We love our bread and butter (and apple and pudding)

Sydney has suddenly remembered winter is coming, and we had better start to prepare for it. For the past week, the mornings have had a decidedly wintry vibe. My light weight coats look more inviting in the evenings. Even in our temperate winters, there is something bracing about walking into a gust of cold wind, knowing that you are well wrapped up and no cold air can sneak under your collar or around your fingers.

Summer (and summer picnics), it’s been nice, see you on the other side.

On a brighter note, autumn and winter can be a good time to visit towns and attractions on the northern or southern coastline that are often overrun by weekenders and tourists in summer. We did exactly that this weekend, meandering through 2-3 cities and towns, and ending up at the start of the southern escarpment of the Great Dividing Range overlooking a valley that is still green from summer. Our accommodation – just outside the nearest town – was low-key yet unexpectedly good. The highlight for me was finding a rickety old set of home-made swings in a corner of the garden, and swinging on it until I got the neighbours’ labradors’ attention. I think they wanted a go too.

Earlier in the week, I made a poshed-up version of bread and butter pudding that seemed an apt way to ease us into the rusticating weekend. It also used up the mountain of brioche I had made a few days ago (brioche-specific post(s) coming up). Both Mr Gander and I have had some pretty uninspiring examples of this pudding in the past. Sometimes, the bread just tastes like stale bread, or the custard is too thin, too sweet, or there just isn’t enough excitement to make me forget that I’m eating soggy bread. This recipe was a little different, and I felt more confident it would succeed in winning us over to bread and butter style puddings.

And succeed it did. (as Yoda might say)

Brioche is very thinly sliced (frozen brioche was easy to slice thinly), and placed in a cake or loaf pan in alternating layers with thin slices of brandy-scented apples. A vanilla custard-like mixture is poured over, left to soak up for an hour, and baked.

Musings on autumn and persimmon bread

Autumn is such a Tween.

We have vacillated between nippy mornings and warm days (apparently, we were in the middle of an autumnal heat wave in Sydney, but you wouldn’t know it at 6am); grey skies and yellow-gold sunsets. The weather, like a girl-child hesitating between two stages of life, can’t make up its mind to put away summer’s strapless dresses and bring out winter’s tea cosies and mittens.

The only certainty is the shorter days that herald every winter. More and more often, I’m leaving work in the dark, and waking up to a dimmer sky.

Poets of every age have written about autumn. Its tempestuous weather, ravishing colours, just-ripened fruits and harvests of grains. The words autumn and fall evoke images of bucolic plenty, but also ideas about the fleeting passage of time. No wonder autumn is such a fickle character.

It wasn’t until this morning that I had time to sit down, reflect, and notice, I mean really notice, the colours of the season. At the end of a crazy-hectic week, sitting down at the dining table with a large weekend-sized mug of tea was … a moment of quiet gladness.

I had made a persimmon bread-cake during the week. Persimmon seems the right kind of fruit to have in the house while we are surrounded by such gorgeously red leaves falling from neighbouring trees. I love how the fruit becomes soft, squishy, a bag of orange-red goo that you can spoon and slurp. With porridge, yoghurt, or by itself by the spoonful, so I lose none of its unique, slightly buttery yet crisp flavour. Perhaps it’s because persimmons were one of the hallmark fruits of autumn and winter in my part of China, their bright orange-red a reminder of festivities past and to come. Tied with string, they looked like little lanterns.

Edible lanterns!

Vampire-proof French garlic soup

 

“If everyone ate more garlic, the world would be a happier place”

Ruth Reichl, Comfort Me With Apples

 

I’ve sometimes wondered why people thought garlic helps to ward off vampires. Is it the “righteous” pungency; the undeniable whiff of, um, holiness? Hopes that vampire virus will be killed by garlic’s antioxidants, a belief that no one can chew on a mouthful of raw garlic and survive? Or, is it due to ‘Vampire disease’ or porphyria, the result of in-breeding among the European nobility – is Count Dracula just a misunderstood, new-age (light and garlic-) sensitive guy?

Whatever the reason, I was intrigued by a soup that was described as “[t]his one will keep your house safe from vampires for a year at least.”

This French garlic soup has venerable but mysterious origins. Francois Xavier of fxcuisine found this recipe in Larousse de la cuisine des familles (alas, I couldn’t find that book anywhere, even online), “presented as a family recipe from a Provence mama.” The soup is made with a garlicky olive oil roux, which is mixed with the roasted garlic, cooked to a smooth consistency and slight nuttiness, then thinned with water or stock and simmered to fragrant soupy-ness. There is very little else besides perfectly roasted, semi confited garlic bulbs (which I also blogged about last weekend) and a handful of herbs. Even the pasta to bulk up the soup is, I think, kind of optional.

This is not a Parisian glamourpuss. Light brown in colour, slightly lumpy in a stew-soupy way, it was a lesson in how brown food is not a food blogger’s photography dream.

But, one taste and I was hooked. Potage de creamy, complex and comforting garlic? Yes please!

Heavenly ambrosia: quince jam and Hungarian short bread

 

Bottom: First, good Peter Quince, say what the play treats on, then read the names of the actors, and so grow to a point.

Quince: Marry, our play is, The most lamentable comedy, and most cruel death of Pyramus and Thisby.

Midsummer night’s dream, Act 1, Scene 2

Quince. That un-beautiful, knobbly, hard, yellow fruit that appears in fruit shops each autumn. And goes through an almost magical transformation in the kitchen: when cooked, the fruit turns soft, then becomes pink-tinged, then red-tinged; pureed, and cooked over a leisurely stove, the fruit paste becomes a rich, translucent, jewel-like red.

