Aphra

When I was a teenager in high school our "domestic science" teacher taught us to make strudel dough, and I can remember making it at least once at home. This same teacher taught us to make rough puff pastry and some other things for which I can only admire her guts. But if she could teach a class full of fifteen year olds to make strudel dough, I don't think you've got anything to be afraid of. I bought two of the Time/Life "The Good Cook" series at a thrift shop recently, and the "Cakes and Pastries" one has a step by step guide to strudel dough.

I have had a can explode. I had a long phone call and forgot about topping up the water in the pot. There was an almighty bang and sticky, semi-caramelized, condensed milk went everywhere. And I do mean everywhere. It took me hours to clean up the mess.

Not a pastry, but what about a take on classic Pêche Melba? Poached peaches with raspberry sauce and vanilla ice-cream. Epicurious have a couple of nice variations.

Hey a local almost. :-) Diggers Seeds also own the Garden of St Erth in Blackwood, which is a bit closer to Daylesford than Dromana. They carry a wide range of vegetable and herb seeds, as well as plants in pots. Lots of unusual and exotic varieties. The advantage of the Garden of St Erth is is that they carry stock which will grow successfully in this climate. http://www.diggers.com.au/GardensStErth.htm There is also Kyldara Park Herb Farm in Trentham. http://www.kyldaraherb.com.au/ Sadly, although it's just up the road from me, I've never visited it, so don't know if they sell herbs, but I'd assume so.

It's not an expert opinion or anything, but provided your yeast is nice and active, which it looked like it was, there's no real reason why your bread shouldn't rise, eventually. I would usually consider the times in bread recipes as a guide, rather than being prescriptive, and if my bread hadn't risen adequately in whatever the recipe's time frame was, I'd have just given it more time. I think that if you'd given your bread a bit more time at the stages where you felt it wasn't working properly, you'd have got a good result. There are a lot of variables with bread making, and I've found it's more effective, for me at least, to work to how the bread looks and feels, than to the times in the recipes.

Here are two cakes I make all the time, they are both from Claudia Roden's "Book of Middle Eastern Food", but because I've been asked for the recipes a lot, I've rewritten both recipes to reflect my own practic, so I think they're OK as far as copyright goes. I've specified flour for the pans, lately I've been using oil spray which works just as well, so the flour isn't necessary. I've also used a little caster sugar instead of flour (I'm not sure what caster sugar is in American terminology, it's fine sugar in the grade between powdered sugar and ordinary sugar). I've done a rough translation of these amounts from lbs and ozs to metric, but it's not a cake where exactness matters hugely. 250g good quality dark chocolate 2 tablespoons milk 125g ground almonds (I like to buy raw almonds with skin and grind them myself in the food processor. The final result is a bit coarser than if you buy ready ground almonds, but you get a nice almondy flavour because the almonds tast fresher. Or you can buy ready ground almond meal.) 6 tablespoons sugar 6 eggs, separated butter, flour for the pan. Melt the chocolate with the milk. I like to separate the eggs, beat the whites until stiff, and then beat the yolks separately with the sugar until they are white and fluffy. I think this makes for a cake with a bit lighter texture, but you don't have to do this is you're short of time. Just beat the whites until stiff. Mix the melted chocolate with the ground almonds, sugar and egg yolks. Fold the stiffened egg whites through. I've found that the easiest thing to make this cake in is one of those cake tins with the detachable bottoms, ring tins? But whatever you use, you need a reasonable sized one, since the cake rises more than you would expect. Grease the cake tin with butter and sprinke with flour. Bake in a moderate oven (about 230-250 I suppose) for 3/4 to 1 hour. It's cooked when it's just set in the middle, but a bit of time more or less doesn't make a lot of difference. It's supposed to be a bit squidgy. The cake will rise a lot, but as it cools it will slump, that's part of the deal. You can get it to slump less if you turn the oven off, open the door and leave the cake to cool slowly. You can sprinkle it with caster sugar, but I prefer cocoa. It's great hot, or cool, served with cream or raspberry puree. It keeps for days, it freezes well and it's just yummy. It's hard to get wrong really. I've made it so many times that the page in the book is all covered in chocolate blobs and you can't read some bits of the recipe. Here's another one which is just as easy and just as good to eat. From the same book...you'll get this in groovy restaurants in Melbourne a lot..but it's dead simple to make, you just have to allow more time. Orange almond cake 2 large or 4 small oranges 6 eggs 250g ground almonds 250g sugar 1 teaspoon baking power although this is not in the recipe, I add about a tablespoon full of orange flower water, but no big deal if you don't have it. flour and butter for the cake tin. Wash, then boil the unpeeled oranges in some water for about 2 hours, or until they've gone very soft. Put the whole oranges through a sieve or something, (to get rid of the pips, although I'm so lazy I just whack them in the food processor and whizz them up pips and all). Beat the eggs and sugar in a bowl, add the almonds and orange pulp and then cook as above. Same deal with the tin. This cake will take a bit longer to cook, so about an hour, but again, it's very squidgy and heavy. It looks a bit peculiar, but it tastes wonderful.

