Didn't your mother ever tell you...

That too many cherries will give you a tummy ache?!



Mine did – but that didn’t stop me gorging myself on kilos of them last weekend when we went cherry and berry picking in Silvan, near the Dandenongs, about 45 minutes outside of Melbourne.

We paid $7 entry to cover the cherries that we would eat whilst picking (oh boy did I make sure I got my money’s worth), were handed a bucket and pointed in the direction of heavily fruit-laden cherry trees at the end of the track.



Ever wondered why cherries are so bloody expensive? It’s because picking them is a seriously labour intensive activity! It takes a loooong time to fill 2 buckets with cherries, especially if like me, you adopt the “one for you, one for me” method of picking.

After the cherries came the blackberries and raspberries. What a revelation! What amazing, beautiful, tasty little morsels! I hate to sound so much like an inner-city girl, but seeing those deep red berries peeking out from behind the bushy leaves, looking like, well, flowers, and then popping them in your mouth and realising that it’s actually a raspberry, like, the same thing that comes in punnets at the supermarket seemed a little ridiculous but very wonderful!

We headed home with our bountiful bounty, stuffing a few more cherries and berries into my mouth on the way. Once home, I had rolled around on the floor for a while emitting cherry-tummy-ache induced moans and groans, and then decided that 7kg of fruit is too much for regular human consumption. There was only one thing for it – a jam session! After a quick tribute to Bob Marley, we got down to business: the very messy business of pitting cherries and the very dangerous business of sterilising jars.



Jam is really an incredibly easy thing to make – it’s really just equal quantities of fruit and sugar, juice of a lemon or two (and if it’s fruit without a lot of natural pectin – like cherries) a bit of extra pectin or jamsetta which you can easily pick up from the supermarket.

To quote my fellow jammer, “jam-making is an easy but fraught process” – so I’ve taken lots of photos for you to follow.

Home-made jam is an entirely different thing to supermarket jam! For one thing, it tastes like fruit rather than sugar, for another it's totally natural and therefore healthy ;) - so what are you waiting for? Don an apron, boil some jars, and get jamming!

For cherries, and all stone fruit the first step is to pit all the fruit. With cherries this can be a very messy business. I was lucky enough to be using an olive pitter which made life much easier, nevertheless it took about an hour to pit 3kg of cherries!



Next, throw all the fruit in the biggest pot you have along with an equal quantity of sugar - so we had 3kg of pitted cherries and 3kg of white sugar.



Put the pot onto a very low heat - you don't want the sugar to burn at all. Let the whole thing heat up very very slowly, stirring occasionally. The sugar will begin to dissolve and the cherries to release juices so it will start looking delicious and syrupy. At this stage, squeeze in some lemon juice - we used 2 lemons.



Continue to heat it all up, stirring to make sure it doesn't stick to the bottom and eventually the mixture will begin to hubble and bubble. At this stage, if you're using jamsetta/extra pectin, throw it in. Also, you'll find that the boiling produces a fair bit of foamy "scum" that rises to the top. Even though for us it was a hot pink foam that looked quite delicious, we skimmed it off because that's what you're meant to do when you're jamming.



To test if the jam is ready, splodge a bit on a plate and pop it in the freezer. If, after about 30secs the jam comes out set (no longer liquid but not quite a solid) your jam is ready. And so begins the dangerous part!

Gently and carefully remove all the jars that you've been sterilizing (by boiling on the stove for a while) from the hot water and place on a heat-proof surface.



At this stage you want to act as quickly as possible to make sure the jars are still hot and sterile when you pop the jam in. Quickly and carefully ladle the jam into the jars and wearing gloves or using a couple of tea towels, screw the jar lids on tightly.

Give the jars a good clean (because they'll inevitably get disgustingly sticky) and leave them on the benchtop to cool over night.




And taadaa - Jam!

Enjoy on toast, in baking, from a spoon or any other usual jam enjoyment activities which I will leave up to your imagination.

