My chocolate cake quest continues

I cannot resist a chocolate cake recipe. Just when I think it is not possible to add yet another one to my burgeoning files - there must be at least 100 chocolate cake recipes already there - along comes a new one.

My latest cake recipe comes from New Zealand food writer and author Annabel Langbein. My friend John, a secret foodie at heart, has discovered Annabel through her series screening on ABC 1, and he kindly sent me a link to her website, thinking I would enjoy it. And I have. Annabel has travelled extensively and written 10 cookbooks, one of which, Assemble - Sensational Food Made Simple, won the Gourmand World Cookbook Award for "Best in the World for Easy Recipes".

Annabel also features recipes on her website, one of which is for "Magic Chocolate Cake and Chocolate Ganache". This is a brilliant cake, which can be made either as one large cake, two medium cakes, or 10 small ones. It has a reasonably long list of ingredients but you throw them into a food processor, whiz for 30 seconds, pour into a cake tin and then bake, making it possibly one of the easiest cakes ever to make. As Annabel notes in her recipe introduction, "If you have never made a cake before, let this be your first. It is so simple and the results are satisfyingly impressive."

The secret ingredient in this mix is 100g grated carrot (or pumpkin), which adds a lovely moistness to the cooked texture. It also has mixed spice, cinnamon, golden syrup and espresso coffee, which sounds like a lot of flavours to pack into one cake but it really works, adding a lovely spicy undertone to the chocolate notes. I encourage you to head over to Annabel's website to check out this cake recipe, as well as the other recipes and features.

Happy birthday! Part 2

Shiny wrapping paper lies shredded on the floor and the helium is slowly leaking from the balloons but there is no post-party flatness. Family and friends gathered to help us celebrate Emily's first birthday and the party euphoria and sugar high lingers.

Hosting a party, particularly at home, brings a whole host of administrative issues on top of the catering. Cleaning, dusting, putting precious objects out of reach of 15 stampeding toddlers, sorting out toys into boxes for different age groups, sweeping the back deck, setting up outdoor furniture, arranging the pot-plants, buying the balloons and streamers ... the list is endless. But an inveterate list-maker like myself finds it satisfying ticking off each item.

Also satisfying, and much more fun, is planning the party menu. With up to 50 people coming, we can't just throw together a few platters and hope that will be enough. Luckily there are good cooks on both sides of the family and all are drafted in to help fill the white platters that are marching out of the cupboards, eager to be used. Of course we have bowls of chips and lollies to put out, but there's also pastry pinwheels, club sandwiches, potato and fetta pastries, corn and ham mini-muffins, caramelised onion tartlets and smartie biscuits.

I'll share some recipes in a future post. In the meantime, here is the fairy toadstool birthday cake that I made for the party.

Happy birthday! Part 1

Today my baby girl Emily turns one. It's the common lament of most parents but it really is true: where has the time gone? This past year has really flown by and she is growing up so quickly.

We are having a proper party to celebrate on the weekend, and I've already planned the birthday cake from The Australian Women's Weekly birthday cake book. But for our little family dinner tonight I made a sweet little marble cake, all swirls of multi-coloured cake butter, topped with rose-pink icing and silver cachous.

The marble cake is very easy to make (although it does use a few bowls) and can be whipped up in surprisingly quick time. It is a basic butter cake mix that is coloured with cocoa and pink food colouring. It makes a lovely afternoon tea cake but is also nice for a little birthday celebration, particularly for a gorgeous little girl.

Marble cake

This is not a huge cake, so I make it in a loaf tin, which makes a good-sized bar cake. However, you could double the mixture and make it in a square or round cake tin (you may need to adjust the cooking time to suit).

50g butter, softened
115g caster sugar
1 egg
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
250g self-raising flour
125ml milk
2 tablespoons cocoa
1/4 teaspoon bicarb soda
1 tablespoon milk, extra
few drops of rose-pink food colouring

Pre-heat the oven to 180 degrees (160 degrees fan-forced). Grease and line a loaf tin (it usually measures about 10cm x 24cm).

Cream the butter and sugar together with an electric mixer until light and fluffy. Gently beat in the egg and the vanilla extract. Sift the flour and mix in alternately with the milk. Divide the mixture into three bowls. Beat the sifted cocoa and bicarb soda and the milk into one bowl. Add a few drops of rose-pink food colouring (a little goes a long way but you do want this to have a strong colour) into the second bowl. Leave the third bowl plain.

Drop spoonfuls of mixture into the prepared cake tin. When finished, use a skewer to swirl through the mixture. Bake for 40-45 minutes (you may need to cover the top with foil if the top is browning too quickly) or until a skewer inserted into the cake comes out clean.

Cool in the tin for about five minutes and then turn out onto a wire rack to cool completely.

When cold, ice with a basic butter icing (beat 25g softened butter, 125g sifted icing sugar and a few teaspoons of boiling water until smooth. Add a few drops of rose-pink food colouring, mix to a smooth consistency and ice) and decorate with silver cachous or sprinkles.

