Recipe: Toni's Cake
Dec. 24th, 2018 09:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
highlyeccentricThis was, in fact, the first recipe I ever posted to this journal, and I'm hereby re-posting it with internationalised measurements. It is the Ancestral Christmas Food of my people, or at least, my family and my cousins on the maternal side. It is called Toni's Cake because the recipe came to us from Toni. It came to her from someone else, and so on and so forth.
This recipe is: oven-free, vegetarian
This recipe could be: gluten free, easily, if you substitute GF rich tea biscuits (Sainsburys ones worked for me). Dairy-free should be possible, with margarine, but I've never tried it. Egg-free likewise - I would start by adding oil in place of the egg, and possibly melt the cocoa with hot water. An entirely vegan version *should* be do-able, but I suspect that both margarine and oil-for-egg would create.... a lot of oil. If I was going to try it i'd use coconut butter, but rather than engineering that from scratch, perhaps try this no bake coconut chocolate slice.
This recipe is not: in its current state, safe for pregnant women (raw eggs)
This recipe requires: a blender or means of crushing biscuits; a beater or means of creaming butter; at least three bowls
- ABOUT 400 grams of biscuit. Ideal biscuit types are: rich tea, Marie, milk arrow root. Graham cracker might also be an option. I have also made this on Arnott's Choc Ripple biscuits, in an instance of Marie Biscuit shortage. The exact quantity is also really not a major issue - depending on the size and shape of dish you use, you may end up with too much base mix anyway.
- 250 gram of butter, softened
- 4 eggs
- 1 1/4 cup sugar (Australian cups)
- 2 tablespoons (Aus) of cocoa
- A dash of vanilla essence
1. Blend/crush the biscuits. If you don't have a blender, put them in a well sealed plastic bag, smash 'em with a rolling pin, and then crumble it with your fingers for good measure.
2. In one bowl, cream the butter and sugar.
3. In another bowl, beat the eggs, and add cocoa and vanilla
4. Mix the wet bowls together.
5. Scoop about 2/3 of the wet mix in with the dry, and mix together (admit defeat: use your hands) until you have a fairly solid, buttery chocolatey goo.
6. Find your serving dish*.
7. Press the biscuit mix into the dish. Then spread the chocolate cream across the top.
8. Refrigerate... some time. Upwards of 5 hours, I think - I always do overnight.
*At home we always use this one particular fancy serving plate that is shallowly dished. I've done it in slice trays before, but I warn you it doesn't lift out prettily. Today I've made it in a round cake tin, one of the ones where you can pop the bottom out, and a smaller one in a ceramic baking dish. The key factor is surface area, because you want to have enough chocolate cream left for step seven. Based on today's efforts, you want a surface area of more than 60 sq cm - I think 80-90. 100 is probably pushing it too far. If you're making this for the first time, find one dish you like, make the first one, then find any other random container and put whatever's left in it. Err on the side of having leftover biscuit base.
Looking at it, I suspect the ur-recipe of being a 'recipe on the back of a product package', at some point, or possibly a magazine recipe. I also suspect its origin isn't Australian, because the base measurement, 50 Marie Biscuits, is pretty illogical - it's 1 2/3 of a pack of Marie Biscuits. If you were designing it from scratch you'd surely use a standard pack size. (Unless Marie biscuit packs have got bigger over time? Possible but unlikely.) My suspicion is that American Graham Crackers were involved, because if it was Rich Tea biscuits originally, there'd be no need to swap in Marie - Rich Teas are readily available in Australia. The 1 and 1/4 cup measurement for sugar is about a single Imperial cup, though, and 250grams isn't a normal butter package size in the US, so maybe it's UK in origin.
This recipe is: oven-free, vegetarian
This recipe could be: gluten free, easily, if you substitute GF rich tea biscuits (Sainsburys ones worked for me). Dairy-free should be possible, with margarine, but I've never tried it. Egg-free likewise - I would start by adding oil in place of the egg, and possibly melt the cocoa with hot water. An entirely vegan version *should* be do-able, but I suspect that both margarine and oil-for-egg would create.... a lot of oil. If I was going to try it i'd use coconut butter, but rather than engineering that from scratch, perhaps try this no bake coconut chocolate slice.
This recipe is not: in its current state, safe for pregnant women (raw eggs)
This recipe requires: a blender or means of crushing biscuits; a beater or means of creaming butter; at least three bowls
- ABOUT 400 grams of biscuit. Ideal biscuit types are: rich tea, Marie, milk arrow root. Graham cracker might also be an option. I have also made this on Arnott's Choc Ripple biscuits, in an instance of Marie Biscuit shortage. The exact quantity is also really not a major issue - depending on the size and shape of dish you use, you may end up with too much base mix anyway.
- 250 gram of butter, softened
- 4 eggs
- 1 1/4 cup sugar (Australian cups)
- 2 tablespoons (Aus) of cocoa
- A dash of vanilla essence
1. Blend/crush the biscuits. If you don't have a blender, put them in a well sealed plastic bag, smash 'em with a rolling pin, and then crumble it with your fingers for good measure.
2. In one bowl, cream the butter and sugar.
3. In another bowl, beat the eggs, and add cocoa and vanilla
4. Mix the wet bowls together.
5. Scoop about 2/3 of the wet mix in with the dry, and mix together (admit defeat: use your hands) until you have a fairly solid, buttery chocolatey goo.
6. Find your serving dish*.
7. Press the biscuit mix into the dish. Then spread the chocolate cream across the top.
8. Refrigerate... some time. Upwards of 5 hours, I think - I always do overnight.
*At home we always use this one particular fancy serving plate that is shallowly dished. I've done it in slice trays before, but I warn you it doesn't lift out prettily. Today I've made it in a round cake tin, one of the ones where you can pop the bottom out, and a smaller one in a ceramic baking dish. The key factor is surface area, because you want to have enough chocolate cream left for step seven. Based on today's efforts, you want a surface area of more than 60 sq cm - I think 80-90. 100 is probably pushing it too far. If you're making this for the first time, find one dish you like, make the first one, then find any other random container and put whatever's left in it. Err on the side of having leftover biscuit base.
Looking at it, I suspect the ur-recipe of being a 'recipe on the back of a product package', at some point, or possibly a magazine recipe. I also suspect its origin isn't Australian, because the base measurement, 50 Marie Biscuits, is pretty illogical - it's 1 2/3 of a pack of Marie Biscuits. If you were designing it from scratch you'd surely use a standard pack size. (Unless Marie biscuit packs have got bigger over time? Possible but unlikely.) My suspicion is that American Graham Crackers were involved, because if it was Rich Tea biscuits originally, there'd be no need to swap in Marie - Rich Teas are readily available in Australia. The 1 and 1/4 cup measurement for sugar is about a single Imperial cup, though, and 250grams isn't a normal butter package size in the US, so maybe it's UK in origin.