Category Archives: Food and Cooking

#100 Appreciate Small Discoveries

This pandemic has challenged us on so many levels over the past—how many?—months, but there’ve been unexpected rewards along the way to compensate.

For example, the realisation that owning a dog means escaping lockdown whenever an excuse is needed to leave the house was a lightbulb moment for many. Similarly, it’s been a real eyeopener for many businesses to discover that all workers don’t have to battle peak-hour traffic twice a day when they can work effectively from home.

As the world contracts and international travel fades into memory, one way to extract the best out of life is to:

#100 Appreciate Small Discoveries

Parking in a side street a couple of weeks before Easter, I came across this cute rabbit painted on an inconspicuous wall.

It brightened my day no end:

*Easter Bunny by talented local street artist Kade Sarte.*
*The eyes even follow you*

Another unexpected offering appeared alongside the entry to a car park. This sunny butterfly frieze greets passers-by like a welcoming smile, so thanks, Kristina and Albury City:

*by Kristina Greenwood for Upstream 2021*

Its personal significance was enhanced exponentially when a matching beauty landed in my garden a couple of days later:

*Australian Painted Lady Butterfly on chive flowers*.
*“Hey, you’re famous!”*

The pandemic threw up another joy recently when Warburtons, a UK company that bakes much loved crumpets, released their secret recipe to comfort suffering compatriots during the depths of winter.

With a rallying cry of

who could resist giving it a go?

My first batch, cooked in a pan on the stove top, resulted in terribly mismatched crumpets, until the idea of repurposing my pie maker into a crumpet maker seemed a worthy experiment.

Woohoo! Yessir!

Have a look at them cooking:

*Perfect shape, perfect bubbles, perfect browning when turned! What’s not to love about a pie maker*?

Here’s the adapted recipe if you want to give it a try:

An innocuous visit to my GP this week threw up another new and exciting discovery when the doc asked me if I’d like eScripts sent to my phone instead of handing me the usual paper ones. (She’d noticed I was using earpods in the waiting room, she said, so assumed I was tech savvy. 🤣)

Heart thumping, I agreed to the eScripts, not wanting her to know the truth about my dread of technology and its propensity to go bad. Of course, the minute I walked out of the surgery, I checked my messages, convinced it wouldn’t have worked, but to my surprise …

So now all I have to do is show the pharmacist the super trendy eScripts on my mobile to get them dispensed.

There are so many wonderful small discoveries to be found at our new Harris Farm Market that I don’t know where to start, but the little lime-green kale/silverbeet/herb stripper has to be up there with the best. It rips out the pesky central stalk in milliseconds.

*Insert the stalk into the hole of best fit, pull through and voila! the leaves are freed.*

Harris Farm sells assorted native finger limes, too …

And what this means is that I can now amass any and all ingredients needed for my latest craze: the home made poke bowl with added crispy kale and finger lime bubbles topped with sriracha mayo.

And a final discovery has been the talented Marsh family from Faversham in the UK, who’ve been coping during lockdown by repurposing songs and posting them on YouTube.

Here’s their performance at the BBC Comic Relief concert. They re-worded Total Eclipse of the Heart to reflect what everyone can relate to on some level during the pandemic.

*They’re more often found performing (in pyjamas of course) in their bedrooms, kitchen or living room.*

Who’d have thought small discoveries could give so much pleasure?

#98 Allow yourself to be seduced

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Once you reach a certain age, it’s easy to forget what it’s like to fall in love.

That excited fluttering in the stomach when thinking about the object of your affections, the anticipation of sharing time together, the sheer joy of knowing you’ve met your perfect match at last.

I thought it was too late for this to happen again, but now realise there’s no age limit to infatuation:

#98 Allow yourself to be seduced

Harris Farm Markets has decided to favour our town with its presence and I’m smitten.