Daring Bakers challenge - L'Opera Cake

It was another sweet month for the Daring Bakers, with the elegant French dessert L'Opera Cake on the menu. Believed to have been created around the beginning of the 1900s, L'Opera Cake is usually made of five components: a joconde (a cake layer), a syrup (to wet the joconde), a buttercream (to fill some of the layers), a ganache or mousse (to top the final layer) and a glaze (to cover the final layer).

When I read initially read the recipe, it seemed long and daunting. However, once I broke it down into the separate steps, it was quite simple and didn't take too long to put together. While I would not recommend trying to whip this cake up in a hurry, you could certainly put it together during the day for an elegant dinner party dessert. As the joconde and syrup keep well, you could make those the day before (which is what I did) to make it even easier to put together.

Traditionally, a joconde is flavoured with darker flavours such as chocolate or coffee. But this month's hosts, Lis and Ivonne (DB founders) and Fran and Shea, decided to celebrate their start of spring with L'Opera Cakes that are light in both colour and flavour (ie no chocolate or coffee but vanilla, coconut, lemon or almond).

The joconde was simple to make, being a mixture of egg whites (whipped to a meringue), ground almonds, icing sugar, eggs and butter. It made a lovely light sponge cake that cooked in under 10 minutes and had a moreish nutty flavour. The joconde was made in two lamington tins, so it wasn't a very high cake, but it was sliced up and layered into thirds, so the thickness was just right.

The joconde was moistened with a light sugar syrup that I flavoured with brandy (not having any cognac on hand). Although it was only a small serving, it made far too much for this cake, so I need to find some good use for excess sugar syrup as I didn't know what to do with the leftovers.

The buttercream was not hard to make but was quite fiddly. It involved making a hot sugar syrup (heated to 124 C on a candy thermometer) that was poured into beaten eggs and whipped, before a great mass (200g) of softened butter was beaten in until the buttercream was thick and shiny. I found a lot of my sugar syrup hardened into the bottom of my KitchenAid mixing bowl, so I'm not sure how much of the syrup was incorporated into the buttercream. The final product was thick and tasty but I think next time I might use my basic buttercream (butter and icing sugar) from the trusty old Women's Weekly cookbooks. I don't think it will have the same lightness of texture but it will certainly be quicker and faster to make.

I decided to omit the white chocolate mousse from this cake, as I felt that the cake was already loaded with calories and expense (a dozen eggs, loads of butter and sugar, plus several blocks of white chocolate if I made the mousse and glaze). The mousse was an optional extra for this challenge anyway.

The final step was to assemble the cake and drizzle over the glaze. The joconde was sliced into squares and rectangles, so that it made three layers. I moistened each joconde layer with the syrup, then spread over one-third of the buttercream, finishing with the buttercream on top. I refrigerated the cake for about an hour, until it was quite firm and made the glaze, which was a mixture of melted white chocolate and cream. Owing to a miscalculation on my part (the glaze recipe called for 14oz of white chocolate, which is nearly 500g), I only had 200g of white chocolate but this was enough to cover the cake, albeit thinly. The glaze was cooled and poured over the cake, which was then put into the fridge to chill and set.

The final result was an absolute winner with my tasting panel. It is a rich, special occasion cake, best served in small slices. We felt the cake was quite rich enough with just the buttercream and glaze and I think adding the mousse may have made this cake too sweet for our tastes. It is an expensive cake to make and does take time and effort but it is certainly worth it if you want a show-stopper of a cake for afternoon tea or dessert. You can also pretend you're in Paris when nibbling on a slice because it does have an unmistakeable French air to it - the seeming simplicity of the cake belies the attention that has gone into it behind the scenes.

Congratulations to Lis and Ivonne for choosing such a spectacular cake. Unfortunately my digital camera is broken at the moment, so I can't share photos of my finished product but it turned out wonderfully and I would definitely make this again.

Birthday cakes

As a child, we were allowed to select our birthday cake every year from The Australian Women's Weekly Children's Birthday Cake Book. This has become a classic over the years and a staple in many kitchens. Most of my friends had birthday cakes made from the more than 100 cakes in this book. My sisters and I enjoy reminiscing over what cake we chose each year. I remember the piano, with its keys made from white chocolate and licorice, a sweet shop, and a log cabin with its roof made of Flake chocolates. Other cakes, chosen by my sisters, included the ballerina figurines on a rose-pink cake, the swimming pool filled with green jelly, the farm animals cake, the choo-choo train and the candy castle made with upside-down ice-cream cones iced with meringue icing. It was an exciting event to choose your cake each year, with the birthday recipient spending weeks poring over the pages before making the final momentous decision. We never gave a thought to how difficult or time-consuming the cakes were to make and mum faithfully made them each year. Even though one of my sisters and I have birthdays only two days apart, we always got our own cake each year.

