Mmmmm, Coffee and Cake!

I was going to write a round-up of our trip to New Zealand, what we liked best, some of the best photos what we thought of the country and the differences and similarities between New Zealand and the UK, but I’ll save that for another day. Instead, a post about cake!

One of my favourite things about New Zealand was the food, especially the cakes. Part of this was due to the fact that I’d been fairly careful with my diet in the lead up to the Triathlon World Championships in Auckland. I hadn’t wanted to be carrying any extra weight for the race so had been taking it easy in the cakes and chocolate department. I’d also been avoiding caffeine. However, once the race was over I could let my hair down and finally eat cake.

The cakes and biscuits in New Zealand were delicious too. Big chocolate coated chocolate chip cookies called Afghans, loads of macadamia slices and other nutty treats, huge pieces of carrot cake with chunky walnuts and sticky frosting, rhubarb muffins, honey ice-cream, the list goes on and on, we tried them all. Portion sizes were always twice what we’d get in the UK too, so there were no complaints there.

Because of this we treated ourselves to a nice recipe book called ‘Volcanic Kitchens’, the proceeds of which contributes to the Whakapono Health Trust. Accompanying the many recipes in the book are over 160 photographs from around New Zealand by photographer Gerhard Egger so it will be a nice book to look at as well as having some tasty recipes to try.

Morgan was off school last Thursday as his school was being used as a polling station so whilst Anna was at work Morgan and I were busy in the kitchen all day trying out recipes from the book. The Kumara and Pumpkin curry was delicious and made even better by the fact that both the pumpkin and the kumara (sweet potato) were grown by our own fair hands in our garden and picked just before adding them to the curry. The Naan Bread recipe from the book worked well too, despite the fact that our yeast was a little out of date.

Home Grown Pumpkin

Home Grown Pumpkin

The Lemon Curd Cake recipe was a little odd – and for once it wasn’t due to my inability to follow recipe instructions.

It said to add the eggs to the flour mix to and process to a soft dough. Well, when I did that we ended up with a runny batter, certainly not a dough. Oh well, the next step was to press the dough into the base, no pressing for me, I could just pour it. We were then supposed to make our own lemon curd, but seeing as we have about 40 jars of lemon cheese from the Ilse of Man in the cupboard I decided to use one of those instead – yep, a whole jar!

The recipe said to “pour in the curd mixture and top with the remaining crumble’… What do you mean, remaining crumble? It hadn’t mentioned crumble before, how was I supposed to have some remaining if I hadn’t made any and hadn’t used any up until this point? Oh well, I guess they mean remaining dough, or batter in our case. I’ll just add some more flour to that until it becomes a really sticky mess and then try to spread it on top of the lemon cheese. As you can imagine that didn’t really work. Never mind, lets just stick it in the oven and see what happens whilst we go for a walk in the dunes.

Morgan

Morgan

Dunes of Ynyslas

Dunes of Ynyslas

When we got back the alarm was going on the cooker, had it really been 40 minute already??? Surprisingly it turned out OK and came out looking quite nice. A little brown around the edges maybe but those are the sticky treacely bits that will taste the best. better still it tasted nice as well and everyone enjoyed it.

Lemon Curd Cake

Lemon Curd Cake

I wonder what I can cook next from the book? We have lots of pumpkin leftover so the pumpkin cake will probably be next on the list.

2 Responses

  1. Avatar forComment Author mum says:

    looks tasty, although I think the sticky bits around the edge is probable due to the walk in the dunes!!

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Alan Cole

Alan is a Freelance Website Designer, Sports & Exercise Science Lab Technician and full time Dad & husband with far too many hobbies: Triathlete, Swimming, Cycling, Running, MTBing, Surfing, Windsurfing, SUPing, Gardening, Photography.... The list goes on.

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