I’d heard about this market for years from family and friends in Sydney. They’d regale me with stories of the freshest of local fruit and vegetables, the most exotic groceries imaginable, displays to make your head spin, anything and everything a foodie ever dreamed of, and all coming together under one roof. A magical land akin to a Willie Wonka factory but designed for adults.

AND NOW IT’S IN MY TOWN AND IT’S WALKING DISTANCE FROM HOME!

As I think about it, all the adjectives, adverbs, similes and metaphors in my repertoire don’t do it justice. Instead, sit back, relax, and enjoy photographs that display the long lost art of effortless seduction.

From fruit and vegetables …

Assorted heirloom tomatoes to make Maggie Beer envious

Can you get fresher than Living Lettuce?

To deli items …

…to coffee and desserts

Organic single herd milk. (Yes, it’s really a thing!)

… not forgetting a seafood stall and a butchery, a smokehouse and a florist, a juice bar and an on-site baker’s mill—among too many other delights to mention.

I realise I’m in the early days of my infatuation and that the shine will inevitably fade. I’ll emerge from these crazy, heady days of unbridled pleasure with an overstocked pantry, feeling a tad guilty about neglecting the lovely Swedish baker and the excellent bulk food store to the south of the town, the well stocked essential ingredient shop in the town centre and the European deli to the north.

But until that happens, I’m basking in this flood of oxytocin.

And did I mention it’s walking distance from home?

#97 Explore Ways to Cook … Parsnips?

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Every home gardener knows it.

One year, you produce crops so lush, so abundant, so profuse, that you’re convinced your gardening skills are unparalleled. Then the very next year, you can almost hear the whispering coming from the garden as the veggies declare, “It’s my right, as a living, growing seed, to deprive you of my bounty this year for no apparent reason.”

And so this summer, the zucchini plants refused to flourish (I know! Who can’t grow zucchini?), the eggplants lay down their drooping arms early, and the sugar snap peas refused to be either sugary or snappy. Only one garden bed flourished while my back was turned.

And this is why I find myself forced to:

#97 Explore ways to cook … Parsnips?

Months ago, I threw some newly purchased seeds into an empty garden bed which then appeared to stay dormant for so long that I forgot I’d ever planted anything. Imagine my surprise when these lush leaves appeared, seemingly by magic:

It was parsnips! Purportedly a winter vegetable, it had decided to grace my garden bed—no, take over my garden bed—with summer produce.

So what do you do with a glut of—parsnips?

It turns out you can make several delicious dishes, beyond the well known roasted parsnip.

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The easiest dish to cook is from a recipe sent to me by a friend when I put out the call for parsnip help. Called Parsnip Puff, and featured in an early Beverley Sutherland Smith cook book, my friend had scribbled the word ‘great!’ by the side of it, which is always a good sign.

Not only does it taste richer, creamier and more flavoursome than plain old mashed potato, it even looks yummier:

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Buoyed by this success, I moved on to the ever reliable, ever moreish parsnip chips.

Just peel a parsnip with a vegetable peeler until it’s been reduced to a pile of shavings, then drop these into a pan of sizzling peanut oil until they turn golden. Drain on kitchen paper, sprinkle with salt and try to stop yourself devouring them in one go. So delicious.

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But why restrict yourself to savoury recipes? What about giving Catherine Berwick’s parsnip and maple syrup cake a try? Honestly.

It has a 5 star rating from 194 reviews, which is very impressive, but more importantly, it charmed my friends over the festive season:

It even freezes (if it lasts that long)!

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But there’s no point keeping parsnip all to itself.

This zucchini slice from Taste (4.9 stars from 822 reviews!) can be raised to a 5 star rating with the addition of a grated parsnip (and carrot) in the mix. If you have fresh golden eggs directly from a friend’s chickens, it will end up looking like this and keep you going in snacks for… ooh, at least a day:

I’m now sold on parsnips, and plan to grow them again next year.

Although I fear they’re already out there muttering, “If she thinks she’ll get an abundant crop like last year … tell ‘er she’s dreamin’.”

