Look out CWA...

Is your pastry not up to scratch? Do your sponges come tantalisingly close to perfection only to end up flat as a pancake? Have you never made either? In that case you've come to the right place. I've recently come across these two great recipes that can become a valuable addition to your baking arsenal and can be the backbone of many favourite desserts. In no time you will be rivalling the Country Women's Association for baking prizes at country shows!

Recipe 1: Pastry

225g chilled butter, chopped

2 cups plain flour

1 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon sugar

6-8 tablespoons of iced water

Method:

Quite simply place all the dry ingredients in a food processor add the butter and mix until the butter has just combined and the mix has the textbook 'breadcrumb' consistency. Then add enough water for the mixture to begin to clump together. At this point remove the mixture from the processor and onto a bench. Form the mixture into a ball and give it a quick knead. Cover the dough and refrigerate until ready to use.

This recipe made enough pastry for the pie pictured above (around 10-inch dish) with a bit left over.

Tips and notes:

1. It's important that the dough does not heat up too much. To keep the butter cool I chopped it up and then refrigerated it again, getting it out at the last moment. Similarly I processed and kneaded the mixture as quickly as possible to stop the butter from melting.
2. When it's time to use your dough take it out of the fridge and give it a few minutes to soften a little otherwise you wont be able to roll it out!
3. The pastry can take a little bit of punishment. I gave it a solid blind bake before filling it and putting a lid on it and it was fine.
4. It's a lot of butter but you only live once!

Recipe 2: Idiot-proof sponge

4 eggs, separated 

1/2 cup cornflour

1/2 cup custard powder

2/3 cup Caster sugar

1 teaspoon Bicarb soda

1/2 teaspoon Cream of tartar

Method:

Preheat oven at around 190°C (fan forced).

Beat the separated egg whites until soft peaks form (or alternatively you can hold it upside down and nothing falls out). Next beat in the yolks one at a time, beating until each one is just combined. Then slowly add the sugar and beat again until just combined. Add to the sifted dry ingredients and gently fold with a metal spoon. Pour mixture into two 8-inch cake tins and bake for around 20 minutes.

Tips and notes:

1. I add a little caster sugar to the egg whites before beating them as it improves the stability of the egg whites.
2. It's easier to separate eggs when they are cold as opposed to at room temperature.
3. You can also bake the sponge in a lamington tray (or a larger cake tin, although the cooking times will vary)
4. If you begin combining the dry and wet ingredients by adding a little of the wet ingredients first and incorporating that before adding the rest you get a better result.
5. Use a wheat-based cornflour instead of a maize-based one. Don't know how that makes it cornflour but the recipe wont work without it.

So get out there and beat those grannies!

What Tony did next...

Hasn’t Tony been a busy man.

In between kissing strangers, squeezing out nuggets of wisdom and pimping out Liberal candidates, he has found the time to release a statement that might actually have an effect on the electorate (other than a frenzied creation of enema-related memes).

Today Mr Abbott announced the Coalition would be not preference the Australian Greens (i.e. placing them last on how to vote cards) in a somewhat predictable move to hamper the minor parties’ prospects at the September 7 poll.

Of course this is not an entirely new process, as we all know. Deals to swap preferences were probably being struck moments after the move to preferential voting was made in Australia in 1918. It wouldn’t surprise me if the allure of swapping preferences was the reason behind preferential voting’s introduction in the first place.

The Coalition are no doubt taking this action in the wake of the last federal election where Liberal Party preferencing enabled Adam Bandt to become the first member of the Greens to hold a lower-house seat in federal parliament. Not only was that unpalatable it also helped create, as some would have you believe, the unmitigated disaster that was the 43^rd Australian Parliament. The ALP on the other hand, seemingly feeling the electoral hurt are grasping at any opportunity available to them, drowning sailor-floating driftwood style.

Is it just me, or do these dealings seem to be a little undemocratic and if I may be so bold as to borrow a term from The Thick of It, morally bankrupt. This may be a bit harsh on a perfectly legitimate and heavily utilised electoral exercise, but wouldn’t it be better if people could vote however they wanted?

The answer to that is of course you can, that is the whole point of preferential voting. You rank from highest to lowest you favoured candidates. The problem is though most of us don’t. As I alluded to in previous posts and electoral doyens Colin Hughes and Brian Costar have stated most emphatically in their work Limiting Democracy (I highly recommend this), voters tend to vote for who the major parties vote for both the House of Representatives and even more so in the Senate.

In a perfect world no doubt the parties would come to us selling their vision for the future of this country. But when it is much easier and even more effective to simply dish out numbered how to vote cards on Election Day, you can see why they don’t bother.

So my challenge for voters on September 7 is simple. On your way to the polling booth don’t stop when the volunteers of political parties attempt to foist their preferences upon you. As Johnnie Walker would say just keep walking as this is the one day where the electorate gets to say what they think, not what the parties want them to think. And for credit go below the line in the Senate, as this not only ensures you have complete control over your vote it also annoys the pants of those working at the polling booth!