Crème Caramel

When you’re learning a new language there’s usually a lesson on food quite early in the course. Food vocabulary is really important when you get to your destination, since you’ll want to buy meals quite frequently. Food lessons give you an insight into culture too. Applying these lessons needn’t wait until you travel overseas – why not visit a restaurant or bake a treat to get into the swing of things?

James has been learning French, which has turned out to be an excellent source of food inspiration. A listening exercise gave us a crêpe recipe, and the resulting spinach and fetta crêpes made a great change from pasta and rice for dinner. To follow up from a French main you need a delicious dessert, and crème caramel is a perfect choice.

Crème caramel is a baked custard with caramel sauce. This one is rich and eggy, with a simple caramel sauce. After reading this month’s Donna Hay magazine I’d be tempted to try some flavour variations, particularly an orange version. It’s nice to start simple though, and traditional crème caramel is beautifully smooth and fulfilling.

Crème Caramel
Recipe adapted from the Hampden Park Public School 30th Anniversary Cookbook.

Ingredients for the sauce
1 1/4 cups caster sugar
1/3 cup water

Ingredients for the custard
1 1/2 cups milk
1 cup thickened cream (we used light cream)
4 eggs
2 egg yolks
1/4 cup brown sugar (firmly packed)
2 tabs golden syrup

Method
1. Preheat oven to 160 ^∘C
2. Heat caster sugar and water until dissolved, then increase the heat and boil without stirring for 5-8 minutes or until golden.
3. Pour evenly between 8 half-cup ramekins and allow to set.
4. Combine milk and cream in a saucepan and heat to a simmer without boiling. Remove from heat.
5. Whisk eggs, yolks, brown sugar and golden syrup together in a heat-proof bowl.
6. Gradually whisk the the warmed milk mixture into the egg mixture.
7. Pour this over the caramel in the ramekins.
8. Put the ramekins in a large baking tray and fill with hot water to half-way up the ramekins.
9. Cover with foil and bake for 40-45 mins until the custards have set.
10. Allow to cool before serving.

Quark Strudel

When you have an excess of quark on your hands you need to bake something. Quark is a German curd cheese, so to maintain the German theme a strudel seems an appropriated choice. The pastry surrounding a strudel is traditionally stretched until it’s papery thin. Obviously this requires elasticity in the dough, and without gluten elasticity is hard to achieve. This means that making a gluten free strudel is a challenge.

A recent Daring Bakers’ challenge suggested a strudel dough should be so thin you can see the pattern of your tablecloth through it. Lorraine’s photos show that she achieved this amazing feat, so it must be possible (at least if you use wheat flour). Gluten free strudel dough is less accommodating, and mine was certainly not the 2 feet square that the recipe prescribes. It wasn’t see-through either. The tablecloth was only visible where the dough was torn.

When I was rolling up the strudel, the fragile dough burst dramatically, and the quark filling began to ooze out. In the nick of time I remembered my mother’s habit of baking strudels in pyrex dishes, and my gooey strudel was saved. It was ugly, but delicious. If you want to enjoy a quark strudel while avoiding the trials of strudel pastry you could use frozen puff pastry instead. Since this isn’t an option for a gluten free strudel, you could consider making gluten free shortcrust rather than a true strudel pastry. If quark is hard to find you can make homemade quark like I did.

Even though it isn’t pretty, exploded quark strudel tastes good. James actually preferred the strudel to the quark cake I made earlier. The filling isn’t too sweet, so the sultanas have a chance to shine against the lemony background. This filling is so delicious and creamy I would happily eat it with a spoon. This would conveniently avoid the bursting pastry problem too. The combination of quark, citrus and dried fruit is beautiful, and I’m already scheming about a version with orange and currants in place of lemon and sultanas.

Ingredients for the dough
200 g gluten free plain flour
1/8 tsp salt
30 mL olive oil
105 mL water
1/2 tsp vinegar

Ingredients for the filling
~1/2 cup almond meal (for sprinkling)
250-300 g quark
1/4 cup caster sugar
1 egg (lightly beaten)
grated rind 1 lemon
1/2 cup of sultanas (soaked in hot water or rum)

Method
1. Combine the flour and salt, in the bowl of a mixer. Pour in the combined liquid ingredients while mixing the dough. The mixture should come together in a ball, you may need to add a little water to achieve this.
2. Change to the dough hook and knead the dough for a few minutes into a slightly rough ball.
3. Rest the pastry in the fridge overnight.

