My first experience of a home-grown cake was a sponge, made by our elderly neighbour Jean Hobbins, circa 1974. That unforgettable cake was two generous layers high, made with duck eggs - duck eggs make a richer and structurally superior sponge cake than anything from a chook. The cake also contained sugar, which had been purchased, and cornflour, also bought, though as I was inadvertently growing maize, and had learned how to grind and sift it to make cornflour, I could have given her some home-grown product. The maize had sprouted from the kernels that had passed unhindered through a horse who had helped make the stable tailings with which I fed my garden.
Even the sweetening could have been home-grown, honey instead of sugar. (See below for "honey pavlova").
The most glorious part of this cake though was its top and its middle. The middle contained cream from Jackie the cow (I don't know if having a cow named for you is a compliment or not), so thick it hardly needed whipping, sweetened with passionfruit pulp picked that afternoon from the vine that grew over the chook house.
The cake was topped with more cream, then more passionfruit, and then with a mix of home-grown berries. There were four of us at the table. Jean simply cut the cake into quarters. It was paradise on a plate.
Since then I make a sponge cake only about once a decade, because they are so good that I might eat even more than a quarter. But I do make pavlova. There is a quiet comfort in knowing that civilisation might come to an end, but we could all still have the local ingredients to make a pavlova.
First of all, the eggs. Our backyard chooks are looking pleased with themselves just now, picking and choosing among our post-Christmas leftovers. Fresh egg whites make for a structurally more secure pavlova. I also whip the whites in a metal bowl, as plastic bowls may have a slight film of grease, so they whites don't get as firmly fluffy.
Next is the sugar - preferably icing sugar for the best result. Overbeating pavlova mix till large sugar crystals dissolve may make your mix clumpy and watery. I sometimes use honey, which I began to do in the days when we kept bees. I can't give you exact quantities, as the water content of honey varies, but begin with the same number of spoons of honey as you would use sugar - always use local raw honey - from bees that have fed on flowers, not sugar, and won't have had water added to it as the product boiled. Mix gently, and put the pav into the oven as soon as possible, and you should have good results.
You may need to acquire a bee hive, or find a local beekeeper to get a secure supply of raw honey. The newly designed "flow hives" where you just turn on a tap to extract the honey are so tempting that I might, just possibly, go back to bee keeping. Note to self and others - bee keeping requires a lot more knowledge and work that just turning on a honey tap. You also need to make sure no neighbours are allergic to bee stings. But I find bee lore fascinating, and only gave up bee keeping because the boxes of combs were too heavy to carry, especially in the heat of summer.
Cream of tartar or vinegar is usually added to stabilise meringue mix. I add a squeeze of the lemons that grow outside the window, which seems to work as well as vinegar does.
Now for the really interesting bit - the topping. Sadly kiwifruit produce their crop in winter, not the summer holidays. Now and then a few may last long enough in the fridge, but I recommend substituting other fruit in summer.
The passionfruit comes from the vine which grows against the north-facing stone wall of my study, thus getting the best of the sunlight plus the reflected and stored heat of the stone. Passionfruit vines are short-lived. Mine fade away after about six years, and those that live longer are susceptible to a virus that gives thick-skinned fruit with no pulp inside. I planted this one in autumn and it is already fruiting, cheered on almost daily watering and weekly feeding, despite the cool spring and early summer. Passionfruit likes to grow fast, and produce lots. If it isn't well fed and watered right from the start it will produce little or no fruit, or just sit there and eventually die.
I never have much luck with raspberries - I think they need more sun than our garden can give them, though neighbours down the valley are giving away old ice-cream containers full. We do grow very good native Atherton raspberries - a tall staked cross between a bush and a vine, extremely cold and heat tolerant, fast growing, and with an intense raspberry flavour. I bought my Atherton raspberries online, as they are hard to find in garden centres, but should be more common, as they don't need the pruning and cosseting that introduced raspberries need.
