A Jubilee Afternoon Tea, Part Two - Apple Streusel Cake, and Mini Crustless Quiches

If you've been following along, you may recall that I had an afternoon tea a couple of weeks ago in a small nod to HRH Queen Elizabeth II's 60 years of service. That post mainly contained some very half-@rsed recipes for sandwiches, which, duh, and a link to a scone recipe that I first posted quite some time ago.

Today, I will attempt to actually provide you with a meaningful recipe to make ammends for the last one. And then I will post a half-@rsed mini crustless quiche recipe below it. Again, the photos aren't any better than in the last post, but let's face it - eating the food is far more important than taking pretty photos!

APPLE STREUSEL CAKE (from AWW Bake)

1/2c plain flour (plus the below)

1/4c SR flour (plus the below)

1/3c brown sugar, firmly packed (plus the below)

1/2tsp cinnamon

80g chopped butter (plus the below)

200g softened butter

2tsp grated lemon rind

2/3c castor sugar

3 eggs

1c SR flour

1/2c plain flour

1/3c milk

25g butter

5 medium (750g) apples, peeled, cored, quartered and finely sliced

1/3c brown sugar.

Process the first 5 ingredients until they come together (mine came out like fine bread crumbs and I then had to squish it with my hands to make it come together, but even so it was crumbly. But who cares, because it tasted AWESOME). Wrap in gladwrap and freeze 1hr or until firm.

Beat the second group of ingredients until fluffy, then add the eggs, one at a time, until mixed. Do not over-mix.

Add the fourth group of ingredients to the batter in 2 batches (wet-dry-wet-dry), spread in greased, lined, 22cm round tin and bake at 180oC for 25 minutes.

Meanwhile, melt the butter from the last set of ingredients and cook the apples for around 5 minutes, until brown. Add the sugar and cook for 5 minutes more until thickened.

At the 25 minute mark, pull the cake out of the oven and, working quickly, spread the apple mixture across the top of the cake and top with grated streusel mix (mine was more of a crumbly powder which I poured evenly across it).

Bake for around 25 minutes more, stand for 10 minutes in the tin then turn onto a rack (I did this by putting foil over the top, turning it onto the foil then turning it, right side up, onto the rack). Serve warm or at room tempterature, preferably with a little cream. Yum.

Mmm, delicious, crumbly top... *drools* I think it's supposed to be chunkier and crumblier, but I liked mine just fine. Don't be fooled into baking it for longer to try and crisp the top up, because it won't work. It will only dry the cake out. Trust me, I'm a doctor (actually, I'm not).

HALF-@RSED MINI CRUSTLESS QUICHES:

For each batch of 12 or so mini quiches (made in a 12-hole, rounded-base patty pan tin), you will need 4 eggs, a slosh of milk and whatever you want to put in to flavour them. I imagine the more milk (or cream) you put in it, the less eggy the filling and the more... custardy? Quichey?... it becomes.

Spray the tin with oil spray, beat the eggs and milk until of a consistent texture, add fillings such as the following and bake at... gosh, I think it was about 190oC for around 10-15 minutes. Just keep an eye on them, okay? They'll puff up when you cook them, and then fall when you take them out of the oven.

The fillings:

Cherry/grape tomatoes, halved, oven roasted with some oil, salt and pepper. Mix a big squeeze of basil from one of those Garden Gourmet tubes into your egg mix and spoon into the pan, then pop one or two of these puppies on top.

OR

Baby spinach, wilted in a wee bit of olive oil, and some (home made, in my case!) feta cheese, crumbled. Mmm, home made cheese tastes so smug :)

Or, prosciutto, chopped up finely (this picture makes me so happy. As did eating several slices of prosciutto before I reminded myself that I actually needed to use it), and a handful of grated cheddar.

This lot were a little bit on the eggy side, but I guess that's what happens when you don't use a recipe! They were still tasty, though, especially the spinach/feta ones. And so quick, and, compared to the ones with pastry cases, low calorie. Which should balance out that cake with its dollop of cream quite nicely :)

A Jubilee Afternoon Tea, Part One - Coronation Chicken, and Cucumber Cream Cheese Sandwiches, and Scones

I decided that I had to get on top of this themed dinner party business as part of my 101 Things challenge. Almost a year has elapsed since I began my challenge and not a single dinner party had been had. So I decided that I needed to relax my definition of "dinner party" to include all social gatherings that involve serving food.