#89 Make Maggie’s Dried Mandarin-skin Powder

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There’s a lot to love about Maggie Beer. Her warmth, her charm—which I’m assured by people who have worked with her, is utterly genuine—and her taste buds.

Especially her taste buds. If Maggie says this ingredient goes perfectly with that one, you can believe her, and if you have any doubts, just buy me a tub of her Pheasant Farm Paté for a demonstration of how happy her flavour pairings can make someone.

So when a recipe in her recent cook book, Maggie’s Recipe for Life—a compilation of recipes aimed at reducing the chances of Alzheimer’s and other lifestyle diseases—called for dried mandarin-skin powder, I simply had to make this ingredient for my pantry.

#89 Make Maggie’s Dried Mandarin-skin Powder

Now this is where Maggie sometimes challenges her adoring fans. For example, her recipe for the delicious-sounding eggplant, tomato and feta salad begins with the words, ‘Some years I grow up to six different varieties of eggplant in our garden’.

Of course you do Maggie, but did you know that the rest of us consider ourselves very lucky if a bog-standard Solanum melongena bush gives us two or three eggplants?

So it was no surprise to turn to the back of her book for the dried mandarin-skin powder instructions to find this:

Oh Maggie, Maggie. What if we don’t have a ‘very old, very reliable bench dehydrator’, or even a very old, very unreliable one? Or indeed, any dehydrator at all?

So it looks like I’ll have to trust Maggie’s taste buds, accept that dried, powdered mandarin-skin is a worthy creation, and channel her thoughts to come up with my own method.

The first step, of course, is to grow at least two varieties of mandarin tree. Foreseeing this need, several years ago I planted both an Imperial and a Satsuma mandarin tree. The former produced pip-laden, dry, shrivelled fruits that weren’t worth the space they took up in the garden. But the latter? Deeply orange in colour, sweet as pie, not a pip to be found, easy to peel and abundant. Simply delicious!

Here are the steps to preparing mandarin skin for its journey into powder, what I like to call, ‘respecting the fruit’ by utilising a ‘head to tail’ approach.

Peel the mandarin so the skin remains in largish pieces:
Devour the fruit segments
Gently scrape away the white pith from the skin. The end of a steel vegetable peeler works very well. It doesn’t matter if it tears a little.
When you’ve finished, they’ll look a bit like this
Store them in the fridge until you have enough to spread evenly on an oven tray
Pre-heat your oven to low (90-100ºC) then place the prepared skins on their tray in the oven for 35-45 minutes. Keep an eye on them so they don’t burn. They should look like this at the end of drying:
When cool, pulverise in a whizzer till they have the luxurious appearance of gold dust
Indulge your senses with the heady aroma of limonene, more glorious than saffron, more functional than real gold dust
Store in airtight container
And sprinkle on breakfast cereal or desserts to re-capture the aroma of your mandarins for months and months.Magical!

#87 Plan for “The Year of Living Safely”

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The longer I’ve lived, the more the years have merged into each other, especially since ceasing work.

So if you were to ask me what I got up to in, say, 2013, I really wouldn’t have a clue unless I checked my photos and bank statements.

Today, I’m taking the bold step of predicting that in the future, not one child or adult living on earth at this moment will ever forget what they were doing in 2020.

My generation has been lucky enough to miss a World War, and life has been mostly smooth sailing for us. That is, until a novel Coronavirus reared its ugly little genetic parcel of RNA and decided to inflict Covid-19 on the world.

Time to

#87 Plan for “The Year of Living Safely”

It’s going to be extremely tough for so many people, as jobs dry up, money disappears into the ether, and our lives are physically restricted. But maybe we should be relieved that no one is dropping bombs on us, there are unlikely to be food shortages, and no mastermind is trying to exterminate an entire race or entire religion. Even if we have to stay home for a year, if we help and support each other, we can probably muddle through somehow.

