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Happy Australia Day to all you Aussies! I hope everyone is having a relaxing long weekend 🙂 As a country, Australia does not really have a defined cuisine of its own. I guess it has something to do with being derived from Britain, and not really having a whole lot of history of our own. However, there is one sweet that we do claim do be our own (aside from the humble Pav, of course!). It is the delicious Lamington. If you do not know what a Lamington is, you are missing out, big time! They are slices of sponge-y cake, filled with jam, and covered in chocolate icing and coconut. Yum! I had actually never made a Lamington before, so I wasn’t sure how it would go, but I decided on a cake version for my Mum’s birthday, and I must say, it was delicious, and a big hit.

I was going to use the recipe from the ‘BAKE’ book, from the Australian’s Women’s Weekly (AWW are the go-to’s for great recipes for many Aussies), for normal Lamington’s. However, I just had to look on my favourite site, Taste, of course, to see if they may have had a recipe for a cake. Luckily, I found the perfect one with great reviews, so I went with that, with a few of my own additions. I guess I could be more sure of the measurements this way, instead of having to adapt a slice into a cake. Anyhoo, the recipe was great – easy to follow and not ridiculously time consuming, either. Winner 🙂

Lamington Cake: (recipe from Taste.com)

Cooking oil spray, to grease
1/2 cup self-raising flour
1/4 cup plain (all-purpose) flour
1/4 cup cornflour
4 eggs, at room temperature
3/4 cup caster (white) sugar
2 cups coconut
250ml thickened cream
1/3 cup icing (confectioner’s) sugar
1 tsp vanilla bean paste/natural extract

Preheat your oven to 180c/356f. Grease two 20cm round springform baking tins with cooking oil spray, and line with non-stick baking paper. Set aside.

Sift all three flours into one bowl. In a separate bowl, beat all of the eggs, and the sugar, for approximately ten minutes, or until the mixture is thick, pale and creamy. Then, sift half of the flour mixture into egg mixture, and gently fold it in with a metal spoon until well combined. Repeat with the remaining flour. Make sure the flour is all combined as it can be difficult to see in a large bowl – the flour will just sink to the bottom. And remember to be gentle as you don’t want to knock too much air out of the sponge.

Divide the mixture evenly into the 2 prepared tins. Smooth the surfaces with a metal spoon to ensure the mixture is even. Bake for 12-15 minutes (mine took 14, but ensure you check at 12). Insert a skewer to ensure cake is cooked – the skewer will come out clean. Leave in tins to cool, then place on a wire rack.

Chocolate Icing:

2 cups icing (confectioner’s) sugar
1/3 cup good quality cocoa powder
1/2 cup water

Sift the icing sugar and cocoa into a bowl together, and add the water. Mix well until combined and smooth. Pour the icing into a large, shallow dish. Pour the coconut out onto a large baking tray.

Place one side of the sponge cake into the icing, cover the sides, then dip the other side of the sponge in the icing. Cover in coconut and place on a large cake stand. Repeat with remaining sponge cake, except place this one on a plate or another baking tray. I found this process super messy and it took me a while, but I got there in the end!

Balsamic Strawberry Jam:

1 medium punnet of strawberries, hulled and quartered
1 tsp vanilla bean paste/natural extract
1 cup caster (white) sugar
1/3 cup balsamic vinegar
Splash of water

Place strawberries and water (I literally used a splash, just to moisten the strawberries) in a medium sized saucepan. Cook on a medium heat until the berries begin to soften (about 2 minutes). Add the vanilla and sugar, and cook over a low heat for about 10 minutes, or until strawberries have broken down. Add balsamic vinegar, and continue cooking on low until mixture becomes a sticky, jam like consistency. Pour into a bowl, and leave to cool. If you are not using the jam on the day of making it, cover with cling wrap and place it in the fridge. I made my jam two days beforehand.

Assembly:

Whip up 250ml thickened cream, with 1/3 cup icing (confectioner’s) sugar, and 1 tsp of vanilla bean paste/natural extract. With one sponge cake already on the cake stand, cover with whipped cream, ensuring you spread the cream right to the edges of the cake (if you want to decorate it like my cake, leave a little bit of cream behind to pipe on top). Then, spread over the strawberry jam – although this time don’t spread it right to the edges, leave about 1cm. Place the other sponge on top of the cream and jam. Decorate as desired 🙂 EAT!

HAPPY AUSTRALIA DAY! (check out my past Australia Day posts here.)

