Tastes Like Home
“Home, for me, is the act of baking itself. Browning butter, the nutty scent of toasted almond, the magic of whipping egg whites. Every bite of these simple lemony loaves conveys tangy love. The memory – what was baked into me – is the thing that has stayed. ” – Natalie Paull
Natalie Paull says…
I didn’t grow up in a family that venerated food, with many generations gathered around the kitchen counter: chattering, full of joie de vivre, teaching and learning. We were fifth-generation Australian and the food we ate was basic, nourishing and functional. One annual culinary constant was an odd dessert called “mulberry fluff” when the tree in our backyard was heavy with fruit, and everyone’s fingers carried indelible purple stains. We were nothing fancy.
But my parents would sometimes bake. Mum would, every week – to have something simple and citrusy to slice for playlunches or satisfy our family’s post-meal sweet tooth. I would perch beside her and dip a finger into the creaming butter and sugar believing it to be magic. The house would swell with the aroma of freshly baked cake – square, dense and topped with a thick slick of icing.
In November each year, Dad would bake the family Christmas cake and the kitchen would become a sacred space. The shopping was an exacting and exciting expedition. The preparation – making sure all the ingredients were at room temperature – was a solemn, near-religious instruction. The kitchen got warm in a different way, not just from the oven. He’d pull out our noisy-as-hell old Kenwood mixer, and I’d stand next to him for the entire day. Nothing else mattered except how this cake was being built from batter to baked. That’s where I learned how I bake: absorbing how his hands moved, mimicking his patience and diligence. And measuring, always measuring.
Some bakes aren’t a grand event or a story about a dish travelling across oceans or surviving generations. What I have is smaller, but just as precious. Home, for me, is the act of baking itself. Browning butter, the nutty scent of toasted almond, the magic of whipping egg whites. Every bite of these simple lemony loaves conveys tangy love. The memory – what was baked into me – is the thing that has stayed.
Ingredients
Makes 8 small cakes
120g unsalted butter
2 large lemons
110g pure icing sugar
35g soft plain flour (8–9% protein)
¼ teaspoon fine sea salt
75g blanched almond meal
100g egg whites, from 3–4 eggs
Lemon Syrup
40g pure icing sugar
70g fresh lemon juice
Lemon Glaze
100g icing sugar
20g fresh lemon juice
Method
Preheat the oven to 180°C. Grab eight small moulds – use cupcake tins or little dariole moulds. I splurged on a financier tin from Korea that makes long fingers, and love it.
Cook the butter in a small saucepan over medium heat until medium brown speckles form on the base. Pour into a small bowl to quickly stop cooking, scraping in all the brown goodness too. Brush the interior of the moulds with a light coating of the browned butter (the rest is for the batter). Finely zest one lemon into the remaining butter, then express-chill in the fridge – it should still be liquid (it makes the batter thicker and easier to use when fresh).
Sift the icing sugar, flour and salt into a small bowl and place the almond meal on top. In a wide bowl, hand-whisk the egg whites until just foamy. Stir the drys into the whites and hand-whisk gently until just combined, then hand-whisk in the brown butter. Into each mould, spoon enough batter to 90 per cent fill each cavity. If using chilled batter, it is more like a paste, so pipe the batter into the moulds.
Bake the fins for 12–14 minutes until they are pale brown around the top edges and have pert little bumps. If any batter has puffed over the edge of the tin during baking, push the bulges back in line, while hot, using a small knife.
To make the syrup, sift the sugar into a bowl, then hand-whisk the lemon juice in to make a thin syrup. Take the fins out of the oven and invert onto a rack lined with baking paper, teasing them out of the tins with a butter knife if they need help. Cool the fins for 1 minute. Give each fin a quick roll in the syrup, then place onto the rack. Leave to cool for 5 minutes.
To make the lemon glaze, place the icing sugar in a bowl, then vigorously hand-whisk 30g of the leftover syrup in to make a very thick glaze that drools thickly from the whisk – use extra juice if you need. Spoon the glaze onto one of the fins – give it a suggestive push in the direction you would like it to go, then let gravity do the rest so it settles into a smooth finish. Adjust the consistency after the first one – add a few drops more juice at a time or a sprinkling of icing sugar.
If the glaze is good, continue to glaze two or three at a time, zesting the other lemon directly over the fins to rain on the glaze. If you leave the glaze too long, it dries firm and loses sticking power. Once glazed, c’est fini!
SWEET HEART BY NATALIE PAULL IS OUT NOW, THROUGH MURDOCH BOOKS
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Published in ed#769