Spiced Plum and Honey Cakes - Kids in the kitchen

I arrived home a few days ago to my daughter Poppy (10 years old) having made this plum cake. My hubby has been trying to educate our family to work more with seasonal ingredients and it's something the children are taking part in with great enthusiasm. Grandma Kiwicakes plum tree was raided for this cake.

The smell upon entering our home was incredible. Poppy tells me this was the most complicated recipe she's ever tackled. She said nothing was hard, but for her there were a lot of steps.

Poppy decided to make a cinnamon honey whipped cream to go with it. She tells me she "just added cinnamon and honey to whipped cream, until it tasted right". By the time I arrived home the cake had already been sampled, however Poppy had taken photos for me.

The recipe is from my recently purchased book Love, Bake, Nourish by Amber Rose. It's been a great find. Amber Rose offers great tips on the health benefits of many of the ingredients listed. A lot of the recipes exclude sugar and refined flours and there are great gluten free options too.

Recipe reproduced with permission from Love Bake Nourish by Amber Rose, with photography by Ali Allen. Published by Kyle Books and distributed in New Zealand by New Holland, RRP $45.00

Spiced plum & honey cake

This cake works particularly well made with smallish dark red plums that are really sweet. The plum season comes just as the evenings start to get shorter and you can feel a chill in the air. I really enjoy this time of year, when the leaves turn a golden amber and dew-laden spiders’ webs line the woodland pathways. It’s the onset of the season for comfort food and best-loved jumpers.

serves 8–10

180g white spelt flour, sifted

2 teaspoons baking powder

130g ground almonds

½ teaspoon ground cinnamon

½ teaspoon ground cardamon

½ teaspoon ground star anise

5 large free-range eggs, separated

240g unsalted butter, softened

210g honey

400g plums, halved and stoned

Unrefined icing sugar, for dusting (optional)

Preheat the oven to 180°C. Grease and flour a 22cm loose-bottomed cake tin.

Start by mixing all the dry ingredients in a medium bowl. In a separate bowl, beat the egg yolks, butter and honey with an electric hand mixer until thick and smooth. Gently fold in the dry ingredients.

In a separate, very clean bowl, whisk the egg whites until stiff, then fold them, a third at a time, into the cake mix, ensuring that they are thoroughly incorporated.

Scrape the mixture into the prepared tin and level the surface with the back of a spoon or a palette knife. Place the plums cut-side down on top of the cake mix. Transfer to the oven and bake for 45 minutes or until a skewer inserted into the centre comes out clean. Remove from the oven and leave to cool for 10 minutes in the tin before carefully turning out onto a wire rack to finish cooling. Dust with icing sugar, if you like.

As a tea cake this doesn’t seem to need anything else, but if you are eating it as a pudding, it’s very good with a little cream or Greek yogurt sweetened with honey.

Rocky Road - with freeze dried strawberries & raspberries

This Rocky Road could not be simpler and it tastes better than any Rocky Road I've ever tried. In a bowl simply place one bag of mini marshmallows (if you buy the gluten free ones, this entire recipe will be gluten free). Add nuts of your choice, I used two handfuls of walnut pieces. I used half a bag of Freeze dried strawberry slices or raspberries per batch. My silicone baking pan is aprx 28x18cm but any size will do. Melt 500g of dark or milk chocolate over a double boiler and stir through your dry mixture.

Allow to cool at room temperature. I reserved some of the prettier slices of freeze dried strawberry for the top of my strawberry batch, I placed them on top before the chocolate set. For my raspberry batch (below), I used some of the crumbled pieces from the bottom of the packet, to sprinkle over the top.

For my strawberry batch I sprinkled over edible gold glitter.

All packaged up ready to give as gifts for Christmas, but they would make lovely gifts all year round.

Gluten Free Feijoa cake

Last week you may recall, I posted this recipe for gluten free Mandarin cake. Over the weekend, I looked at our poor feijoa trees which are still groaning under the weight of all their fruit and decided to give the same recipe a go, substituting the feijoa for the mandarin in the recipe. it turned out just great, I used the skin and all. It tasted amazing!

