Cookie Time Factory, Templeton

Mr Cake and I took a bit of a mid winter break to visit Sister Cake and her family in Dunedin, and chose to fly into Christchurch and drive down so we could visit some of the foodie delights en route. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your point of view!) there was a fair bit of fluffy white stuff on the ground when we woke up yesterday morning in Christchurch - with the optimistic aim to drive south in the afternoon.

We're stubborn, so after borrowing chains for our rental car (an unassuming Hyundai Getz, very much in the around-town category) and having a bit of a play with snowboards on the lawn we set off, in the hope that allowing extra time would enable us to get there before dark, despite the motorway between Oamaru and Dunedin being closed.

It's the most snow I've seen in Christchurch since 1992, when I was 9 and was mostly upset about having left my library books at school and not being able to retrieve them before the holidays, since school was cancelled on the last day of term (not completely true; I was initially worried about that, but stopped caring once I realised that the snow was actually more fun than reading). The roads out of town were pretty treacherous, and it was very slow going to Templeton, where we stopped to visit the Cookie Time Factory.

Cookie Time used to do factory tours, which most Cantabrians who are around my age will probably remember going on at some stage of their childhood. There was a yellow brick road which led through the factory, with big windows in front of the various pieces of equipment, so you could see the cookies being made, as well as the chocolate covered marshmallow fish and frogs Candy Time made at the same factory - riveting stuff! More riveting, though, were the free samples - there were boxes around the factory full of seconds which you could help yourself to as you wandered about. The power of free sugary food is so great that it's the only part of the tour Mr Cake remembers! Sadly the last tour was in 1996 so these days kids have to get their parents to buy the treats directly, instead of pretending the tour will be educational when it's all about the samples. ;-)

When I was a kid and we went on holiday, any south-bound travel always commenced with a stop at the factory - these holiday stops were more about stocking up on bags of broken cookies for the road, which is what we did on Monday. We were welcomed in (there wasn't too much traffic on the road, given the conditions) and as well as the cookies and bumper bars the factory shop also now offers hot drinks - great for drivers who need to concentrate extra hard on the conditions (and indeed for warming the belly in exceptionally cold weather).

The shop isn't huge but you can get a 1kg bag of cookies for $8 so if you need some high-energy snack food or have a cookie monster in your family it's worth a visit. I managed to restrain myself to a pack of bumper bars and a bag of cookies, which will last for quite some time! Mr Cake also had a coffee, which did help him keep his eyes on the road. The driving got a lot easier soon after Templeton, though - in fact, not long after we passed through Dunsandel this was the view in front of us: 

Worlds away from Christchurch! We knew the snow was still falling in Dunedin and though we didn't really see any further signs of snow until Oamaru we knew the motorway still wasn't open.

This meant our relief was very great when, after a day of passing very little traffic coming the other way, and very shortly before we reached the questionable section of road, a long line of cars appeared. Sure enough, the road had been opened - in fact, the Kilmog wasn't anywhere near as bad as the road at the Christchurch end. We did see a large number of abandoned cars by the roadside, as reminders to drive carefully, and reached our destination in good time - early enough to have a birthday dinner with Sister Cake.

Did you get snow? Did it play havoc with your schedule? And who else remembers the Cookie Time factory tours?

Chocolate Chip Bacon Cookies

True story: I was a vegetarian for five years. My first meat dish when I converted back to omnivorism was bacon ice-cream.

I was living in a student flat at the time, and my flatmates were used to cooking my meals without the meat. I got a point where I couldn't sustain stored iron and decided I needed to reintroduce animal to my diet, and I thought serving up a non-vegetarian bowl of ice-cream to my flatties would be a novel way of telling them.

These cookies are in the same sweet/salty/savoury category as the ice-cream, but I think make more sense to the tastebuds. The bacon is candied, which brings the texture more in line with normal cookie bits - think of dried fruit - chewy but not too chewy.

The candying is really easy (though baking paper, foil or a silicon mat is essential if you want to reuse your oven tray!) - just liberally coat bacon in brown sugar and bake for a while. I probably used about a tablespoon of sugar per piece of bacon, but since bacon varies in size I'd recommend you just use enough that both sides of the bacon are well covered. There were a couple of bits that I didn't get a good sugar coating on and they didn't meld into the cookies so well, so be liberal (this is hardly health food, after all!). 

Turn the bacon over midway through, and drag any bits that are looking less sugary through the syrup on the tray. Toward the end watch carefully - as you can see mine did burn a teeny bit around the edges. Because of the sugar involved this resulted in an unnecessarily large cloud of smoke and a panicked rush to the window to open the electronic windows, which is actually completely pointless (the rushing part, that is) because the windows take about 30 seconds to open so it's not like making haste changes anything. Fortunately the fire alarm didn't go off. The cookies are good but perhaps not quite good enough to make amends to the whole building for a late-night evacuation!

