Cakes, cakes and more cakes

Last Thursday was nannu Edgar's birthday, so since the mother-in-law decided to slave away baking a huge batch of vegetable lasagne and another batch of meat cannelloni, I offered to make the cake. It had to be sugar-free, and everyone agreed it had to be light cause we were sure nobody would feel like a heavy dessert after lasagne and cannelloni! So after looking for some cake recipes that used Splenda, I decided to give Diana's Desserts' version a try. Mother-in-law had a batch of strawberries that needed using, and hubby reminded me that he'd been wanting a cream-filled cake for ages.. so I came up with my own concoction. I made two cake layers, a mascarpone strawberry filling and covered the whole thing with sweetened whipped cream.

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Here's what went into the filling:

1 tub (something like 250grams) mascarpone cheese

1/2 tub (about 100grams) light cream cheese
about 5 tablespoons red Martini

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1/4 cup Splenda

about 2 cups small strawberries, cleaned and halved

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I just mixed all the ingredients together except the strawberries. I spread a thick layer of sugar-free strawberry jam on the bottom layer of the cake, then I spread half of the filling mixture onto that, topped it with the halved strawberries, and proceeded to cover with the other half of the filling mixture. The top cake layer facing the inside filling was also spread with jam, I pressed the top cake layer onto the filling to make everything adhere properly, and then covered the top and sides of the cakes with whipped cream that was sweetened with Splenda. After allowing the cake the cool properly, I decorated its sides with chopped hazelnuts, placed a paper doiley on top and sifted powdered cocoa, removed the doiley and topped the cake with sugar-free chocolate dipped strawberries. The result was better than I expected - the cake rose perfectly even though it had Splenda rather than sugar, and cut beautifully revealing the nice contrast of the strawberries in the cream filling. And, most importantly, it was light enough to eat after lasagne - and the birthday boy liked it :)

Yesterday I baked the best banana cake ever. I omitted cinammon and sultanas, which I usually love in banana cakes, cause of hubby. The banana flavour came through more intensely however, and I ended up loving it. I added a generous amount of chopped walnuts and real vanilla extract, but what really set this cake apart from other banana cake recipes I'd tried before was the fact that I used 'OO' type flour (the kind that I usually only use for pizza dough). The crumb turned out really light and moist. I just drizzled some melted chocolate on top and that was it - a cinch to make really. I've finally managed to locate the recipe I used - Kato's Easy Banana Cake from Recipezaar. I made some of the batter into cupcakes and they worked out fine as well. This has definitely become a go-to recipe now!

I usually try to make Monday an easy slowly-ease-into-the-new-week kind of day. Judging by what I have in the freezer, it was either beef brodu or even easier, the beef barley soup I had tried a couple of months ago. Since it had gone down a treat with the hubby, I suggested it, and he actually preferred it to brodu.. which is all the better cause it meant shoving all the ingredients in the slowcooker this morning and now I'll actually go back home to dinner! Yes and I'll have plenty of time to catch up on housework hmmm...

Just for the record..

It's been quite crazy lately, what with organising lunch or dinner for people coming over, cleaning the house, shopping, running errands, organising experiments at work.. so it's been ages since I've posted anything. The cooking has been going on at full speed mind you, with some yummy results. Sometimes I do take a few pictures with the intention that I'll write about it, if for nothing just to keep track of recipes that went down well. But the next day I realise we were in too much of a hurry to gobble everything up and the pictures turned out too dark or just not good enough. Then when I do get good photos, I just end up procrastrinating and the cycle starts all over again. Anyhow, I've decided just to post this cause it was just too good to forget...

This plum frangipane tart (recipe adapted from Jamie Oliver's website) was a result of having some plums sitting on the kitchen top for over a week which nobody wanted since they refused to ripen. I had tried Dorie Greenspan's Dumply Plum Cake the week before with yet another batch of unloved plums, but it was too buttery and rich for my liking. Jamie's tart was not too sweet, not too heavy but hit the spot perfectly - problem solved. I also made a miniature version of this to take to work and it disappeared even before I left the room at 8 in the morning - always a good sign.

And I've still got sugar under my feet...

Here we are already drudging along the second week of September... already into our fourth month of married life! Looks like we've settled in quite nicely now, but it's proving to be a lot of work managing the household chores, cooking and working a full-time job. Most days I plan the next day's dinner in the evening, and if I'm stuck I just go through my emergency meals spreadsheet that I've been compiling, complete with hyperlinks to the recipes. I've been finding it very useful on days when hubby doesn't feel like wrecking his brains over ways I can use what's in the fridge and leaves me with a genial "Surprise me!" void.

