What does one do with lots of blood plums from a friend’s plum tree? Why not make an upside down down cake?

Here is a nice easy recipe that I use regularly from my favourite dessert cookbook – Donna Hay’s Modern Classics Book 2, adapted slightly to be gluten free.

You can use any stoned fruit for this recipe – plums, apricots, peaches…

Ingredients:
1 1/2 cups plain gluten free flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
4 eggs
1 cup caster sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
125g butter, melted

Topping:
1 cup sugar
1/2 cup water
75g butter
12 blood plums (or any stone fruit), halved and stones removed

Preheat the oven to 160 degrees. To make the topping, place the sugar and water in a saucepan over low heat and stir until the sugar is dissolved. Increase the heat and boil until the syrup is a golden brown colour. Remove from the heat and stir through the butter. Pour into a well greased 24cm round cake tin.

To make the cake, sift together the flour and baking powder three times and set aside.

Place the eggs, sugar and vanilla in the bowl of an electric mixer and beat for 8-10 minutes or until thick and pale. Sift the flour and baking powder over the egg mixture and gently fold through. Fold through the butter. Place the plums cut side down and very close together in the caramel. Spoon over the cake mixture and bake for 1 hour 5 minutes or until cooked when tested with a skewer.

Allow to stand for 5 minutes then invert the cake into a plate.

Make a nice cup of tea and enjoy your work!

Cupcakes, how can you possibly not love them???

Joy Cupcakes is such a cute shop, it just makes you smile when you walk in and see all these beautiful, immaculate cupcakes sitting there waiting for you to pick one…or two…or three…

Whilst there is not a huge range of gluten free cupcakes (there are only a few flavours), they are clearly marked on the cupcake menu, which also tells you which days of the week each flavour is baked.

There are 2 locations – Southern Cross Lane, 121 Exhibition St, Melbourne and Doncaster Shopping Centre.

Get yourself a treat!

Week 36 of the Cookbook Challenge and the theme is Comfort – what can be better comfort food than chocolate? And when you do anything with chocolate you may as well be decadent and go all out, and who better to learn from than Nigella. This recipe is from my Nigella Express book.

Ingredients:

225g dark chocolate
225g butter
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
200g caster sugar
3 eggs, beaten
150g ground almonds
100g chopped walnuts

Preheat the oven to 170 degrees celcius. Melt the chocolate and butter gently over a low heat in a heavy based saucepan.

Take the pan off the heat, mix in the vanilla and sugar, and let it cool a little.

Beat the eggs into the pan along with the ground almonds and chopped walnuts. Turn into a 24cm square baking tin.

Bake in the oven for 25-30 minutes, by which time the top will have set but the mixture will still be gooey. Once cooler, cut carefully, four down, four across, into 16 squares.

This recipe was really easy to make and with minimal ingredients it’s something you can whip together when you need a bit of a chocolate fix. Plus it tasted great, nice and moist, and keeps well in an air tight container. Yum!

My friends and I often joke that they way things are going with gluten free food now getting increasingly popular, maybe one day people will walk into a restaurant and have to ask “do you have any gluten?” Well Caffe Si is already one of those eateries – everything is gluten free, no gluten here. This is a small cafe in a local strip of shops in Caulfield North with coffee, cakes, sandwiches and breakfast options. Unfortunately when I went they had run out of bread which was a shame as I was looking forward to a big cooked breakfast with toast. Instead I had a veggie burger wrap which was almost satisfied my craving. We went on a Sunday morning so I’m not sure if it was due to it being the end of the week but the menu and display area looked a little bare with not a huge variety to choose from.

This place would be really nice with a few couches and a bit more colour around, whilst the food was beautiful, the environment felt a little sterile – it didn’t feel like we could have sat around for ages like some other cafes around. However still recommended to try out. They also have a lot of home made pastas and meals you can take home to stock up.

Click here to go to their website

[mappress]

Week 6 in the Cookbook Challenge and I’m quite late in posting this review! I’ve been on holidays for the past 2 weeks. The theme for week 6 was ‘Christmas’…Christmas seems like such a long time ago…

I decided to attempt a Chocolate Fudge Swiss Roll from one of my favourite cake cookbooks, Gorgeous Cakes, with a slight adaptation when the roll didn’t quite look like the picture…

Ingredients for the sponge:

50g cocoa powder

Pinch of sea salt

3 large eggs

75g light muscovado sugar (I just used caster sugar)

Icing sugar

Ingredients for the filling:

100g dark chocolate broken into pieces

1 tablespoon dark muscovado sugar (I just used dark brown sugar)

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

200ml whipping cream

Chocolate curls (optional)

Pre-heat the oven to 180 degrees. Butter a 23cm x 32cm baking tin, line with baking paper and butter the paper too. Sift the cocoa into a bowl and add the salt. Place the eggs and sugar into a bowl and whisk for 8-10 minutes with an electric whisk until the mixture is pale and mousse like. Lightly fold the cocoa in two goes. Pour the mixture into the prepared tin and smooth the surface. Give the tin a couple of sharp taps to eliminate any large bubbles and bake for 8-10 minutes until set and springy to the touch.

Lay out a clean tea towel and sift over a fine layer of icing sugar. Turn the cake out onto it and carefully roll it up with the tea towel leaving the paper in place, starting at the short end. Leave this to cool for 40-60 minutes.

For the filling, melt the chocolate with the sugar, vanilla and 2 teaspoons of cream in a bowl set over a pan of simmering water, stirring until smooth, then set the bowl aside to cool. Whisk the remaining cream until it is stiff and fold in the cooled, melted chocolate.

Carefully unroll the sponge and peel off the baking paper. Spread with the chocolate cream, then roll the sponge up again and tip it into a long serving plate, seam downwards. Dust with icing sugar, and decorate with chocolate curls if you like. Chill, uncovered for 2 hours. Dust with icing sugar and chocolate curls to serve.

As you can see, mine wasn’t quite as pretty as the picture and had a few cracks appear when I rolled it back up with the filling. So I ended up covering the whole thing in the leftover filling to make just that little bit more decadent