Autumnal birthday cake for the autumn of my life....

On the 30th March it was my 30th birthday, and so far it's been an extended one starting with this birthday cake at a rehearsal 4 days beforehand, and a ending with an afternoon drinks party for friends at my house on Easter Monday. In between I've had dinners with family and a very luxurious weekend away in Daylesford, with a lunch at The Lake House and spa treatments daahling! in Hepburn Springs. Still to come is another birthday weekend away with more friends. I like special birthdays! They almost make up for the slight panic you may feel at turning an age where you thought you would be all grown-up, and realising you have a long way to go before that happens.
I didn't want to make another chocolate cake to take for rehearsing friends, so I turned to this one in Nigella's Domestic Goddess: the Autumnal birthday cake. Appropriate as my birthday falls in the first real flush of Melbourne autumn, which is my favourite time of year. The days are warm, clear and sunny, the leaves are turning, the afternoon light is golden and the nights are crisp and I can curl under my doona for the first time in months. Do you like my pseudo-artistic cake decorating efforts with the leaves from our front yard? Hey, I brushed the dirt off first!

The cake is an adaptation of a maple & pecan layer cake cake from the Magnolia Bakery in New York, and it uses 2 full bottles of maple syrup. You know how much that stuff costs? Hell! I might as well make it from GOLD! I nearly reached for the imitation maple-flavoured slop, but slapped myself around the head and reminded myself that I'll only turn 30 once, and if I couldn't buy the good stuff for my good friends then I was a horrible person. At least buy the good stuff for me! Despite the amount of syrup in the cake and the frosting, it wasn't overwhelmingly sweet, although the smell convinced many otherwise. This cake would be a great wasp attractor.

It's a simple, sponge-like cake batter, flavoured with maple, that is best eaten on the day it's made as it tends towards dryness. It was already heading that way that evening. The frosting is a cooked meringue, with the texture of marshmallow fluff, again flavoured with maple syrup, and quite sticky to touch. The pecans provided a textural contrast that was needed, although I was confused by the amount in the recipe, because the picture in Nigella's book definitely doesn't show it covered in as many as specified! The recipe doesn't instruct this, but I toasted the pecans before chopping them in salted butter, and based on my new knowledge from Ray Capaldi at Fenix about the need for salt in nut-based desserts, I added a hefty pinch of my pink Murray River salt flakes. I liked the taste of salt cutting through the sticky meringue.

A note for next time: it calls for a lot of flour - 1/2 kilo of it, and self-raising flour at that. I don't like the squeaky, chalky mouthfeel of SR flour, especially in those quantities, and again armed with my new knowledge from Ray Capaldi about how flour is a cheap filler, next time I would cut down the amount. Hopefully it would still set, but it's worth a try. It might stop the tendency towards dryness too.
It's rich and filling, and we could only manage small slices, although my brother who really doesn't have a sweet tooth came in late at night and found the large wedge leftover. Heating it up in the microwave (dryness factor) he ate the entire CHUNK, which frankly astounds me. I know he likes maple syrup, but....whoa!
No recipe on my site this time, but I found it on another blog. Enjoy!

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Going bananas!

It's been a recurring theme on many Aussie foodblogs over the past year: we miss our bananas. I think most of you have heard by now that in mid-March 2006, Cyclone Larry announced itself in far north Queensland and destroyed 95% of Australia's banana crop. At the time I remember a few people giggling, heh, bananas! Cyclone comes through and we lose bananas! But when the reality of our banana-less existence sunk in, and the prices of the few left in Australia shot up to about $16 a kilo, the situation was miserable. Australia wouldn't import bananas in the interim, so we could help our own farmers; mentioning this to some friends in the UK recently sparked a fairly heated argument about protectionism and our moral duty to help poorer countries who need to export the few goods they have. Like most things, I can see both points of view, and we decided to abandon the argument and go and have a pint instead.
Lady Lunchalot is today celebrating Banana Sunday, in which we celebrate the return of bananas to reasonable prices; currently about $3 a kilo, although I've been told that something disastrous has happened again up there, and prices will rise again. She gives a good potted history of the banana situation the past year, and made me realise how much I did miss those things: especially those mornings when I'm running late, and it's the perfect thing to grab and eat in the car...i.e. pretty much every morning.

There's a bit of a coincidence with the banana cake I made. I tore the recipe out of a New Idea magazine in the lunchroom at work, on Friday 17 March, planning to make it after I bought a few bananas to go soft. Cyclone Larry hit on the Monday morning, and my banana cake plans were put on the shelf. For a long time!
So, here is is finally. It's a bog-standard very easy banana cake recipe, sent in by a reader, but the thing that caught my eye was the inclusion of coconut cream. I can't say I can taste it in the finished cake, but it does make the cake very moist. I think it would keep a long time. The recipe recommends drizzling with passionfruit pulp before serving, but I forgot to buy any. My eye fell on my bottle of pomegrenate molasses, and I decided that would have a similar sort of tang. Well, what a revelation! From now on, I'm always adding it to my bananas; the sweet-sour tang perfectly offsets the almost sickly sweetness of the bananas. Plus, aren't pomegrenates the fruit of love? Seems appropriate, considering the event coming up this week. So, one cake is decorated in Valentines day hearts, and the other is heart shaped, and drizzled in the fruit of love. All's well with the world. :-)
Read on for the recipe:

Easy Banana Cake
From New Idea, March 2006

1 cup caster sugar*
1 1/2 cups self-raising flour**
1 cup mashed overripe bananas
1 tsp vanilla essence
1/2 cup dessicated coconut
1/2 cup coconut cream
2 eggs, lightly beaten
125g butter (1/2 pack) melted
Passionfruit pulp to serve (or pomegrenate molasses)
Cream cheese frosting:
25g butter, room temperature
75g cream cheese, softened
1 1/2 cups icing sugar mixture
1 tsp grated lemon rind

1: Grease a deep, 20cm round cake pan and line with baking paper. Preheat oven to 190C (moderately hot)
2: Combine sugar, flour, bananas, vanilla, coconut, coconut cream and eggs in a large bowl. Stir in melted butter until well combined. Pour mixture into prepared pan.
3: Cook for about 1 hour, or until cooked when tested. Stand cake in pan for 10 minutes before turning onto a wire rack to cool
4: To make cream cheese frosting, beat all of the ingredients together in a small bowl with an electric mixer until well combined
5: Spread frosting over top of cold cake. Just before serving drizzle with passionfruit pulp.

* I used 1/2 cup caster sugar & 1/2 cup raw sugar
** I used 1 cup SR flour & 1/2 cup wholemeal SR flour. I think you could use all wholemeal SR without any problems.
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