You see, the element of surprise stops at the exact point that I actually decide on a recipe - then he'll instantly start tweaking and twisting and stretching the ingredients and side dishes to such extents that I might as well just go on "Ready, Steady, Cook" with a mystery bag of produce and place it in front of him, letting his imagination run wild. Wild meaning that if there's meat, there has to be fries.. if there's pasta, some of it has to be left sans sauce for him to enjoy as God (or Barilla) created it.. What worries me most is that if left to his own devices, he'd be more than happy to eat steak or pasta every day, so I have to be a bit sneaky with the veggies and the tough task of at least one weekly meat-free meal. Last time I suggested I make a nice soup for dinner, I showed him a few recipes on Tastespotting, and as soon as he saw a stew-like Beef and Barley soup, I had lost my battle. It did look delicious, and it was cooked in the slowcooker, and I did have to go buy that dress after work, so what do you know I did end up making just that!

Lately I've been trying out quite a lot of new recipes, including FX Cuisine's Falsomagro, which turned out to be an exercise in bondage with me all tied up with a lump of meat on a Saturday evening. All the hard work and swearing paid off in the end, cause it's definitely one of the recipes I'll be going back to. Good thing I figured out how to 'knit' a string jacket for the Falsomagro (pictured here) - next time round it won't take half as long to prepare. I made some minor changes to FX's recipe, mainly that I left the eggs slightly undercooked so that they were easy to peel and could continue cooking whilst inside the Falsomagro, but in the end they had just solidified to a bright yellow and were not overcooked to a greyish rubbery lump. I did not serve the Falsomagro slices topped with the sauce - instead, I had added some pancetta cubes to the sauce ingredients prior to cooking, and used the heavenly result to dress fresh pasta and used that as a starter. With the Falsomagro slices I served a very simple Bernaise sauce, which in my opinion, let the tastes and textures of all my hard work stand out much better.

Today should have been one of our 'lighter food' days after quite a few days of indulgence. Yesterday we had agreed before that I was to limit myself to Brodu (a Maltese traditional soup which is basically a light vegetable broth flavoured with fresh beef chunks). But then hubby came running into the kitchen later in the evening sniffing around with a huge smile on his face - I'd lit a Yankee Housewarmers candle, which had in a few minutes filled the house with the smell of cakes, and what my husband apparently concluded were donuts.. as if I'd decide to start frying donuts at 9pm yeah right!! He was so disappointed that I decided to surprise him with a batch today, even though I'd have to rush home like a madman after work and after going to the supermarket to fetch a few things we needed.

I did a few research on the net - what hubby and most of the Maltese population mean by donuts is the doughy, yeasty, sugar-enrobed concoction, and definitely not the glazed light Krispy Kreme version. On 101 Cookbooks, there was an oven-baked recipe which sounded tempting, but then I thought what's the point - if this is gonna be a treat, then let it be a full-blown one! I looked and looked and decided that I should really tweak my findings into my own recipe, and the risk was worth it.. I'm writing it here for my own reference in the very near future cause this one was definitely a hit!

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Donna's Donuts

3/4 cup milk
1/2 cup sugar
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon nutmeg
2 teaspoons vanilla essence
5 cups plain flour, sifted
2 sachets instant yeast
1/2 cup butter, melted
2 eggs, beaten

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Method:

Mix the milk, sugar and salt and whizz in the microwave till warm. Mix so that the sugar and salt dissolve completely. Place 2 cups of sifted flour in the food processor (with the dough hook attached), add nutmeg and vanilla essence and milk mixture and process till mixed well. Sprinkle yeast and process for a few seconds. To the melted butter, add the 2 eggs. Pour this mixture with the rest of the contents in the mixer, and process till it's incorporated. Add the remaining flour gradually, until the dough starts leaving the sides of the food processor as it turns. The dough will be very very soft, but shouldn't be liquidy or pourable. Transfer the dough with the help of a spatula to an oiled bowl. Cover with clingfilm and let it sit in a warm place for 30-40 minutes, until the dough doubles in size. Turn the dough onto a floured surface and fold it over a couple of times, ensuring there's plenty of flour underneath it. Roll the dough to a thickness of around 3cm, cut out small rounds of about 8cm in diameter (I wanted relatively small donuts) and place the dough rounds on floured dishes. Cover again with clingfilm and allow to rise for another half an hour.

Deep fry the donuts in hot vegetable oil, turning once one side is done. These really cooked fast and were done in 2 minutes flat, so you have to keep an eye on them otherwise they burn! Drain on paper towels, roll in generous amounts of sugar and pipe either nutella or strawberry jam (or both like I did) into the centre. Best eaten warm (with a loved one).

Store any leftovers (yeah right) in an airtight container.. but as I said these were verrrry good so if you do not intend to eat them all please think ahead and send out a batch to a neighbour as soon as you make them!

And we're in...

After over two months of hard work (damn it was I being optimistic when I thought we'd manage in three weeks!) we've finally made the move. Both the husband and I are happy with the results... we've managed to go round the house's shortcomings and transform it into a comfy and welcoming home. Still, the new oven and washing machine haven't yet been delivered... as often happens on this tiny island... things move sloooooowly. But I have my slowcooker, a hob, a microwave oven and a rice cooker which should suffice to start off my daily cooking right? It's a challenge, but so far (ok, I've only cooked two meals) I'm managing. As for our laundry, I'll be using my mother-in-law's washing machine next door, which I'm awfully grateful for!