So... afternoon tea's a theme, right?? *looks hopeful*

I decided that, what with the Queen's jubilee celebrations, that as a member nation of the British Commonwealth we ought to celebrate, British style. And that meant afternoon tea. There was suggestion that we should all be wearing tiaras, but I forgot, and someone else's broke, and a crown ended up serving as a table decoration.

I also decided that I need to start using my recipe books. I have (counting in my head) at least twenty-three cook books, not including the miniature ones, and there are at least five that I have definitely never cooked a recipe from. So I have decided that I will average one recipe per week for a year, making an effort to cook from a different book each week. I have decided that it's okay to cook partial recipes - for example, if I want to make creme patisserie then it is perfectly acceptable to use the recipe from within the croquembouche recipe. Hopefully this means that this time next year I will have 52 more recipes on my blog, and I will therefore be eligible to participate in the Secret Recipe Club.

I know, I have some odd goals in life.

For this afternoon tea, I only used one new recipe. Unfortunately. But there you go - it's my recipe for the week, and there are already plans afoot for the coming weekend. Delicious plans. Oh, yes.

I apologise for the photography. It was late afternoon on an overcast, wintry day and in circumstances like those, especially when there are five other hungry people waiting to dig in, setting up visually pleasing photos has to take a back seat. I will also be posting the cake and quiche recipes separately to the sandwiches and scones. It was too much recipe-ing for one post.

Here is the spread. There are a couple of things on the table that other people made - the yo-yo biscuits, and a chocolate slice (and there were some yummy lemon and lime tarts that someone else made that aren't in the photo), but the rest was my doing, including a batch of scones that aren't on the table in this picture (but the whipped cream and jam are. See that massive pile of white stuff? Yep. That's cream.).

I made the scones using the same recipe I used for these ones, back in the early days of my blog. I have since made these scones several times and they are generally thoroughly spectacular - light, fluffy and just mmmm. This time, I was a little disappointed by them. I think the problem was that I opened the oven just a minute too soon, and as a result they weren't as perfect as usual. Sigh. Better luck next time!

There are two types of sandwich in the lower left hand side of the photo - the first is my take on coronation chicken, and the second is cucumber and cream cheese.

I'd just like to go in to bat for cucumber sandwiches. I don't know whether the cucumber sandwiches people pick on have cream cheese in them or not, but if they do, then people have rocks in their heads. These are YUMMY! (but hey, white bread and philly - how can you go wrong??)

I made four complete sandwiches each of the coronation chicken and of the cucumber, then cut the crusts off and cut them into corners. I then finished the chicken ones with a smear of cream cheese and a wee dusting of sweet paprika down one side, and cucumber ones with chopped chives.

I went through about half a tub of light Philadelphia cream cheese spread, less than half a cucumber, a small bunch of chives and eight slices of bread for the cucumber-cream cheese sandwiches. Slice your cucumber thinly, and leave your philly out on the bench for a while before use to soften. Once no longer rock solid, whip the philly up in the tub with a butter knife to make it more pliable before you begin spreading, otherwise you'll put dirty great holes in your bread. Spread one side of each slice of the bread (make sure they're matched up so they join together evenly when sandwiched); place about 9 thin slice of cucumber on one side; give it a wee sprinkle of salt; sandwich together; cut off crusts and cut into 4 triangles; smear one side of the triangle with more philly; press into chopped chives.

For the coronation chicken, I lightly buttered eight slices of bread (paired as above). I went through the breast (both sides) off a ready-roasted whole chicken; two stalks of celery; somewhere between half and one cups of whole egg mayonnaise (I really have no idea how much I used, so if you're getting low in the jar you should probably buy a new one, just in case you run out half way!); and a little margarine/olive oil spread. Remove the skin from cooled chicken breast; shred with two forks; add finely sliced celery; start by adding about half a cup of mayonnaise and mixing that in, then taste-testing it for texture from there on in. I added more mayo a spoonful at a time (making sure to use a clean spoon for the mayo and not cross-contaminate it with chicken - mayo and chicken are two of the worst culprits in the world of food poisoning and I wanted to avoid that!), then, once it was sufficiently mayo-y, I added salt and pepper to taste. The whole sandwich making/presentation thing was as above, but using sweet paprika rather than chives to decorate.

Gosh, I write good recipes...

Oh, look! I found a photo!

Next up: Mini crustless quiches, and apple streusel cake. Yum.