My first mother's day present, which I received when my son was just nine days old, was the updated version of this book, now called The Australian Women's Weekly Kids' Party Cakes. I confess that I prefer the older version. Although the updated book has many new and exciting cakes, some of the old favourites have been banished (many of the cakes I chose, such as the piano and the sweet shop, have disappeared) and some have been updated for modern tastes or made more elaborate. For example, the number 10 cake in the old version was a lovely lamington cake, topped with whipped cream and shaved chocolate. In the new book, it's become the "soda and pizza cake" and is nowhere near as attractive or inspiring to make.

But there's still plenty of options and it's a fun challenge each year to select a cake. As my son has just turned two, I'm doing the selecting for him but soon he'll be old enough to choose his own. I now have new respect for mum producing these cakes each year, as quite a bit of thought and planning has to go into them. You need to make sure you have the right-sized tins and all the ingredients, which often include specific lollies that aren't always readily available. Luckily I have some good old-fashioned lolly shops nearby and they nearly always come to the rescue with the correct lollies, even if it means producing items I've never heard of.

Last year, we had the bright-green express train and this year I made the giraffe cake. Both seemed difficult when I read through the detailed instructions but actually proved to be reasonably easy to make. The book recommends that you use packets of buttercake mix but also provides a buttercake recipe. Being a packet cake mix snob, I choose to make my own cake and it is extremely easy and very little extra work. The fun is in the tinting of the buttercream icing and the decorating.

I thoroughly enjoyed the birthday cake tradition as a child and I love it even more now that I'm continuing it for my own.

Daring Bakers - perfect party cake

A sweet treat was on the agenda for this month's Daring Bakers challenge. Hostess Morven chose a recipe for "Perfect Party Cake" from Dorie Greenspan's Baking From My Home To Yours. Dorie's introductory notes to the recipe were glowing: "Stick a bright-coloured Post-it to this page, so you'll always know where to turn for a just-right cake for any celebration ... The cake is snow-white, with an elegant tight crumb and an easygoing nature: it always bakes up perfectly; it is delicate on the tongue but sturdy in the kitchen - no fussing when it comes to slicing the layers in half or cutting tall, beautiful wedges for serving; and it tastes just as you'd want a party cake to taste - special."

I must admit that I was a little sceptical when I read these notes, as it seems extravagantly high praise for a cake. However, having made the cake, I now agree with Dorie's sentiments. This is an easy cake to make but the end result belies the simplicity - it looks impressive and tastes even better than it looks. My panel of eager cake-tasters did not believe me when I told them how easy this cake was to make. The cake is a basic butter cake, flavoured with lemon, and split into layers that are sandwiched together with raspberry jam and a rich buttercream or whipped cream. I chose to use the option to substitute whipped cream for the buttercream, as I couldn't stomach the thought of an icing made with 375g butter! Although the buttercream sounded delicious, I thought the raspberry jam and whipped cream made a delicate combination that suited the cake's subtle flavour.

The cake's ingredients were simple: flour (I used plain flour instead of cake flour and it didn't seem to affect the final result), baking powder, salt, milk or buttermilk, egg whites, sugar, lemon zest, butter and lemon extract. A slightly unusual twist was to whisk the egg whites and milk together. I had expected that I would have to beat the egg whites until they were stiff but this was not the case - the tablespoon of baking powder gave the cake enough rising power to not need the extra from fluffy egg whites. The cake was baked in two tins, split in half when cool and then sandwiched together to make an impressive-looking layer cake.

Thanks to Morven for choosing such a wonderful recipe. I've not come across Dorie's books before but am now inspired to search them out. This cake is going into the "definitely make again" file. It is very versatile and would be suitable for a birthday, elegant afternoon tea or a glamorous dessert.

Too many recipes

At what point does collecting recipes cross from a passion or hobby to an obsession? I have drawers overflowing with recipe clippings, hand-written recipes stashed everywhere, and copies of old food magazines taking over my cupboards and yet I still collect. Not a week goes by without at least one recipe being saved from Epicure, Good Weekend or the Sunday Life magazine (or all three!) Then there's a new edition each month of Gourmet Traveller, Delicious and Donna Hay magazine to drool over. The Internet means I can collect recipes from The Times and Guardian websites in the UK and I recently discovered the excellent Cuisine magazine from New Zealand, which has a wonderful online archive.

I've tried all sorts of systems over the years to try and keep my recipes in order and easily accessible: pasting into a scrapbook, filing into plastic pockets in a folder, and sorting into filing folders according to food type. I commandeered two drawers in our large filing cabinet and embarked on filing in earnest but quickly grew tired of the project and dumped the lot, mostly unfiled, into one drawer. Currently I'm stashing away recipes in a large filing box from Ikea with no filing system whatsoever.

