CookingAndRecipeTips.com

I like eating desserts but I usually don’t particularly enjoy making them. However, this is a quick and easy cake to make and it tastes great. The original recipe suggests serving with a strawberry coulis but the cake is fine just as it is if strawberries are not in season when you make it.

Flourless Chocolate Dessert Cake

Ingredients:

100g dark eating chocolate, chopped
100g butter, chopped
2 tablespoons marsala
1/2 cup (110g) caster sugar
2/3 cup (80g) almond meal
1 tablespoon instant coffee powder
1 tablespoon hot water
3 eggs, separated
icing sugar mixture

Method:

1. Preheat oven to moderate. Grease deep 20cm-round cake pan; line base and side with baking paper.
2. Combine chocolate and butter in small saucepan; stir over low heat until both are melted.
3. Combine chocolate mixture with marsala, sugar, almond meal and combine coffee and the water in large bowl; beat in egg yolks one at a time.
4. Beat egg whites in small bowl with electric mixer until soft peaks form; gently fold into chocolate mixture in two batches. Pour mixture into prepared pan.
5. Bake in moderate oven about 45 minutes; cover with foil during baking if overbrowning. Cool cake in pan, cover; refrigerate several hours or overnight.
6. Carefully turn cake onto board; cut into slices with a hot knife. Dust cake with icing sugar.

Serve with strawberry coulis and whipped cream if desired.

Strawberry Coulis

Ingredients:

250g strawberries
1/4 cup (40g) icing sugar mixture

Method:

1. Blend or process hulled strawberries and icing sugar until mixture is smooth.

Tips

The cake will sink slightly as it cools.

Marsala is a sweet red wine. If you don’t have any handy, you can try substituting port or even sherry.

If you are after a gluten-free recipe, check that the icing sugar you use doesn’t contain flour.

Fried rice is a quick, easy and nutritious dish.

Ideally the rice should be cooked the day before (see the steamed rice recipe), spread out on a tray and allowed to cool and dry in the refrigerator. Once it has cooled it can be placed in an airtight container and stored in the refrigerator till the next day. This is not essential but it helps to stop the rice sticking together when you are making the fried rice.

The ingredients are not critical and you can use lots of different ingredients as long as they do not produce too much moisture on cooking. The ingredients I have listed here are suggestions – feel free to experiment.

Ingredients:

2 or 3 eggs
100 – 200 g bacon rashers, chopped
2 or 3 shallots or 1 small onion
1 red capsicum, chopped
2 small carrots, diced
1 tin baby corn, chopped
soy sauce
oil for cooking
4 cups cooked rice

Method:

1. Lightly whisk the eggs.
2. Heat  a little oil in the wok and cook the egg turning it over halfway through the cooking process.  You may find it better if you rotate the wok to get the egg to coat the sides thus forming a thin omlette rather than having a thick mass of egg at the bottom of the wok.
3. Remove egg from wok and set aside. When cool, cut into small pieces.
4. Heat a little oil in the wok and add the chopped bacon, If using onion instead of shallots add it at the same time as the bacon.  Stir fry for a couple of minutes.
5. Add the carrot and stir fry a further two minutes.
6. Add remaining vegetables (including shallots) and cook a further two minutes.
7. Add cooked rice and stir through until rice is heated. Add soy sauce to taste.
8. When rice has heated, add chopped egg and stir through.
9. Serve while hot.

Variations:

As noted earlier you can use lots of different ingredients depending on what is in season and what you have available at the time. For example, you could use celery and add it at the same time as the carrot. You could use broccoli or cauliflower, beans, snowpeas, mushrooms etc.

Tips

If you use different coloured vegetables, the dish will look appetising and inviting. This is one way to get kids to eat vegetables they might not otherwise eat. If the vegetables are chopped finely, they don’t stand out so much and the flavour combines with the other ingredients so the kids may be less likely to object to eating it.

