Rice Pudding Cake

As things start to get a little chilly here, and we are about to start the olive harvest too, I always feel the need for food a little more on the substantial side.

This is a recipe from Two Greedy Italians aka Antonio Carluccio (my hero) and Gennaro Contaldo.  I loved this programme, of course because of both their personalities but also because so much of the food was just so very honest and simple and tasty.

This recipe uses a lot of eggs - at the moment I am getting near enough 6 a day so I love recipes that are heavy on eggs.

Ingredients:  3 pints of milk (1.7 litres); 1 vanilla pod (I used a teaspoonful of vanilla paste); 1/2 lemon, zest only cut into large pieces (I used a zester and did not remove the lemon zest later); 7oz (200g) sugar; 10 1/2 oz arborio rice (300g); 5 large free range eggs, separated; 2floz (50ml) orange liqueur; 1 1/2 oz raisins (40g) I used double the amount and made half moscatel sultanas and half pre soaked dried figs (from Finca La Reina of course); 1 orange, zest only grated.

Dried figs chunks soaking

Method:  Preheat the oven to 180C and grease and line a 24cm (10 inch) loose bottomed cake tin with greaseproof paper.  I actually forgot to grease the sides but I did cover the base with paper.  It stuck to one tiny bit of the side of the tin, it could have been a lot worse... you should try not to forget to grease the tin.

Place the milk, vanilla pod (if using paste like me add it later when the mixture has cooled and you add the egg yolks), lemon zest and sugar into a large saucepan and bring to the boil.  Add the rice and then lower the heat and simmer gently for about half an hour or until it resembles a nice thick creamy rice pudding.  The original recipe says the rice should be al dente - or still have a little bite to it.  Mine was well and truly cooked but it hasn't affected the finished cake.

Remove from the heat and leave to cool.  At this point you should remove the vanilla pod (if using) and also the lemon zest chunks - unless they are nice and thin strips like mine were in which case I think its a matter of choice.  I transferred the rice pudding to a bowl to help it cool and added the fruit.

The original recipe says to whisk the egg yolks and liqueur until creamy.  I simply added them to the cool rice pudding along with the orange zest and orange liqueur and then stirred really well.

In another bowl, whisk the egg whites until stiff.

 Then fold in the egg white and put into the tin.

This is simply a HUGE cake but don't worry if it comes right up to the top of your cake tin, it doesn't rise very much at all and shouldn't spill over.

Bake in the oven for one hour.  When it first comes out of the oven you will see that it has risen quite a bit.

But it starts to collapse as soon as it begins to cool.  That's what its supposed to do.

It can be served warm or cold sprinkled with a little orange zest (although it is already very rich I might add a dollop of cream too!)

 

 Enjoy Enjoy Enjoy!

All Figged Out!

This is our first year at Finca La Reina and I don't think we knew what to expect from 30 fig trees. Lets be more accurate... about ten of those trees are still quite young and the yield from them has been negligible.  So that makes 20 trees... some of these (about another ten) have been neglected in recent years and are more dead branches than live ones... so that takes us down to about 10 trees.  Of this ten... one is a purple skinned and is not quite ripe yet (although we have had the odd ripe one off it) so that leaves 9.  From our 9 producing trees we have so far picked 30kg of figs.

There are of course, still more to come, but already we are getting lax and some figs are rotting on the trees.  I keep telling myself that this year doesn't count.  We haven't even unpacked all our boxes yet and I can't find my maslin pan so fig jam in any quantity is proving difficult.

So... what am I going to do with all those figs.  Well we are drying some - bit of an experiment, the locals do it all the time, how hard can it be?  I am using some clothes airers with fabric pegged over the top... it's a bit makeshift but it will do for now.

Is it possible to over-dry them?  I think it might be... I've had to bin a few already.  Next time I will only dry the really large ones... oh and damaged ones are useless for drying... they just seem to go bad... so damaged figs will have to go into jam, good ones for drying (oh and eating fresh), and slightly under-ripe ones for making into preserves.  Trouble is, I am really just not ready to do this yet... my kitchen isn't even built yet and we are using a very basic and small space to do everything.

Never mind... I am doing my best not to let any of the figs go to waste.  Plenty of fig recipes under August's tab so if you are a lover of the fig... check it out.