I'm not alone in this passion to collect recipes. Ivonne from Cream Puffs in Venice blogged about how she was always collecting recipes to make in the future. The crunch point came when she discovered a large stack of food magazines and recipes that she'd stored in her cupboard a year earlier and forgotten about.

"Why do I keep all these magazines? And why do I have all these loose bits of paper with recipes printed on them flying around my house? What is this all about?" Ivonne asked. "As I sifted through the endless pile, I kept thinking to myself that I couldn’t possibly throw this recipe out or recycle that magazine. This is the 2002 issue of so-and-so that has that perfect recipe for watchamacallit that when I finally get around to making it will be the best thing ever."

Ivonne is a far braver woman than me because, confronted with this massive pile of clippings, she did something I can't bring myself to do: she dumped the lot. She farewelled years of recipes without a backward glance and did not regret it.

While I agree with Ivonne's sentiments, I can't bring myself to throw out recipes. I always hope that I'll get around to making them, even though I know that I could spend the rest of my life doing nothing but cooking and still not make them all. I have managed to stop myself collecting some types of recipes - after all, how many lemon delicious, lemon tart and chocolate mousse recipes can you have? Looking at the several versions I have, I see that all use the same ingredients but only the proportions differ. (The same can also be said of chocolate cake but that is one recipe I can never stop myself from collecting, no matter how many I have!)

Ivonne concluded: "It finally occurred to me that the best chocolate cake I will ever make is the one that I actually make. The imagination is delicious, but reality is even more so. It occurred to me that it was time to squelch the insecure little baker in me that keeps telling me I can bake a better this or a better that and just get down to the act of baking."

It's not an insecure baker that keeps me collecting recipes - it's an addict who wants to keep trying new and different dishes and flavours. I'm not on a quest for better recipes; I just like to experiment. I have a treasured collection of family favourites that I make frequently and these are supplemented with new recipes that I collect. How else would my repertoire expand?

But Ivonne is right - we just need to bake. She has come up with the concept of "Magazine Mondays", where each week she makes a conscious effort to get in the kitchen and actually cook all the recipes she's bookmarked. It's a great idea and I might try and do something similar myself. In the meantime, here is a family favourite recipe that is regularly made: my sister's easy melt and mix chocolate cake that she makes every year for family birthdays. It is a never-fail cake and always disappears quickly.

FELICITY'S EASY MELT AND MIX CHOCOLATE CAKE

1 1/2 cups SR flour
1 cup caster sugar
60g butter
2 tablespoons cocoa
1/4 cup boiling water
1 egg
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/2 cup milk

Mix cocoa and boiling water together.

Sift flour into a bowl and add sugar. Melt butter and mix in, along with egg, vanilla extract and milk. Lastly mix in cocoa mixture.

Bake at 180 degrees for 30-35 minutes.

Ice with chocolate icing or vienna cream.

To make vienna cream, beat 125g butter in an electric mixer until as white as possible. Sift together 1 1/2 cups icing sugar with 2 tablespoons cocoa. Gradually add half this mixture. Beating constantly, add 2 tablespoons milk gradually, then beat in remaining icing sugar mixture. Vienna cream should be smooth and easy to spread.

Daring Bakers #14 - Yule Log

With plenty of Christmas baking happening, it was appropriate that the Daring Bakers join in with the festive Yule Log. There are many versions of this classic, but the version we were assigned to make involved a genoise sponge filled and iced with coffee buttercream and decorated with meringue or marzipan mushrooms.

The actual recipe was straightforward and simple to make but it involved several steps and a bit of time set aside to make it and the commodity most lacking in December is time. As my mum's birthday is on Christmas Eve, I thought it would be nice to share the Yule Log as her birthday cake (she's very used to the blurring of Christmas and birthdays!) I intended to make and blog about this cake on 23 December (as we were supposed to post our Daring Bakers blog entry on 22 or 23 December)and then serve it for mum's birthday lunch the next day.

Well, the best laid plans of mice and men of course went astray and so I found myself taking over mum's kitchen on Christmas Eve to make up the Yule Log. The genoise sponge was very easy to make, involving a mixture of eggs, egg yolks, sugar and flour that baked for just 10 minutes. It made a lovely light airy sponge cake. Although the instructions said to let the sponge cool and then roll up, I've found from previous swiss roll cake making that it's best to roll the sponge in a tea-towel when hot and let it cool in that shape, which helps prevent cracking.

The buttercream was made by beating egg whites and sugar over hot water until hot, then beating to a meringue and then mixing in a large portion of butter, followed by coffee granules dissolved in liquor. Not having made buttercream like this before, I was a bit dubious but the end result was a light, sweet cream that spread easily on the cake. I found that there was far too much buttercream for the cake and I could easily have used half the amount that was made. As it was, my Yule Log increased greatly in size as I piled on spoonful after spoonful of buttercream.

