Greek Almond Biscuits

When I was about 13 years old, my mum was invited by a work colleague to attend the Christening of her God daughter. This was a big deal because both she and the baby being Christened were Greek. If you know any Greeks, you'll know that everything they do is BIG, and the Christening was no exception. Despite us being significantly removed from the family of the baby, we were none the less welcomed with open arms to a joyous family occassion for something like 400 people.

We attended the Christening ceremony at a Greek Ordthodox Church, which was an event in itself. While the structure of the building was hideous on the outside, the interior was incredibly ornate. The ceremony was entirely spoken and sung in Orthodox Greek - so we couldn't understand a word of what was said. And everyone in the church was clearly very Greek. We fifth generation Aussies looked distinctly unexotic next to everyone else. The God Mother stood proud as punch at the front of the church, holding the baby - a four month old little girl, plump as a peach, and dressed in an ornate white Christening dress. She was such a good girl throughout the ceremony, despite its length and despite having to get her head and hair very wet.

Afterwards we were invited to the celebration - a typical Greek party, with mountains and mountains of food. I remember looking across the room to see the baby perched on her handsome young father's knee while he fed her half a peach (she been changed out of her Christening frock and into something more durable). No wonder she was such a healthy baby! After we'd eaten our fill the dancing began. Despite my love of dancing I was very shy about joining in - mainly because I didn't want to be ridiculed by my family - you know what teenagers are like about public embarassment. But when both my sister and I were dragged out of our seats, I couldn't refuse.

We danced in typical Greek style - in a circle, holding hands high, two steps this way, one step back that way, and three steps back in the direction we'd started. It was great fun, although I remember being troubled by my jelly shoes - a silly piece of plastic held on my foot and ankle by a long shoelace with silver lame thread through it. They were possibly the most uncomfortable shoes I've worn in my life!

At the end of the night we bade our goodbyes to the God Mother and thanked her for such a wonderful night. She handed each of us a huge biscuit wrapped in red cellophane tied with a gold ribbon that had a little plastic crucifix dangling from it. She told us they were the traditional biscuit to give at Christenings but that she'd ordered them too late so they were still very fresh. She suggested we wait two weeks before we ate them.

Not likely! I waited two minutes until after we'd pulled away from the function centre in our car, then I unwrapped my biscuit and bit into it. And the world changed for me in the very next second - pure delight are the only words I can use to describe the experience. I'd never tasted anything like it - the unique combination of almond and sugar, baked so that the exterior was just crunchy, while the interior remained soft and squidgey.

Thus began a 25 year search for the recipe of that magical biscuit which, until now, has evaded me. I have found Greek cake shops which sell those bisuits by the kilogram (which is obviously how you'd need to buy them for a Christening with 400 hundred guests), and I've also come across them in the shape of a horseshoe, sold at cafes invariably run by Greeks. But I've never been able to find the recipe and make them myself. Until now. Following, is the recipe for Greek almond biscuits, with a little twist to put my own stamp on them of course.

Ingredients
3 cups almond meal (ground almonds)
1 cup caster sugar
3 egg whites
1tsp drops almond essence
125g flaked almonds
2/3 cup dark chocolate chips
15g vegetable shortening (Copha)

1. Place the almond meal, sugar, egg whites and almond essence in a large mixing bowl. Mix until all ingredients are combined and form a thick, sticky paste.
2. Pour the flaked almonds onto a dinner plate or a relatively flat pasta bowl.
3. Spoon the mixture into a piping bag fitted with a large round piping tube. Pipe logs of mixture about 10cm long in rows on a baking paper lined baking sheet.
4. Roll the logs of mixture in the flaked almonds, ensuring that the entire surface area is covered and place back on baking sheet.
6. Bake in oven (pre-heated to 180 degrees celcius) for 15-20 minutes or until golen brown on the outside. Gently transfer from cookie sheet to a wire colling rack using an egg lifter. Allow to cool.
7. Place two handfuls of chocolate chips in a microwave proff bowl, with one knob of vegetable shortening (Copha). Heat on high for 30 seconds or until shortening melts - be careful not to burn the chocolate. Mix until combined then spoon into a disposable plast piping bag. Snip the tip of the piping bag off with scissors, then pipe thin lines of chocolate across biscuits in a criss-cross fashion. Allow chocolate to cool and harden, then serve.

White Chocolate Ganache

I don’t think there is an occasion more joyous than a wedding. Of course, once a wedding has taken place, many more joys follow, like the arrival of a long awaited baby. But it all starts with a wedding, and I find weddings to be chock-filled with hope.