The Daring Kitchen: Cha Sui & Cha Sui Bao

I was absolutely stoked about this month's Daring Cooks challenge because a) much like Sara from Belly Rumbles, my family and I also regularly go to Yum Cha for Sunday brunch (our favourite haunt is a place called Plume in Doncaster, Victoria) and b) Cha Sui Bao (or Cantonese BBQ pork buns) really and truly are one of my favourite Yum Cha dishes, at least, in steamed form. Sadly, I rarely get to try them because nobody else in my family likes them, and I can't eat an entire basket of them on my own :(

Our Daring Cooks’ December 2011 hostess is Sara from Belly Rumbles! Sara chose awesome Char Sui Bao as our challenge, where we made the buns, Char Sui, and filling from scratch – delicious!

Now, as anyone who has ever read my interpretation of the Daring Cooks challenges will know, I am in the habit of doing things in a fly-from-the-seat-of-your-pants way. This month, I was determined to get it right. I mean, REALLY determined.

But then two things happened.

One, my friend Kaye conned me into doing the Kokoda Track Memorial ("1000 Steps") walk as training for the hike that I conned her into doing over Christmas. I figure fair's fair, but it did cut into my dough-making time.

The second thing that happened was that Christmas shopping/shopping for hiking/doing washing/unpacking my precious boxes of cookbooks freighted from Adelaide so that I could start making (and freezing) biscuit dough for next weekend's Christmas baking/making biscuit dough/doing some preliminary packing for the nightmarish quinella of working week-flying interstate for Christmas-going on a hike-going camping-going back to work took longer than expected *draws breath*

Exhibit A - the kitchen floor, where my life exploded in a haphazard fasion:

(Exhibit B would be my credit card statement, which is somewhat bruised and battered)

But you know what? Given that I work full time (not in the Australian definition - 38 hours a week - but ACTUAL full time, which normally runs at 50-60 hours per week), plus have a 3 1/2 drive at the start and end of every week, plus have regular social commitments in three states, I think I'm doing pretty well to keep up with these challenges!

So whilst I did manage to marinate the pork overnight (showing uncharacteristic organisation skills coupled with determination and commitment to do this recipe right), I ran out of time for dough making and cheated by using pre-made wonton wrappers instead. But hey, if I was a REALLY horrible person, I would have bought a packet of the frozen buns and **pretended** that they were my own creation! But that's not how I roll. If I cheat, I declare it. None of this sweeping it under the rug business. Like here - the post where I coined the phrase "Betty Crocker Cheat" (except that I'm sure someone else has used the phrase before, but it's the first time **I've** come across it). And I think that being a Betty Crocker Cheat is okay once in a while. Like today.

Cheating owned. Wonton wrappers, generally available in your supermarket dairy case next to the "fresh" pasta.

The marinating part in itself was an adventure, because, true to form, I had to improvise. I was absolutely convinced that we had both oyster sauce and hoisin sauce and OH MY GOD THAT'S WHY IT DIDN'T TURN OUT THE RIGHT COLOUR!!! I totally forgot to put the Pillar Box Red food colouring in. Which, by the way, I actually have in the cupboard, dagnammit!

Anyway, back to my story... hunting through mum's cupboard of sauces and condiments lead me to discard, amongst other things, three old bottles of tomato sauce (one home made, one normal store-bought and one erroneously-purchased tomato AND onion sauce, the first two of which had turned a terrifying brown colour and the third of which was just plain wrong); two bottles of herb vinegarette (one of which I had made as part of a craft stall in Year Three (that's back in 1991, for those playing at home! Yes, mum keeps condiments for twenty years. In this case I suspect it was a sentimental attachment. To a bottle of herb vinegarette...)); a tetra-pak of Campbell's liquid fish stock that was Best Before 2002 (normally I ignore BB dates but in this instance I was happy to make an exception!); and an old (BB March 2000) jar of home-brand Nutella that had obviously made it through a few scorching hot summers because the fat had come out of it, was sitting in the bottom of the cavity left by dipping bananas in it (yes, really. You should try it! You microwave the jar for 20 seconds at a time until it's the right consistency and then dip the banana in... no wonder I was a porker...) and had gone rancid. True story!

But no oyster sauce, and no hoisin sauce. Which makes me think that I actually have them in my cupboard back in Adelaide...

So, once again, I will copy out the recipe and annotate where I diverged from it. Nobody's surprised by that, are they. <-- statement, not question

BBQ PORK (Cha sui):

1 pork fillet/tenderloin - 2-3lbs (I used a tray of those nicely trimmed pork fillets from the supermarket, about 500g worth)

4 large cloves of garlic, crushed (check!)

1tsp ginger, grated (check!)