Mandarin cake - (Gluten free) with marzipan mandarins

This cake was so much fun and so quick to decorate. At my home, our family has committed to eating more seasonally and making good use of all the produce growing right on our section. I made this cake, this week for my husband's birthday, he is not a fan of icing, so this cake was perfect for him. The recipe was from Julie Le Clerc's Favourite Cakes book and Julie in conjunction with her publisher's Penguin, she graciously granted her permission to reprint the recipe for you all.
I originally tried the coconut version of this recipe, as one of my staff members Karina had made it. In the recipe Julie suggests options to use either 330g of dessicated coconut or 330g or ground almond. I knew if I tried the almond version I'd really love it (as I'm a huge fan of almond). My staff here at Kiwicake's are just gorgeous, when we are not sharing our baking or cooking, with each other, we are gossiping about recipes or what we are going to bake or cook - it is so inspiring. I am grateful to Karina for discovering this recipe - she tells me she prefers the almond too after having had a slice from this cake.

We planted our little mandarin tree some years ago and despite it's small size it's producing a vast quantity of mandarins at the moment.

I thought the mandarin's made of marzipan would be a nice compliment to the almond in the cake. They are coloured using the new Progel food colouring gel pastes, which I was thrilled with the workability of these gels. I modelled the mandarins using my hands, and just poked the dots on them using a toothpick. I used a small rose leaf cutter and veiner for the leaves.

When I baked this, I did use a springform cake pan as suggested. I fell in love with my new Fat Daddio's brand springform pan. It worked really well, I may use it for quite a few things I think, now that I have invested in one.

Recipe from "Favourite Cakes" by Julie Le Clerc, published by Penguin. The recipe is gluten free. If you do not need it to be gluten free, you can use any icing sugar and baking powder you have on hand.

Mandarin Cake.
600g Mandarins (or oranges) - we've tried both and prefer the madarins
6 eggs
1 cup caster sugar
3 cups of dessicated coconut (225g) or 3 cups of ground almond (330g) I used the ground almond
1tsp gluten free baking powder
gluten free icing sugar to dust

Preheat oven to 160C and grease a 22cm springform cake tin and lightly dust with gluten free flour.
Coarsely chop the mandarins, including the skin but removing any pips and place in a saucepan with enough water to cover.
Bring to the boil, then simmer until mandarin pulp is tender and the liquid has mostly reduced (this will take 30-40 mins). Blend or process to smooth puree and set aside to cool.
PLace eggs and sugar in bowl and whisk with electric mixer until thick, pale and fluffy.
Fold mandarin puree into egg mixture. Fold in coconut or ground almond and baking powder. Pour mixture into prepared tin. Bake for 70 minutes (mine took 65 mins, so check before timer goes off), covering with foil halfway through to avoid over-browning.
Allow to cool in the tin before removing to a serving plate. Dust with icing sugar to serve.

We served this cake, with a mandarin frozen yoghurt - that my ten year old daughter made from a recipe from a children's cook book. The original recipe was apple frozen yoghurt, we adapted it to mandarin flavoured by switching out the apple juice and changing it for the juice of mandarins. When choosing your apples, use a mild apple (not a strong sour one, such as Granny Smith) as the mandarin is sour enough. It was the perfect accompaniment.

Mandarin frozen yoghurt.
1/3 cup honey
1/2 cup juice squeezed from mandarins
1 tsp gelatine
500g greek yoghurt
3/4 cup grated peeled apple

Put honey and mandarin juice in a saucepan and stir on low heat until the honey has melted. Cool for 5 minutes. Then add gelatine, stir until dissolved.
Put yoghurt, grated apple and gelatine mixture in to a loaf pan (on our second attempt we used a silicone loaf pan, so it was much easier to turn out, than from a metal pan. We found this very difficult to scoop, to we cut slices from the loaf and it looked quite stylish on the plate, next to the cake when served.

Both recipes worked well with children helping, as all of the steps were very simple to follow. The hardest part for them was waiting for things to cool, to move on to the next step