Let's turn on your stove

In the last few weeks my office kitchen bentch has been ‘post-ited’ with ‘please pick me’ signs in front of a basket of oranges and lemons. So, what can we do with them??

Plenty actually..we can make orange-lemon jam, lemon curd, lemon cake, … you name it. But considering I am on a diet attempt (before winter approaching which I normaly gain a couple of kilos due to less outdoor activities), I have to make cakes with less fat and carbs.

So here it is: Orange-almond cake. It’s very easy to make, no flour, no butter and no chocolate…and yet yumm…

Ingredients: 5 large eggs, 250 kg caster sugar, 250 gr almond meal, 1 tsp baking powder and 2 oranges.

How to?

1.  Preheat oven to 170-180°C. Grease and line the base of a baking pan with baking paper.

2. Boil two whole oranges in a saucepan for about 2 hours or less if it’s covered with the lit. Make sure the oranges remain covered with water. Drain and cool. Blend it to make an orange pulp or pure (the texture is your preference).

3. Beat the eggs with the sugar until thick, then add slowly the orange puree, ground almonds and baking powder and mix well. You can add almond flakes if you want to add little bit of different texture in the cake.

4. Pour into prepared pan and bake for 40mins to 1 hour (depending on the size of your baking pan). Leave the cake to firm up in the pan for 20 minutes then turn out, remove the baking paper and turn over to finish cooling right way up.

5. And if you want to add more calories, to serve sift icing sugar on top…and add slices of oranges..and/or…glaze with orange syrup.

I am happy with only up to step 4, and you?….

What should we do when someone gave you passionfruits?? Follow what I did, make them (i meant the passionfruits not the person who gave the passionfruits..) as ice cream.. yummy… and if you want to be more creative, make a passionfruit icecream cake…

It’s very easy, to make the base we can use crashed plain biskuit and mix it with melted butter (about 40gram for a pack of biscuit). To make the icecream, soften 2L vanilla icecream using a mixer, add in about 40 gram coconut flakes, and about 1/2 cup of fresh passionfruit (more passionfruit the better), mix it all and put on the base and let it set for a night… this is the hardest thing: to wait till it sets. But the taste worth the wait….

My friend gave me a bucket (literally a bucket!!) of red-mulberries last spring. Not only that she also gave me her recipe. So here is the result with a slight modification, namely reduced sugar and cream.

Recipes:

Do you know that mulberry trees are either dioecious or monoecious, and they sometimes change from one sex to another. And the fruit is actually not a berry but a collective fruit, with their fleshy bases swollen during pollination.

Today is the 10th day of 10th month of 2010… what a perfect date (and if my dad is still around he’d be 80 years old)

So I have to post something here..

Guys, i bet you have come across a situation i had last week…

I baked a cake which only use egg yolks… and heaps of them!! (you guys can guess what kinda cake is!!). And as a result, as you can imagine, heaps of egg whites as leftovers.. What can I do with them?. I don’t really like pavlova, meringue cookies, and not brave enough (yet) to bake maccaroons after failed in August. Luckily, I found leftovers (half a jar) lemon curd in my fridge…and still taste good.

So, here it comes… Meringue roulade with lemon curd. From memory, for 1 recipe (about 40×29 cm shallow baking pan) I used 6 (large) egg whites, 190 gram caster sugar, 2 teaspoon corn flour (so the meringue can be rolled), 1 teaspon vanilla essence. I mixed the lemon curd with double cream and leave it in the fridge for half an hour first before use. And don’t forget to line the baking pan with parchment paper.

And the result is,… yuummmm…. my colleques love it as much as I do…