Next day
4. Prepare the filling by combining the quark, caster sugar, egg, lemon rind and drained sultanas.
5. Then roll out the dough. Flour a clean tablecloth and use your floured hands to spread the strudel dough. It should be able to stretch to 2 feet square, or until you can see through it.
6. Sprinkle the dough with almond meal to absorb excess liquid from the filling.
7. Make a line of quark filling at one end of the strudel dough. Then use the cloth to help you roll the strudel up. The weight of the filling should allow it to roll up if you raise one end of the cloth. You will also need to fold in the sides of the dough to ensure the filling doesn’t fall out the end of the roll.
8. Turn your strudel from the cloth into a casserole dish, or onto a baking tray (if it has enough structural integrity).
9. Bake at 200 ^∘C for 30 minutes until lightly brown at the edges.
10. Serve warm.

Quark Cake

How do you say Eischnee in English? A direct translation from German would make it egg snow, which is rather pretty. Unfortunately the idiomatic version in English is probably the less poetic beaten eggwhite. The reason for translating a German recipe is that James has been raving about Quark Cake since he came back from Germany. Quark is a German curd cheese, which is more sour than sour cream, but similar in texture. Since James is not normally a lover of cheesecakes, the quark version must have been pretty special. The difficult part about making this cheesecake is that quark is not readily available in Sydney.

One Austrian friend managed to find organic quark at a speciality deli, but the price was exorbitant. Luckily another friend is both a home cook and a native speaker of German. She has been missing quark, so before long she found some recipes for both the quark itself, and for Quark Cake. Knowing James, she didn’t translate them, since that would be denying him the opportunity to practise his German.

Having made some quark (see the post on homemade quark), all that remained was to choose a Quark Cake recipe. Since James had amnesia regarding all features of the cake he’d had (barring its yumminess), all options were open. Why not choose something out of the ordinary then – a baked cheesecake with beaten egg white? It sounded different, and the lemon zest and rum-soaked raisin flavours were appealing.

In a last-ditch attempt to reduce the saturated fat content of this recipe I used a sweet, gluten free version of Heidi’s Olive Oil Shortcrust for the pastry case. This crust is a little crunchy for a cheesecake, so feel free to substitute your favourite melt-in-the-mouth short crust recipe. After all, you can’t be good all the time.

This Quark Cake is soft, and well endowed with rum-soaked raisins. The lemon zest keeps it from being too sweet. The tang of quark makes the cake quite different from a cream cheese-based cheesecake, so it’s definitely worth making quark for it. It’s not too fiddly, and it’s a less time consuming way to get your quark fix than a trip to Germany!

Ingredients for the Quark Filling
fills a 22cm short crust pastry case
250g quark
130g castor sugar
2 eggs, separated
rind of half a lemon
50g butter (melted)
30g gluten free plain flour
80g raisins soaked in rum

Method for the Quark Filling
1. Preheat the oven to 160 degrees Celcius.
2. Separate the eggs.
3. Combine the yolks and half the sugar with the quark. Mix it thoroughly.
4. Add the lemon zest, then the melted butter and mix well.
5. Sift in the flour and combine.
6. Drain the raisins (which you’ve soaked in rum for at least an hour), and add them too. Ensure they are well drained or the alcohol could curdle the mixture.
7. Beat the egg whites with the other half of the sugar until stiff peaks form.
8. Add 1/4 of the egg white to the quark mixture and fold in.
9. Then fold in the remainder of the beaten egg whites.
10. Pour into a cooled pastry case (22cm diameter).
11. Bake at 160 degrees Celcius for ~45 min. When the cake is cooked the centre will spring back when lightly touched and a skewer will come out clean.