When the bacon is cooled it'll get reasonably firm and quite easy to cut with scissors - make the pieces quite small, as it's more about the overall salt/sweet balance and a bit mouthful of meat might not be optimal.

You could probably keep the bacon around for a few days (airtight container in the fridge) if you didn't want to use it straight away (though it's pretty tasty on its own, actually - it might not last as long as you think!) but I threw mine into cookies pretty much straight away. I used my favourite chocolate chip cookie recipe, with good quality dark chocolate. I completely rate the cookie recipe (everyone always loves the cookies) but the concept would work with your go-to recipe as well - I do recommend keeping the chocolate dark, though. 

I saved some of the bacon aside (as well as eating a fair bit - I used 8 rashers but you'll see the recipe only calls for 5-6 - they didn't all make it into the cookies!) and placed a little piece on top of each cookie to make the bacon a little less covert. It's still not very obvious, though, and I don't think anyone identified the secret flavour without serious hints, even after eating.

They are great - I couldn't stop eating them, and definitely had more than my share! - and have an added flavour dimension. I often find cookies (even these, my absolute favourites) too sugary and the bacon really helped round out the sweetness. It was a slight hint of savoury, a bit of a salty kick, and the occasional subtle note of true meatiness. Most of my colleagues tasted them without knowing what they were and commented that they were delicious, failed to identify the secret ingredient and then nodded knowingly when I told them.

You could add more bacon if you wanted (I kept some out) but I think this was pretty good - not too meaty (they are cookies after all) but enough flavour that it had an effect on the overall cookie experience.

What do you think - do you like salt with your sweet, or does this sound too weird?

Chocolate Chip Bacon Cookies
Ingredients
5-6 rashers of bacon (I used middle bacon)
5-6 Tbsp brown sugar
180g butter, melted and cooled
1 cup brown sugar, packed
½ cup sugar
1 egg + 1 yolk
2 tsp vanilla essence
2 cups plus 2 Tbsp flour
½ tsp baking soda
½ tsp salt
1 ½ cups semi-sweet choc chips

Preheat oven to 200 C.


Line a baking tray with baking paper, tinfoil or a silicon mat. Coat each piece of bacon with brown sugar, covering both sides. Place in the oven for about 15 minutes, then turn the pieces over, ensuring all pieces are well coated in sugar. Cook for a further 10-15 minutes, watching carefully to ensure they don't burn. Remove from oven and allow to cool.


When cool enough to handle, cut into small pieces with scissors.

For the cookies, preheat the oven to 160 C.

Beat together butter and sugars, then beat in egg, yolk and vanilla. Mix together flour, baking soda and salt in another bowl then add and mix until just combined. Mix in chocolate chips.

Bake for 11-14 minutes – cookies should be light golden brown with slightly hardened edges but centres still soft. Cool for a few minutes on the tray before transferring to a rack to cool fully.

Roti Chenai, Wellington

Roti Chenai Cafe is a reasonably well-known Wellington eatery, being easily visible on Victoria Street and quite accessible for work crowds from both ends of town. A friend dined with me and both she and I had previously visited for lunch. 

It has a nice atmosphere – lots of quirky ornaments and vibrant colours – and the tables aren’t too jam packed together, which I like. It’s clearly popular as although we were very early we weren’t the first diners, and it was full by the time we left at 7pm. 

Roti Chenai’s food is fusion – South Indian and Malaysian – and the menu is broad. Each dish is labelled with the region it hails from, and as I was favouring a curry style dish over noodles, beef rendang (my standard order) was my choice, rendang being the only dish of that type from Malaysia on the menu.

My friend chose the sambar dosai -  she’s vegetarian and was pretty happy with the number of options on the menu, which is a good sign. 

My rendang was hearty and rich, and came with “curry sauce” as well as rice. The curry sauce was a little thinner and lighter in flavour and it was quite nice having both on the plate. I really enjoyed the rendang, and the roti was fresh and tasty too. 

My friend’s dosai was a curious dish – dosai is described on their website as a batter made of urid and rice flour, fermented overnight then cooked like a pancake. The pancake is huge (so big it doesn’t really fit on the plate!) and very thin and crispy. The sambar filling was a lentil-based curry, which was tasty (though perhaps not as flavoursome as the rendang). 

As well as the savoury food Roti Chenai do dessert roti. I knew Mr Cake wouldn’t say no to one of these, so when we’d finished our meal I ordered one chocolate and one banana roti to go. We watched as the roti cook made them and wrapped them carefully in tinfoil to keep warm. They came with cream and maple syrup and they went down a treat – we both preferred the banana roti as the chocolate was a bit sickly, and maple syrup and banana is a great combination (although perhaps not very Malaysian!).

All in all it was a great meal – very good value food with great variety and friendly service. 

