This is an *epic* cake. It’s so damn tasty, and it’s gluten free so it will satisfy all your friends. Even those afraid of the South Park Gluten Free Ebola penis issue. (Lachlan, I’m looking at you!)

You don’t need to use blood oranges, that’s just what I had on hand when first working on the recipe. Also the coconut crunch can be substituted with almond meal, again, just what was in the pantry closely matching almond meal when I only had 200g.

Top this one with some candied orange slices and in addition to looking amazing you will also benefit from the extra caloric intake.

Ingredients

• 2 blood oranges, washed
• 200g caster sugar, plus extra for dusting
• 5 duck eggs
• 200g almond meal
• 50g Banaban coconut crunch
• 1 tsp baking powder
• Rind of 2 more oranges

Method

1. Bring a large pot of water to the boil. Wash the oranges and cook in the boiling water for 2 hours. Drain, allow to cool to room temperature, then puree. This step can be done ahead of time.
2. Preheat the oven to 160°C. Grease and line a 22 cm spring form cake tin with baking paper. Beat the eggs and caster until well combined. Stir in the orange puree, orange rind, followed by the almond meal, coconut crunch and baking powder.
3. Pour the batter into the prepared tin and dust the top with extra caster sugar. Bake for 1-1¼ hours, until the top is golden and a skewer inserted into the centre comes out clean.
4. Allow to cool in the tin. Dust with icing sugar, cut into slices and serve.

This weekend I attended a wedding in a gorgeous little country town, Yungaburra. The wedding was at the groom’s parent’s house, which is a quintessential country Queenslander with views of green rolling hills.

It’s also our regional food bowl, and I was pretty excited when I found a heavily-laden cumquat tree in fully fruited glory. I wet myself with excitement when the Groom’s dad said that they don’t use them, and I should take as many as I want. So I practically picked off the whole tree.

To celebrate a friend’s Australian permanent residency I’ve made a lemon cheesecake. It’s a bit of a challenge to bake anything at the moment because our oven is busted and needs a nice electrician man to fix it. So, a no-bake lemon cheesecake it is. Oh, and I’ve got no biscuits, and my bra’s already off, so I’m not going out for biscuits. So I need to invent a new base too. Luckily for me, I found inspiration all over the place.

No Biscuit Base

I was very pleased to find Jordans Muesli had a cheesecake recipe on their site. Since I can’t get their muesli in Australia, I just used what I had in the cupboard, but borrowed their proportions. Thanks Jordans!

• 150g muesli
• 100g butter, melted
• 25g brown sugar

Base Method

1. I blitzed up the muesli in the food processor until it was almost powdery, still had some chunky bits, and added the brown sugar and butter.
2. Press it into the tin just like you normally would with any cheesebase base.
3. Pop him into the fridge to get super firm.

Lemon No Bake Filling

I did loads of research into this bit, because I was really determined to have a gelatine-free cheesecake. My previous attempts at using gelatine in cheesecakes have been a disaster, with gluggy gelatine all thru the mix. I’ve become really scared of using it!

I found a couple of recipes that seemed very confident of the mixture thickening appropriately, but alas in their reviews loads of people also had trouble thickening. This recipe from Exclusively Food even had great photos along the method. So, it was gelatine time. In the end, the recipe I used was most similar to the Lemon Icebox Cheesecake from tastebook.

• 250g cream cheese
• 395g (1 can) sweetened condensed milk
• ½ cup lemon juice
• Rind of 1 lemon
• 2½ tsp powdered gelatine

Lemon Filling Method

1. Using my KitchenAid food mixer, I mixed the cream cheese until it was light and creamy. The same texture as if I was making cream cheese frosting. This took a fair while.
2. Add the lemon rind, mix mix mix.
3. Gradually add the sweetened condensed milk. Stir down the sides quite a bit during these 1st 2 steps.
4. Sprinkle the gelatine on the lemon juice, and wait for 5 minutes for it all to be wet and spongy.
5. Sit the container with the lemon juice in a bowl of boiling water to dissolve all the gelatine. I used a pyrex jug for the lemon juice to make this a bit easier. You don’t want to get the lemon juice too hot at this stage. Be especially careful to make sure you have no chunky bits of gelatine.
6. Add all the lemon juice/gelatine mix to the mixer, and mix really well. The mix should thicken a bit.
7. Pour into your chilled base, and return to the fridge.