Remember,

Planning for the next however-many months of my life at home has made me realise that the past 7+ years of writing this blog has been the perfect preparation. Embarrassingly, I’ve discovered that my life in retirement has been almost entirely home-based. (I saw a meme once that suggested the trajectory of your life is determined by the song that was top of the hit parade in your country on your 14th birthday. Mine was Tom Jones’ Green, Green Grass of Home!)

So rather than re-invent the wheel, I’ve prepared a reminder of some of the fun and frivolous (and generally inexpensive) activities previously featured in this blog. As we’re urged to restrict our shopping, a few of them may need tweaking, but they’re all amenable to this.

A few other ideas spring to mind now, such as ‘Learn how to cut your own hair’ or ‘Move the furniture around to pretend you’ve renovated’. But I’ll leave other, more qualified, people to give tips on exercising-in-situ, virtual travel and the best books to read.

Meanwhile, stay safe and please, for the sake of our wonderful health professionals, as well as all our fellow travellers, stay home!

#84 Hold a Sustainable Kris Kringle

5 Replies

Sometimes, in the face of a wilfully stupid government that leaves you feeling powerless, all you can do is quietly undermine them.

So with large tracts of the east coast of Australia now alight with unseasonal bushfires and a government still intent on promoting coal and coal mines, I’ve channelled my anger and frustration into a small act of defiance this Christmas.

No big buying spree to prop up the economy, thanks all the same, Mr Treasurer. This is the year my group of friends decided to

#84 Hold a Sustainable Kris Kringle

So much better than the usual exchange of bought-at-the-last-minute ‘stuff’.

The brief was simple:

◊ Make it
◊ Bake it
◊ Pick it
◊ Plant it
◊ Re-cycle it
◊ Re-gift it
◊ Re-use it
◊ Re-design it
◊ Re-purpose it

And here are the ideas we came up with:

A re-purposed hand towel sewn into a clever shower mitt, together with a bar of perfumed soap:

2. A re-gifted book on ‘green’ drinking and eating

3. A Garden Box full of goodies, including freshly laid eggs:

4. A jigsaw puzzle the original owner had completed more than enough times:

5. A Gift card promising a home cooked meal, with no expiry date!

6. A re-cycled novel by Ann Cleeves (who writes the Vera series) presented in a Christmas-card decorated bag:

7. Cards of assorted sizes printed on a home printer from photographs taken locally by the gift-giver:

8. Bonus cosmetics received after placing an order for regular cosmetics:

Every aspect of this Sustainable Kris Kringle was perfect: the pre-planning, the collating and especially the exchange of such personal gifts at our breakfast gathering.

The vote is that we’re definitely doing it again next year.

With apologies to the economy, of course.

Image of Christmas Trees (at top of post) is my lettuce, having bolted in the pre-summer heat. [sigh]

#80 Practise baking a Sourdough Loaf … again … and again … and again …

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It all began when a friend suggested we attend a one-day sourdough baking course run by the Bicycle Baker, local artisan bakers who sell delicious sourdough loaves around the Albury district.

The idea of learning how to make them at home was very appealing. Who doesn’t love the smell of freshly baked bread in the morning, the crunch of biting into a perfect sourdough crust and the unique taste and texture of hand-baked bread?

It was at this point, I should have shrugged and said, “Nah. Why bark when you have a dog?” After all, it was no trouble to nip down to the shops and buy a loaf. Takes me ten minutes, tops.

But no, because I’d done a bit of yeast bread-making years ago I thought it would be a quick refresher and I’d have the aroma of freshly baking bread wafting around my kitchen in next to no time. I expected this blog post to be titled #80 Bake a Sourdough Loaf.

Ha!

Here I am, weeks later, agonising over every step of the procedure as this activity morphs into:

#80 Practise baking a Sourdough Loaf … again … and again … and again…

The class was great fun and we all went home with a fresh, delicious loaf of sourdough bread.

