Cinnamon Sugar

One of my favourite night-time snacks as a child was cinnamon toast.  My Mum used to make this for my brother and I when we got home from seeing a concert.  Mum loved classical music and used to take us to hear the Perth Symphony Orchestra at the Concert Hall.  My Dad worked away a lot so it was always just the three of us heading out in Mum’s Ford Consul into the city for a night out.  

I wasn’t so interested in the music, but I really liked the dressing up part, usually a long dress or ankle length velvet skirt and my little fur handbag (it was the 70s), and feeling very grown up.  I also enjoyed the spectacle of it all, particularly at Proms concerts as you got to throw streamers at the end, and the people watching part, but the music was kind of lost on me.  I think the only time I really got into the music was when Mum took us to see a West Indian steel drum band and I got up onto the stage and danced, much to the embarrassment of my brother.  Give me something with a beat any day. 

Anyway, these soirees always ended with cinnamon toast.  The three of us would stand around the kitchen eating cinnamon toast and discussing the evening’s events.  To this day, whenever I taste or even smell cinnamon sugar, I am immediately transported back to those evenings.

A nice use of cinnamon sugar is on top of a traditional tea cake.  There are loads of tea cake recipes around so I won’t repeat one here.  

All you need to do is brush the top of a tea cake with melted butter, mix equal quantities of cinnamon and sugar together and then sprinkle over the top.  Instant childhood memory. 

Sponge Queen in Exile

I am not Australia's next Sponge Queen.  The Australian Women's Weekly ran a competition earlier this year to find Australia's Sponge Queen, which I entered.  The State semi-finalists were announced last month, and I'm not one of them.  And that's quite OK.  But I am disappointed I won't get to cook in the Women's Weekly test kitchen in Sydney, where the final is being held. The chance to cook in that kitchen was the main reason I entered.  It is the holy grail for bakers, where recipes are tested and cookbooks developed.

My generation grew up on Women's Weekly magazine style recipe books after they first appeared in the early 1980s. They are part of our history, reflecting the tastes and preferences of Australians, and our after-school and weekend rituals of helping Mum in the kitchen. They are the books we turned to after moving out of home, and when we needed a recipe we know would work.  Everyone has at least one Women's Weekly recipe book in their kitchen, and everyone knows about the AWW test kitchen. For as long as I can remember, I have always wanted to go there and bake cakes.

I entered the Sponge Queen competition with a cornflour sandwich sponge recipe.  It is a recipe I use all the time as it is so light and airy, and consistently good. In fact, it featured in my very first post on this blog (for the Shortcut Dobos Torte).  Nonetheless, I tested and re-tested that recipe about 30 times before entering the competition, and made a few modifications.

Cornflour Sandwich Sponge recipe

4 eggs
1/2 cup caster sugar
1 cup cornflour
pinch salt
1 tsp cream of tartar
1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda, sifted
2 drops vanilla essence
1 tbsp copha, melted
plain flour, for dusting

Preheat the oven to 180 degrees celsius.  Brush the inside of each tin with the copha and dust with flour.  Whisk the eggs, sugar and vanilla essence together on a high speed for at least 10 minutes until thick and fluffy.  Add the cornflour, cream of tartar, bicarbonate of soda and salt. Gently fold the dry ingredients into the egg mixture.  Divide the mixture evenly between the two sandwich tins.  Bake in the oven for 15 minutes. The sponges are cooked when they have come away from the sides of the tins, and spring back to the touch.

Tips

1.  The eggs should at be at room temperature for maximum aeration.  The eggs not only bind the ingredients together, but are the key raising agent. Aerated eggs = towering sponge of goodness.

2.  Whisk the eggs and caster sugar to the 'ribbon stage', which means that when you take the whisk out, a thick ribbon of mixture will fall back into the bowl.  Reaching the ribbon stage takes about 10 minutes on my Kitchenaid mixer.  The volume of the mixture trebles in size, and is pale and thick.  So thick, in fact, that if you put the dry ingredients on top of the mixture, they will stay there.

3.  When whisking to reach the ribbon stage, whisk for about 5 minutes on high speed, and then reduce the speed to medium for another 5 minutes.  This ensures that the air bubbles in the mixture are uniform, giving the mixture stability.  Large bubbles can burst during the cooking process, which results in a flatter sponge, and nobody wants to see that. Large air bubbles also rise to the top affecting the look of the surface of the sponge.

4. To sift or not to sift the dry ingredients?  I found that sifting the dry ingredients (except for the bicarbonate of soda, which does need to be sifted as it is lumpy) makes absolutely no difference to the end result. Controversial I know, but the key to a good sponge at this stage of the process is how you fold in the ingredients not whether you have sifted the ingredients.  A heavy folding hand removes the aeration and sifting the ingredients beforehand won't save you.  Be kind and gentle to your mixture and fold the dry ingredients in with a light touch.  I use a spatula so I can really get down to the bottom of the bowl and turn the ingredients over.  I find that using a large metal spoon doesn't get into all the nooks and crannies and you sometimes find pockets of dry ingredients when pouring the mixture into the tins.

5.  Speaking of tins, I use anodised aluminium tins with deep sides and a non-stick surface.  Notwithstanding they are non-stick, you still need to grease the inside of the tins and dust them with flour.  I found after careful testing of cohpa, sunflower oil, unsalted butter and lard, that melted copha is the best.  It will give your sponge smooth sides and a smooth bottom every time.  EVERY time.

So there are my tips from my test kitchen in suburban Perth.  Not quite the AWW test kitchen, but I'll get there some day.  A girl can dream.

Paper Butterflies #2

I've gone a little butterfly crazy since my last post.  I invested in a large butterfly paper punch, and have been adding butterflies to everything I possibly can.

Before going any further though, I have a confession to make.  I once killed a cabbage moth for the sake of art.  I was trying to add a touch of realism to a Mothers Day card I was making.  My vision was a nature scene and, in my seven year old head, I thought the moth would lift the card to another level. My Mum was very gracious about it but, honestly, what was I thinking?  For the record, dead insects have never featured in my card-making activities again, and my relationship with the insect kingdom is extremely positive. For example, a large spider has been living on the outside of my kitchen window for almost a year and I have never once thought of reaching for the Baygon. And this is coming from someone who screamed the entire way through the movie "Arachnophobia".

Anyhoo, back to the beautiful world of butterflies.  Here are a couple of really simple ideas.

Take a coloured paper gift bag, preferably duck egg blue.  Stick a small paper doily in the middle of the bag using double sided tape.  Punch out a butterfly in black card, glue it down the centre and place it in the middle of the doily.

The doily and the butterfly create a simple silhouette, and add a touch of old-fashioned elegance to the bag.

Another idea is the double whammy butterfly on a small gift box.  Using the template I created for the previous post, I cut out a large butterfly from light brown card.  For the smaller butterfly, I punched it from the paper I used to wrap the gift box.

The butterfly adds height and texture to an otherwise plain box.

Enough butterflies for a while....but they will be back!