Thornless blackberries and red loganberries are excellent on a pavlova. Both grow all too well in our climate. Their roots tend to travel metres underground, so a vine pops up in the middle of the tomatoes and parsley, and is half a metre high before you notice it. Never grow any bramble berry where they may escape and form a thicket. I cut my bramble berries back to a few stems twined on a trellis each winter. That gives us all the berries we need.
You might also like to add mulberries to your pav, though removing as much of the stem as possible is laborious and leaves you with purple fingertips if you are lucky, or purple splodges on your favourite t-shirt if you aren't.
Now for the cream. I have recently discovered miniature goats, which I gather have only fairly recently (as in decades) been bred from the feral goats that cause so much devastation. A female miniature goat is about 60cm high, medium dog size, intelligent, docile and an excellent pet, well suited to a backyard, or being taken on a walk to a local park where they can help with mowing and manuring. Unlike dog droppings, goat droppings don't smell, being mostly grass and whatever other herbage the goats can reach. They are also small, a size your average dung beetle can easily break down.
Miniature goats are very, very cute. If your ambitions go beyond a guinea pig, a pair of miniature female goats - with a visit to a male at the appropriate time, so you get baby goats and so more milk- will give you enough goat's milk, cheese, yoghurt and cream for an average family.
There's a myth that you can't get cream from goats. You can - it just takes longer. The cream in cow's milk rises to the top in about 24 hours. A litre of goat's milk will give you a layer of cream about 6mm thick after 5-7 days in the fridge, though you may get more cream, and faster separation, if your goats are well fed. And no, the normal backyard will not entirely support your goats, even with visits to the park and along the footpath, but given that most of us buy pet food for our dogs, cats, guinea pigs and white rats et al, buying pelleted food and lucerne for your goats is an excellent investment, as you can't milk a dog or cat. Well, actually, I suppose you can, but if after thousands of years of domestication we are not drinking dog or cat milk, I suspect dog or cat milking is not a worthwhile activity.
If you haven't got the time, energy or ingredients, just go for a "nearly home grown" pavlova, buy your cream and sweetener, and just focus on the topping, as there are a thousand other uses for those delicious berries and the passionfruit.
Tomorrow's dessert for our household may be berries suspended in champagne jelly - wait till the jelly is just beginning to set then throw the berries in, or go for layers of jelly with a layer of berries added after each jelly layer has set. It looks spectacular in a glass dish, or in individual wine glasses, not too sweet and an excellent way to use up the leavings of any celebration bottles, though a jelly made from cherry juice is even better. Either way, you will have purple fingers, and the sense of nutritional completion that comes when you have eaten something so good you don't need more of it - and have (possibly) worked off the calories consumed by growing it.
This week I am:
- Watering, as all the trees, shrubs and veg that have spent the last two cool, damp years thinking they were in Ireland, with rain at least every second day, are wilting, and so am I.
- Picking the first of this season's basil, native limes, and far too many zucchini.
- Turning home-grown celery into a celery, apple and spinach smoothie, very green and slightly sweet.
- Pondering on pollination - many trees this year were full of blossom, but had little fruit set, and almost no bees among their flowers. This may have been due to cold, damp weather, but the local bee populations have also plummeted in the years of drought then fires. If they don't recover by next year we will have to consider getting a bee hive or two, but introduced bees will compete with the native bees, and I'd like to give the native ones a longer chance to recover.
- Muttering at the cherry tomatoes and the Earliblaze apples, which should have ripened by now, but didn't with all the cool weather, and grumbling at the mulberries, which for some reason fruited sooner than usual instead of having branches laden with fruit for the kids to pick now.
- Explaining to a fascinated small boy that the gaudy red and yellow gladioli that grow semi wild here only bloom at Christmas. A flower with two bright colours on each petal, with a new bloom opening on the stem each day, seemed to him to be extra special. It reminded me how much I love them, too.
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