I had been wanting to try this flavour for some time, but I was just trying to figure out the best way of making the filling, and incorporating as much donutty flavour as I possibly could into the it, instead of say, just making a buttercream and flavouring it will a crapload of cinnamon. This time, I went all out Zumbo-style, and creeped a little bit out of the box, and my comfort zone. Thankfully, it kind of paid off. This flavour was quite delicious.

I’m not going to write out a recipe for the filling, because I did so many things and added so many little bits and pieces that I cannot remember it to the tee! I will try to explain it as best as possible 🙂 I was extremely lucky with my shells this time, they were a particularly good batch and I didn’t have to throw ANY out – this never happens! Totally wish it was like that everytime! Again, apologies for the shadow-y night time photos.

Macarons:

This recipe is Adriano Zumbo’s, and was published a couple of years ago in the Herald Sun. You will definitely need kitchen scales to make macarons.

135g almond meal
135g icing sugar
125g caster sugar
45g egg whites
50g egg whites
40g water
1/4 tsp colouring gel, brown

Spray four oven trays with cooking oil spray around the edges, and line with baking paper and set aside. Place almond meal and icing sugar in a large bowl, and sift together 3 times. Set aside, along with the 45g egg whites. Put 50g egg whites in a separate bowl. Heat caster sugar and water in a small saucepan, over a low-medium heat, until the sugar completely dissolves (if it slightly burns my tongue, it’s done!). If you do not want to burn your tongue, Zumbo suggests investing in a candy thermometer and heating the syrup until it reaches 118 degrees C (244 degrees F). If the syrup becomes thick and powdery in appearance, you will need to start again. This is because the sugar has been heated too much, too quickly, and instead of dissolving, it has cooked.

Begin beating the 50g egg whites with one hand, and with the other, stream the hot sugar syrup down the side of the bowl to create an italian meringue. Beat until stiff peaks form, the meringue should be thick and very glossy. If you want to add flavouring/colouring, now’s your moment. So add the colouring now. Just lightly beat them into the meringue. Pour meringue into the almond meal, icing sugar and 45g egg whites mixture and mix roughly to combine. When combined, fold mixture together (one single stroke) until there are no air bubbles left. Make a spread across the top of the mixture, and it should disappear in about 20 seconds. Spoon mixture into a piping bag fitted with a round nozzle. (If you don’t have a piping bag set, most supermarkets sell plastic ones, they are Multix brand, in an orange box and contain 5 piping bags with a few different nozzles, plus they’re only about $3. You should be able to find them in the baking aisle). Lock the bag by spinning the top around 4 times. Pipe 3-4cm rounds on the oven trays prepared earlier. Tap the bottom of the trays on the kitchen bench and let them sit for about half an hour, or until mixture is dry to the touch. Meanwhile, preheat the oven to 145c (135c fan forced).

Place in oven and bake for 16-20 minutes. Check macarons at 16 minutes, and to test if they are cooked, pull a macaron off the baking paper. If it is stuck, keep cooking and checking regularly. Cool on trays for 5 minutes, then peel off and place on a wire rack. The mixture should make about 12 -15 large macarons, and about 25 smaller macarons. Macarons keep really well (about 5 days in the fridge) and some say that the longer they are refrigerated, the more the flavour is likely to develop. Macarons taste best when they are stored in the fridge, then brought down to room temperature to eat.

Cinnamon Donut filling:

As I mentioned earlier, I am not going to write out a recipe for this filling. I’ll briefly go through what I can remember 🙂

So, firstly, I placed the donuts in the container with the cream, and left it from about 12 midday to 3 or 4pm the next day. I pulled all of the donuts out, except for 2, and in hindsight, I think I really should have left 3 to give it a little bit more of a donutty flavour. The cream was not as flavoursome as I hoped for, so with the remaining 2 donuts in the cream, I blitzed it all up together, to make a cinnamon donut whipped cream like thing. After this, the mixture was still a little lumpy, so I put it through a fine sieve which made it separate – which was actually not a bad thing. I then whipped up about 3/4 cup thickened cream, and added some icing sugar and cinnamon sugar (you can buy this in a glass jar at the supermarket or just add cinnamon and sugar separarely), and folded it into the donut and cream mixture. It was very runny after this, so I stirred in about 1/3 cup cornflour, and left it overnight to thicken. I then just placed the filling in a piping bag fitted with a round nozzle and filled the shells. Due to the amount of cream in the filling, it was a bit more runny than usual, which made the shells a bit fragile. They still tasted pretty awesome, though 🙂

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whiskitforabiscuit

it's worth the whisk…

Lamington Cake with Balsamic Strawberry Jam

Cinnamon Donut Macarons

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