I’m not used to big, chewy, sugar-and-butter-laden, chocolate-chippified snacks. I’m typing at the speed of sound while doing a bidding war on eBay for something I don’t want while Skypeing with my Nan and singing along to Depeche Mode. I’ve never felt so ALIVE!

Oh, now I’m sad. Another cookie, please.

Once-baked would just be, er, scotti?

Today I made biscotti! Never done that before. Today I also built a garden bed! Also never done that before, and, while satisfying, it was slightly less interesting than the biscotti. Although both lacked conflict and drama, and therefore the narrative structure for either is pretty weak. But the biscotti is pretty pretty! So there’s that. (There’s what?)

line 'em up!

Biscotti, in case you can’t be arsed looking it up on Wikipedia, means “twice baked” (from medieval Latin via modern Italian), and they are pretty fantastic. If you like crunchy biscuits, boy howdy are you going to love these babies. They can be really simple — these ones are flavoured with just lemon zest and chopped almonds — or really lush and decadent — I found plenty of double chocolate biscotti and chocolate-drizzled biscotti and so on. Man, people get carried away.  Biscotti seem very easy to make: you mix the wet, mix the dry; combine into a thick, tacky dough, then shape into two loaves and bake them. Cool, slice, then re-bake until they’re dry and hard. Ta-da! You just made biscotti! (In your mind. In real life you just read a sentence on a blog.)

crumb close-up, pre-second bake

Sifting through all the recipes for biscotti, you can’t help but notice people love to jump on board the Excess train to FlavourWorld. I always thought of biscotti as a pretty restrained kinda biscuit, with a few nuts or maybe some spices, but you really notice how many people run with the opportunity to add more flavourings.

I’m sympathetic: I know the itch to add more. But…c’mon guys.  It’s like a phobia of simplicity. Cake is fine, but it isn’t TRIPLE DECKER CHOCOLATE CAKE STUFFED WITH PRUNES STUFFED WITH MASCARPONE DRIZZLED WITH MAPLE SYRUP AND CRUMBLED HAM.  Cheesecake is just embarrassing unless you’ve made the base from Mars Bars and then poured peanut butter over the top and sprinkled it with caramel fudge pieces.  Chocolate chip biscuits? Ahem, don’t you mean TRIPLE FUDGE RIPPLE CHOCOMORES WITH TWO TYPES OF CHOCOLATE CHIPS? I mean, settle down, people. Not every recipe has to be cranked up to 11 on the flavour-ometer-tron. There’s deliciousness to be found in simplicity: consider the wonderful flavours of a perfectly ripe tomato, with basil and olive oil. Meditate, if you will, on the perfection of a strawberry, or a piece of warm bread with soft butter. What I’m trying to say here is that delicious, moreish treats are totally possible without adding mini M&Ms and chopped marshmallows and chocolate-covered pineapples. Just relax and keep it simple.

Now we're talking...bake two completed!

After baking my two loaves for about 45 minutes at a pretty low temperature, I let them cool completely on the bench before slicing. I mostly did this because I needed to put the bread in the oven before it overproofed, but it also made sure that the once-baked loaves were firm and hard, and that I could hold them steady while slicing (because frankly, there’s a fair bit of resistance: you’re going to need a big ol’ serrated bread knife). I think I want them in thinner slices, but that will come with practice. A lot of the recipes I found had really mondo uber-fat fingers of biscotti, waaaaay too chunky to dip into your espresso cup. Kind of moving towards a thick finger cookie, really.

Big ol' pile of yes please.

These are delicious. Really awesome.  Really hard, crunchy and dry and perfect for dipping in tea or coffee. Apparently the traditional recipe uses no fat or oils, relying on eggs to provide just enough moisture to bind the dough together.  Normally I love biscuits that are chewy and soft, so God only knows why these babies are rocking my casbah so hard, but I’m not one to ask the probing questions. Clicky for recipe: I used lemon zest instead of orange. I can see room for experimentation: I really like the idea of mixing in some anise or ginger, or maybe trying the apparently ubiquitous craisin-pistachio combo.  But that’s as zany as it’s going to get. None of this chocolate-bacon-caramel-and-froot-loop biscotti business around here, thank you very much.