A neanderthal dessert

There’s a story that my grandmother tells that has been told so many times that I can’t remember whether it was about me or my sister any more. My Savta (Hebrew for grandmother, and the only name I’ve ever known my paternal grandmother by) is a marvellous baker – she has ways with yeast that would make some of the fancy artisanal bakers popping up these days weak at the knees! So, she used to come to our primary school every now and then and do baking classes with the kids. We all loved it, but when Savta introduced herself to the class: “Hi everyone, I’m Savta”, the little girl in the story (me or my sister) became quite distressed claiming, “you’re not everyone else’s Savta, you’re only mine!”

So, we’ve obviously become more generous with our Savta-sharing over the past 20 years because last week we shared a special and all too rare baking afternoon with a couple of friends who were dying to learn her magical ways with yeast.

The cake of the day was Caveman Cake – which I think is actually supposed to be called something like Dumpling Cake – a Hungarian specialty that we have thus named because you never cut the cake, but rather rip off chunks with your hands and gobble as quickly as possible.

Thea brought along her wonderful fancy camera and was nice enough to take photos of the whole process for me – so I’ll try to illustrate the recipe as best I can with her gorgeous shots.

Caveman Cake

The thing with this cake is that it’s about perfecting the dough, which isn’t hard work but might mean a couple of failures and a couple of mediocre cakes before you get things right. The wonderful news is that when you’ve got this dough right, you can also use it to make delicious homemade donuts!

Dough

6g dry active yeast
1 tsp sugar
2tbs warm water
400g flour
2 egg yolks
50g butter (although Savta always uses margarine to make the cake suitable for eating after a meaty Friday night dinner, in accordance with Kashrut laws around mixing meat and milk)
250ml tepid water (for a richer cake you could substitute this with milk)
1 tsp salt
2 tbs caster sugar
¼ cup canola oil plus a bit more for greasing

Filling

120g walnuts
4-5 tbs apricot jam
100g sugar
Zest of 1 lemon

Mix the yeast, tsp of sugar and warm water in a large bowl and leave aside to proof.

Add all other dough ingredients to the bowl.

At this stage if you’re lucky enough to have a bench-top mixer, stick it in there with the dough hook attachment and let it go on medium for about 3 minutes.

After 3 minutes, slowly add the oil in a thin stream and let it be incorporated into the dough.

If you’re doing this by hand, it will be quite a wet, sticky and soft dough, so rub a bit of oil onto your hands as you work. You’ll probably have to knead for about 10 minutes and then slowly incorporate the oil.



Now it’s time to leave the dough alone in a warm place, let the yeast do its work and relax with “something prepared earlier” and a cup of tea.

Although there is a little bit of work to be done now – grind up the walnuts in the food processor and mix it with the sugar and lemon zest. Also, preheat the oven to 200c.



Once the dough has doubled, or even almost tripled (usually about 1 - 1.5 hours), tip it out of the bowl onto a well floured surface.

Handle the dough as little as possible because you want to keep all that precious air in there but flatten it out a bit to about an inch thick.



Using a cookie cutter or glass cut circles of dough out – make sure you use all the dough, fashioning odd shaped bits out of the cut-offs - because Savta would be very disappointed if you threw anything out!



Take a large, deep cake tin (any shape will do, Savta always uses a big square one) and sprinkle a bit of oil on the bottom.

Place a layer of the dough rounds on the bottom of the pan – they don’t need to overlap, and don’t even really need to touch because it’ll grow again before it goes in the oven.

Pop about a teaspoon sized blob of apricot jam on each round and sprinkle over half of the walnut mixture.

Repeat until all dough rounds have been used up – don’t put jam or walnut on the top layer, just brush it with some egg white or milk.



Leave the cake like this for about 20 minutes to rise a bit more and pop it into the hot oven for about 30mins or until it’s golden brown and springy to touch.

Pull it out of the oven, turn out onto a cooling rack.

Enjoy, tearing apart with your fingers as soon as it’s not going to give you third degree burns (although, even that would be worth it!)