Tag: banana cake

Acts of Kitchen 13: Anne preserves

AoK_logo_v2In this episode, I bake! (what a surprise, I know). And Anne talks to me about preserving in a whole lot of ways for a whole lot of reasons with a whole lot of food.

Birthday cupcakes over the year.

Cheese scones and banana caramel cake.

Sweet! Celebration.

The kimchi recipe Anne talks about: from Maangchi

Email me: acts of kitchen @ gmail dot com; leave  a review on iTunes to share the lurve!

Coconut and cheese and banana

 

OK so not all of those ingredients together but I’ll bet that recipe exists somewhere, because internet. Instead:

  1. I have lots of milk that needs to be used (long story). I shall find a dessert! … looking, looking… eventually, in a book on pies that I’ve rarely used, I come across Impossible Pie. What makes it ‘impossible’ is that the layers separate – it gets a bottom, a custardy middle, and a crusty top courtesy of the coconut. Basically this one, except that mine didn’t have nutmeg and that is a GOLD idea. It was very tasty! I added sour cherries because I could. Um, I made it in a cake tin because I don’t have a deep pie tin. I only got a glass pie tin last year because pie? Australians don’t really DO pie.
  2. IMG_1324.JPGCheese scones. I’ve struggled with scones, it’s fair to say. Then I found this recipe and I decided to try it… because one GREAT BIG scone o’ cheese (250g cheese to 450g flour!!) sounds awesome. It was as I was making the breadcrumb effect of flour and butter that I realised you don’t have to make all the butter disappear, and I think this might be the turning point for me and scones. Because this scone was awesome. I did have to cook it for longer… but that’s because I didn’t knead it enough and it was a bit bigger – that is, higher, rather than being spread out – than it probably should have been. But it was a lovely texture and a wonderful taste and I will SO be making these again. Note to self: probably don’t try to double it next time; it was a bit hard to mix. Although the fact that I now have a giant cheese scone to eat and seven small scones in the freezer is pretty darn appealing.
  3. Bananas. I don’t eat them fast enough, and I already have some in the freezer… and I don’t love banana cake. Enter banana AND CARAMEL cake. Make caramel; pour into tin that’s lined with paper, because that’s just smart. Put banana onto caramel. Make cake batter, pour on top, TA DAH. … I’ll admit I didn’t actually eat any of this one. I took it to church and by the time I got around to going to the morning tea spot, it was all gone. I was told it was very tasty though. Certainly the batter was…

Swiss meringue buttercream

IMG_0836When Katherine, at the Sweetfest, mentioned that her swiss meringue buttercream recipe was from Martha Stewart, I wondered whether my Martha Stewart’s CAKES would have the recipe. And it did. And then we were invited to a friend’s house, and I had banana and walnut cake in the freezer already, and so… experiment! (Of course, it’s also online.)

Stewart’s version makes 9 cups’ worth and requires a swoon-worthy amount of eggs and sugar. So I’ve written the halved ingredients into the book itself, and then I realised that I only had 150g of butter anyway so I just figured out how much sugar and so on that required; the answer was 2 whites, and so on.

It’s a very straightforward process to make the frosting, happily. Yes there’s whisking of sugar and whites, but that didn’t take too long. The rest of the process was easy.

I didn’t flavour the buttercream aside from the vanilla, since it was going on a banana cake anyway. It was easy to spread onto the cake, which is an important thing for me. I had enough left over that I could have frosted the edges if I wanted, but decided that that would be a bit of overkill – especially when I discovered that the buttercream will last in the freezer for three months. So into a jar it goes. No idea where it will be used in the future.