And talk about easy! Holy nuts, they’re straightforward. Pastry, filling, pastry: BAM. If you use frozen pastry, you’re laughing. I did not, and I was still chuckling. I made a very simple sweetcrust pastry (which, if I’m honest, could’ve used more sugar):

- 200g plain white flour
- 50g white sugar
- 125g butter, cut into small cubes
- some cold water

Mix the flour and sugar, then use your fingers to rub the butter into the flour until the lot is all crumbly and evenly-distributed. Add cold water, a trickle at a time, enough to bring it all together into a firm, soft dough. Not too sticky, not too dry. Shove it in the fridge while you have lunch so that it can chill.

Whole and unspoiled...but therefore imperfect.

Isn’t it beautiful? That’s an M, although it looks like a 3. Or a bird. Let’s say it’s all three and that will solve any arguments.

While the raw dough was chilling, and after I had some lunch, I cooked some apples. I used four, but you could easily use as many as eight and have a much plumper pie. Or you could use apricots, plums, peaches, nectarines, berries — that’s the lovely thing about pies. Like a big, sweet, stiff sandwich, the filling options are infinite. Anyway, four medium-sized apples, peeled, cored and finely sliced, which I simmered in lemon juice and a couple of tablespoons of cinnamon sugar (I think it would work out to roughly two tablespoons of sugar to one of cinnamon, and a generous serve of lemon juice), with about ½ to ¾ cup of water. (I just nuked it in the microwave for ten minutes or so: that did the trick.) Once they were cooked, I drained them.

While the apples were cooling, I rolled out half the pastry and lined a medium-sized pie dish (actually the bottom of the tagine, but who’s asking?) with it, then baked at 180°C for twenty minutes. Which was about seven minutes too long: it came out very brown. Filled it with the cooked, drained apples, then topped with the remainder of the pastry, rolled out nice and thin. Brush the top with milk, then bake for about fifteen to twenty minutes. DONE. CHOP!

Hiyaaaaa!

Actually, it’s best if you let it sit for a while before you cut into it: about half an hour is enough that you won’t burn your mouth when you bite into it. If you’re serving it with ice cream, you can probably start carving after just ten minutes, but you should expect it to melt said ice cream. Here’s M, unable to sustain patience any longer, serving a slice:

Blades of fury!

Ooooh, I forgot: before I put the top layer of pastry on the apples, I put blobs of fig jam here and there on the apples. That made for a delicious surprise when I had my slice. I recommend it.

Afternoon tea. A beautiful place to be.

See, using four apples, I ended up with a pretty slim-line pie. That’s fine, dandy and delicious, but it’s not necessarily an eye-grabbing, cherry-popping show-stopper.  If you really want to wow ‘em (whoever ‘em are) you might want to increase the fruit content so you get that fat domed pie thing happening. Even so, this is a damned tasty snack or breakfast (it will almost certainly be breakfast). I don’t make pies often…but now I’m thinking I should change that. I really like the idea of a breakfast pie, with a muesli/crumble topping instead of a second layer of pastry. Served with yoghurt and honey! Yes. YES.  This is going to be mega.

tumblebrown bix!

I made bikkies! I went to the library! Apparently I am four years old, because this was enough to make me twinkly-cheeked and rosy-eyed. If you are feeling at all ennui-ed, perhaps a little pallid or blue with the ongoing round of daily life, may I suggest a visit to a library and some bikkies to stir your cockles? Sure, it won’t cure your cystitis, but it’ll put a positive spin on it.

Which do you want to hear about first? The library, you say? Huh, I would have thought the biscuits, but okay, whatever. (Here’s another picture of biscuits to keep you going.)

See? Bikkies! Lovely! Keep reading.

To the library! I loved the local library when I was a kid. It was a high point of the school holidays when Mum would take me and my brother there: you had ten books for two weeks. Decadence. I usually had them all bowled over in the first few days, some a few times, and then we’d have to go back for a refill about halfway through the school holidays. This experience was repeated often enough that, in my head, library = magical free book world. So today I went to the library I haunted when I was at uni, reactivated my card and presto! Magical free books! I got a buzz akin to that which I felt as a wee tacker on school holidays — which exploded into a Festival of Wow when the dude at the library desk explained to me that, as a grownup, I was entitled to forty books at once, for up to six months! (Unless someone else puts in a request for one, in which case I have a fortnight to get it back to them.)

I am a happy little camper/clam/Vegemite. Imagine a world where you can just waltz in and borrow books and then, when you’re done, you can give them back. You don’t have to worry about finding room on your bookshelf, or packing them when you move, or anything. SPREAD THE WORD! PEOPLE MUST KNOW!