This post was originally written for the Makan Blog Squad. Mrs Cake dined anonomously courtesy of Malaysia Kitchen. 

Family Heritage Recipe Bake-off and Seed Cake

You might think that I'd have a swag of family heritage recipes - you know, old favourites, passed down from generation to generation, eaten and enjoyed by many generations of the Cake family. When a friend suggested having another themed bake-off with a family heritage theme I jumped at the opportunity - and then realised my recipe book is not lush with promise from a multi-generational perspective.

Though everyone in my family loves eating, we all tend towards obscenely busy lives, and as such food has had to work in around it - except for me, since food is what tends to make me busy. ;-)

There's also that whole glamourising the past thing - often the perception seems to be that ye olde foode is better than what we have now - and it might be if all you eat is pre-packaged convenience stuff (I've nothing against convenience food every now and then, by the way) - but over time we tend to improve on things, and we are generally much weathier than our forebears and have many more foodstuffs at our fingertips. I guess what I'm really trying to say is that I'm glad that my meals aren't all meat and three veg, and that I don't have much call for lard in my kitchen.

Anyway, when I asked Mum if she could think of family heritage recipes we didn't get very far. Rice bubble crunch, which Grandma apparently used to make often, hardly seemed worthy. Making a Sunday roast, though certainly a family tradition (dinner is still at lunchtime on Sunday for my grandparents) didn't quite fit the bill for a bake-off. My Nana (Dad's Mum) used to make a mean pav but we don't have her recipe. Mum did mention that her grandmother used to often have seed cake - something which seems to have fallen out of favour.

Then I spied a challenge on The Wheeling Gourmet - the 1914 version of the Edmonds Cookbook (Sure to Rise!) is online, and he put out the call for folks to try a recipe from that version against the modern equivalent, to see the effect of the passage of time. If you want to join in let the Wheeling Gourmet know by commenting on his post - you don't need a blog, just to send him some notes and photos of your results.

Seed cake features in both the 1914 version of the recipe and the one from my 1998 Edmonds Cookbook, and there are quite a few differences between them. For starters, the older one had three times (!) as many eggs. I hypothesised that perhaps eggs were smaller on average back then - since we breed livestock for production optimality (if you'll excuse my economist-influenced turn of phrase!) I wonder if the average size of an egg has increased in the last 100 years.

As it turned out, despite only having a third more flour and similar quantities of butter and sugar, the older recipe actually made about twice as much cake. Could the change in proportion relate to the relative cost of ingredients - did flour cost relatively more back then?

As well as the quantity variations the older recipe was decidedly scant on details. I appreciate that ranges would have been the primary cooking device and temperature control was perhaps not so refined as to make instructions such as "Preheat oven to 180 C" but there wasn't an indication of cooking time either - in fact, the recipe stopped short after mixing the ingredients. Perhaps the intention was to eat the batter raw. ;-)

Many of the other recipes in the 1914 book have instructions such as "cook in the usual way" - with such oblique directions it amazes me the cookbook established itself so thoroughly in Kiwi culture - but then I suppose women tended to have a firmer grounding in the domestic science in those days, and perhaps secrets such as what constituted "the usual way" were passed down through the generations.

I baked the modern version in a loaf tin and the other in a round cake tin, so it would be easy to know which was which. I definitely preferred the loaf look - but all bar one of the bake-off attendees preferred the older version. It was moister and definitely eggier and the lemon (which you could easily add to the other one, of course) was a great accent flavour for the distinctive caraway seeds.


Either way this is definitely the sort of cake you have with a cuppa - perhaps slathered with butter, though fresh it was fine on its own.

The other bake-off fare all seemed to me to be much more interesting - gougère (French cheesy choux pastries); versunkener apfelkuechen (German apple cake) and stunning baklava - and was all enjoyed greatly.

Do you have any family recipes that have been passed down through the generations?

Seed Cake (adapted from the 1998 Edmonds Cookbook)
Ingredients
125g butter, softened
1/2 cup sugar
1 Tbsp whisky or brandy (optional)
1 1/2 cups flour
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
2 eggs
1 Tbsp caraway seeds

Preheat oven to 180 C. Grease and line a loaf tin.

Cream butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Add whisky or brandy, if using. Sift flour and baking powder together. Add eggs alternately with dry ingredients. Mix in caraway seeds. Spread mixture in the prepared tin. Bake for 30-35 minutes or until cooked through.

Seed Cake (adapted from the 1914 Edmonds Cookbook)

Ingredients
225g butter
225g sugar
6 eggs
2 cups flour
1 tsp baking powder
1 Tbsp caraway seeds
zest of 1 lemon

Preheat oven to 180 C. Grease and line an 18cm square cake tin or two loaf tins

Cream butter and sugar, then add the eggs, beating in one by one. Add the dry ingredients, seeds and lemon zest and mix to combine.

Bake for 30-35 minutes or until baked through.