1tbsp peanut oil (once again I fell into the Adelaide/Melbourne trap, so used vegetable oil instead)

1+1/2tbsp maltose (you can substitute honey - I did!)

1+1/2tbsp honey (check!)

2tbsp hoisin sauce (I used half a tbps of Worstershire sauce because it needed using up)

1tbsp dark soy sauce (I used 1+1/2tbsp, plus water as below - don't ask me whether it's scientifically correct, but I always assumed that light soy was a watered-down version... perhaps I ought to have Googled that...)

1tbsp light soy sauce (I used 1tbsp water)

1tsp oyster sauce (I used fish sauce)

1tbsp shaoxing cooking wine (I never intended to buy this because it said you could substitute cooking sherry, and where you can substitute cooking sherry you can also substitute a mixture of brown vinegar and sugar, or so my mum tells me! So I used 1tbsp of brown vinegar and a little over a teaspoon of brown sugar)

1/2tsp ground white pepper (I used black... I know, I know!)

Pinch of salt (check!)

1/2tsp 5-Spice powder (check!)

1/2tsp sesame oil (check!)

1/2tsp Pillar Box Red food colouring (as discussed, oops...)

Trim pork loin of the yucky bits and slice lengthways so you have 2 long pieces, then cut in half (or, if you're me, buy a tray of ready-cut pork fillets because that's what the supermarket stocks). By cutting the pork into smaller pieces to marinate you will end up with more flavoursome cha sui (check!). If you want to leave the pork in one piece you can do this too.

Combine all other ingredients in a bowl and mix well (check!). The instructions say you should heat maltose in the microwave a little to make it easier to handle. I was using honey so it wasn't a huge deal, plus I like to put too much on the spoon, knowing that not all of it will come off, and then lick the spoon :)

Cover pork well with 2/3 of the marinade. Marinate for 4 hours/overnight. Refrigerate the remaining marinade - you will use it to baste the pork.

(I would just like to say how divine this marinade tasted, what with the ginger and garlic swimming about in it. And yes, I tasted it **before** I put the raw pork in it. But still, mmm, golden, glisten-y goodness... *drools*)

Preheat oven to 180oC and cover a tray with baking paper/foil and spray-oil a rack (not in the instructions, but I used my own smarts there) and place over the tray.

Sear pork in hot frying pan so it is well browned, remove from pan and place pork on rack in oven.

Bake approx. 15 mins (mine were quite thin pieces so baked for closer to 12 mins), basting with remaining marinade and turning until cooked through.

CHA SUI BAO:

(Random trivia instalment: "bao" means "bag" (or wrapping, or container, or something that encapsulates something else - this can also be a less literal "wrapping", like the word for "to include") in Mandarin and, somewhat poetically, applies to buns, and I assume the same for Cantonese given that the Cha Sui is the bit we just made, and the bit we're about to make is buns!

Further random trivia: "shu bao" is, more or less, a school bag, "shu" meaning book and "bao" meaning bag. The character for "shu" looks like the leaves of a corner of a book with a pen and an ink splot, once you get used to looking at Chinese characters, anyhow! I also vaguely recall that "pencil case" is "qian bi bao", "qian bi" being "pencil", and the character for "bi" having the radical for "bamboo" in it. It really is quite a cool language. In its own quaint way I would almost call it romantic because it's so steeped with culture and history, but also logic and precision. It's been seven years since I studied it but I think I may have just fallen in love with the language all over again... 

This, by the by, is the word for school bag. See what I mean about the pages and the ink splot in the word "book"? And the second character is "bao", same as the "bao" in dumpling (in case you were unaware, there are multiples of each word in Chinese. You can differentiate by which of the four tones in which the word is articulated (flat, rising, dipped, falling), but there are still doubles of some words! Which is where context comes into it...). I always remembered "bao" because it looks like it's wrapped around something. You can use little stories like that to remember a LOT of Chinese characters. It's very helpful. Random trivia over!)

Aaaaaaaaanyway,

350g Cha sui, finely diced (yeah... I didn't weigh it... but I also made something different with the leftovers for mum for her dinner considering she can't have wheat, so that turned out okay!)

2 shallots (as in, those tiny brown onions you can get)

1 tbsp dark soy

2tbsp oyster sauce (I used fish sauce)

1tsp sesame oil

1/4c chicken stock

1tsp cornflour

1/2tbsp vegetable oil

Heat the vegetable oil in a pan. Sautee the shallots for 1-2mins until soft. Add diced cha sui to pan and stir.

Add soy and oyster sauces and sesame oil to pork mixture and fry for one minute.

