South Hobart news c1986

I've recently started as deputy-and-future editor of the South Hobart community newsletter. I've just been given a ton of back issues as PDFs.

Nº 9, April 1986 has a report on the family fun day, an ad for an electrician that's still advertising 39 years on, and an appeal for witnesses to a murder.

I remember the murder case well, I knew people who knew the three involved. This is from The Age, 15 Aug 1986.

"…on or about 24 February this year, Maurice Huish was involved in a fight with Leigh Turner in which Turner died. Huish had gone to the dead man’s Macquarie Street flat dressed as a woman."

Cake news

I have just put a cake in the oven, and have never done so with lower expectations. It is about 15mm deep in a too-big tin. I replaced more or less every ingredient. Realised at the end I had used plain instead of SF flour so I scraped it out of the cake tin, added 2 tsp of baking powder, gave it a rough mix up, back into the tin. Woo-hoo. Seat of the pants stuff.

- - o O o - -

Well it came out about 22mm deep. I went to ice it and found we had no icing sugar. I served it with what I thought was thickened cream that turned out to actually pour very nicely i.e. I should have whipped it. 

So all up that's a 3/10, about standard for my cake-making.

Elf turns 38

My delightful yet camera-shy wife had a birthday on Wednesday. She does not trust my natural taste in gifts, so she specified what she would be receiving. From me a 30 metre garden hose (in beautiful rose-spattered wrapping paper), and from the boys the new Alexander McCall Smith book. Mum and Dad were going to get Elf a travel rug. She graciously declined and requested a bale of barley straw.

I baked a flourless chocolate cake that I found on the www. It was a corker and it has inspired me to break my cast-iron "no recipes" rule of blogging.

Jill Dupleix's 'Incredibly Wonderful Chocolate Cake'

INGREDIENTS
250g dark, bitter cooking chocolate
150g castor sugar
150g butter
100g ground almonds
5 free-range eggs, separated
icing sugar

METHOD
- Heat oven to 180C. Melt chocolate, sugar and butter in a bowl over a pot of simmering water.
- Remove from heat, stir thoroughly to combine, mix in ground almonds, then beat in the egg yolks, one at a time.
- Beat egg whites until stiff and peaked, and stir a couple of spoonfuls into the chocolate mixture to lighten it, before gently folding in the rest.
- Turn into a buttered and floured 20cm round tin and bake for 40 to 50 minutes. [Elf's cake tin tip is: after buttering and flouring the tin, pop it in the freezer until the cake mix is ready.]
- Leave to cool before removing from tin.
- Dust with icing sugar to serve.