obsessed with my new camera!

So, as you can imagine, I was jumping up and down the whole of this morning, and I knew that I had to test my new camera-crush out. And I had also been thinking of creating a rice pudding for quite a while, since I had never made one before.

I actually fell in love with what is deemed to be a "nanna" dish back in New York, the most amazing and not-at-all-nanna-ish city in the world! Down in Soho, there was a shop entirely devoted to this delicious, ricy treat. There was every type of rice pudding you could imagine! Rocky road rice pudding, panna cotta rice pudding, applie pie rice pudding - you name it! So I sort of had a rice-pudding epiphany that day.

And here I am, having made my own scrumptiously simple, yet all round awe-striking version (adapted from a 'Joy the Baker' recipe). Hope you have a rice pudding epiphany like me!

(P.S The little NYC taxi and playing cards are just two of the cutesy little things that I bought in my favourite city and future-home, the Big Apple.)

(P.P.S. Apricots are back in season, yippee! I had a big bag and decided to bake them, Bill Granger style.)

Vanilla Bean Rice Pudding with Baked Apricots

Serves 6-8

Ingredients:

2 1/2 cups boiling water

1 1/2 cups short-grain (I used Arborio) rice

A pinch of salt

5 cups whole milk

2/3 cup caster (superfine) sugar

1 tsp vanilla bean paste (or 1 whole vanilla pod, if you want to be fancy)

6 fresh apricots

Method:

Bring the two cups of water to the boil in a large heavy-bottomed saucepan, and, once bubbling violently, pour in the rice and salt. Bring back to the boil, and then reduce to low heat and simmer for 15 minutes, or until all the water has been absorbed by the rice. Make sure you stir the rice occassionally, as it can tend to stick to the bottom!

Once the rice is cooked, place in a large bowl. Rinse the pan that the rice was in.

Cut apricots in half and get rid of the stone. Place in a large baking dish and sprinkle with a little brown sugar. Place in the oven at 170 degrees celsius for 20 minutes.

Add the milk, caster sugar and vanilla bean paste to the clean pan. Bring to a low boil, so the milk doesn't burn. Once the milk is slowly boiling, add the rice and cook down to a creamy pudding-y mixture (about 20 minutes). Stir often, as, yes, the rice has a tendency to stick to the bottom of the pan!

Place pudding in a large serving bowl or cute glasses/dishes to serve, and place the apricots atop! The wonder of rice pudding - it can be eaten steaming hot, nice and chilled, or at room temperature! Yay for rice pudding!