All this time, a heavenly perfume fills the house. The smell is a kind of perfume that evokes the Arabian Nights, the fabled quality of rose water and vanilla, with such a come-hither, heady, honeyed sweetness. A smell that we could almost taste. 

We made quince paste on the weekend, in a slow cooker. And the quince paste became the show-stopping star of this Hungarian short bread.

Don’t get me wrong, the Hungarian short bread was sweet, rich, soft-crumbly, airy-light. There was no hint of toughness or overworked dough. This was due to the unusual method of grating frozen dough into the pan rather than rolling out the dough. I have used this method before, for this stunning yet stunningly simple apricot and chocolate tart (link to UKTV website). If you don’t mind granted dough scattered all around the tart pan and on the bench, this pastry is fool proof, and seriously good.

And the Hungarian short bread couldn’t be simpler. Grate frozen dough. Spread quince paste. Grate more frozen dough. Bake. Dust in a snowstorm of icing sugar when the tart is just out of the oven. Cool (barely) and eat.

From German chocolate cake to truffle

A couple of weeks ago, I made a gf Germany chocolate layer cake for a good friend.

I had a few bits of the cake left over, including bits trimmed off to make the layer cake prettier. I don’t know enough about baking and desserts to invent a Christina Tosi-like Germany chocolate birthday crumbs (German chocolate cake birthday crumbs. Now there’s an idea. It might be good in a chocolate-chip-german-chocolate-cake-crumbs cookie…) But I did come across a recipe for truffles made of chocolate cake and other things that make your dentist happy and are possibly not good for you.

Problem solved.

If having too much chocolate cake can ever be a problem.

The chocolate cake was crumbled up into a large mixing bowl, mixed with extra butter, cocoa powder, chocolate ganache, and the coconut-custard mix that was used for the layer cake filling. The mixture was thick, dark, dark brown, buttery-cocoa-y smelling. This mixture is rolled into balls, which are covered in a thick, dark chocolate ganache and topped with multi-coloured silvery cachous and dried rose petals.

Not every truffle was a perfect round or perfectly decorated, but together, they made a pretty plate and exuded the most enticing chocolate-y smell.

Comfort: roasted caramelised whole garlic and slow ribs

The world has felt out of kilter this week.

The flood of images from Boston; strange encounters at work and after work; a sudden drop in temperature catapulting us from late summer into early winter.

And this morning, one of those torrential, tropical downpours that reminds Sydney siders life is not all about sunburn and beaches. None of those polite drizzles, this was rain with fat, heavy raindrops far heavier than any water saving showerhead can produce. The kind of rain that floods footpaths and cafes, gets under your umbrella and splashes up to knee height, and has us talking about carpentry skills for building Noah’s Ark.

It didn’t feel like a baking day, as I had planned. It was a day for a hot toddy, lemon ginger apple juice, or mulled wine, or congee or chicken soup. Something that says comfort blanket. A day for warm fireplaces, long slow braises, and slooooow roasted ribs and whole garlic.

The roasted garlic is simple to make, but yields such complex flavours. Whole heads of garlic are cut in half horizontally, then placed, cut face down, in a puddle of olive oil and baked for almost an hour and a half. After an hour, a gorgeous, warm smell, laced with caramel sweetness and with none of that raw garlic bite, fills the kitchen. The garlic bulbs shrink as they caramelise, so the outer layers of the garlic either lift off, or holds the garlic bulbs so loosely they are easily dug out with a small fork.

The garlic bulbs can be spread on toasted crusty bread, added to a dish of roasted sliced potato, or made into a thick garlic soup (soup coming soon), or mashed into almost anything, really.

The slow roasted oven ribs are also lovely, fall-apart-with-thick-sauce lovely. This (I think southern) recipe seemed so simple yet produces such beautiful looking results, it was only a matter of time before I gave it a go. Ribs are coated in a dry rub, wrapped in foil (I use two layers to be sure), and roasted on a slow oven for up to 4 hours, or an extremely slow oven for about 6 hours. The dry rub becomes a barbecue sauce of sorts. The meat can be further browned under the grill (broiler), but I find I prefer it without.

Ceci n’est pas une madeleine, here’s honey beer bread instead

In an old house in Paris that was covered with vines,
Lived twelve little girls in two straight lines.
They left the house at half past nine … the smallest one was Madeline.

Tuesday 16 April was our next assignment for the Tuesdays with Dorie group. In place of a real entry, here is a post-processing enhanced and slightly tongue-in-cheek image of madeleines baked in non-madeleine pans.

Work got in the way of a more thoughtful post about how to make this classic French cake-cookie. A quick search on the internet, however, revealed a range of fail-proof recipes and one contentious debate – whether baking powder should ‘even be in the same room with madeleines’ (Lebovitz, 2007).

I went with the recipe in the book Baking with Julia, which was a genoise batter without baking powder and enriched with egg yolks. It made a light, but slightly drier cookie-cake, with the requisite crispy, lightly golden edges. They tasted a little richer than cupcakes, and the addition of lemon zest made them bright, cheerful little things.

They almost walked in two straight lines. And the smallest one was almost called Madeline.

The recipe from Baking with Julia can be found at the blog Counter Dog. To see what other TWD bakers have done, please visit Tuesdays with Dorie.

In lieu of proper madeleines, here’s a buttery honey beer bread instead. Although Madeline and her friends are more likely to have eaten baguettes in their old Paris house covered with vines, I like to think this bread is hearty and homely enough to have occasionally graced their table too.