What I hadn’t appreciated was the effort that Nicky and Tim, aka the Bicycle Bakers, must have put in over the preceding weeks to help us all produce these perfect loaves on the day. Baking a sourdough loaf is nothing short of a protracted labour of love.

The sourdough starter is the secret, that magic ingredient used as a leavener in lieu of commercial yeast. Sourdough starter is needy. Very needy. In fact, we were advised to give a name to the little blob of sourdough starter we were handed at the end of the course. That’s because it has to be fed regularly, nurtured with care and even taken on holidays, lest it die of neglect. Like I said. Needy.

I thought of calling it Bear, so the phrase ‘Feed the Bear’ could become my daily mantra, but before long, I changed its name to Bambi.

Because I didn’t want to be the one to kill Bambi

The magic of sourdough starter is that it begins life as nothing more than a mixture of baker’s flour and water. But after daily feedings—you discard 80% of the previous day’s mix before adding fresh flour and water—you eventually have a little jar of bubbling, wild-yeasty-smelling starter that gets better and stronger the more times you feed it.

Modern day Bambi

If I may be allowed to mix my mythologies, Bambi can only be used for bread making when he reaches the Goldilocks point: not too bubbly, not too flat, not too whiffy, not too bland. I’ve learned through trial and error that this Goldilocks point is rarely reached at a convenient time for baking bread.

But once that moment arrives, you mix Bambi with your bread flour, water and salt, do a little kneading, then leave it to ‘prove’.

For THREE to TEN HOURS!

By now, it’s about four in the morning, but you’re so invested in your loaf that you get up to work it into its final shape, let it rise once more, slash designs on the top as best you can to let out steam,

then place it in a preheated oven that will never be as hot or as reliable as a commercial oven.

If you’re lucky, you may end up with a loaf that rises tolerably well and browns nicely.

When cut, it even has the look you’re after.

And the taste … ?

Hmm. It’s ok…ay.

But maybe I’ll nip down to the Bicycle Baker’s and buy a loaf to tide me over before my next marathon session.

Or I could just list Bambi on GumTree. Free to a Good Home, of course.

#63 Investigate a Mystery

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Enid Blyton must take some responsibility.

The idea that you can spend years entertaining children with exciting tales about other children solving mysteries (The Famous Five, The Secret Seven, The Five Find-Outers & Dog) without it having repercussions in their later life is fanciful. Without a doubt, it’s the reason I’ve always had a deep seated urge to solve mysteries. And this need continues well into retirement.

#63 Investigate a Mystery

It began back in mid January when my sister bought me a birthday present online to be sent directly to my post office box. But when my birthday came and went and I hadn’t thanked her, she realised the item had gone missing, and so began the investigation initially known as The Mystery of the Missing Parcel.

No problems. A copy of the original Australia Post receipt, showing its tracking number, should set things right:

But when we checked on the Australia Post website, the parcel appeared to have been delivered to my local post office two weeks earlier, just a few days after it had been sent.

…curiouser and curiouser

A trip to the post office will sort this out, we thought naively. The gift will be there, sitting on a bench waiting to be collected. It did seem odd, though, that they hadn’t placed a ‘parcel awaiting collection’ card into my PO Box.

‘No,’ they told me. ‘We don’t have the item here. It’s already been picked up.’

Not by me it hasn’t. Who signed for it?

They shrugged. No one has to sign to pick up parcels any more nor show any ID. Even when the parcel’s been registered and the sender took out extra insurance. Naturally, I made a fuss. It was my birthday present after all. They finally offered to look at the CCTV footage taken of the Post Office collection hatch at the exact time the parcel had been collected – ‘11.28am Mon 22 Jan’ – to see who’d picked it up.

And this is where the story takes a darker turn. An unidentified man was seen on CCTV taking possession of an identical box to the one I was awaiting at exactly that time. This was no longer a simple mystery, this had turned into a crime.

The birthday present, it turned out, was a box housing four bottles of Vino Cotto, an elixir so delicious that, well, it just had to be found or someone would have to pay. My sister had recently discovered that this little gem was being made to the original Italian recipe right here in Australia.