That's pretty much it. I spent most of last winter making sourdough and getting the hang of that, which was fun, but after a while I craved the "wheatiness" of ordinary yeasted bread. The technique I use for yeasted bread is pretty much the same way I've been doing it for twenty-odd years ... the only difference is that instead of kneading it, I experimented with the stretch and fold technique because I'm lazy. It's the long, slow, cool fermentation which gives the flavour. In Australia Pasta Dura is a name for a kind of bread, commonly found in Italian bakeries and restaurants. It's typically white bread with a very crunchy, almost hard crust and a very soft interior. There is a recipe for it in Carol Field's "The Italian Baker". She describes it as a "hard, matte crust and a dense, stark, white, slightly cottony interior". It's a very dry, hard dough ... I've never made it because it sounds like very hard work. If the bread had a crunchy crust, it probably didn't have a high proportion of fats. I think that the more fat in a bread dough, the softer the crust is going to be, although I'm happy to be proved wrong, since that's just my experience, and based on nothing else. Carol Field also has a recipe for bread made with durum flour, which is excellent. I've made it a number of times.

I've made quite a lot of yeasted bread over the years, and I would probably use even less yeast than that for 1kg of flour, maybe a teaspoon which I think is about 7g? I'm not very accurate, I tend to make bread a lot by general feel. I usually set my bread up at night, using cold water and leave it in a cool place overnight to rise, the next morning do a gentle stretch and fold and leave it for the day and bake at night. The bread will have a lovely taste of wheat. I'm not convinced that yeasted bread is inferior to sourdough, it's just different. My technique is an adaptation of Elizabeth David's basic bread from "English Bread and Yeast Cooking" ... and the stretch and fold technique works just as well for yeasted bread as for sourdough, to my mind. I don't get all carried away with bread flour, it's not that easy to find in Australia anyway, and on the odd occasions I've used high protein flour the end result wasn't all that happy. I look for a decent, unbleached, all-purpose flour and use that, or organic flour when I'm feeling wealthy. Did the bread you had in the restaurant have a very crunchy crust? Italian Pasta Dura has a very light, soft interior. It might also have been bread made with the addition of butter or milk to the dough, adding fats will give you a very soft crumb.

Thank you so much for your kind offer Kathryn. I live in Central Victoria, but I go into the Vic Market once a fortnight or so. Today I went to the Asian supermarket across the road from the Market and bought a packet of Yunnan tea, which is doing very well as an every day sort of tea. I'm saved! Of course, now I'm actually thinking about it, there is also a tea and coffee shop inside the Vic Market. Next week I'm going to be in Melbourne for a meeting at RMIT, and I know there is a specialist tea shop in the Queen Victoria centre, so I'll visit them. Thank you all for your help.

After a brief flirtation with coffee in my youth, I have returned to the home of my grandmothers and am now, once again a tea drinker with a minor flirtation with decent coffee. Upon my return I realised that I much preferred China tea to Indian and Ceylon teas. Well, that wasn't a problem really, lazy human that I am, I could buy Twinings China Black in tea bags and be happy. In the summer I drank Lapsang with a little lemon or maybe a nice cup of Earl Grey, and all was well. For a little while. But the sudden influx of flavoured teas and ten varieties of green tea and whatnot invaded the supermarket shelves and suddenly China Black was no more. Oh well. For a little while I drank Russian Caravan, which wasn't quite it, but better than nothing. And then by accident I discovered Twinings Yunnan Tea and I was back in business. For a little while. I was even makiing special trips to the only supermarket I knew which carried the Yunnan. But then the Yunnan went the way of China Black and even Russian Caravan is losing ground to three hundred varieties of tea flavoured with white chocolate and toenails or used bandaids and rosewater, or whatever. So the question is now, what am I going to drink? I'm obviously going to have to break out my teapot and visit speciality stores, but I'm a little lost by the varieties of loose China tea available. I've visited Grey and Seddon online, and they look promising (I'm in Australia), but I don't know what to buy. I do drink White Tea and Chai tea, Yerba Mate sometimes and some herbal teas, but what I really want is a decent black tea as my every day tea, so that I can come home, put on the kettle and make myself a nice cup of tea. Any suggestions would be very welcome.

I like bread salad. There's a recipe here, but I just mix cubes of firmish bread (i.e., not supermarket type fluffy bread) with some chopped, ripe tomatoes, lots of olive oil and some good, red wine vinegar and let stand a bit and then add some red onion, maybe some diced cucumber or whatever I feel like. I also have a recipe which I think I made up, although I'm sure it's not original. Fry lots of garlic and a couple of hot chillis in olive oil, spoon out the chillis and garlic and keep aside and add a couple of cups of coarse breadcrumbs to the oil and fry til the breadcrumbs are crisp and brown, then mix the garlic and chilli back in. You can add this as a topping to all sorts of things ... I like to cook some pasta shells, mix them quickly with ricotta cheese and chopped parsley and serve with some of the garlic/chilli/breadcrumbs spooned over the top. I like the contrast of smooth bland cheese with the spicy, crunchy breadcrumbs. Or you can make bread and butter pudding ... I like my bread and butter pudding very plain with just milk and eggs with a bit of sugar and some vanilla, topped with buttered bread and baked til the bread is brown and the custard just set. Makes a great breakfast cold!