People must also know about these biscuits.

See, I told you there were bikkies.

Perhaps this was another nostalgia thing? Probably not. Date and ginger biscuits are pretty timeless. My demands: they had to be not-too-sweet, chewy, and totally loaded with ginger. Chewy Spicy Ginger Cookies? Touché, Internet. This recipe has exactly what I want, plus awesome pictures.

Only I couldn’t leave it alone. Two reasons: I lacked molasses and crystallised ginger; I wanted dates. Here’s the recipe, revised for spoonfully tastes (and reflecting gaps in my pantry as I discovered them).

Date and Ginger Chewy Bikkies

What you use:

• 2 ¼ cups all-purpose flour
• 1 tsp baking soda
• 2 tsp ground cinnamon
• ¼ tsp ground nutmeg
• ¼ tsp ground ginger (desperately wanted more: alas for an ill-stocked spice box!)
• ¼ tsp salt
• ⅔ cup dark brown sugar
• ⅓ cup honey
• 1 large egg
• ¼c canola oil
• 2 Tbs fresh grated ginger
• 90g dried dates, finely chopped

What you do:

• Turn the oven on to 180°C/350° F.
• Whisk the honey, brown sugar and oil until it looks thick and mixed; add the egg and ginger and whisk until it’s frisky and foamy.
• Pile the flour into the middle of the wet ingredients, make a little divot in the top, then pile in the dates, baking soda, salt and spices. Mix these into the flour in some sort of half-arsed attempt to make up for your reluctance to comply with the instruction to mix your dry ingredients in a separate bowl. C’mon, we’re not here for a washing up party.
• When you’ve convinced yourself the flour, dates, soda, salt and spices are all properly mixed, get gung-ho and mix them into the wet ingredients waiting below.
• Roll your biscuit dough into wee balls (you may need to dust your hands with flour), put them on a greased tray and flatten slightly. When cooking, they’ll puff up but not spread much, so if you don’t like high-dome bikkies, flatten them more. Shove ‘em in and cook ‘em! Mine took about 12-15 minutes.
• Optional step before putting them in the oven: roll balls in sugiaar, or cinnamon-sugar mix, for crunchy goodness.

What you get:

You will need to provide your own whiskey and pencil.

What you will say:

“Mmmm! Mmmmfff, mmyeah, mmm. Mmm. S’good. Mmmnother, pleeff?”

What I will do slightly differently next time:

• Crystallised ginger. The original recipe has the crystallised ginger mixed through and sprinkled on top, and frankly I think that is the best thing in the universe. Delicious.
• More powdered ginger in the mix — not my fault, but still.
• I overcooked some slightly. I won’t do that again. That should go without saying, but I wanted a third thing so that my “what I would do different” list didn’t contain just “add more ginger”.

I have tasty sexy delicious chewy ginger biscuits. I have library books. I am one happy, if dorky, individual.

Anyway, inspired, I dug out a recipe I’ve been thinking of trying for a while: date and tahini breakfast bars. On Limes and Lycoprene (which is where that link’ll take ya), they look awesome. Sustaining, nourishing, stuffed with nuts and fruit: truly full of promise. But whether it’s because I used home-made tahini or because my dried fruit selection wasn’t as good, mine were surprisingly bland.

Kinda chewy, kinda crunchy: total dud

Like, really bland. Ridiculously bland. It was like the inverse of the saying “the whole is greater than the sum of the parts”. Take dates, pepitas, mixed dried fruit and chopped nuts, and you’ve got yourself a sexy snack (or at least some trail mix) right there — but cooked up into this chewy, texturally-satisfying slice, something mysterious happens. Everything good evaporated out of mine. I really liked the idea of having them on hand like a portable shot of muesli or something, but no dice.

Luckily, heritage cooking to the rescue! Jam drops, from my Mumini’s recipe:

Jam droppery

Ah, a soft and crumbly biscuit with a chewy well of thick jam in the middle. Either plum or fig. You choose. Go on, take one. HAH! You can’t! They’re over here and you’re over there!

M gets one because he baked bread:

Breadosaurus!

Jam drops are, I admit, not nearly as nutritious as the date and tahini bars, but they win the flavour battle hands-down. Once I realised I was eating the date and tahini bars out of obligation, not pleasure, I decided it wasn’t worth. Life’s too short. Do the fun stuff first.