Its literal translation is ‘cooked wine’ but it’s so much more than that. Making vino cotto involves the long, slow reduction of grape ‘must’, the juice of a particular variety of grape, with the addition of ash from the burnt grape vine. The resulting rich, exotic syrup is then stored for months before being brought out for special occasions.

When I was a child, my grandmother would slave over its production so that every Easter it could be retrieved from storage and served drizzled over Crostoli as the entire family – parents, aunts, uncles and cousins, scrambled for the last drop of this liquid gold. Making it was so laborious, so complicated that we all knew we’d not see it again for another year.

That did it. No strange man was going to get away with my birthday bottles of vino cotto, so I swung into investigative mode and set up my white board.

I’ve concluded my investigations now and have decided the most likely sequence of events is as follows:

The box arrives at the post office on 22 January
The staff place a ‘parcel to collect’ notice in the wrong PO Box. Exhibit A shows a photo of PO boxes in close proximity to mine. Exhibit B (taken peeping through a slatted grille) shows the boxes snapped from the reverse angle. Quite a jumbled mess, suggesting it would be simple for the ‘notice to collect’ to be placed in the wrong box
An unidentified man, probably with a PO Box close to mine, takes this incorrectly placed notice from his PO Box into the collection hatch and is given the parcel, no questions asked. It doesn’t worry him that he’s not expecting a birthday present and that it isn’t addressed to him either
Aforementioned unidentified man then takes the parcel home, opens it without any concern that his name is not on the label and that it isn’t his birthday, sees the word ‘Vino’ on the bottles and thinks all his Christmases have come at once.

The Post Office hasn’t taken kindly to my suggestion that they place a WANTED poster sporting the unidentified man’s image on every billboard around town, so I have little hope of discovering his identity.

But a couple of things cheer me up. Australia Post has finally refunded us for the value of the goods so I’m expecting more bottles of vino cotto to arrive any day now.

And best of all, unidentified man wouldn’t have had a flood of lovely childhood memories as he indulged in my vino cotto and I trust he was bitterly disappointed to discover that, despite being utterly delicious and addictive, it contains no alcohol whatsoever.

Yay!

My culprit may remain elusive, but three bottles of vino cotto PLUS a jar of marinated wild baby figs in vino cotto arrived at my door (thank you to Angela from Il Baronello) in time for Easter. Just drizzle over fresh Crostoli.

The verdict?

Squisito!

#55 Create Perfect Crispy Salmon Skin

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If there’s one treat on earth that’s even better than crispy pork crackling – because it’s lower fat and doesn’t involve murdering a sociable, intelligent and highly trainable animal – it would have to be salmon skin that’s been baked to crunchy perfection.

(I mean no offence to all the salmon out there, but be honest, you’re not in Babe’s league.)

So for months I’ve been trying a variety of cooking tips found on an assortment of Google sites to achieve this, and after much experimentation using friends as guinea pigs (thank you all for suffering through various iterations) have finally hit the jackpot and am delighted to share the results, which have proven to be reproducible in my oven at least, right here, right now.

#55 Create Perfect Crispy Salmon Skin

It turns out that salmon skin nirvana is not too difficult to achieve:

Preheat a fan forced oven to 200ºC
Choose a salmon steak with a generous covering of skin. I’ve noticed they sometimes sell skinless salmon steaks. Unbelievable! I pray they don’t just toss out the skins…
Carefully detach the flesh from the skin with a sharp knife, just so…

…before scraping off all the fat and any residual flesh on the undersurface so the skin is glistening and streamlined.

Then cut to size and pat dry on a paper towel:

Next, season generously with salt, pepper and oil, rubbing in well, and lay the pieces on an oiled metal cross-wire cooling rack.