If you’re lucky, you only ever need to have one wedding – although some people have more than one, if not several! So the trick to getting your fill of wedding joy is to know lots of people who are planning on getting married.

As a cake baker, I am getting to participate in weddings, baby showers, naming days and even funerals (although not too many of those, thank goodness)! I consider it a privilege to be invited to create cakes and cupcakes for these landmark occasions in people’s lives. We (my darling husband and I) always try extra hard to come up with something special that fits the occasion and the people who we’re baking for. And what we’ve discovered is trying extra hard allows us an opportunity for continuous improvement. When people want something unusual on their cake(s) we find ourselves stretching our skills and often discovering something new in the process.

This month in preparation for a wedding we’ve discovered white chocolate ganache. If you’re a regular reader, you may have heard me curse white chocolate in the past. I am proud to say I’ve reconciled with white chocolate and I’ve cracked the very difficult to make but very professional looking white ganache. Here’s how you make white chocolate ganache.

Ingredients
750g white chocolate bits – Callebaut is the best
225ml pure cream

1. Pour the white chocolate bits into a large bowl. Give yourself plenty of room to manoeuvre.

2. Heat the pure cream in a small saucepan until it boils. Be very careful as you do not want it to burn to the bottom of the pan, or rise up and boil over.

3. Pour the boiling cream evenly over the white chocolate bits, then begin stirring with a fork. The mixture will be lumpy and sticky – just keep going and watch as the white chocolate melts.

4. There will be a point where the heat is all but gone from the mixture and you feel you need a little bit more to get across the line. Place the bowl in the microwave oven for 20 seconds. Then take it out and resume mixing, but this time do so with a balloon whisk. It helps to have a buddy on hand at this point, because the mixing requires a fair bit of elbow grease. Continue mixing until all lumps of chocolate are gone and you are left with a smooth, thick, viscose mixture.

5. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and stand aside. Leave the ganache to set for 24 hours. I kid you not – if you want to avoid heartache, leave the ganache for a full day. When you return to use it, it will be thick like butter and can be used to fill a cake and cover it. Heat your palette knife under hot water and run it over the surface of the ganache to achieve a perfectly smooth look.

6. What you do next is up to you – you could flick dark chocolate across your cake, decorate it with Guylian chocolates, or drape it with fondant. I have seen one baker attach large pieces of chocolate bark to the sides so that the pieces stand about two inches about the cake. He then filled the top of the cake with spun toffee – an incredibly elaborate looking cake for a very special occasion.

Cupcakes in the market

We are off to market again this week, with four new products to add to our range. We've had a great response so far to our three key products - chocolate, strawberry and vanilla cupcakes, but we decided we'd try a "flavour of the week" approach, and found that when ever we introduced something different, it sold out!

Last Friday we tried chocolate meringues - they were gone by 11.30am! Then last Saturday, we tried raspberry passionfruit cupcakes, and again, they completely sold out. Our conclusion: variety is the spice of life. So this week we are bringing the raspberry passionfruit cupcake and chocolate meringues, along with a date and walnut and a banana cupcake to market. We're excited because it means we now have eight products! Hopefully we now have something for everyone. Even gluten free folks!

If you're in the neighbourhood, do drop by and see us! We'll be at the Organic Food Market in Bondi Junction Mall, Sydney, Australia, from 8.30am to 5.00pm on Friday, August 8, and from 8.30am to 4.30pm on Saturday, August 9. Mention this Blog, and we'll give you a free mini cupcake!

Date & Walnut Cupcakes

My husband has always enjoyed the flavour of caramel more than chocolate, so last year when we went to Brest in Brittany, France, he was delighted to discover that caramel was also the preferred flavour in that region. On our first night in Brest we had the great pleasure to dine at a traditional Brittany restaurant with our friends and hosts.

Of course crepes were the main item on the menu, and both Mark and I enjoyed ourselves thoroughly. I forget what I had for dessert because it paled in comparison to the confection that Mark accidentally ordered. When he ordered a bowl of caramel icecream for dessert he had no idea that there would be anything else in the bowl other than icecream. Imagine his surprise (and my utter envy) when the waiter placed a massive bowl of caramel and vanilla icecream covered with delicious, hot, runny, buttery caramel sauce, topped with whipped cream? Mark’s eyes nearly popped out of his head!

In fact, it wasn’t just caramel that was so important to the people of Brittany – it was also butter. They put butter in everything! On the crepes, on the vegetables, all over the bread – they’re mad for butter. And since caramel is based on butter, naturally they love that as well.

