Food Endeavours of the Blue Apocalypse: Blue Apocalypse Cake

My blog is two years old now. I’ve had a really great year - hits to my blog have increased dramatically, my food blog was mentioned in the list of WA food and wine bloggers in the Eat Drink Perth 2011 program , I attended the second annual Australian Food and Drink Bloggers Conference in Sydney and I was on a judging panel for a banana bread competition at the Beaufort Street Festival.

(from Eat Drink Perth 2011 program)

You can see me stuffing my face with banana bread in this video of the Beaufort Street Festival at 1:41-1:46

I started this blog as a way to record and share the recipes that I cooked. This blog has become my own online cookbook. A lot of the posts are of recipes that I have learnt from my mum and dad. The more I cook, the more value I place in knowing how to cook the food that I grew up with because it’s an important part of who I am, and as I cook, I am learning more about my culture. I hope that when my younger brother and younger sister have grown up and move out of home, this blog will be a useful resource for them, and when I have children of my own one day and for future generations of my family, they will have a place to learn about and cook our family’s food.

Here are some of my favourite family recipes from my past year of blogging –

•    Vietnamese chicken salad
•    Hainanese chicken rice
•    Braised pork belly with diakon
•    Prawns and beans with shrimp sauce and lemon juice
•    Vietnamese braised pork belly and hard boiled eggs in coconut juice

I also love baking and the most successful things that I have baked over the past year are Momofuku’s Crack Pie and Rose Bakery’s Pistachio Cake. I also love this oat and cheesecake slice that I came up with.

My favourite eating experience last year was attending the Mundaring Truffle Festival for the first time and enjoying truffles in all its glory. After the truffle festival, I used the truffles that I bought to create some recipes including truffle congee, truffle scallops and truffle fries. My finest dining experience was the Marque degustation at Restaurant Amuse.

One of my most popular posts that I really enjoyed writing was my survey of the best banh mi in Perth. At the end of last year, my friends and I decided to get together for an almond croissant taste test and consumed 6 almond croissants one Saturday morning (such taste tests are not for the faint hearted).

Over the past year I have also met and become friends with a lot of Perth bloggers especially during the month of March when Eat Drink Perth was on. I met up with some food bloggers for the first time to take on the What the Pho? pho eating competition and I organised my first tweet up to get together some of Perth’s food blogging community for Amuse Project Mayhem.

One of my favourite posts was Kitchen Confidential – Being a chef, the daughter of a chef…waiting where I share a personal story of what it’s like to have a dad who is a chef.

I also traveled to South East Asia in September/October last year and I’m still working through my travel posts. So far I have written on Bangkok, Ayutthaya and Luang Prabang, I’ve still got some posts on Vietnam to go.

Now I begin my third year of blogging in 2012….the year of the Apocalypse (21.12.2012)…

So unless you have been living under a rock, I’m sure you have heard that this year is the end of the world as we know it. Many great prophets, religious scriptures, and scientific evidence point to a possible apocalyptic event happening this year.

Mayan Calendar

The main theory being that the Mayan calender ends on 21.12.2012, which marks the end of cycle of creation that has spanned over approximately 5,125 solar years.

The end of the Mayan calendar is also supposed to coincide with a galactic alignment, in which the Sun will align with the center of the Milky Way galaxy for the first time in about 26,000 years. Some predict that this galactic alignment has the potential to create a shift in the Earth's poles and cause a series of disastrous environmental events.

Do you think it’s a coincidence that the Mayan calendar ends on the day the Earth is to be in exact alignment with the Sun and the center of the Milky Way galaxy?

Another theory is that an asteroid or another planet (Nibiru or Planet X) will collide with Earth.

Is this what Planet X looks like?

But don’t be too alarmed, remember the Y2K panic? Well that ended up being a whole lot of nothing! Who knows what will really happen on 21.12.2012? I guess we will just have to wait and see ….

…and maybe we can take some advice from Public Enemy “Don’t believe the hype”

My blog is called Blue Apocalypse, derived from the metal band Tool, (read the About Me section if you want to know more about how I came up with my name) and as a result I get a lot of apocalypse related keyword searches like what to eat in an apocalypse, apocalypse food, apocalypse cooking, apocalypse spice, apocalypse desserts etc. Unfortunately for people looking on my blog expecting some advice on what to eat in an apocalypse, I don’t have any. But this is about to change. I think that it will be a fun challenge to do some posts on the subject that people may mistake my blog to be about. So funnily enough, my chosen blog name which is completely unrelated to cooking and just a name that I used as an internet alias when I was younger has become an impetus for some new blog entries. As well as all the usual stuff that I like blogging about (recipes, reviews, travels, eating experiences etc.), I will be writing a series of apocalypse posts covering apocalypse related cooking/apocalypse inspired recipes. This will be an interesting project for me and I look forward to researching and learning more about the apocalypse and presenting to you my findings. I am also open to any suggestions, please comment below if you have any apocalypse food ideas or can recommend some apocalypse related reading material.

Here’s what I have so far.

Thanks to all the readers of my blog, my twitter followers @blueapocalypse and people who are fans of Food Endeavours of the Blue Apocalypse on Facebook. As time goes by I find myself putting more and more time into this blog, it’s nice to know that something that means a lot to me is also meaningful for other people :)

Now, let’s eat some cake.

I found this picture of me which I thought was fitting for this post as it looks like I am about 2 years old and eating cake. Well I think I am eating cake, this is debatable, I will accept any reasonable conspiracy theories as to what might be on the plate.

What would a Blue Apocalypse cake look like?

What about this?

Blue Apocalypse Cake

Ingredients

(The basis of this cake is a butterscotch almond cake from Taste, I adapted it for a 20cm round cake tin)

•    185g butter, softened
•    270g self raising flour
•    165g brown sugar
•    3 eggs
•    3 tablespoons honey
•    200ml milk
•    70g almond meal
•    1 teaspoon vanilla extract
•    red and blue food colouring

Method

Preheat oven to 160°C. Line a 20cm round cake tin with greaseproof paper.

Place butter, flour, sugar, eggs, honey, milk and almond meal in a bowl. Using an electric mixer, beat on low for 1 minute or until just combined. Beat on high for 3 minutes or until mixture is pale and thick.

Then divide the cake batter among three separate bowls. Add a few drops of red food colouring into one bowl and blue food colouring into another bowl, mix until the colour is incorporated into the batter (add more food colouring is desired to get right shade of colour). Leave one bowl of batter plain.

Place alternate spoonfuls of the 3 mixtures into the prepared cake tin, tapping the base of the tin on a flat surface to settle the mixture. Use a chopstick (knife or fork) to gently swirl the batters together to create a marble effect (don’t overmix the batter). Tap the base of the pan on a flat surface to smooth the surface and eliminate any air bubbles before placing in the oven.

Bake for 45-50 minutes or until a skewer inserted in the centre comes out clean. Stand cake in pan for 10 minutes. Transfer to a wire rack to cool.

A cake needs icing to complete it so I made a really simple chocolate buttercream icing. Beat 55g of softened butter until light and creamy. Then add in a cup or more of sifted icing sugar, 2-3 tablespoons of cocoa powder, 1-2 tablespoons of milk and beat until fluffy and you get desired taste and consistency.