Mum's Sultana Cake

Intro

The first pages in my recipe notebook are all written in my 11 year old handwriting and are all my Mum's. She is an amazing cook and gets enormous pleasure nowadays from preparing beautiful evening meals to share with her new husband, my step father Graham, and also glorious dinner parties for friends and family.

This is all a far cry from the family cooking that Mum used to do at the time I was copying out her recipes. I left home when I was 19, and as the eldest of 4 kids, Mum still had many years of family cooking ahead of her and making good, nutritious meals on limited income. I remember Mum going through her recipe book choosing recipes we were able to bake on the basis of how economic they were: how much butter, how many eggs. We were beginner cooks and I guess to there was a better than even chance that it would be a disaster! She identified, quite rightly, that the more ingredients a recipe has the higher the cost.

I have kept Mum's recipes back until now because they are really special and I didn't want to share them until it felt right.

This light sultana cake is a staple that mum regularly made. I remember it being yellow and lightly studded with moist sultanas and whenever we went on picnics - which we did often - we always took a square tin containing a sultana cake. Our favourite place for picnics was Mount Victoria in Wellington, we spent hours in the pine forest having raucous pinecone fights, but Red Rocks was memorable too with towering rock cliffs to scramble up.

Recipe

• 1 pound sultanas (450g)
• 1/2 pound butter(225g)
• water
• 3 eggs
• 1.25 cups sugar
• 1 teaspoon lemon essence
• 12 ounces flour (3 cups)
• 1 teaspoon baking powder

Place sultanas in a saucepan, cover with water then boil for 5 minutes. Strain then add the roughly chopped butter. Set aside to cool.

Beat together eggs and sugar until thick and pale then stir into the cooled sultanas and butter. Add essence, flour and baking powder.

Bake in a greased, floured and paper lined square tin for about an hour, or until a skewer comes out clean, at 350 degrees. Watch the top so it doesn't burn the sultanas (might want to put a square of paper on top after 40 mins).

*Can add spice if desired.

Lemon Souffle

Intro

I don't know where this recipe came from but it is one of my Mums. Its more of a mousse so I don't know why we call it a souffle ... but we do.

For our family Christmas lunch would not be complete at all without a big glass bowl of this light as a feather gorgeous dessert. We usually don't decorate it at all - just plain - and serve it with big fragrant strawberries or raspberries. On a whim once I added tequila, on the assumption that tequila improves pretty much anything, and while it was nice I wouldn't mess with the recipe too much. Its perfection just as it is.

Recipe

• 4 separated eggs
• 8 tablespoons caster sugar
• 2 and a half lemons - finely grated zest and juiced
• 2 teaspoons gelatine soaked in 5 tablespoons cold water
• 1/2 pint cream

Place the egg yolks, sugar, lemon rind and juice in a basin over hot water on the stove and whisk until the sugar dissolves and mixture thickens a little. Remove from the heat, place in a cold water bath and whisk until it is cooled and thickened. Take the dissolved gelatine and stir into the egg yolk mixture. Whip cream until thick and fold gently into yolk mixture. Its much easier to get a smooth dessert if you don't over whip the cream. Whip the egg whites until stiff - again not too stiff - and fold through gently. Pour into serving bowls, 1 big or individuals, cover with gladwrap, refrigerate overnight and and serve.

Marshmellow Slice

Intro

I was talking to an older friend last week about how hard it is to find a cafe serving nicely sized slices, proper savouries and club sandwiches. It is increasingly hard these days to buy 'polite' servings when eating out. Huges wedges of thick slices and palm-sized shortbread are simply overwhelming for many people and older people in particular. She has a point. This is the baking of my childhood; slices were cooked in swiss-roll tins and cut into 24 neat squares, savouries were 2 inches across and comprised a thin layer of savoury mince encased in flaky puff pastry and pikelets, as served by Nana Wilson, were tiny pillows of lovliness.

This slice is one of my Mums and I don't remember it being made terribly often. I remember it usually had toasted coconut sprinkled on top but sometimes it had a thin layer of chocolate icing. Nowadays I double this recipe because my favourite tin is a bit bigger than a standard swiss roll tin and  we like our slices a little more generous in size than this recipe from the 1960s.

Recipe

• 3ozs butter
• 3 ozs sugar
• 1 egg
• 5 ozs flour
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• Pinch of salt

Cream the butter and sugar until light, pale and creamy. Add the egg then fold in the sifted dry ingredients.

Spread into a greased swiss roll tin, prick all over and bake 15 minutes at 350f. Remove from oven, pour marshmellow over the top and sprinkle with coconut or ice thinly with chocolate icing when cold.