The final step was to make meringue mushrooms for decoration. Unfortunately I ran out of time to make these, so my Yule Log was served up with no decoration. Apologies to Lis and Ivonne, this month's hosts, for not quite completing the challenge as specified (and for being a day or two late in posting).

To assemble, the sponge was unrolled and filled with buttercream. I sliced off the ends and put these on the log to make a stump shape, which was then iced all over with buttercream. A fork drawn through the buttercream helped to give it the appearance of bark.

The Yule Log was eagerly received by the assorted family members and birthday girl, although opinions differed as to whether it really looked like a log or was more like a submarine or tank! However, all were agreed that the buttercream was probably too rich and sweet and so small portions of this cake were more than enough. While I would definitely make the genoise sponge again, as I think it would lend itself to all types of fillings, I would probably make less buttercream or adjust the recipe in some way to make it less rich and sweet.

Once again, this was a fun challenge to make. Thanks to Lis and Ivonne for choosing a fun, festive treat to make and I look forward to more DB challenges in 2008!

Orange cake

I recently wrote about the treasure of lemons and their versatility. Give me a bag of lemons and dozens of recipes flow through my mind. Give me a bag of oranges and my repertoire is more limited. I don't know why this is. I'm a big fan of oranges but I've just never cooked much with them.

Although my orange recipes are limited, the few I do have are pretty special. I have a recipe for "The Amazing Orange Cake", a recipe by Margie Agostini of Caffe Agostini in Sydney that she gave to my all-time favourite cook Jill Dupleix to generously share with her readers. It more than lives up to its name - it's the most rich, moist, buttery cake I've ever eaten and seconds is not enough. I think this is the best cake I've ever eaten (and that's a big call from someone whose first preference is for chocolate or lemon cake). But there's a certain freshness and lightness to an orange cake that is different from the tang of a lemon cake or the dense sweetness of a chocolate cake.

The Amazing Orange Cake is an "occasion cake", one to make to impress guests. It's also huge, using half a kilogram each of flour, butter and sugar, and takes more than an hour to bake. So for times when I feel like an easy cake, I make my mum's simple orange cake. She made this cake all the time when we were kids and I can see why. It's a simple cake, using the bare minimum of ingredients that are always in the pantry. It takes a few minutes to mix up and just half an hour in the oven.

Having recently received a bag or enormous juicy oranges as a gift, I quickly whipped this up and it was gone within the day, which is always a good recommendation!

SIMPLE ORANGE CAKE

125g butter
180g sugar
250g self-raising flour
2 eggs
juice and rind of 1 orange with enough milk to make 1/2 cup liquid

Cream butter and sugar, add well-beaten eggs, then add flour and lastly liquid of juice and milk and finely grated rind. Bake in a moderate oven (180 degrees) in an orange-cake tin (I used a loaf tin) for 35-40 minutes.

For icing, melt 1-2 teaspoons of butter, then sift in 2/3 cup of icing sugar and mix with orange juice (and some fine zest if you like) to make a soft icing.

The art of the sponge

Ah, sponge cake! Is there anything more likely to strike fear into the hearts of cooks and joy in the faces of the afternoon tea guests?

Epicure in today's Age features a gorgeous article on sponge cake, which it says has become an endangered species. "The sponge was an early casualty of the post-WWII economic boom. Dramatic social and economic changes led to a decline in home preserving and home baking ... The sponge, being a time-consuming cake, was almost lost in the rush for modernity," Richard Cornish writes. The County Women's Association are the self-appointed guardians of the traditional sponge and they outline in the article their many theories as to why the sponge has declined, chief among them being lack of time. CWA state president Noela MacLeod says that people are too busy to bake sponges and find it easier to buy a cream-filled sponge from the supermarket (personally, I would rather eat cardboard than one of those cakes).

My great-aunt always served a sponge for afternoon tea, usually a traditional sponge with a cream and jam filling, but occasionally chocolate sponge or ginger fluff sponge. Mystique surrounds sponge cakes because they can be temperamental and nothing is more deflating to a cook's ego than a flat sponge. You must use fresh eggs, sift the dry ingredients several times, take care not to overbeat the mixture, grease the tins well and make sure the oven is the correct temperature.

I made sponges often as a little girl but have steered clear of them in recent years because of my temperamental oven. However, mum recently gave me her recipe for ginger fluff sponge. I love the spicy gingeriness of this cake, much more than a traditional sponge and it's great for afternoon tea. It's good timing as I plan to make it this weekend as a tribute to the sponge - long may it live!

GINGER FLUFF SPONGE

4 eggs
3/4 cup white sugar
1 dessertspoon golden syrup
1/2 cup arrowroot or cornflour
2 teaspoons ginger
2 teaspoons cinnamon
1 teaspoon cocoa
2 dessertspoons plain flour
1/2 teaspoon cream of tartar
1 teaspoon bicarbonate soda

Beat eggs and sugar until thick and creamy. Add golden syrup. Sift together twice arrowroot, ginger, cinnamon, cocoa, flour, bicarb soda and cream of tartar. Fold into egg mixture. Pour into two 20cm well-greased sandwich tins. Bake in a moderate oven (180 degrees) for 15-20 minutes. Fill with whipped cream, ice with chocolate icing and dot with cherries or chopped walnuts. Best eaten on the day it's made.

