EBERHARD’S BLACK FOREST CAKE

Eberhard's Black Forest Cake

One of Eberhard’s Black Forest cakes famously appeared on TV eleven years ago when SBS TV sent a production crew to Das Helwig Haus B&B on the Granite Belt to film him preparing and serving a German Christmas Feast. The feature film has repeatedly been shown on the SBS TV Food Lovers Guide to Australia. Eberhard will be 83 years of age in July and my daughters and daughter-in-law decided that it was time for him to pass on his secrets to them. Thus I was able to capture in film the process. One of the girls wrote down the recipe. Read the rest of this entry »

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AN ABUNDANCE OF ZUCCHINIS 1

Every year when I was a child my father cleared a piece of scrub land on our farm at the foot of the Bunya Mountains and burnt off the felled scrub, before planting pumpkins, watermelons and other vegetables in the ashes. Years later he asked me if I knew why these crops flourished? By then I had become the gardening guru in the family. Dad said, that if he merely added ash to a vegetable garden he couldn’t get the same healthy result. I explained that not only was he using fertile soil for the first time, but the heat of the fire had killed all the nasty pathogens in the soil which might have inhibited the growth of his vegetables. This is a method of growing vegetable gardens in tropical countries like Papua New Guinea.

When I was a child we never ate baby vegetables like button squash and zucchini. The Acorn Squash and Marrow, as we called zucchini, were rather despised and tasteless vegetables, best hollowed out and stuffed with a savoury meat mixture. It was only after Eberhard and I moved to live on the Granite Belt of southern Queensland in 1992 that I came to have an appreciation of Mediterranean vegetables like zucchini, eggplant and capsicums. The Granite Belt has a cool mountain climate and many of the farmers here are descendants of earlier Italian immigrants. Each year this district supplies a huge volume of vegetables and fruit to the Brisbane and Sydney markets.

Disaster struck the Granite Belt community on Christmas Day with a huge hail storm that destroyed or damaged many of the vegetable crops as the farmers were about to commence the seasonal picking.

Hail storm over the Granite Belt on Christmas Day 2008

The farmers had two choices. They could slash their damaged plants to the ground, plough the soil and replant, or they could pay workers to strip from the plants and throw away all the damaged vegetables, in the expectation that the bushes and vines would recover and begin bearing produce again. Read the rest of this entry »

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AN ABUNDANCE OF CHERRIES

For me, cherries have always been associated with Christmas mornings. As a child I left a pillowslip at the end of my bed on Christmas Eve as I recited, “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.” Waking in excitement at the first light of dawn I would peer into the depths of the pillowslip to find the small brown paper packet containing apricots, plums and cherries. Stone fruit were scarce and expensive, but always a Christmas treat.

I knew nothing of Morello cherries, the sour kirsche of Europe, until I married Eberhard. Almost thirty years ago he established one of the first coffee shop restaurants in Toowoomba, which became rightly famous due to his skill as a baker of Continental cakes. In those days it was nothing for him to bake and assemble two large Black Forest Torte every day. In those days he was able to buy 5kg tins of sour kirsche imported from Yugoslavia.

When we moved to the cool mountain climate of the Granite Belt in 1992 and established Das Helwig Haus B&B, one of the first trees I planted was a Morello Cherry tree to enable us to harvest and preserve our own cherries. Like many other Australian fruit eating birds, the Eastern Rosella parrots have flourished since fruit orchards were established on the Granite Belt and now every year farmers set up scare guns to startle the parrots away from their orchards and vineyards, or they shoot hundreds. These birds are not an endangered species and the alternative is costly – to net the crops.

Grape vines covered in bird netting

I did not want my cat,  Patches, hunting the parrots and bringing them to me like trophies. Read the rest of this entry »

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MUESLI

A CRUNCHY BREAKFAST TREAT.

I serve this muesli as part of our breakfast buffet at Das Helwig Haus B&B and all our guests rave about it. The basic recipe was given to me about 1973 by a Mrs. Newton who was then my neighbour in the town of Dalby.

I’ve taken the recipe a step further by growing the nuts and fruits that make it so special. I’ve gone through my photo file to extract views that will best illustrate the process of creating this particular muesli.

Fresh sun ripened figs.

However, you can of course buy nuts and dried fruits to add to your mixture.Apart from the sultanas, the three ingredients I like to add are fruit leather made from persimmons, dried figs and pecan nuts, all of which we produce in our own garden.

Here you see a French Wwoofer girl cuddling our cat Patches while ripening persimmons hang like Christmas decorations on a small Nightingale persimmon tree. Patches is never far from the action and we always say she is supervising the workers.

Preparing figs for drying.

Dried figs on racks.

The figs must be split prior to drying in a dehydrator for approximately twelve hours.The persimmon fruit is placed in a blender with a little sugar and reduced to a pulp. Greaseproof paper is laid over the mesh screens of the dehydrator and the fruit pulp spread across it. Again after approximately twelve hours the paper can be peeled off the fruit leather, which is then cut into narrow strips with kitchen scissors. Like the nuts and figs, the dry pieces of fruit leather can be stored in airtight jars until required. The nuts are broken into half the fruit leather cut into squares and the figs quartered

MUESLI

1kg oats

4 cups shredded coconut

2 cups sesame seeds

1 cup sunflower seeds

4 cups wheatgerm

1 cup oil

1 spoon salt

500g brown sugar

Combine all ingredients. Place on trays and brown in the oven stirring occasionally.

Cool and add 2 cups sultanas plus other dried fruit and nuts.

* In the USA and Canada sultanas are usually called raisins, which I discovered when my friend Margaret in Ontario baked a Raisin Pie.

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