Recipe 32: Cherry Cake

Cherry cake at Christmas time in Oz! What could remind one of the old country more, with overtones of Chekov and relaxing afternoons, than a light and cheerful cherry cake? A fresh sponge with little bursts of cherry-popping flavour is just the thing for an airy afternoon cake with a decent cup of tea or, even for a spot of dessert with a little cream drizzled over the top. Sounds pretty good, huh? Well, at least I think so.

Now before I begin telling you about this, I’m sure I can guess the question on your lips:

“But how do you stop all the cherries from sinking to the bottom of the cake?”

Well, having consulted a few recipes it seems that there are two ways to do this:

1. Once you’ve quartered the cherries, lightly coat them in a couple of tablespoons of self-raising flour. This will give them a little more ‘fixidity’ (?), and prevent them from sinking down as much.

2. Delia suggests only putting 2/3 of the cherries in during the folding stage and then adding the final third once the mixture’s in the tin. Pop the cherries on top of the mix and then push them just under the top of the mixture with a teaspoon.

I did both and got on fairly well with it. So, read on for your recipe for a delicious cherry cake.

Ingredients

200g cherries	175g self-raising flour
175g butter (room temperature)	Approx. 75 g almonds to decorate (and/or used crushed ones in the mix itself)
175g caster sugar	Vanilla or almond extract
3 large eggs

Begin with the cherries. If you’re not using fresh ones and they’re covered in syrup, pat them dry. If fresh ones, you’ll need to take the stones out – if you have a de-stoning device (as my brother, whose kitchen it was I was cooking in, has), use this then quarter. If not, take them out as you quarter them. Now coat them in about 2 tablespoons of self-raising flour.

For the cake, cream the butter and sugar together until light, pale and fluffy. Now gradually beat in the whisked eggs a little at a time. 

Sift the flour and carefully fold this into the creamed mixture using a metal spoon. Put in two thirds of the cherries together with the ground almonds and carefully fold these into the cake, adding one or two drops of almond extract (or vanilla extract if using that). 

Now spoon the cake mix into the prepared tin, level off the top with the back of a spoon, then sprinkle over the remaining third of the cherries and poke them just under the surface with a teaspoon. 

Bake the cake near the centre of the oven for 50 minutes, then cover with foil and continue cooking for a further 10 minutes, or until the centre is springy to touch. 

Cool the cake in the tin for 15 minutes before turning it out onto a wire rack to cool. Now all that’s left is to enjoy it with a little single cream or perhaps a nice cup of tea!

Today’s tip:

Apart from the tip to stop the cherries sinking, if you’re using a spring-form tin, to make it easier taking it in and out of the oven without destabilising the base, put it on a baking sheet for conveyance.

Also, having eaten a slice of the cake after dinner, I reckon a little dry Spanish sherry would work very nicely with it too, or maybe a chilled vermouth.

Baked Christmas Eve 2014 in Melbourne!

Adapted from: http://www.deliaonline.com/recipes/cuisine/european/english/old-fashioned-cherry-cake.html

Recipe 31: Basque Hake

This is one actually cooked back in the summer while enjoying the August sunshine of Andalucia, but it's taken a little while for it to come online... I'm pleased to say that this is a delightfully easy and very tasty dish (isn't that almost always the way with fish dishes?) that benefits from it's source being a video from the Guardian website. 

So, apart from the ingredients, you get a little bit of fishing culture and so on in what can only be described as a 'magazine article' about Basque cooking and a demonstration of how to cook it by Michelin-starred chef Dani Lopez. Worth a watch, and not only for the amazing recipe, which is recreated here your reading...

Ingredients:

Hake fillet (one steak-sized piece per person)	100-200ml fish stock (ideally made from hake bones)
2 cloves garlic, finely chopped	Dried guindilla pepper or other pepper (e.g. chilli)
Handful of parsley, chopped	Clams (3 per person)
Tbsp. plain flour	Hake kokoxtas (the little gelatinous bit on the jaw of the fish)  - I couldn’t sauce these so just doubled the clam portion
Good splash of white wine	Fried garlic and garlic flower to garnish J

1. Fillet the hake (video shows you how to do this), ensuring you pin bone the fillets as necessary. Or just buy them filleted from the fish monger. This is what I ended up doing. However, this does mean you can’t use the hake bones to make the fish stock and will have to rely on a shop-bought stock or one you’ve prepared earlier).

2. Coat the base of a pan in olive oil and add garlic and a little of the pepper (just to add a subtle heat). Once the garlic starts to ‘dance’, add a little flour to thicken the sauce. Now add the splash of white wine and then the stock. Allow this to boil to thicken up.

3. Put in the hake, flesh side down, to poach it in the light sauce. If the sauce looks a little dry, add a bit more stock. Cover and poach for a couple of minutes only – be sure not to overdo it!

4. Very carefully (the flesh is nice and delicate), turn over the fillet. A good spatula will aid you in this. Now add clams and kokoxtas. Cover and poach for about 2 minutes, until the clams have opened up.

5. Plate up with 3 clams and 3 kokoxtas per person, drizzle over  a little of the sauce and top with the garlic and flower. This didn't feature in my dish and, if you compare mine with Mr Michelin-Star Chef, my presentation's not quite up there either. However, it did taste damn good, though.  

If you’ve got plenty sauce, I imagine you’ll do as I did and have more so that you can soak it up with some good, crusty bread. Very good. Very, very good, in fact.

Today’s tip:

The quality of the fish stock really does make a difference. The ‘whiter’ the stock, the more attractive the dish. I’ve also tried this with prawns when I couldn’t source clams and it was still pretty tasty. I reckon you could use this recipe for most forms of white, fleshy fish.

Today’s learning:

Hake is the most sustainable fish in the UK but of the 12,000 tonnes landed each year, only 2% is consumed in the UK. Time to eat more, me thinks!