Ingredients for the Olive Oil Short Crust (gluten free)
alternatively blind bake your favourite short crust pastry in a 22cm tart tin
200g gluten free plain flour
50g brown rice flour
50g castor sugar
1/4 cup olive oil
1/2 cup water

Method for the Olive Oil Short Crust (gluten free)
1. Preheat the oven to 200 degrees Celcius.
2. Combine the sifted flours and sugar with the olive oil.
3. Add the water very gradually until the dough comes together in a ball. You won’t need all the water, so add it only a little at a time.
4. Roll out the pastry on a lightly floured board until it is the right size for your 22cm tart tin. Loosen the pastry with a palette knife and roll it around your rolling pin while you transport it into the pan. If it cracks (and since it’s gluten free you’re a hero if it doesn’t), then poke it together with your fingers.
5. Prick the pastry with a fork and cover lightly with uncooked rice, then bake blind for ~25 mins at 200 degrees Celcius.

Homemade chocolate sauce

A little while ago we invented a new homemade chocolate sauce from some half-remembered chocolate sauce recipes and the ingredients we had to hand. We’ve been meaning to post about it, but we’ve just been too busy eating it. We find it goes very well as topping on ice cream.

It’s very simple to make.

Ingredients

2 tablespoons cocoa powder
2 tablespoons honey
2 tablespoons water

Method

Put all the ingredients in a saucepan and simmer on low heat, stirring occasionally. Adjust quantities of ingredients to taste. Serve as soon as the sauce reaches the desired level of viscosity (about 5 min should be long enough for a nice gooey ice cream topping).

The sauce also works very well as chocolate flavouring in homemade milkshakes, but that’s the topic of another post. The sauce goes well with pretty much everything that cows give us – as Ogden Nash would say:

The cow is of the bovine ilk,
One end is moo, the other, milk.

Guylian Cafe

The Vegaquarian recently asked me out for dinner and a lecture. It sounded like a nice idea for a girls night out. Even if the American Recession wouldn’t have been my first choice of lecture topic, I thought it would be worth seeing. I was also drawn in by the prospect of dinner at the Guylian Cafe. As it turns out the lecture was quite interesting although it would have been useful to have some prior knowledge of economics.

I resisted the temptation to ride the new office elephant to get there. I think she’s only really good for trips down the corridor. Preferably after hours when you won’t get spotted.

When we arrived at the Guylian Cafe we decided to have a main course as well as a dessert. The Vegaquarian loves her salmon, so the Smoked Salmon Salad with capers was the obvious choice for her. It arrived with plenty of salmon, rocket and capers.

I couldn’t resist the goats cheese in the Vegetarian Salad, so it was my choice. I really liked the pine nuts and currants and I would have been happy to have more of these. I found the salad dressing a bit vinegary, especially with the tangy goats cheese. Overall the salad was pleasant, but it seemed light and small for a meal. There is a good reason for this though and that’s saving room for pudding. A light salad is the perfect choice before a big rich dessert. This is a good piece of menu planning – well done Guylian.

The Vegaquarian is on a mission to try Affogato at every restaurant she visits. The Guylian Affogato lost points for being served with the coffee already poured onto the icecream. This removed a certain level of interactivity and affected the temperature of the dessert. What the Affogato did score well for was the liqueur. It was chocolatey and creamy. A perfect addition to the coffee and icecream.

I had a Chocolate Passion Shake. The passion in the name made me expect passionfruit, but there wasn’t any. The passion must refer to a passion for chocolate not passionfruit. That’s a good kind of passion too. The shake was served in a really tall glass, but luckily the large quantity didn’t mean any compromise in quality. The shake was rich with chocolate and icecream. I really enjoyed it, but I have to warn you it was really filling. I was very glad I’d had a salad for first course when I had to fit in a dessert like that.

On the whole I enjoyed the Guylian Cafe. The service was fine and the view at Circular Quay was lovely. It’s quite expensive at $10-15 for even the simpler desserts. The quality of the food is good though. In the chocolate cafe stakes I would say I preferred Guylian to Lindt, but my favourite is still Koko Black.

As well as the difference in food, I wonder if these cafes differ in their levels of girliness. Alternatively maybe the differences in clientele on my visits were related to the time of day. When I’ve been to Lindt in the afternoon it has felt like most of the tables were groups of women and the only men there were accompanying women. At Guylian the eaters seemed more mixed and there were even some men eating there without women. I wonder if that was because it was dinner time or if different types of chocolate attract different consumers?

Guylian Cafe
Shop 10 Opera Quays
3 Macquarie St
Sydney

Ratings (out of 5 snorts)

Price	2 snorts
Taste	4 snorts
Service	3 snorts
Atmosphere	4 snorts