Lex Culinaria

Fallen Angel Cake

This favourite dessert of the infamous V is really just a very good angel food cake topped with an offensive, artery clogging v.v. lemony lemon curd I make from the yolks leftover after the angel food cake. I've called it Fallen Angel Cake as this recipe tends to transform the relatively virtuous light and fat free angel food cake into a substantially less healthy, but vastly improved in the tase-department, delight.

The contrast between the sweet and light cake and the velvety, tangy and rich lemon curd is absolutely sinful.

Angel Food Cake

Ingredients

13 large egg whites, at room temperature
150 g sifted confectioners sugar
100 g sifted cake and pastry flour
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 teaspoons cream of tartar
200 g granulated sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla

preheat oven to 350°F.

Sift together confectioners sugar, flour, and salt into a bowl using a fine sieve.

Beat whites on medium speed until foamy. Add cream of tartar and beat at high speed until they form soft peaks. Add granulated sugar, about a 1/4 at a time, beating between each addition until the sugar disappears. After the last addition of sugar, continue beating just until whites are very thick and form soft, droopy peaks. Beat in vanilla.

Sprinkle 1/4 of the dry mix over the whites and fold in carefully but thoroughly. repeat with the remaining 3/4s.

Pour batter evenly into ungreased tube pan and bake until top is golden. The cake is done when it springs back when touched and a tester comes out clean. This should take 40 to 45 minutes, less with a fan forced oven. Invert pan onto neck of an empty wine bottle or a large metal funnel and cool completely before turning back over. Loosen cake from sides and centre of pan with a knife and pop gently out of the pan. Serve sliced with genrous amounts of warm, homemade lemon curd.

Lemon Curd

Ingredients

2 1/4 cups sugar
3/4 cup plus 2 tablespoons lemon juice
3/4 cup butter, cubed
13 large egg yolks
3 tablespoons grated lemon peel
1/4 teaspoon salt

Combine all ingredients other than the yolks in heavy medium saucepan. Stir over medium heat until butter melts and sugar dissolves. Remove from heat. Gradually whisk in the yolks. Whisk constantly over medium-low heat until curd thickens, about 2 minutes (do not boil or it will curdle).

Strain curd through sieve into bowl. Press plastic wrap directly onto surface of curd and chill, or pour warm over angel food cake. 

First Annual Food Blog Awards

There are so many creative food bloggers out there it reall staggers the imagination! The very inventive bloke who writes the Il Forno baking blog is full of good ideas: He came up with "Is My Blog Burning". I've never participated before, but I can't wait until the January edition comes out so that I can cook along with all my favourite food bloggers!

Now the Accidental Hedonist has come up with another great idea: Food Blog Awards.

What a great idea to share the world of food blogging with...welll, the world!

Devine, Sublime Garlicky Mashed Potatoes

This recipe is from A Perfect Winter's Eve Supper

Potatoes like this are what love is all about.

Ingredients:

• 10 goodish sized organic red potatoes
• 1 head garlic, oiled and roasted for at least 45 minutes
• cream
• sour cream
• salt
• pepper
• butter

Quarter the unpeeled potatoes and boil until just done. They shouldn't be falling apart, but they should yield easily to a fork.

If you're making them ahead of time you cab boil them and leave them to sit on the stove in the hot water so you can mash them at your leisure.

When you're ready to mash add in a nice dollop each of butter, sour cream and cream (I'd use about 1./4 cup butter, and 1/3 cup of each type of cream) and squeeze in the whole head of nutty, creamy roasted garlic cloves, add in a little salt and fresh ground pepper and mash just enough to get a creamy, somewhat lumpy potatoe mixture - but absolutely no more than necessary as too much mashing will make your potatoes go all gluey.

<-------------Use a masher like this

                                       and avoid those like this ------------------>

as the latter tends to overmash and the skins get stuck and are a bugger to pick out of the little holes. 

The Essential Roast Chicken

This recipe has been moving and changing over time. It's an amalgam of a number of other recipes and it guarantees beautiful, fragrant, plump and crispy chicken. But prepared to give it a lot of love. And butter. Did I say butter? And after that, how about some butter? More butter please!

This used to be a favourite of my Antipodean (boo hoo) mates Ollie and V, who often came for dinner. V's favourite desert was my Fallen Angel Cake, which involved a virtuously fat free, light as air angelfood cake smothered in a gorgeous, velvety (fatteriffic) warm lemon curd (well you have to do something with the 13 leftover egg yolks from the angelfood cake).