I had been promising the husband that I was gonna make him banoffee pie from scratch as soon as we moved into our new house. See, banoffee pie is his soft spot... and he had really worked hard what with moving heavy boxes and piles and piles of clothes (mostly his), drilling holes to put up new curtain rails, hammering in nails for our degree certificates that we finally got round to framing, cleaning out and organising the garage... plus all the technical stuff having to do with setting up our laptops and internet connection. Thanks to his being thoughtful enough to buy a router I now have a wireless connection which enables me to surf the net from my kitchen - I've been teasing the mother-in-law about being able to look up recipes at the click of a mouse ever since! So, he really did deserve a treat - so yesterday I browsed through some recipes for banoffee pie. Most recipes revolved around some variations, mainly having to do with:

1) Type of base: Pastry crust or Cheesecake biscuit base;

2) Toffee preparation: Ready made, cooked in can (4 hours of boiling cans of condensed milk in a pan) or prepared in an oven (pour condensed milk in a glass dish, put in bigger dish half filled with water, cover with tin foil and bake for 2 hours).

The base definitely had to be the cheesecake biscuit version, just cause I had asked the husband beforehand and he confirmed he preferred it. As for the toffee, boiling cans of condensed milk on a stove (whilst keeping an eye on them for the full 4 hours making sure that they are always covered with water, or else risk dangerous explosions of hot scalding toffee all over your kitchen) sure sounded like going back to chemistry experimental sessions... tempting, especially after reading all the rants about the delicious dulce de leche that results. But I was gonna get back from work at 4pm the earliest, so my pie wouldn't be even close to ready by dinner. So, needing to adopt an oven, I called the mother-in-law and explained my problem - she had a couple of cans of condensed milk (of the low-fat type incidentally, made with skimmed milk instead of full fat milk, still has normal amount of sugar which is the bit I wanted to caramelise, so worked perfectly well) and offerred to put them in the oven for me as explained. When I got back home, I popped next door and found a dish of gooey toffee ready to be transformed into a decadent dessert.

Back in my kitchen, one last look at the sad ripe bananas on the counter - soon you'll be heroes my friends.. here's the list of ingredients:

Banoffee Pie

Base

300 g digestive biscuits + ginger biscuits + Mulino Bianco's Grancereale Croccante biscuits
150 g melted butter
2 tablespoons brown sugar
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Filling

3 ripe bananas, sliced
600 mL condensed milk
400 mL fresh cream
2 tablespoons caster sugar
2 teaspoons vanilla essence
1 cup grated dark chocolate
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What to do
First thing to get out of the way is preparing the dulce de leche - that's the caramelised condensed milk - just open the cans and pour the condensed milk into a glass dish, cover it tightly with tin foil, then place it into a larger dish that's half-filled with water. Put everything in an oven and bake at 150 degrees celcius for 2 hours. Once it's ready allow it to cool down to room temperature then put it in a fridge or freezer if you want to speed up the process.
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While the condensed milk's in the oven, start working on the base - just throw the biscuits into a food processer and process until they're all finely chopped. Add the melted butter and sugar and whizz everything round until the mixture has blended well. You want a moist crumb which you can work with, but not a paste, so add more biscuits or butter to the mixture accordingly. The amounts will vary slightly according to the type of biscuits you use - although most recipes indicated using digestives, I wanted a more flavoured and easier to bite into base. So I mixed the digestives with ginger biscuits (for just a bit of spicy flavour) and Grancereale Croccante (very very crumbly and crunchy made with cereals and rice) make the base a bit less compact. This combination worked well I must say - will be trying it for other variations of cheesecake. When you're happy with the consistency of the base, press the mixture onto the base of an 8 inch springform tin. I got a pretty thick layer, about half an inch, cause that's how we like our cheesecake base - you could decrease the thickness if you think that's too much. Once the base is all spread out, place it in the fridge for an hour till it sets, or in the freezer like I did, for about 20 minutes.

When the base has set, spread half the dulce de leche on the biscuit base, then chop the bananas and arrange in concentric circles on top of the toffee. The remaining dulce de leche is then spread on top of the banana layer. For the final layer, whip the fresh cream with the castor sugar and vanilla essence and spread on top of the pie. Sprinkle the finely grated chocolate on top of the cream layer to make it pretty.

Ideally you should refridgerate this decadence for at least another hour - but if you can't wait, like my husband, go ahead and indulge. A word of warning though - the layers could fall apart if not allowed to set properly, though the husband's oohs and aahs weren't indicating any sort of discontentment!! It tasted even better this afternoon since the banana flavour had come through even more. So there you have it - easy peasy banoffee pie that's sooo much better than other versions we've had at restaurants! And it really did make our first official dinner in our new home even sweeter :)