12 April 2010

Three Great Cakes

Lately I've been trying new cake recipes and lucked across a few really good ones. So, I thought I'd share. Warning: I tend to prefer cakes that are intensely flavored and moist. If your favorite cake is angelfood, these recipes are not for you.

CHOCOLATE BANANA CAKE (from Brisbane News)
150 g plain flour
25 g cocoa powder
1 tsp baking soda
¼ tsp salt
115 g unsalted butter
200 g caster sugar
2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla extract
3 medium-sized bananas, mashed
120 g sour cream
115 g dark chocolate, finely chopped
250 ml cream, softly whipped

Preheat oven to 175C. Grease a 23 cm round cake tin, dust with flour and line with baking paper. Sift together the flour, cocoa, baking soda and salt. Place the butter in the bowl of an electric mixer and beat for 1 minute until pale. Add sugar and beat until creamy and light. Reduce speed and add eggs one at a time until combined. Add vanilla and banana, mixing on speed 1. Remove bowl from mixer and fold in flour mixture in two batches, alternating with sour cream. Stir in chocolate, and pour batter into tin. Bake for 1 hour. The cake should be firm to the touch and an inserted skewer should come out clean. Cool in the tin on a rack. Once cool, top the cake with the whipped cream. (Also nice with ice cream.)


PUMPKIN CITRUS SYRUP CAKE (from Womens Weekly cakes cookbook)
250 g butter
2 Tbs orange rind
2 Tbs lemon rind
1 cup sugar
3 eggs
2 cups self-raising flour
1 cup mashed pumpkin

Preheat oven to 190C. Cream together butter, orange & lemon rind & sugar. Add eggs, flour & mashed pumpkin. (To make 1 cup, boil 350 g cubed pumpkin until tender.) Pour into 23 cm round cake tin and bake for 1 hour. The cake should be firm to the touch and an inserted skewer should come out clean. When the cake is ready, combine 2 Tbs ea. orange & lemon juice with ¾ cup sugar in a small saucepan and bring to the boil. Reduce to medium heat and allow to thicken (approx 1 minute). Pierce cake all over the top with a fork or skewer, and pour the hot syrup over the cake while it is still hot (in the tin). Stand at least 10 min. This cake lasts four days (if you don’t eat it all right away!) and tastes best the second day.


PUMPKIN SWIRL BREAD (from allrecipes.com)
224 g cream cheese
¼ cup white sugar
1 egg, beaten
1¾ cup all-purpose flour
1½ cups white sugar
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp ground cinnamon
½ tsp salt
¼ tsp ground nutmeg
1 cup pumpkin puree
½ cup butter, melted
1 egg, beaten
1/3 cup water

1. Blend cream cheese, 1/4 cup sugar, and 1 beaten egg. Set aside.
2. Combine flour, 1½ cups white sugar, baking soda, salt, and spices. Set aside.
3. Combine pumpkin, butter or margarine, beaten egg, and water. Add flour mixture to pumpkin mixture, mixing just until moistened. Reserve 2 cups of the pumpkin batter. Pour the remaining batter into a greased and floured 9 x 5 inch loaf pan. Pour cream cheese mixture over pumpkin batter, and top with reserved pumpkin batter. Cut through batter several times with a knife for a swirl effect.
4. Bake at 350 degrees F (175 degrees C) for 70 minutes, or until tester comes out clean. [Note: as muffins/cupcakes, bake 20 to 25 minutes.] Cool in the pan for 10 minutes, and then remove from pan to cool completely.

11 April 2010

Easter Week

Once again, we spent our week of holidays “up the coast,” as we say – that is, at the family units at Peregian Beach. Usually, we share our beach holidays with Don’s family, who have two girls and a boy; this time we were with Rob’s family, who have two boys, much to Callum’s delight. It’s been a bit frustrating for Anya as the only girl, while the boys rough-house and say naughty things, but Callum has been completely and thoroughly enjoying himself. Anya isn’t totally left out, as she and Jayden do have in common a great love of drawing and pretend play. I brought a big pile of paper and it’s been all used up along with good quantities of pencil, crayon, sticky tape, staples, and prolific scissoring.

