Weekends are for baking and homemaking - a cranberry and ginger cake with three different flours


My weekends lately have been a mad ride! I always get to Monday feeling so tired and listless I end up doing nothing worth while, nor exercising, nor working out, or writing or shooting, just some minor editing sometimes, some blog related things, and a looooot of rest. This past Monday was no different, still I have been in a roll of sorts with baking and cooking, mostly sweets, as it happens, and the proverbial soups. I have a couple of soups stuck in my head that I would like to cook and shoot, but am at the moment lacking the proper ingredients, and it does seem that whenever we go shopping we tend to forget something or other that is rather important - this last weekend was the onions, we forgot to buy onions!!


I have also been revisiting old dishes, things I used to cook alot when I first got married, like strogonoff - I love strogonoff, I learned my strogonoff from a russian couple my father used to know from his trips to Moscow, and I always cooked mine with natural yogurt, the sourest the better. But if I do a slight search on the internet, most of the recipes I come up with are cooked with cream, which to me does not work, at least not regular cream. I know they told me to use yogurt because back in the days (my father passed away when I was nineteen, and this was way before that) sour cream was not something you could easily find at your local grocery store. We had no huge supermarket chains in the eighties, at least not near my house!! So I do know proper strogonoff is made with sour cream, but I prefer the mildness of the yogurt with the mustard.


And mushrooms. I have been craving mushrooms like a mad woman, and I don't know why, but we have been adding them to plenty of dishes. The kiddo loves mushrooms too, so all is well for him in that department. Even the cakes I have been baking have been a slight wink to my newly wed past! To the point I have been dying to bake a certain apple cake I used to bake every weekend, a cake that, the first time I baked it, we both ended up leaving that one last piece for the other to eat, and it ended up spoiling!! Newlyweds have these things, these gestures that go unspoken and make up for funny fails like that one, go figure, letting the cake go bad because you're sweetly leaving that piece for your spouse, both doing it and none letting the other know!! I can safely say our communication skills have majorly improved since those days.


So this last weekend I baked a lemon pound cake - soon to be featured on the blog! - from a recipe I usually adapted into making lemon cakes, orange cakes and even pineapple cakes. It's simple and versatile, it's rich and good, and the cake is always something dense and fluffy that leaves you craving for one more bite. I hadn't baked that particular cake in plenty of years!!


Now, this one cake is not a lemon cake, and it was not an old recipe getting revamped. This one stemmed out of my husband's clever creation of a cake when he realised he didn't have quite the needed ingredients to pull it off. But he invented and he pulled it off. Sometimes it takes a bit of imagination and a bit of faith to get us there, to save up the day or something that was looking rather like a major fail. I was spiked by that, and by the taste of those three flours combined, and I wanted to try my hand at my own version. I also had put it into my head that I wanted a ginger cranberry cake.



I sometimes can be very stubborn and one minded, getting a little bit obsessed with certain things (cue in a certain pair of Zara shoes I was obsessed about ever since September and that I finally got during the sales!!) and the cranberry/ginger mix was one I had been thinking of for quite sometime, so when my husband delved into the kitchen a couple of weeks ago to bake a carrot cake without telling me his plans, I threw a major tantrum at not having been told, as I had gotten into my mind I wanted my cranberry and fresh ginger fix. I had to wait another week, there was no way around it.


Well, I finally came round to it and here's the recipe:
  • 125 gr unsalted butter
  • 125 gr sugar
  • 75 gr flour
  • 50 gr buckwheat flour
  • 25 gr cornflour
  • 1 knob fresh ginger, the size of your thumb, peeled and grated
  • 1 scant cup cranberries, soaked in red berries liqueur or rum or brandy
  • 3 eggs room temperature
  • 2 tsp baking powder
Turn on the oven at the 180º mark and line a tin with parchment paper. Cream the butter and the sugar until pale and fluffy. Add the grated ginger and mix. Start adding the eggs, alternating with the flours and baking powder mix, making sure the egg is thoroughly mixed into the batter before adding flour. Onceit's all mixed in, by hand add the cranberries and stir gently so they get coated and combined with the batter. Pour into the tin and bake for about 35 minutes, but start checking at about thirty minutes, because every oven is different! Once it's done, let it cool completely, and take it off the tin. If it's really cooled, scatter some icing sugar over the top - I used sugar from candying orange peels, it's quite fragrant and pretty!!



Comments

  1. Tenho uma constante na minha vida, as pessoas que sinto ligações fortes, sejam espirituais, emocionais.. ou têm uma super relação c o pai, ou o perderão na infância. Mas a figura paterna está sp lá. Desculpa raramente comentar os teus cookings!!! Este com TODA a certeza comeria sem parar. E esquecer de comprar cebolas é SÓ o meu maior cliché, e depois, qd compro, ABUSO! Do género Onions for yearsssss

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    1. Hmmm no meu caso nem por isso. Perdi o meu pai tinha eu 19 anos mas nunca tive grande ligação emocional com ele, até pq ele foi um pai extremamente ausente. Aprendi muita coisa com ele, sim, tudo a posteriori, era um homem cheio de talentos os quais a vida obrigou a desperdiçar - excelente desenhista, excelente pintor, cultissimo, excelente musico, excelente cozinheiro - mas jamais o tive como figura paterna. Dizem que as raparigas casam com os pais, eu não, eu casei com o meu avô, esse sim, em termos emocionais e afectivos a minha grande ligação, o grande homem, o tipo de homem que eu quis para mim, dos poucos anos da minha infÂncia que me foi dado conviver com ele e com a minha avó sempre almejei a uma relação como a deles, a ser amada por um homem como o meu avô amava a minha avó. Quando ela morreu, entre lágrimas ele ainda conseguiu dizer "Estava linda, como sempre." depois do velório. Enfim, n sei o que é que a cena do pai tinha a ver com isto tudo mas eheheheh, ás vezes perco-me um bocado. Yah, eu depois tb compro cebolas para dar e vender, eventualmente acabo a fazer spoa de cebolas!! (com as tuas intolerâncias n comias este bolo não, que depois ficavas doente e a culpa era minha!!!)
      Kitchen Witch Miranda

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  2. está simplesmente fenomenal - adoro os ingredientes , adoro a setting e já marchava, pois então!lindas, as fotos!

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  3. Tenho que deixar de vir cá com fome ;_;

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    1. loooool!! tts vezes penso o mm em certos blogs!!

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