Alas, I digress.

Purchase a chook big enough to feed your supper guests and leave leftovers for picking at later - who could say no to a cold roast chook and mayonnaise sandwich for lunch?

I typically use 500 grams per guest, plus an additional little bit. The recipe here is for a 3 kilo chicken, but could be modified by subtracting (or adding) 20 minutes per 500 grams. Your chook should, in an ideal world, be cornfed and organic, but this recipe will transport even the palest, saddest battery hen to the culinary heavens, and you along with it.

Enough for 6 (including my husband, which is saying quite a lot)

Ingredients

• 3 kilo chicken
• 3 medium onions
• 6 cloves of garlic
• butter
• homemade chicken stock
• white wine
• A dry spice rub made of whatever you like (typically I use, in decending order of proportion, good dark paprika, sea salt, cayenne, ground white pepper, onion powder, garlic powder).

Rinse and pat the chicken dry with paper towel. Cut the onions into wedges, separate the wedges into single or double layers and stuff the wedges up the chicken's bottom. Any leftover onion can go in the bottom of the roasting pan.

sliding your fingers between the skin and meat of the breast, loosen the skin from the flesh. Slice pats from the butter and slip the slices between the skin and the breast. Use more butter if you've got a cheaper chook -depending on the quality and size of the bird, I sometimes use up to a cup of butter!

Rub the dry spice all over the chook's skin. Top and bottom.

Skewer the chicken's bottom closed (ouch) and truss up its wee leggies. Either tuck the wing tips under its back, or skewer them to the body with the tip resting in the crease between the leg and body.

Put the darling in a roasting pan with a rack.

Pour sufficient quantities of white wine and home made stock in the pan and throw in the garlic cloves. I tend to use rather more stock than wine, about 3 cups stock to 1 cup wine.

Bung the whole lot in the oven at 200 celcius for 2.5 hours.

Be prepared to baste this birdie every 30 minutes. Settle down in the kitchen with a good book (like Larousse) and a glass or three of wine and baste away. If your stock runs low, add a bit more, or some water, or wine, or whatever.

Drink more wine.

When the bird comes out of the oven, let it sit, with foil tented over it, while you reduce the pan drippings for gravy. If you've used quite a lot of butter, you'll want to skim that off first or the gravy will be far too rich.

Use a fork to mash the nice roasty cloves that were at the bottom of the pan into the drippings and strain the drippings before reducing. If you need to add a little flour or cornstarch to thicken, feel free to do so, but not too much, a nice fluid jus is always more flavourful and attractive than a stogdy, too-thick gravy.

If you must have thicker gravy, reserve some of the butter and fat you strained off so that you can make a proper roux for thickening.  None of this shaking flour and water up in an old margerine container.

Before untrussing and carving this beauty, use two carving forks to hold it upright over the gravy pan to allow the juice to drip out of its bottom. If you've not been shirking your basting duties, there will be plenty of nice, oniony juice there.

Untruss, deskewer and carve the chook up. Arrange it on a platter with the roasted onions extracted from its nether regions. They should be just about caramelised.

Serve this delightful beast with Devine, Sublime Garlicky Mashed Potatoes and a fresh, tangy salad. Oh. and lots of good wine. Preferably a gentle pinot noir.

Be sure you're not wearing a belt.

A Perfect Winter's Eve Supper

The Meal

Last Sunday Cakes and I had a few good friends (CRW, Joan and Kevin), and a bottle or two of nice Australian red, around for a simple, but moorish, roast dinner of garlic mashed potatoes, spiced and succulent roast chicken, a simple red and yellow tomato salad and a berry and nut crumble. Nothing warms the heart more on a cold winter night that s few good friends, a nice dark red and a warm roast dinner.

We started off with a warm dense and crusty brown loaf from the Italian centre shop paired with a beautiful black olive tapenade and homemade marinated Lebanese soft cheese called Labanya (or Labna, or Lebne...whatever) for spreading. The saltiness of the tapenade and the creamy, garlicky tang of the labna were perfect on the soft, brown slices. It was gone in a matter of seconds.