Easter morning the cousins were up at four a.m. with excitement, but thankfully were held back from visiting us until six a.m. I’d hidden some eggs around the unit to start Anya and Callum off, then all four kids moved outside and found more scattered around. I do miss the Easter activities of my childhood such as dying and decorating hard-boiled eggs, and making up little baskets with grass and chicks. Here the focus is very much on chocolate and it’s like having Christmas where all the presents are made of chocolate. We gave Anya a Lindt bunny, and Callum a Buzz Lightyear chocolate figure; they also received a large egg apiece from our in-laws and sacks of chocolate eggs and bunnies from their grandma.

It’s the custom in our household to let Callum and Anya have a little snack just before bedtime – sometimes candy, other times cookies, or even cheese and crackers if the mood strikes. This week, that became an excited look through their enormous array of Easter chocolate to decide which bit to eat next. (Amusingly, looking at Buzz Lightyear, Callum asked, “Where’s his head?” I had to unfold the wrapper to show him the face and remind him that he’d eaten it the previous evening.)

A new addition to our household this week is Maddy, a small mixed-breed dog who belongs to our other in-laws. They went camping this week, and asked us to look after her. She’s about the size of a cat, but very self-assured and tends to snap at small kids. Anya and Callum have had to be very patient with her and approach her very softly. Rob’s family recently acquired a dog as well, a small poodle, so it’s been a very doggish week. The poodle’s name is Minnie and she is amazingly patient, putting up with anything the kids want to do with her.

Another custom we’ve adopted this week is “happy hour” with drinks and snacks on the upstairs veranda or down by the barbecue. It’s a little awkward because we don’t want our kids getting full on chips and junk just before dinner, but it’s been really nice to relax with our in-laws and simply chat. The kids come and go, playing ball or other games, in between sitting with us sometimes to participate in the conversation. We had a good one today that started at 3:30 and carried on until 5:30! I did some sketches of Travis (my nephew) and Anya, and then Anya got inspired and got her own book to do some drawings of me.

Anya’s been learning to read, with “homework” each night of a different reader. The rhyming games, and other word games we’ve been playing with her for the last several years (just for fun without any educational goal) seem to helped a lot with this. She’s really got the hang of sounding out words. The only thing holding her back is her own tendency to get frustrated when faced with something new and difficult. I think as she continues, her confidence will grow and she won’t be so easily frustrated. On the holiday we haven’t pushed her to do much reading, except for one afternoon looking at Dr. Seuss’s “Hop on Pop.”

She also received a list of “sight words” to learn just before the holiday started. (Sight words are those you recognise immediately without having to sound them out.) I haven’t tried to drill her in them – I don’t find flash cards very appealing – but I did use them. I had to make up a board game for her to play with her cousins one afternoon, and I decided to base it on the sight words. Milton Bradley would never buy this game from me, but I do think with a little polish it could work as a real game. My first version involved spinning for a word and moving to the closest square with that word. My second version involved collecting letters until you had the ones that would make a word on the board, so you could move to its square. Her cousins also got me to help them make a snakes and ladders style game with drawings of animals, but I imagine that could also be adapted to sight words.

Meanwhile, Callum is speaking in quite elaborate sentences. For example, today he said without pause or hesitation, “Can I have a drink of water and when I drink it all up, you give me a cup of juice?” (This is a sort of rule I’ve introduced recently, that you only get juice after drinking a cup of water.) He also made us laugh this morning at the beach, as Anya refused to take her hat (she wanted to swim some more), and he scolded her, “Put your hat on, young lady!” Our in-laws have taken to calling him “Mr. Galumph.” I guess this kind of rhymes with our pet name for Anya, “Miss Gump.”