Cumquat Jelly

I had heaps of trouble finding a recipe for this. Most recipes want you to make a jelly like you would make a jam, so finding something which was set firm with gelatine was a real struggle. Eventually I found Cross Creek Cookery. A zany and quirky book of Southern American cuisine written in the 1940s. Thankfully they came to the rescue with their kumquat jelly recipe. Incidentally if you want to know how to cook bear or alligator, you should buy the book!

• 4 cups cumquats, sliced
• ½ cup sugar
• 125ml Sauternes, or some other sweet white wine
• 40ml orange liqueur
• 1 tbsp powdered gelatine
• 2 tbsp cold water
• A few grains salt

Adventurous Jelly Mould

Jelly Method

1. Put all your sliced cumquats in a saucepan, and cover with some water.
2. Bring slowly up to the boil, and simmer for 30 minutes.
3. Drain your cumquats, and push the refuse through your sieve to extract more flavour and juice. You want to end up with 1½ cups cumquat juice.
4. Sprinkle the gelatine over the cold water. Let sit overnight allow the gelatine to swell up.
5. Return the juice back to the saucepan, add sugar, wine and liqueur. Heat until almost boiling.
6. Add the gelatine mixture, and the salt. Stir until fully dissolved.
7. Cool for about 1 hour, and slowly pour some of the mixture over your chilled cheesecake. I poured over the back of a spoon just to make extra sure that I didn’t melt the layer below.

You’ll have a fair bit of jelly left over. Pop into some jelly moulds, or some glasses and have on their own. It’s an amazingly sweet and tart jelly!  I did find this wicked looking jelly mould, it would work great.

Here’s the cheesecake from the top!

I’ve always wanted to go to the USA for their 4th of July celebrations. All countries have a magical air about them on their national day, and the USA isn’t the only country I’d love to visit during their special celebrations.

At home we often cook a country’s cuisine on their national day, so Independance Day is just another reason to try to cook interesting foods, and evaluate which cuisines we like.

For 4th July we opted for gourmet hot dogs, which many would turn their nose up at, but these were no ordinary dogs. Then to finish off the meal, we baked a sweet potato pie.

Here’s (loosely) the recipe.

Sweet Shortcrust Pastry

I’m in morbid fear of pastry. I usually get very angry at it because it’s troublesome. In light of this, I followed the Masterchef recipe.

Sweet Potato Filling

The filling recipe is mostly courtesy Oprah, but I did modify her version quite a bit in the spices end. This is a US version, so the weights are not metric, and the cup sizes are different to that in Australia.

• 1 pound (2 medium) sweet potatoes, baked and peeled
• 1 cup packed dark brown sugar
• 1½ tsp. ground cinnamon
• ½ tsp. ground cloves
• 1 tsp. ground allspice
• 1¼ tsp. ground nutmeg
• 2 tsp. ground ginger
• 1 tsp. salt
• 4 eggs
• 1 cup heavy cream
• ¼ cup (½ stick) butter, melted and cooled slightly

Directions

Preheat oven to 350°F.

In a food processor fitted with a metal blade, puree sweet potatoes.

In a bowl, mix together brown sugar, cinnamon, allspice, nutmeg, and salt, breaking up any lumps.

In another bowl, whisk together eggs and cream.

Add spice/sugar mix to the pureed sweet potatoes, pulse until combined.

Add egg and cream mixture, pulse till combined, then pulse in melted butter.

Spoon filling into par-baked pie crust and flatten out the top. Bake for 30-45 minutes, until filling is set in the center.

Eat. It’s so yum!

It’s not uncommon that I would bake my own birthday cake. While it seems sad, it really is a great time to experiment with new technique because if it goes wrong you’re not stuffing up someone else’s birthday! Here’s what I came up with for the year 33.

Ingredients

• 1 mango
• 1 really ripe large banana
• 250g almond meal
• ½ cup brown sugar
• ½ cup macadamia nuts, chopped
• 3 eggs
• ¼ cup coconut oil
• 3 tsp vanilla paste
• 2 tsp baking powder
• ½ cup extra chopped mango

Method

1. Add mango flesh, banana, sugar, vanilla paste, oil and eggs to a food processor. Blitz until really well combined. Try to make sure there are no more fruit chunks.
2. Add almond meal and baking powder. Blitz until just combined. Don’t overdo it here.
3. Stir thru macadamia nuts and chopped mango.
4. Bake in a round springform pan for 45-50 minutes at 180C.