Have I mentioned how much I love carrots? I have one nearly every day, usually around 3:00 pm. If any of my coworkers had to nominate a habit of mine that most annoyed them, it would probably be the long, drawn-out crunching that takes place between 3:00 and 3:30 at my desk every day. They’re slightly sweet, totally juicy, and I love them. It makes my little bunny rabbit heart flutter to know there are some growing in my veggie patch right now, although it may be a race between winter and the carrots. If you’re just starting out learning to love veggies, I recommend reaching for the carrot: you can chop them into sticks and dip them in things, you can shred them and smuggle them into your sandwich or wrap, you can finely grate them and pop them in a quiche, frittata, omelette, spaghetti sauce, whatever. You can juice them: I love carrot juice but it’s hard to come by unless you have a juice at home (and a vast supply of carrots on hand).

Wikipedia tells me that we currently eat the domesticated version of Daucus carota, which was coincidentally my nickname in year 6; they’re loaded with beta-carotene and fibre (I couldn’t tell you why beta-carotene is good for you…something to do with cells?) (also, you probably don’t need/want me to tell you why fibre is good for you); but apart from that, they’re bright, tasty, juicy, crunchy and I love them. I have heard in legend and in song that purple, black and white varieties exist, and that thought keeps me going when insomnia gets the better of me.

So imagine — just picture it — my delight at realising a way of having carrots at breakfast. I know, right? Two of my favourite things: carrots and breakfast. And if I could work out a way to get some oats in there, well…jump back, Loretta.

Knobbly! Brown! All the things I love in cake.

BAM. Carrot cake. Yes. Rendered healthy and breakfasty through the judicious addition of oats, dates and plenty of spices. I give you The Queen of Carrot Flowers Cakes.

What I Put In

• 25g butter, softened
• 3 tablespoons apricot jam
• ¼ cup brown sugar
• 2 eggs
• 9-10 dried dates, finely chopped
• generous splash of vanilla essence
• nutmeg
• cinnamon
• allspice
• generous pinch of salt
• 2 carrots
• 5 cm stick of ginger, quite thick: loads of ginger!
• 1 lemon, zested and juiced
• ½ cup of oats, soaked in 1¼ cups of hot water
• 2 cups plain flour
• 1 tablespoon baking powder
• 2 teaspoons baking soda

How I Put It In And Such

1. Put the oats and water aside to soak for as long as possible. Add the chopped dates.
2. Finely grate the carrot, ginger and lemon zest.
3. Cream the butter with the jam and brown sugar; add the eggs, whipping cheerfully, and the vanilla. Add the spices and salt to taste.
4. Add the grated carrot, ginger and zest and mix well.
5. When the oats are plumped up and cool — if the water is too hot, it will cook the eggs — add to the mix.
6. Juice the lemon into the mix and stir well. Add the flour, baking powder and baking soda and stir until just mixed.
7. Pour batter into a greased loaf tin and bake at 180°C for around 40 minutes. Test with a skewer to see if it’s ready.
8. Let it cool in the tray for 5 minutes or so and then tip onto a rack to cool.

The Queen of Carrot Cakes. Now, let’s not kid ourselves: this is still a cake. It isn’t health food and it doesn’t count towards your 5-to-7-per-day thing. But it is delicious and the oats, ginger and carrot make it less unhealthy than it could be. Still, don’t forget. Cake is a sometimes food. But sometimes I like a robust, moist, chewy, vegetabley cake served with yoghurt and fruit.

Figs, stewed quince, carrot cake. Yes. Yes, please.

Variations: Next time, I will add more brown sugar. It’s just that side of not-quite-sweet enough. If I had some, I would throw in some chunkily-chopped glacé ginger and maybe some candied citrus peel. Nuts, if that’s where you like to park your car, lightly toasted and finely chopped; you could substitute limes for lemon, and turn it more towards the savoury/pfefferneussen family by adding plenty more spices and a generous spray of pepper. There is loads of potential here.

I have heard (over and over) that cooking is art but baking is science: I’m not sure I’m convinced. I think both cooking and baking are science, but I think they’re also art. In this context, I suspect that “art” is shorthand for “gut feeling”, which, if we’re honest, is a combination of “guess-and-check” and “experience”. I tend to cook by feel. I used to be far more delicate about cooking from recipes, especially for cakes and biscuits and the like. However, it’s worth mentioning that I have produced a lot of duds with this approach. I’m not good at gauging sweetness and raising agents: my principal complaint about store-bought cakes and such is that they’re usually too sweet and fluffy, so I err on the side of less when I’m cooking at home. But through experience, I’m getting there, and my guesswork baking is getting better.