The roast was juicy and gorgeous – crispy and brown on the outside and plump and flavourful on the inside. I made the roast in my usual manner with an offensive amount of butter, homemade chicken stock, a ‘secret’ spice blend, onions and garlic and baste like a mad-woman. I think it was the best one yet, despite the fact that it was not [gasp] an organic free-ranger, like I usually buy. Maybe it was that I left out the half bottle of white wine I traditionally add? I don’t know. But it was certainly comfort-food heaven.

My husband, who has been previously relieved of his chicken-carving duties due to his uncontrollable need to pick at any roast chicken within a half-mile radius, managed to sneak past me a number of times to steal little bits. I must learn to seat him at the farthest end of the table from the kitchen next time.

The mashed potatoes too were a resounding success - creamy and nutty-garlicky without being too rich. Bits of dark red skin dotted throughout. It’s been a very long time indeed since I peeled a potato for anything. As always, I passed over the $30, very posh, square-holed potato masher for the $3 s-curve version that does a far superior job. It thoroughly mashes the potatoes to the perfect texture and never, ever gives you even a hint of gluey-ness.

The salad was delightfully simple –organic red and yellow tomatoes, vine ripened and fairly bursting, shreds of red oak lettuce, the thinnest slivers of Spanish onion, chunks of organic cucumber, garlic infused olive oil, sea salt, cracked pepper and a splash of balsamic.

The conversation was lively, except when eating – then, almost dead silence (except for a few little moans of deep, deep pleasure – or was that only me?).

The crumble, a perfect dinner party desert if there ever was one – you can make it in advance and simply pop it in the oven at the start of the meal and it will emerge, fragrant and steaming at exactly the right time, was heavenly. It came from the oven in a nutty, brown sugar and fruit-scented cloud. The berries were tangy and plump and sweet, the crumble nutty and crispy, with a burnt sugar crust and topped with a dollop of softly whipped vanilla cream. My husband, who is possibly the hungriest man alive, had seconds and would have had thirds had I not shot him “you’d better not finish that whole crumble on me” daggers.

The Recipes

Luscious Labanya

The Essential Roast Chicken

Devine, Sublime Garlicky Mashed Potatoes

Juicy Tomato Salad

Ab Fab Mixed Berry and Nut Crumble

Luscious Labanya

From the post: A Perfect Winter's Eve Supper

Make this beautiful spicy, soft mediterannean cheese ahead and keep it in the fridge for company or just for a delicious snack of an evening.

I suppose you can do this with store bought yogurt, although I prefer to make my own. It’s always creamier and milder than the sometimes gelatinous and too-tart stuff from the dairy case. If you must use store-bought yogurt, please buy full-fat and organic if you can find it.

Ingredients

1 litre creamy, mild yogurt

3 garlic cloves, peeled and partly crushed

1 small hot red pepper

a few peppercorns

a few good-sized pieces of lemon or lime rind

sea salt

olive oil

Line a sterilized colander with fresh and impeccably clean cheesecloth or butter muslin and dump in the yogurt. Let it drain, over a bowl for 6-12 hours, scraping the yogurt from the cheesecloth and stirring it up every two or so hours so that it drains properly. The yogurt on the outside will become firmer and less liquidy as it drains and it is important to allow the softer yogurt on the inside to drain as well. When the consistency is quite creamy, rather like room-temperature mascarpone, bring up the sides of the cloth and tie into a bundle. Suspend the cheese-filled cloth (I tie mine to a cabinet handle) over the colander and bowl and allow to it drain for a further 12 hours, taking it down occasionally, untying it and redistributing the yogurt as before. It should achieve a solid, creamy consistency similar to that of a thick butter icing. The firmer your yogurt was to start with, the less time it will take to drain to the right consistency.

Scrape out the yogurt into a clean, sterile bowl and mix up with a bit of sea salt and, if you like a few dashes of fresh ground cumin.

Pour olive oil into a sterilized jar until it is 3 or 4 inches deep. Add in the garlic, peppers, and rind. Drop spoonfuls of the yogurt into the oil in the same way (and same size) you would for drop cookies. When the dollops start poking through the oil at the top, add more oil so they remain covered. Continue until all the yogurt has been dolloped into the jar and the whole lot is covered with enough oil that it is a centimeter or so above the yogurt balls.

You can keep this in the fridge for a few weeks. If your fridge is pretty cold the olive oil will go all opaque and sludgy, so take the whole jar out and sit it on the benchtop for an hour or so before you want to use it. Then, use a fork to carefully scoop out some cheese blobs and put them in a little dish and spread the yummy oily cheese over nice bread or biscuits.