A is for Aboukir

Yesterday, I made an Aboukir cake.  I also got my new camera working, so here's the first image of the blog!

Aboukir - a french cake, cooked in a Charlotte mould, sandwiched with chestnut cream and coated in a coffee frosting.    (I didn't have a Charlotte mould.  The sprinkles on the top are ground coffee).

About half of it is still in the fridge.  Since most of my family are on odd diets (mother and myself cannot tolerate high fat foods and father is "salicylate free", an anti-allergy diet, and possibly the dullest diet of all time), I had to make a low fat cake for it to have been edible by anyone.  So, I made a 4-egg whisked sponge and used Italian Meringue to create the chestnut cream filling and the coffee frosting.  I'm hoping that enough boiling hot sugar syrup was used to fully cook the egg whites, but I have my doubts - the volume of syrup was quite tiny compared to the volume of egg whites in the bowl. (Usually I would have used powdered pasteurised egg whites when making icings/frostings, as this completely negates any salmonella risk, however I used my last sachets making my father's birthday cake). Even so, the cake turned out reasonably - mother's still tucking into it as I type.  It probably would have tasted better had it not been "low fat", but nobody would have been able to eat it. 

Bad news- my pickled beetroot has gone moldy.  I'm not sure if my homebrewed ginger beer is also going that way - there's some cloudy bits floating throughout the bottle and some sediment in the base.  Not sure if this is supposed to happen.

Still trying to find "abondance" cheese, but have ended up spending the rest of my student buget on a sugar pump, in order to create blown sugar bubbles for a friend's birthday cake.  So until my loan comes through in the end of September, I will not be ordering "specialist" ingredients online.  The next item, "apricot-pays", looks like it's going the same way as "abondance"; something to order online.  Still not entirely sure what an "apricot-pays" is - is it the same as a "sapote", or a "mamee"?  'Tis difficult to order something online, when you're not sure what you're actually looking for...