A little burst of sunshine

Our passionfruit vine has been very prolific this year. I've been gathering passionfruit for nearly a fortnight now, piling them up in the fruit bowl while I ponder what to do with them. Earlier in the season, the March edition of Gourmet Traveller arrived on the same day I gathered the first crop, conveniently featuring a special on passionfruit. Although we enjoyed the passionfruit yo-yos I made, I didn't feel like them this time, nor passionfruit mousse, or the flummery recipe I found in my grandmother's cookbook. So the passionfruit sat and grew wrinkly, and Adam kept asking what I was going to do with them, and still I couldn't decide.

Finally, inspiration struck and I decided to make passionfruit cupcakes. Cupcakes seem to be featured everywhere at the moment, so obviously the idea of cute little cakes had lodged in my brain. I made a basic butter cake recipe, substituting passionfruit juice for milk, divided it into paper muffin cases and iced the cakes with a sunny yellow passionfruit-flavoured icing.

The cupcakes are a bright, cheery yellow and taste like sunshine - a perfect treat as the days grow shorter and darker. Because my vine produces quite small fruit, I've specified a juice measurement, rather than the number of fruit, as it depends on the size you grow or buy. Feel free to adjust the measurements to suit your taste.

PASSIONFRUIT CUPCAKES

125g butter, softened
1/2 cup sugar
2 eggs
1 1/2 cups self-raising flour
60ml passionfruit juice, strained

Cut the passionfruit in half, scoop out the pulp and put into a strainer set over a bowl. Use the back of a teaspoon to push the pulp through the strainer, extracting the juice. Discard the pulp and seeds.

Cream the butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Beat in the eggs one at a time, then add the sifted flour and the passionfruit juice. Spoon into a 12-cup muffin tin, lined with paper cases (I found this quantity made only nine cupcakes but my muffin tin is quite large). Bake at 180 degrees for 15-20 minutes, or until a skewer inserted into the centre of a cake comes out clean.

Cool on a wire rack and ice when cold. For the icing, mix one cup of icing sugar with enough passionfruit juice to make a soft icing consistency (not too runny).

Friday morning tea - chocolate cake

There can never be too much chocolate cake in the world. It suits all occasions, whether dusted with icing sugar for a sweet snack, dressed up with chocolate icing for morning tea or served with a dollop of thick cream for dinner party guests. It can be flavoured with cocoa or melted chocolate, adorned with nuts or raisins, sexed up with liqueur or espresso, served with a basic butter icing or dripping in the thickest ganache. It's no wonder I have hundreds of chocolate cake recipes in my files and plan on making them all at least once in my quest for the perfect chocolate cake.

I'm not sure if there is such a thing as the perfect chocolate cake or one that is perfect for each occasion. The rich, dense, flourless chocolate cake you serve as a dinner party dessert is not necessarily what you want to eat with your morning coffee. (But a slice for breakfast is an entirely different matter...)

This milk chocolate cake by Jill Dupleix comes pretty close to being perfect. As long as you can resist the temptation of letting chocolate sit in your pantry, you will have all the ingredients on hand and can whip it up in no time. This version uses milk chocolate but I've successfully made it with dark chocolate and it is just as moreish.

MILK CHOCOLATE CAKE

170g good-quality milk chocolate (such as Lindt)
150g butter
4 eggs, beaten
150g sugar
150g plain flour
1 level teaspoon baking powder

Pre-heat the oven to 180 degrees. Butter and line a 25cm square cake tin with non-stick baking paper. Melt the chocolate and butter in a heatproof bowl sitting over a saucepan of simmering water. Using an electric mixer, beat the eggs and sugar until they are pale, thick and creamy. Add the sifted flour and baking powder and stir well. Lightly mix in the chocolate mixture. Spoon into the cake tin and bake for 25 to 30 minutes. Cool and turn out. Dust with icing sugar or bitter cocoa powder before serving.

Happy birthday to Sacher torte

One of the world's most famous cakes, the Sacher torte, has just celebrated its 175th birthday. (If you think that an inanimate object can't celebrate a birthday, let me tell you that there was a party for the cake on 12 April at Hotel Sacher in Vienna, and that it included a serenade by an opera star!)

Sacher torte is two layers of a dry, dense chocolate cake, sandwiched together with apricot jam and enrobed in dark chocolate. It was invented by Franz Sacher in 1832 and the trademark registered by the Hotel Sacher, which keeps the original recipe locked in its safe.

