Wattleseeds are my iron chefesque ingredient of late. I’m constantly thinking about ways to incorporate it into my breakfast, lunche, dinner and baking. I fully intend to make an extensive blog post about these lovely seeds, but for now my work hours are getting crazy and I don’t usually feel motivated between the hours of 1am and 6am to cook anything beyond pasta or rice. So that will come later…possibly quite far into the future!
Anyway, wattleseeds are, in my opinion, an under-utilised ingredient in Australian kitchens. They have a taste that is a hybrid of hazelnut, coffee and chocolate with a slight liquor after taste. In ground form (the form that I purchased from my health food store and is from the Vic Cherikoff range of aussie ingredients) is probably the easiest form to include in cooking. In the friands* below I included 1/8 C of ground wattleseeds to an adapted VCTOTW vanilla cupcake recipe, used homemade vanilla extract and also used 1tsp of homemade wattleseed extract that has been curing away in the depths of my pantry for three months**. As a finishing touch, after pouring the batter into my pretty friand tin, I added ~1tsp blueberry conserve to the centre of the batter.
You can just see the jumper of my friend from work as she was impatiently waiting for me to take a picture so she could eat one. She and the rest of my lab seemed to really like them, but I’m thinking they need a bit of work, especially as they didn’t contain nut meal of any kind* and really are just muffins in friand- shaped moulds. One of my work friends suggested using hazelnut meal, which I think would be a perfect way of complementing the wattleseeds.
*Friands, or financiers as they are known in France, are usually golden buttery tea cakes. They’re a popular type of morning tea here in Australia.
** I recently made several extracts (lavender, vanilla, hazelnut, wattleseed and coffee) using a handful of the product I wanted to extract flavour from, 2 cups of vodka, a glass jar and 1 TBSP of agave nectar. They take two months to cure and need to be kept in a dark place and shaken for a couple of seconds every day. The two month wait certainly pays off, as the extracts tend to be stronger than store bought and significantly cheaper per mL
1 response so far ↓
Theresa // July 27, 2008 at 11:37 pm
I looove wattle seed. I’ve tried it in chocolate cake, which was yummy, and in chilli, which was very different but made for all kinds of flavour levels.