Marshmellow topping

• 1 cup sugar
• 1 cup water
• 1 dessertspoon gelatine
• 1 cup icing sugar
• few drops red food colouring

Dissolve the gelatine in the cold water in a saucepan, add sugar and bring to the boil. Simmer 10 minutes stirring occasionally. Remove from heat and cool for a few minutes, add icing sugar and food colouring then beat for 10 minutes until thick and creamy.

Coconut Cake

Intro

A good, basic coconut cake that is weighty and moist.

Recipe

• 5 ozs butter 
• 5 ozs sugar
• 2 eggs
• 6 ozs self raising flour
• 2 ozs coconut
• a few tblsps milk

Cream butter and sugar until light and fluffy, beat in the eggs 1 at a time, add sifted flour and coconut and add just enough milk until mixture drops from a spoon.

Bake in a greased 8 inch round tin for an hour or so at 350 degree F.

Optional: finely grated rind of a lemon.

Chocolate Mousse Cake

Intro

1 part Anita, 1 part my Mum and 1 part Rosalie :) 

This recipe has lovely layering around it and the intro may well end up longer than the recipe! Back in the day, when I was a kid, my Mum and Dad used to have these lovely dinner parties. Graham Greig (work colleague of Mum's) and Anita (his wife) were regular guests. Anita made this gorgeous Chocolate Mousse cake once and, fortunately for us gave the recipe to Mum. Apparently, its an old Hudson and Hall recipe and I did track it down many years later but this modified 'made up' version is heaps easier to make. 

Mum used to make this Mousse Cake for high days and holidays using sponge cake and a packet mousse mix and lumps of cake rather than layers. So not the Hudson and Halls recipe as such, or method actually, which involved many fine layers of homemade cake and mousse and hours of faffing about. The original recipe is hideously expensive to make and we were not a wealthy household but we took the concept! 

Then one Christmas in the mid 80s I put my finger into a bowl of chocolate mousse that Rosalie Blake's son Jeremy had made from a recipe he got from their neighbour Sarah Hodge in Manakau. Stunning. Just 1 word for it. So, the recipe entered its final incarnation and I use Rosalie / Sarah's mousse recipe, Mum's method and Anita's concept. This is only made on very special occasions - birthdays really. But wait - there is a final twist to the tale ... years later, my widowed Mum and Anita's widowed husband Graham got married. and one of the first times I went for a special meal (Christmas or something) I took a Chocolate Mousse Cake ... and that's when I found out that the dessert was actually based on Anita's recipe. 

Recipe

Melt gently together in a double boiler (or a microwave if you are impatient) until a nicely combined smooth mixture - don't over melt or over stir.

• 300g good chocolate*
• 125g unsalted butter (salted works just fine)
• 25g cocoa powder (yes use a scale)
• 50g castor sugar

Separate

• 5 eggs - throw 1 yolk away (or feed it to the cat)

Add 4 lightly beaten yolks to the chocolate mixture and stir until just combined - then stop immediately (or mixture may curdle) Beat together until stiff (but not quite pavlova stiff):

• 5 egg whites
• a pinch of salt

Gently fold into the chocolate trying not to smash too much air out.

Whip cream until soft peaks form (don't over whip because it makes it harder to work with)

• 300 ml cream (whipping cream / double cream - don't know what else its called)

Gently fold this into the chocolate mixture as well, taking care not to smash the air out. 

Take some cake** and break it into golf ball sized pieces. Get a spring form tin and put a thin layer of mousse on the bottom of the tin. Put bits of cake in and pour mousse in the gaps, then plonk more cake and more mousse in until the tin is full. If you use a large tin the cake will be shallower, if you use a smaller tin the cake will be very deep. Its best to use a larger tin because this is a very big dessert cake that feeds about 10 (or 4 teenage boys). 

Cover it with tin foil and refrigerate until firm. At least 6 hours - preferably overnight. When ready to decorate, lift tin foil off, slide a hot knife around the edge of the tin, loosen the spring form tin, take tin off, place a serving plate on top and tip cake and plate upside down. Remove the base of the tin by sliding a hot knife underneath it. Smooth the top if desired with a hot knife. Decorate with whatever you like. I often use piped whipped cream and halved, hulled strawberries or tinned mandarin segments. My kids love broken flaked chocolate or Belgian seashell chocolates or Ferrero Rochers (yes - the bambini are horribly spoilt but they love me so its all good). 

* Good chocolate means not compound chocolate and not that crappy Cadbury palm oil one but real chocolate. Whittakers is great. Milk is perfect or sometimes I use 50/50 milk and dark Ghana. Don't only use a dark one or it will be unpleasantly bitter. If the mousse tastes grainy or doesn't form a delightful creamy smooth texture it is usually crappy, cheap, nasty chocolate (and I've been caught out a few times). 

** I usually buy a plain trifle sponge or pair of round sponges from the supermarket but I sometimes make a chocolate sponge. It makes a firmer cake which is a bit more filling.