Who could say?

Probably. 101 Cookbook’s Bittersweet Chocolate Tart received rave reviews at the party we took it to. You could hear the clink of forks dropped in amazement as people took their first bites. They probably weren’t just being polite. Right? After all, you can’t lie during Earth Hour. The Killer Pandas come after ya. But neither M nor I will ever know for sure.

A hint of mystery surrounded this recipe from the start: the dark chocolate procured from the ANU Food Co-op had limited identifying details. All I can tell you is that it’s 70% cocoa, darkly tasty and comes in huge chunks. M used one of our more fine-tuned kitchen appliances to set the wheels of this mystery in process:

SMASH

And things got increasingly mysterious from there. Also delicious. Here’s the dark chocolate, smashed into slightly smaller chunks:

Chunky, yet enigmatic.

Here’s the pre-baked piecrust (a basic sweetcrust pastry, with white cake flour instead of wholemeal, just to add another twist):

The pie crust of mystery...

Here’s the thick, rich, chocolate filling (just chocolate, cream and eggs):

Mmmmmmmystery...

How can such a simple recipe lead to such mystery? Pour the rich, mysterious chocolate filling into the pre-cooked (and yet strangely mysterious) pie crust, bake for twenty minutes or so to thicken and set, then let it cool before you serve it. We carefully transported it to the Earth Hour party and left it to chill in the fridge while we enjoyed the candlelit ambiance. Later, after much wine and many snacks, a bit of a sing-song and some wikkid drumming, the desserts were circulated. All were a bit cream-heavy for lactose-averse I (including, alas, M’s pie), and M decided to sample the tiramisu first — but in the end, never got to try the pie. And so it is Mystery Pie.

To this day, nobody living in our house knows what the pie tasted like. Its rapid disappearance and some significant heavy breathing and gasps from pie-eating corners of the party all attest to it being something sublime. Some say it tastes like a dark and complex Rachmaninoff élégiaque; others say it is rich and daring like a Pynchon novella. Others claim it tastes kinda chocolatey. It is exciting to preserve the mystery: I will only try it after being blindfolded and driven to an undisclosed location. (Which will add some novelty to the week.) In fact, from now on, I’d like all my meals to be mysterious. I will only eat lunches that have been delivered to my desk while I’m not looking, along with a vaguely threatening note.  All breakfasts must be delivered in some sort of sinister puzzle box that I must solve before I can receive nourishment. And dinner will be served while a crowd of white-robed figures murmurs in the front yard. That should spice things up a bit.

Okay, you’re thinking you know good breakfasts. Fresh fruit and thick yoghurt, or maybe some grilled mushroom bruschetta with crumbled feta, rocket and balsamic vinegar, yeah? Top stuff. Delicious. Let’s knock it up a notch. Let’s leave “good” and try “spectacular”. The French cooking tradition has a few things to say about spectacular breakfasts, but we’re going to zoom in on one thing in particular.

Brioche. Fluffy, eggy, crunchy-crusted rich breakfast bread. Groaning with butter and eggs, the dough is astonishingly silky and supple and produces a bread that is beautiful in its own right, but reaches lofty and seraphic heights with jam or chocolate, or dipped in hot chocolate or coffee. I think the dipping thing is a traditional way of enjoying your brioche, but I can’t find anything online to back me up — could be the dribblings of a mind whose disease has not yet been diagnosed.

Brioche can be made into a loaf or a bunch of little brioche à tête: cute little brioche buns that have a little (usually drunkenly off-centre) nobble head on the top. M didn’t want to make little nobble heads, so these are technically brioche à têtes sans têtes. Actually, each wee brioche is stuffed with a pock of dark chocolate, too (M knows spectacular.), so they’re brioche à têtes au chocolat sans têtes. Or something.

Crunchy yet moist

Brioche à têtes au chocolat sans têtes

A combination of Richard Bertinet’s brioche recipe (from Crust) and ‘The Lazy Man’s Brioche‘ recipe from the Fresh Loaf. Ingredients from Bertinet, technique from the Fresh Loaf. Makes 18.