I first encountered Sacher torte when I was 15 and my family travelled around Europe and the UK for three months. While in Vienna, Dad refused to pay the outrageous tourist prices at the Hotel Sacher, so we missed our opportunity to taste the cake at its place of origin. But a week or two later, my sister celebrated her 12th birthday in Lucerne, Switzerland. We ate dinner at a restaurant with a beautifully decorated and frescoed front and the birthday cake was a Sacher torte, bought from a bakery earlier in the day, and brought out by the restaurant staff decorated with sparklers. I remember it as deliciously rich cake, with small slices being enough to satisfy.

Dad was right about the tourist prices at Hotel Sacher. About 15 years later, when my sister and I were visiting Vienna again, we paid 12 euros for a slice of Sacher torte and two hot chocolates. We enjoyed it but I'm not sure any chocolate cake is worth the equivalent price of a Cheap Eats meal in Melbourne!

Although the original recipe is a closely guarded secret, plenty of chefs have produced their own versions, and it is an easy cake to make at home. I use Jill Dupleix's version. It makes for an indulgent afternoon tea or a glamourous dinner party dessert.

SACHER TORTE

150g plain flour
50g bitter cocoa powder
6 eggs (60g each)
180g sugar
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
150g apricot jam
100g good-quality chocolate
100g butter, chopped

Preheat the oven to 180 degrees. Butter a 23cm diameter springform cake tin.

Sift the flour and cocoa into a bowl and set aside.

Separate the eggs. Beat the yolks and sugar until so thick and creamy that it forms ribbons when you lift the beaters. Stir in the vanilla extract.

Beat the egg whites in a separate, clean, dry bowl until stiff and peaky. Gently fold a little of the egg white into the egg yolk mixture to lighten it, then fold in the remaining egg whites.

Gently fold the sifted flour and cocoa into the mixture, adding two tablespoons at a time. Transfer the quite thick mixture into the cake tin and bake for 30 to 35 minutes, or until a skewer inserted into the centre of the cake comes out clean. Cool in the tin for 10 minutes, then remove from the tin and cool completely.

To assemble, cut the cake into two equal rounds. Place the base on a wire rack over a baking tray. (If the top has risen considerably, cut off the domed part to level the top). Warm the apricot jam in a small saucepan and spread a thin layer on top of the bottom half and its sides. Replace the top half and spread the top and sides with jam (you might not use it all).

Melt the chocolate and butter in a heatproof bowl set over a saucepan of simmering water. Stir until glossy and smooth, then set aside for a couple of minutes. Pour the icing over the top of the cake and sides, smoothing sides with a hot palette knife if necessary.

Allow to cool, then set hard in the fridge for an hour or two before serving.

Sacher torte is traditionally accompanied by whipped cream.

Friday morning tea - chocolate beetroot cake

Among my thousands of recipes, I must have at least one hundred recipes for chocolate cake. Although they are probably all variations on a theme (after all, most of the cakes consist of varying quantities of flour, milk, butter, eggs and cocoa or chocolate), I persist in collecting them and aim to try them all at least once (yes, I do realise this will probably be a life-time commitment!)

Recently, Cindy from Where's the Beef tagged me to participate in a vegetable meme. In it, I was asked if there was a vegetable that I hated as a child but loved as I got older. My response was beetroot and in my answer I mentioned that I had once made a chocolate beetroot cake. Cindy was keen for the recipe, so I share it with you today for Friday morning tea. The recipe came from Jill Dupleix, who seems to love chocolate cakes as much as I do. The cooked cake is a slightly weird burgundy colour but the cake has a lovely moist texture.

CHOCOLATE BEETROOT CAKE

50g bitter cocoa
180g plain flour
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
pinch of salt
250g caster sugar
300g cooked fresh beetroot
3 eggs
200ml corn oil
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Preheat the oven to 180 degrees. Butter and flour an 18cm round or square cake tin.

Sift the cocoa, flour, baking powder and salt into a bowl. Mix in the caster sugar and set aside.

Puree the beetroot in a food processor. Add the eggs, one at a time, then add the corn oil and vanilla extract and beat until smooth.

Make a well in the centre of the dry ingredients and pour the beetroot mixture into the well. Lightly mix, using a rubber spatula, and pour into the prepared tin. Bake for about 40 minutes (or until a skewer inserted into centre of cake comes out clean). The cake won't rise a great deal and the top may crack a bit but it won't affect the flavour. Allow to cool a little before removing from the tin, then leave to cool completely on a wire rack. To serve, dust with icing sugar or cocoa.

The lost art of morning tea

The mention of afternoon tea conjures up images of genteel drawing rooms, floral-patterned china and tiered stands holding little chicken or cucumber finger sandwiches and dainty cakes.

But what do you think of when I say "morning tea"? A coffee on the run or a hastily scoffed biscuit? Perhaps a piece of fruit or a muesli bar? I think morning tea serves just as useful a purpose as afternoon tea and it's time that we reclaimed some precious minutes from our busy schedules so that we can take a break mid-morning for some sustenance.