I don't know about elsehwhere, but in Australia you can often find liquid glucose at pharmacies, that might be worth a try.

A local cafe had rhubarb danishes last weekend which looked great although I didn't try one ... I was seduced by the home-made doughnuts. Elizabeth David has an apple crumble recipe which is a favourite of mine, the crumble is more like a shortbread flavoured with powdered ginger. I like to make it with a very tart apple puree because I like the contrast of the sweet crumble and the tart apple. I think it would work very well with rhubarb, especially with the ginger. The recipe is in her "Spices, Salts and Aromatics in the English Kitchen" and I think the recipe is called Apple Grassmere.

I bought four quinces today, not sure what I'm going to do with them yet. I particularly like them simmered in red wine, sugar and spices (cinnamon, cloves, vanilla, black pepper, ginger, nutmeg, allspice and lemon peel). Peel, core and slice them and then let them cook gently until they turn ruby red and the wine has gone a little syrupy. Then serve warm with lots of thick cream. I love quince jam, I made quince ice-cream a long time ago which was wonderful, and I remember a recipe for quince tart with browned butter which was delicious, but I don't know that I still have the recipe.

I love Maple syrup, although it's fairly pricey in Australia, and you're more likely to get the "maple flavoured" stuff at cafes. The organic stuff is around $13 for 250ml, and ordinary CAMP brand, which is available at supermarkets is about half that price for the same quantity. I've actually toyed with the idea of planting sugar Maples for myself, since I live in a frost and snow prone area, but I don't think I'll be up to caring about syrup after the forty years it takes to mature some trees. Thanks to Verjuice for her idea about Maple syrup and yoghurt. Last week I bought a tub of "Greek-style" yoghurt which had some caramel syrup added, which was nice, but the caramel was pretty ordinary and commercial tasting. A nice idea, I thought, but could have been better done. But now I have a better idea! Yesterday I bought myself a big tub of sheep's milk yoghurt, so I think lunch tomorrow will be yoghurt with a big drizzle of maple syrup. Yum.

Thank you eGullet for this thread and in particular for Maida Heatter's Palm Beach Brownies! That was one of my favourite dessert recipes ... I cut it out of a newspaper years ago, but when I moved house a couple of years ago, the clipping disappeared. I looked for it on the Net, but to no avail, despite it being quite distinctive. I'm delighted to have it again.

The best marmalade I've eaten is kumquat marmalade. I don't make it myself, but I've got a couple of friends who keep me supplied, and come winter when citrus are in season again, I intend to do it myself just to make sure there's no interruption in supply. It's tart and orangey and altogether wonderful. It's excellent on toast, and then I made little shortbread tarts and filled them with the marmalade. Sweet, buttery tart pastry and sharp, citrusy marmalade filling, just perfect.

Hello everyone. I finally got around to joining eGullet, just so I could respond to this thread, but now I don't need to. But what I was going to say was that it seemed to me you were using a lot of yeast for that amount of flour, when I use instant dry yeast I'd probably use about a 1/4 to half teaspoon for around a kilo of flour depending on how much time I'm willing to give the bread. That would give me two, or if I'm being lazy, three risings of the dough. I use cold water and raise bread at room temperature in the coolest room I have, or in the fridge. I prefer the taste of bread given long, cool rises. Elizabeth David's "English Bread and Yeast Cookery" has a really good chapter on amounts of yeast versus amounts of flour and rising time. She does suggest that if you're using the instant dry yeast as opposed to the usual dry yeast, that you more or less halve the amount of yeast you're using. When I'm making yeasted bread, I try and use the smallest amount of yeast I can, and rely on longer rising times. I treat instant and normal dry yeast in the same way, mixed straight into the flour. If you're interested, David has a recipe for bread which starts out with a very small amount of yeast, and has flour and water added to it over two or three days. It's a fun experiment and I did it years ago and it produced very nice bread, but the method was a bit fussy for every day use. From memory it's called Scotch rise bread. I'd been making household bread for many years when I came across David's book, and I remember reading it like it was a novel I was so fascinated by the way she laid out how bread worked. I have a lot of other bread books now, but I still go back to David for my everyday bread ... in fact I wore out my first copy of her book and had to buy another one. Just as an aside, while I'm talking about bread (and it's my first post so I hope you'll be patient with me), I've been experimenting with making yeasted bread, but using sourdough methods. Essentially I use about 1/4 teaspoon of instant dry yeast to about a kilo of flour, including a cup of wheatgerm. I make up a fairly wet dough, and use the fold and turn method instead of kneading. This makes lovely bread, with something of the texture of sourdough, but with a very sweet, almost innocent taste of wheat. Lately I've preferred this bread to the sourdough I've been making all winter (it being summer now in Australia).