Plum Cake by P.Runefais

Excitement in the Bitchin' Kitchen last week, with the belated arrival of our brand-spankin' new Sunbeam Cafe Series 850W MixMaster, a Christmas present from the Parentals de La Bitch. My loveliest Mum justified its purchase with the wisdom that "it's not the sort of thing you'll ever buy for yourself" - which is frankly true. Forking out hundreds of dollars for a kitchen appliance isn't really something that The Bloke and I were likely to do, given the newfound frugalities of deposit-scrounging. Given that I have coveted a stand mixer for about five years now (ever since KitchenAid brought out a supposedly limited edition pink mixer to raise funds for the NBCF) being presented with the infinitely more powerful Sunbeam (325W for the KitchenAid vs. 850W for the MixMaster) as a gift was amazing. Thank you Parentals de La Bitch! We will repay you in Swiss rolls and rye loaves!

Unfortunately, The Bloke's attempt to christen the machine by whipping up some hand-pulled noodles on Sunday night was a little bit o' disastrous fun. Oh, the dough worked just fine once we deciphered the somewhat off kilter instruction booklets. The "noodling" part on the other hand... let's just say that the YouTube videos make it look a helluva lot easier than it is, and that maybe, just maybe, we should've paid attention to the numerous internerd pages reminding us that noodle masters spend decades honing their trade. I think we'll be sticking to our favourite Noodle House in Chinatown to get our fix of wheaten goodness.

But I digress. Attempt number two at creating deliciousness with the MixMaster! And what better dish to get the ball rolling (rather than just warming up ones bowling arm) than a cake! I found the bones of this recipe in the marvellous Cooks Companion by Stephanie Alexander, which is a most excellent book to add to your repertoire as not only is it brainy, the recipes in it actually work. Of course, I got a bit distracted during assembly and thus the top of my version ended up a bit mangled, but eh, it still tastes bloody great. The combination of nut-mealed cake, sweet plums and sticky almost-butterscotch is magic. And it used up the cheap bag of plums I bought from our local fruit market last week, which would otherwise have festered in the bottom of our fruit bowl for all eternity. Who said thriftiness had to equal living on sausages and .... oh wait. OK. Here's the recipe.

Plum Cake by P. Runefais

Ingredients
Cake
180g softened butter
150g white sugar
135g plain flour
135g self-raising flour
Pinch of salt
2 large freerange eggs, lightly beaten
70mL milk
1/2 cup almond meal

10 ripe plums (I used a variety called Black Diamond), washed, halved and seeded
60g butter, melted (extra)
1/2 cup brown sugar
2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
2 large eggs, beaten (extra)

Method
1. Preheat your oven to 180 degrees celcius. Grease a 26cm springform pan with butter.
2. To make the topping, mix the extra melted butter, brown sugar and cinnamon and allow to cool slightly. Mix in the extra beaten eggs and set aside.
2. To make the cake, cream the softened butter and white sugar, add the eggs and then both flours and the salt, add the milk and mix well.
3. Spoon the cake batter into the prepared tin and smooth the top (this will take a bit of effort as the batter is quite doughy). Sprinkle the almond meal over the cake then arrange the plums on top, cut side up. Pour over the topping.
4. Bake for about an hour (if you have a normal oven... about a century if you're stuck with our rental-property beast) or until a skewer inserted into the centre of the cake comes out clean.
5. Serve warm with a sticky dessert wine and a dollop of double cream, or perhaps a spicy sherry. (If you made it with a KitchenAid I'd prescribe a cup of tea and a Bex as accompaniments, but as we've got 500W more power than you retro fools we're going to have it with booze... SUCKERS).

Horse Flesh

An article in the Sydney Morning Herald lamenting the "gruesome trade in horse-flesh"
got me a bit stabby this morning.

I can see how the average punter (both of the restaurant and racetrack variety) could get upset about the practice, really I can. It's probably for the same reason pet owners get squeamish over the eating of dog meat in some parts of the world - the "cute and cuddly factor" has drawn fairly clear boundaries for most of us who have a choice in what goes on our plates.

But is eating horse flesh really any different to eating the flesh of any other four-legged beast?

Seeing as I brought dog meat up as a comparative example, I should probably explain that I object to the practice from an ethical point of view. The excessive cruelty involved in the production goes against my principles of free-range eating, for a start. Yep, I am a meat eater, and yep, many animals have died for my dinners - but the reports of hanging and pre-death electrocution to increase the adrenaline produced by the dogs before they are killed don't really fit in with my idea of keeping slaughter as clean as possible. (Wikipedia says that these practices are being cut down in Korea in favour of mass-electrocution to keep costs down, however, owing to the fact that dog meat is not legislated for human consumption, the industry is completely unregulated).

In contrast, from the article, it appears that horses in Australia are processed in the same way as the rest of our meat. Laura Stoikos, from a sanctuary called Cedar Springs Horses, is quoted as saying: "They are trucked in like cattle in the dead of night, they can smell the blood and they are killed one after another and they can see the horse in front of them killed so they know what is going on." But this is exactly the same thing that happens when your average cow or sheep or pig turns up at the abattoir, how does the fact that the animal being killed is a (perceptably failed) racehorse make a difference to proceedings?

I've known a few "horsey" people in my time, and their dedication to all things equine usually rivals the sport-lust of your most hardened footy fan or V8 SuperCar bogan. I understand why they'd be upset of the slaughter and consumption of their four-legged friends. I also find horse-racing appalling, in all its guises, so the idea that the industry is profiteering off their track off-cuts gets my hackles up. I actually laughed whilst reading the quote from anti-meat advocate Bo Derek in the linked article, suggesting that sporting horses are no longer "beasts of burden" - you only have to look at the injury stats for ex-racehorses and the relatively few years they spend on the track to realise that the only ones getting "sport" out of racing are humans. Owners have been sending old nags to the knackers since the beginning of time. But to suggest that humans eating horse meat is any worse than chowing down on Daisy the De-Milked Dairy Cow, or Mary the Mangey Mutton ... I don't know.

Horse meat has been eaten since pre-Christian times. My relatives ate it in wartime Germany. After a two day ride in the hot rural climes of Katherine in the Northern Territory on an ex bush racehorse, and being bucked off a cranky school horse startled by a motorbike in the pineforests near Joondalup in Western Australia, I don't have a lot of love for the bastard creatures. Having said that, I will admit to pulling a slightly squeamish-ed face when I came across it on a menu at the Tsukiji Fish Markets.


Would you eat horse-flesh, if you knew it had been processed in the same way that "regular" meats like beef and lamb are processed? Or would the cartoon neighs of Flicka and Black Beauty get the better of you?