Nigella Lawson's Easy Almond Cake

I'm going to cook this cake up the coast at my mums place over the Easter weekend. I decided on this cake because it's easy, I've made it before (and have marzipan in the fridge) and it's a counterpoint to Easter chocolate. It's also a cake that lasts a few days very nicely. Since my mother claims not to like sweet almond dishes, but loves friands and various other sweet things with almond in them I'm going to have to make the cake with Michael, keeping the recipe a secret til they are eating it. I'm also going to replace the vanilla essence with the zest of an orange as per Nigella's suggestion, and I might even replace the almond essence with some orange flower water, but I'll decide on the day.

INGREDIENTS
250g softened unsalted butter
250g marzipan
150g caster sugar
1/4 teaspoon almond essence
1/4 teaspoon vanilla extract
6 large eggs
150g SR flour

25cm springform tube pan or patterned ring mould, buttered and floured

METHOD
Preheat the oven to 170C
Chop the butter and marzipan and put them into the bowl of the food processor with the sugar. Nigella asks for the double bladed knife attachment to be fitted to the food processor.
Process til pretty smooth and add the essences and extracts
process again and add the eggs, one at a time, down the funnel of the processor, processing between each addition.
Add the flour and process and then scrape into the prepared tin
Bake for 50 minutes, checking after 40 - the tester doesn't need to be completely clean - and cool in the tin.

I have a sneaking suspicion we don't have a food processor up there, but I know we have and industrial sized stick blender, and with a little ingenuity I think we can make it work. I'll try to post pictures if it all works, because it could be amusing!

Pate?

I know I said I wasn't going to use this blog anymore, but we made pate last week and I wanted to record how we did it and how we'd do it next time so that next time the urge strikes me I have a recipe of sorts.



We started with:

200g fresh duck livers - Tim said to pick them over carefully for gallbladders
(!) but we didn't find any. Next time I would try half duck half chicken livers.

Half a bottle or so of red wine and a cup or so of Brandy reduced with aromatics (I used peppercorns, juniper berries, some thyme) to 4-6 tablespoons of syrupy liquid

Butter - 150g plus more to cook the livers in. This needs to be at room temperature otherwise, apparently, you get flecks of butter in your pate.

plenty of salt and pepper

Then we:
Firstly we got the butter out and chopped it up a bit and did the same to the livers.
Then we arranged the things the finished pate would go into. We weren't planning on turning it out, so we just gave the pots/ramekins we used a light spray of cooking oil. If we had been going to turn them out I could have given them a good spray with oil, then lined them with glad wrap before getting fancy with the gelatin.
We then fried the livers, a few at a time in plentiful butter. The livers need to be seared but not cooked through.
As the livers were cooked they were tossed into the food processor, once they were all done I threw in the rest of the butter, the strained reduction and plenty of salt and pepper.
It got a decent blitzing before I tasted it for seasoning. Since at this stage it's warm pureed semi-cooked liver it'll need more salt because you won't taste the salt as much when it's chilled.
Blitz to mix in the added salt and then pour it onto the waiting containers.

Before popping it in the fridge we covered each little pot with clarified butter to ensure it keeps it's colour nicely (success!).







The verdict:
Well, it was definitely pate, which is a start, but it was a bit dark and intense, for our personal taste. Since it was made with duck livers (rather gamey) and red wine (dark red) that's not surprising. If I was doing it again I would add a splash of cream, some tinned green peppercorns and I'd probably play around with the booze that went into the reduction. I'd also consider using half or all chicken livers to scale back the intensity. I think I want to make it again....

Dinner with a Grandfather

Keda's father came over last Saturday and we had a couple of lovely wines. A 2005 vintage Annie's Lane Coppertrail Riesling was excellent, one of the best young drinking rieslings I've had. It did seem more advanced than I expected but was all the better for it as a young wine - lime, mineral, butter, cleansing and refreshing. The advanced nature exposing itself by the rounder/broader palate (buttery character) and a softer acid finish compared to other 2005s (eg Leo Buring). This bottle was emptied pretty much as a palate cleanser as we hadn't managed to buy or make anything for hors d'oeuvres/entrée, so just some raw cashews and almonds had to suffice. The main was worth waiting for, a duck and shitake pie with a puff pastry lid. Unfortunately no photos of this one but it was a goody, took some time but relatively easy. Roast the bird, discard the skin, pick off the meat and mix with some fresh shitake mushrooms and a master stock style sauce (water, soy, slices of ginger, dried shitake mushrooms, dried chilli, start anise - all simmered for a while, strained and added to the meat). For sides there was a simple green salad with shaved pecorino and roasted carbs (nicola potatoes + parsnips). The carbs were roasted in a combination of olive oil and some of the duck fat that was saved from roasting the duck. A 2000 vintage Pfeiffer pinot noir was provided by our dinner guest. Quite possibly Rutherglen's finest pinot (maybe its only pinot?), this was more a light dry red than pinot, pretty good with the meal but died in the glass after 20 minutes or so. As Keda and her father prefer a cheese course over sweet desserts, that's what we had to finish. All supermarket purchased cheeses but pretty good ones - King Island Roaring Forties (a mild blue), a decently matured Jindi Brie and Yea's Cheddar (Yarra Valley). Since we had no dried fruit to put on the platter I substituted some Arnott's fruit biscuits ('fruit pillows')! To help wash it down a bottle of Penfolds Grandfather Tawny (no longer called Port) was opened and it went down a treat - well, about a third to half of a bottle did, the rest will probably last a month or two! Lovely smooth rancio characters, sweet but not cloying. A couple of glasses and some cheese later, Keda's father was falling asleep at the table - mainly due to jetlag and booze rather than any lack of fascinating conversation! - so we called that the end of the night.

Friday night drinks

We recently had a meal at a place in Willoughby called Maitre Karl. It was a bit of a celebration because my brother is (briefly) back in the country and it was my dad's birthday ealier in the week. Although we only drank two wines that night but both were excellent. The 2004 Petaluma chardonnay which was a rich, full bodied style of chardonnay but built on a core of lemon/grapefruit acid that resulted in a clean finish. This is the third time I've had this wine in the last 6 months (it is my father's current favourite) and this was the best bottle I've had. The cleansing acid allowed it to go well with everyone's entrees (flammekueche or "Alsation pizza"). The main course was with the main wine, a 1997 Grange. Feeling like a bit of a wine tosser I double decanted this about 30 minutes before leaving home which was about 1.5 hours before we started on the wine with our mains. There is a theory that some hold that wines from average vintages drunk relatively young/not at full maturity are better food wine matched than wines from "better" years. The reason is that "better" years, especially for Australian shiraz, usually equate to riper more fruit forward wines. Because the wine has more fruit, in theory it can handle more new oak and a wine with lots of fruit and oak will either clash with most foods or will require extended aging before it will be suitable with food. Anyway, this wine proved the "off vintage" theory beautifully. By the time we started drinking it the wine was open for business - a lovely floral lift followed by darker fruits and chocolate characters. The palate was super smooth, rich and velvety. I could have drunk a lot more of this, a real pleasure to have. One of the better wines I've enjoyed recently and Keda said that it was fantastic with her veal dish (pretty good with my duck as well!).