What goes in ‘em

• 500g bread flour
• 50g sugar
• 10g salt
• 6 large eggs (about 350g), plus one extra for eggwash
• 250g unsalted butter
• 10g dry yeast
• dark chocolate

What you do with that stuff

1. Cut the butter into cubes and set aside.
2. Mix the dry ingredients together.
3. Add the eggs and mix together until cohesive.
4. Turn out onto the bench and knead until it’s smooth and comes away from the bench–about 10-15 minutes.
5. Press the cubes of butter into the dough and knead it all together. At first the butter goes everywhere, but if you persist you end up with a smooth, elastic dough. (About another 10 minutes.)
6. Shape into a ball and plop it into a bowl. Let that rise for an hour (or until doubled).
7. Turn the dough out onto the bench and punch it down. Back into the bowl for another hour (or until doubled).
8. Divide the dough into balls. I did 18 balls of about 64 grams each.
9. Press a square of dark chocolate into each piece of dough then roll into a tight ball. Pop it in the muffin pan.
10. Paint the balls with a fairly watery egg wash.
11. Rise for about 40 minutes in the pan–the balls should double.
12. Give them another coat of egg wash, then rest for about 10 minutes.


Brush brush brush

13. Cook in a 180 degree oven for 10 minutes.
14. Turn the oven down to 165 degrees for a further 15-20 minutes. They should end up dark brown.


Stubborn little blighters

15. Remove them from the oven and cool.

'Scuse fingers

Fluffy, crunchy, sweet and altogether incredible.

Yes.

Makes for a damn spectacular breakfast. Ideally, eat these the day you make them. Brioche doesn’t keep very long, which is one of the great tragedies of culinary science.  However, I have heard brioche that is getting a little dry and stale makes exceptionally good French toast, or the basis for a spectacular pudding.  I don’t know: we never have any stale brioche…

Start with your favourite croissant recipe (oh, of course you have one, don’t be silly):

Ooh baby, work that dough...

Things have been a bit rough for some folks we care about: not starving in the gutter rough, but, well, things could be better for them. And with the alchemy of apricots, flour and butter (and sugar and yeast and some other stuff that was stuck to the bench) M made things better. These wee pastries became a general gift to friends having some trouble. While they won’t solve anything on a fundamental level — pastries don’t plug leaky pipes — they are nourishing, delicious and comforting. They’re baked pleasure.

Slice the prepared croissant dough into pastry bases:

Diamonds

And blob with family-made jam (if you have some):



Blob blob blob!

Top with an apricot half: if you’re in luck, you’ll have stewed fresh apricots in a light sugar syrup. If not, tinned apricots are just dandypants. Try to hold off eating the tinned apricots until after you’ve prepared all the pastries, because you’re likely to eat them all.

Do not sing a lullaby to your danishes.

Brush with eggwash and bake!

Sometimes I am reluctant to bake for people. I know so many people who bemoan their inability to turn down cakes and biscuits. They worry out loud about their weight and health, and I feel like baking gifts for someone who is already unhappy with their food intake is a bit thoughtless. But then, at other times, people need comfort and pleasure however they can get it: life has kicked them squarely in the goolies and nothing feels good. Giving someone something lush and delicious is a comfort because it reassures them there’s still pleasure out there. When everything sucks, it’s hard to remember that the world is as sexy and interesting and thrilling as it is angry and scary and mean, so something tasty and warm is a postcard from the part of world known as “awesome”. It’s not going to fix everything, but it reminds you that not everything is crappy all of the time.



Lush

While they’re still hot, brush lightly with hot honey to make a sticky glaze. I pinched a couple for breakfast this morning. You probably don’t need me to tell you, but they rocked my casbah pretty damn hard. Their therapeutic benefits are unquestionable.

On the brown-low

Okay, I admit brown cake doesn’t photograph so well here. But the photo on the recipe page (linked below) should tell you volumes. Cardamom coffee zucchini cake. Holy shredded panty tassels, dudes, this cake is the bomb. I love my cakes moist and spicy; I love them slighly savoury and decadent. Make this cake. MAKE THIS CAKE. It’s incredibly delicious and made me so happy and I am entirely confident it will make you happy as well. Toast thick slices of it for breakfast, serve with fruit and melty melty butter and a cup of strong coffee. The only change I made to the recipe was to use shredded apple instead of tinned pineapple: I had plenty of apples, I had no tinned pineapple. It worked perfectly. Recipe at Steamy Kitchen. Make the brown cake now!