Most of us are up early, hurriedly eating toast or cereal before we rush out the door, grabbing a take-away coffee to drink at our desks as we log on to start wading through the emails that clogged up the in-box overnight. Some people even skip breakfast or eat at their desks. So by 10am, many tummies are rumbling and complaining that they will not make it through to lunchtime.

I've decided to make my own contribution to resurrect morning tea. On Fridays, I'll feature a morning tea recipe (although many will also be suitable for afternoon tea as well). I'd love to receive any contributions you have.

To get started, I'm featuring the unusual Armenian nutmeg cake, a recipe that my mum passed onto me. The unusual step of using some of the mix as a base results in a different texture from most other cakes I've had, but this is an absolutely delicious cake and always disappears quickly when I make it!

ARMENIAN NUTMEG CAKE

2 cups firmly packed brown sugar
2 cups self-raising flour, sifted
125g butter
1 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
1 cup milk
1 egg, beaten
1 teaspoon nutmeg
1/2 cup chopped walnuts

Combine sugar and flour. Rub in butter until the mixture resembles fine breadcrumbs. Press half of this mixture into the base of a well-greased (or baking paper-lined) 20cm square cake tin.

Dissolve the bicarb soda in the milk, add the egg and nutmeg and pour over the remaining sugar and flour mix. Mix well, then spoon into the tin on top of the pressed-in mix. Sprinkle walnuts over the top. Bake in a 180 degrees Celsius oven for one hour. Allow to stand for 15 minutes, then turn out onto a wire rack to cool.

Cake of glace jewels

Christmas has flashed past once again, leaving me with some new cookbooks and foodie must-haves, a pile of shiny paper to recycle, some lovely memories of the food we ate and the new dishes I cooked, and lots of itsy-bitsy leftovers. (Is it just me getting older or is Christmas coming around faster each year?) There are half-empty packets of dried cranberries that went into the pistachio and cranberry nougat I made as gifts for friends (it also gave me the chance to try out my latest gadget - a sugar thermometer). I tried a new panforte di siena recipe, an aromatic concoction of spices, glace fruit and chocolate that was designed specifically to accompany a glass of rich Rutherglen muscat and that left me with a pile of glace figs and ginger. There are also many small bags of almonds, walnuts, and hazelnuts taking up space in my pantry.

My new year's resolution is to try and buy fewer cookbooks, as they are rapidly pushing every other book out of my bookcase and leaving little room for my stack of foodie magazines. But my resolve is being sorely tested as more and more glossy books full of luscious pictures and recipes pour forth from publishers. So I've decided to road-test the latest cookbooks through my local library. A recent loan was the interestingly titled How to cook absolutely everything cookbook by The Australian Women's Weekly. It's an impressively hefty and thick red-covered book with hundreds of recipes sorted according to ingredient type (salads, pasta, seafood, cakes etc). There were versions of many tried and true recipes, such as caesar salad, beef pies, chocolate cake and Christmas pudding, but also many new recipes. As I flicked through the cake chapter, I came across a recipe for fig, walnut and ginger cake that instantly took care of most of my Christmas itsy-bitsy leftovers.

The fig, walnut and ginger cake is dense but moist, with sweetness from the figs, zing from the ginger and an addictive crunch from the walnuts. It also looks very pretty, with the jewels of glace fruit studded throughout the texture. I tweaked the recipe a little, substituting natural yoghurt for sour cream and adding extra glace fruit and nuts. Next time I will add a sprinkling of cinnamon or mixed spice for some extra tang.

It's an extremely easy cake to make, with the only drawback being the time-consuming task of finely chopping the ginger and figs. But the end result is worth it. A nice wedge of this cake, accompanied by a cup of Earl Grey tea, makes a perfect morning tea. It's so delicious that I won't be waiting for leftovers to make this again!

FIG, WALNUT AND GINGER CAKE

185g (6 1/2 ounces) butter, softened
165g (6 ounces) caster sugar
3 eggs
160g (6 ounces) glace figs, finely chopped
70g (2 ounces) glace ginger, finely chopped
70g (2 ounces) walnuts, finely chopped
75g (2 ounces) plain (all-purpose) flour
75g (2 ounces) self-raising flour
80g (2 ounces) natural yoghurt

Preheat the oven to 170 degrees Celsius (350 degrees Fahrenheit). Grease and line the base of a 14cm x 21cm (5 1/2 x 8 inch) loaf pan with non-stick baking paper. Cream butter and sugar together in a medium bowl until light and fluffy, then beat in eggs, one at a time. Stir in the figs, ginger and nuts, then fold in the sifted flours and yoghurt. Put into the prepared tin, smoothing the top. Bake for about one-and-a-quarter hours. Stand in the tin for five minutes, then turn out onto a wire rack to cool.

Adapted from a recipe featured in "How to cook absolutely everything" by The Australian Women's Weekly.