(It goes without saying that Murray River pink salt, freshly ground black pepper using an obscenely long pepper grinder and a virtuous brand of EVOO were chosen)

Now the following step is VITAL to success:

Place the racks with their compressed cargo onto a baking tray and into the hot oven on the middle shelf.

Then, if you cook the salmon fillet in a frying pan on the stove top at a low-moderate setting for 5 minutes on one side and 4 minutes on the other, this 9 minutes will be the exact time it will take for the skin in the oven to reach perfection.

Yes, really.

I invert the two little trays (as one) at the same time as I turn the fillet on the stove top, too, just for symmetry.

The salmon skins should be golden brown, straight-as-a-die and delicate crunch heaven.

You’re most welcome.

#52 Bake an Authentic Austrian Torte

4 Replies

Aah, Austria.

How could I ever forget my one-and-only visit to this beautiful land-locked country?

Three of us on the obligatory rite-of-passage backpacking trip around Europe found ourselves in Salzburg at Christmas in 1974.

Mozart, the Sound of Music, golden cakes and tortes and strudels that reached out from shop windows to embrace us and our first ever White Christmas.

Magic.

But then life got in the way and I forgot all about the country and its delicious pastries until a few years ago when I was gifted a small slice of an Austrian Panama Torte, baked by my elderly Austrian neighbour Martha and kindly brought over by her husband Joe, as a thank you for the spare eggs I’d given them.

I was told this was a special-occasion cake, complex to make and based on a precious recipe they’d brought with them from their home country to Australia after the War.

Clearly this was a very special offering and after the first bite, it was obvious why. It was melt-in-the-mouth chocolate and almond nirvana. The future was now clear for me:

#52 Bake an Authentic Austrian Torte

I asked for the recipe a few times over the years, but with our busy lives, it never quite happened so I resigned myself to the memory of that cake rather than ever tasting the reality of it again.

Until one day, three months ago, Joe brought frail Martha over to my place – together with her handwritten recipe, translated from the original German, for the famous Austrian Panama Torte!

We sat in the garden as Martha haltingly talked me through the Byzantine instructions and I faithfully took notes and tried to make sense of the sometimes confusing translation.

2 ½ ribs of chocolate? Who measures chocolate in ribs?

Austrian cooks, that’s who and they mean horizontal ribs, not vertical

The almonds and the chocolate, I was instructed, MUST BE carefully hand grated. No food processor should go anywhere near them or this whole light and fluffy flourless concoction would come crashing down.

And the egg whites have to be beaten to within an inch of their lives but their folding into the almond/chocolate/egg yolk mix must be done with the tenderness of wrapping a newborn.

The oven door has to be propped ajar for the first 15 minutes of baking or the mixture might just refuse to rise.

this was serious baking

And yet it worked, and a newly minted, pleasingly light and fluffy cake came out of the oven:

Martha’s had a lifetime of practice slicing it horizontally to perfection – two cuts, do you mind – before spreading the chocolate butter icing between the layers, but my skills doing this tricky manoeuvre with such a mercurial cake were untested.

Enter, the ever helpful YouTube with instructions on how to measure the cutting lines before marking them with toothpicks…

… then gliding a fresh piece of dental floss through the cake just so…

… creating three (almost) perfectly cut horizontal slices.

This only left the chocolate butter icing to prepare and spread between layers and all over, before garnishing with lightly toasted almond flakes…

…and cutting into slices to share with family and friends

And the taste?

outsidethesquare101

101 fun and frivolous things to try in retirement: a single's guide

Category Archives: Food and Cooking

#100 Appreciate Small Discoveries

#98 Allow yourself to be seduced

#97 Explore Ways to Cook … Parsnips?

#89 Make Maggie’s Dried Mandarin-skin Powder

#87 Plan for “The Year of Living Safely”

#84 Hold a Sustainable Kris Kringle

#80 Practise baking a Sourdough Loaf … again … and again … and again …

#63 Investigate a Mystery

#55 Create Perfect Crispy Salmon Skin

#52 Bake an Authentic Austrian Torte