Mix cornflour and stock together then add to pork mixture.

Stir well and keep cooking until mixture thickens, 1-2mins.

Remove from wok/pan and place in bowl to cool. Set aside until ready to use.

*    *     *      *     *

Now, if you want the bun recipe you can jump onto the Daring Kitchen website after the 14th of the month and it'll be there. Or you can do what I did and go off on a tangent...

*   *   *   *   *   *  <-- much nicer than the above attempt, don't you think?

So, what I did next was to roughly chop some baby... gai lan, maybe? It was on the same shelf as bok choy, anyhow, but looked more like spinach. Anyway, I did that (after washing it - it had grogans on it) and half wilted it in a frypan with a finely chopped, 1.5-2cm piece of fresh ginger. It seemed to be a lot more robust than the baby spinach I am accustomed to wilting, which is a good thing.

Then I got a wonton wrapper, put a little of the greens in it and a little of the pork, wet two adjacent edges, folded it into a triangle so the wet edges lined up with the dry ones and pinched it shut. I steamed them in the bamboo steamer I bought mum for Christmas back in 2005 when I was working for the devil a call centre selling mobile phones to defenceless elderly people in sales in order to make a few hundred extra dollars for my backpacking trip to Europe, AKA Nessfest 2005 (2 of us went, both Vanessas), which she (mum) to this day has not used. Explains why it still smelt like a Chinese supermarket! (I think the smell is camphor... hopefully it's not poisonous to humans in steam form...)

And then I sat them on little squares of baking paper in the steamer basket over boiling water (oh, BTW, I put the water on to boil at around the same time as I wilted the greens), 4 at a time, and steamed them until the wonton wrappers were soft. Sorry, no photos of the steamer so I'll give you a picture of the pre-steamed dumplings instead - you can see how the edges were pinched together:

Upon my first sampling I began to suspect that this style of wrapper is better suited to putting in soup, but I think they turned out okay. I just put them on to steam for a little longer.

They were tasty, anyhow!

If I had my time again I would a) make the proper pastry, b) cut the pork a little smaller, and c) put more stuff in it, like bamboo shoots or something with a bit of texture. And you know what? This is actually quite a simple recipe so I will probably make it again, hopefully with the proper ingredients this time!

Thankyou, Sara, for such a tasty challenge :)

Oh, also, I used the left-over pork and greens for mum's tea, and tossed them through thin rice noodles. And then after she'd eaten half of it I realised that soy sauce contains gluten, at least, the one I used does. D'oh!

Feta, Pancetta and Basil Mini Toasts

Behold the glory that is the mini toast! Cute and versatile, I happen to think that this Blast from the Past is tasty enough to be used at any social gathering. I seem to recall some very odd things being put on them in the eighties and nineties, but they ain't no cream of chicken and mushroom vol-au-vent (no idea whether I spelled that one correctly, but I think ya'll know the little Filo Baskets from Hell that I am referring to).

And that's a good thing.

I dreamt up this combination on my three-and-a-half-hour Friday night drive back to Melbourne the other week (does anyone else spend as great a proportion of their waking hours as I do thinking about food??). I had already decided to make brother Saul a caramel mud cake and had more or less nutted out how I would decorate it (which, by the way, was blown out of the water by the fact that NOBODY in Eltham seems to stock Jersey Caramels(!!!), so I had to improvise), and my mind then wandered to savoury food as I wasn't quite sure if I was supposed to bring a plate. Well, I figured that even if I wasn't supposed to bring one, that nobody would have trouble polishing off a plate of them.

They're super simple:

1 packet mini toasts

10 thin slices of pancetta

1 thick slice of Danish feta from the deli

1 bunch of basil.

I used a pair of scissors to cut up the pancetta into 4 or so strips (they should be ever so slightly narrower than the mini toast, and short enough to wrap once around a small cube of feta without too much hanging over at the end).

I then cubed the feta into about 24 pieces (they were probably a little small but still tasty), popped each cube on 1 small/half a large basil leaf (tear them, don't cut them), put them, feta side down, on the middle of a piece of pancetta, wrap both sides of the pancetta up over the basil, then flip them on to a mini toast so that the join in the pancetta is on the bottom (i.e. touching the toast). The weight of the filling should hold the pancetta in place. 

Creamy, salty, fresh and crunchy all at once. I insist you try these immediately! And, just quietly, because the basil makes it taste so fresh I reckon you could probably polish off almost a whole batch and somehow convince yourself that you'd eaten health food, and not a great big hunk of cheese!