Silverbeet is a lovely leafy green vegetable that contains lots of iron, folate, vitamin A and vitamin C. It can be cooked or eaten raw.  Sometimes it can be difficult to get kids to eat it so I like to cook it with a few things added to give it a little more flavour. When cooked, silverbeet reduces quite a bit.

Here are some suggestions on different things you can do with silverbeet. Of course, you don’t have to do exactly as I suggest. Use your imagination and whatever you happen to have to hand.

Wash and roughly chop the silverbeet.

Then chop and lightly fry some onion and/or garlic in a large fryingpan . Add the chopped silverbeet and fry over moderate heat stirring occasionally. I like to cover it initially so that the steam helps to cook the upper layers of the silverbeet to get it to reduce in size a bit quicker. Otherwise it is difficult to stir without it falling out of the frying pan.

I usually add a sprinkle of salt as well.

Sometimes I do it with egg. Fry the chopped silverbeet (with or without the onion) until it has mostly reduced in size and most of the liquid has evaporated. Lightly beat one or two eggs. Clear a little room in the centre of the frying pan  and add the egg. Allow the egg to cook awhile and then stir it into the silverbeet.

If you have mushrooms, you can chop these and cook them with the silverbeet to give a nice flavour and a variation in texture.

Leftover silverbeet can be added to other dishes. I have used it in fritters, stir fries, polenta, stews etc.

And if your kids watch Popeye, you can tell them that silverbeet is related to spinach and that might encourage them to eat it!

This is suitable for BBQs and tastes great.

Honeyed Chicken

Ingredients:

6 chicken breasts
pepper
¹/₄ cup chablis (or other dry white wine)
2 tsp french mustard
4 Tbsp honey

Method:

1. Cut each chicken breast into 4
2. Season chicken breasts with pepper.
3. Gently add chablis to mustard and mix until smooth.
4. Add honey and blend well.
5. Place chicken breasts on greased foil on the barbeque, cook over medium heat. Brush with honey mixture during cooking.
6. Cook 12-15 minutes or until cooked, turning frequently and brushing with honey mixture.

Tips:

You may find it easier to combine the honey if it has been warmed first.

Chicken and corn go together very well whether as a BBQ chicken with salad, corn, pineapple and beetroot, or as a soup such as described here.

Chicken And Corn Soup

Ingredients:

1 kg chicken pieces or 1 small chicken
1 large onion
8 cups water
2 cups hock (or any dry white wine)
2 tsp salt
¹/₄ tsp saffron
1 large can (440 g) whole corn kernels
salt and freshly ground pepper
2 egg yolks
150 mls cream
chopped parsley
bread croutons

Method:

1. Simmer the chicken pieces and onion in water, hock, salt and saffron for 1 hour.
2. Remove chicken, allow to cool then shred meat from the bones.
3. Remove onion from stock.
4. Replace meat in the stock and add drained corn kernels. Simmer for 10 minutes.
5. Remove excess fat and season to taste with salt and pepper.
6. Lightly beat egg yolks and add cream. Stir a little of the soup into the beaten egg yolks and cream, then stir back into the soup.
7. Reheat but do not boil.
8. Serve garnished with parsley and bread croutons.

Serves: 10

Preparation time: around 1 ¹/₂ hours

Tips

If you do not have 90 minutes to prepare this, you can cheat a little by buying a barbecued chicken and using chicken stock. Add the stock powder to the water and hock etc and bring to the boil. Strip the meat off the chicken and add it to the stock.

Unless there is a real reason to use just yolks or whites I tend to use the whole egg. Otherwise I end up with a collection of whites or yolks that gets thrown out a few weeks later when they are discovered at the back of the fridge. So, although this recipe calls for egg yolks, I use the whole egg. The saffron already gives it the nice rich yellow colour.

Variations

You can also use crab meat for this recipe. You can use chicken stock and then add the crab meat at the simmering stage.