Unfortunately for me, the diet in France was far too rich and my stomach put severe restrictions on what I could and couldn’t eat. Annoying, since it had taken me 11 years to get back to France after my first visit. I would have been happy if the waiter had brought me Mark’s dessert, only leave out the icecream and the whipped cream – a whole bowl of that caramel would have been heaven to me!

Ingredients
1 cup chopped dates
1 cup of water
1 cup of brown sugar
125g butter
1 egg
1 cup self raising flour
¾ cup plain flour
1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
1 tsp mixed spice
75g chopped walnuts
12 unbroken walnut halves.

1. Pre-heat you oven to 180 degrees Celsius.

2. Place the chopped dates and water in a large saucepan and bring to the boil. Remove from the heat, add butter and stir until melted. Allow to cool.

3. Add sugar, egg, flour, bicarb soda, spice and walnuts and mix until combined. Do not beat!

4. Line a 12 hole muffin tin with confeta cups and drop icecream scoopfuls of mix into each. Bake in oven for 20 minutes. Tops will remain soft and squidgy so do not touch!

5. Cool on a wire rack. Makes about 15 cupcakes.

Caramel Buttercream
½ cup brown sugar, tightly packed
30g butter
2 tblsp milk
175g salt reduced butter
1kg icing sugar mixture
150ml milk

1. Melt butter in a saucepan over a medium heat. Add brown sugar and stir until combined.
Slowly bring to boil and simmer until sugar is melted. Do not over heat or you’ll get hard lumps in your mixture.

2. Warm 2 tablespoons of milk in microwave so it comes to room temperature. Add to butter and sugar mix and stir until combined. Set aside to cool completely (or make this the day before you need it if you have time).

3. Put 175g butter, icing sugar and milk into the large bowl of a mixer. Combine on low speed until all ingredients are wet. Increase speed to medium-high and beat buttercream until it’s light and fluffy.

4. Add caramel mixture and beat until well combined. For a deeper caramel colour add ¼ teaspoon of Parisian Browning Essence if desired.

5. Top cool Date & Walnut cakes with caramel buttercream and decorate with half a walnut.

Newsflash - Cadbury Snaps Snapped!

We interrupt this blog to announce to chocolate and cupcake lovers every where that Cadbury Snaps are no longer available in Australia!

Regular readers of Kitchen Alchemy will be familiar with our Double Dutch Chocolate cupcake, the crowning glory of which has been a Cadbury Snap. But no more! After an extensive search of the retail outlets in South Centennial and Pagewood, we can confirm that Snaps are no longer available on supermarket shelves. Rather than wonder in silence we decided to go straight to the source and find out who is to blame!

A quick call to Christine at the Cadbury consumer information line confirmed what we at Kitchen Alchemy had long suspected: Snaps are a limited product only available at certain times of the year. In fact, Snaps are imported from the UK, where they come in additional exciting flavours like organge, hazelnut and honeycomb, as well as the flavours seen here: mint, caramel and of course the original.

So, we are very sorry to announce that our Snap topped Double Dutch Chocolate cupcake will cease to be in about 36 cupcakes time. Sadly, we will be switching to the inferior Nestle chocolate button as decoration until such time as a suitable replacement can be found.

RIP Snaps!

Lets do it again!

Flush from the success of our first market stall, we've decided to plunge in the deep end and do it all again this weekend!

It was hugely exciting to take our cupcakes to market last weekend. We were up and running by 8.15am, but didn't serve our first customers for at least another half an hour. When I finally relented and went off to get a latte, Murphy's Law kicked into play and Mark made our first sale in my absence.

But further sales were fast to follow. It's great to see people we don't know happily purchasing our product and enjoying it! Apart from the odd homeless person (pickled in Jim Beam) we found the Bondi Junction Organic Food Markets an extremely pleasant place to spruike our wares. So we'll be there again this Saturday, July 12. Hope you can make it down to see us this time - and of course partake in a little piece of cupcake heaven.

We're going to market!

We are thrilled to announce we are taking our cupcakes to market!

On Saturday, July 5, 2008, Kitchen Alchemy will unveil its cupcakes at the Bondi Junction Organic & Grower's Market. The market opens at 9.00am and closes at 4.00pm. It's located in Bondi Junction Mall, which is on Oxford Street, right near the ramp to Bondi Junction train station.

We'll be selling our vanilla cupcakes, topped with delicious strawberry or vanilla buttercream, our Double Dutch Chocolate cupcake, plus a limited number of our mini cupcakes (all vanilla with an assortment of buttercream toppings).

We're really excited about this next step in our cupcake venture. If you've been a reader but never a taster, we especially hope to see you there!