Wednesday 29 August 2012

Culinary Adventures - The Minced Meat Savoury Cake

Image source
(the closet thing I could find to our cake on-line)
Noooo, not mincemeat, minced meat, as in the ground up bits of dead cow you fry and chuck into bolegnaise and chilli.

Every now and then DF and I like to have what we call 'culinary adventures', we hear or see random, strange sounding foods and think "we should give that a go". Years ago a friend of mine mentioned to me how one of her friends had made a savoury cake, where they replaced the sugar with cooked minced beef, and tonight we decided to give it a go since we couldn't decide what to have for dinner. This beauty follows the basic Victoria Sponge recipe and I can whip one of these up in my sleep (I've been making them with my Mom since before I can even remember).

The math behind a Victoria Sponge is simple enough, all four ingredients are in equal amounts, and the average large egg will weight about 50 grams, so if you're just home baking all you have to remember is that it's 50g of flour, butter and sugar (or minced meat) per egg you use.

However, we quickly discovered that this won't fly with a meat cake, as you need to fry the meat before putting it in it will naturally reduce as you cook it, so ultimately our ingredient list looked more like this;

200g fried minced beef
150g baking butter
3 eggs
150 self raising flour

First fry your mince till it is cooked through and there's no pink meat visible, depending on what type and quality of your meat you may have to drain the fat off as you would when preparing it for any other form of cooking. Remember, always drain your hot fat into an empty cup or tin, leave it to cool then scrape it into the bin, never pour hot fat straight into your bin or down the plug, unless you like melted bin bags or clogged drains >< Then put your meat to the side to cool off.

Once cooled, weigh out your butter, add it to a mixing bowl and mix the meat in with the butter, along with what ever your preferred seasoning is, we added a touch of salt, pepper and oregano, and mix thoroughly. By the time you're done it should almost look like you'd got bread crumbs mixed into the butter. Then add your eggs and mix again till you're at a semi-stiff consistency. Finally measure out your flour and sieve it into the bowl, stirring it in gently till you can no longer see any of the white flour.

Then it's simply a matter of greasing up your baking tin, pouring your mixture in and popping it onto the middle tray of your preheated oven. We left it in there for about 30 minutes, but I'm fully aware that different ovens cook things at different speeds (for one thing, everything always takes a bit longer in our oven since it's not got an amazingly good seal on it) so I'd recommend leaving it it for as long as a normal sponge takes to bake, which is usually between 20-30 minutes.

When it's done you may peek into the oven and see what looks like fat bubbling up around the edges of your tin and panic like it did (Oh no! How do I drain fat from a cake?) However once I turned the heat off it vanished without a trace and there was no soggy, fatty cake sitting at the bottom, so I can only assume that it was in fact some meat juices that were absorbed back into the cake once the oven was turned off.

And that's it, serve it while it's still hot with some mashed potato 'frosting' and some gravy 'sauce'. If you're feeling fancy like we were, grate some cheese into the mash, add a spoonful of coarse-grain mustard and put some mint sauce in the gravy.

And how did it taste? Delicious, it's a warm, hearty meal, suitable for winter. It was unusually chilly today so it warmed us up a treat. It would also say it's a very heavy meal (I don't wanna think about how many calories there were in there) so I wouldn't recommend eating it if you've got a lot of moving around planned for later on.

I also suspect it would make excellent after-party food. Cook it up before you head out for a night on the town and help yourself to a slice once you're back home to soak up some of that booze and wash it down with a pint of water before you head to bed, sounds like a pretty good hangover preventative.

If you've read this and given it a go, leave me a comment to tell me how your Savoury Cake went ;)

And before you ask, nope, still no bloody pen -_-

1 comment:

  1. A little quirky and so basic I bet I could even make it taste delicious. Haven't cooked one yet though.  

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