Like the hundreds of keen cooks vying for honours at this year’s Royal Adelaide Show, Vida Symons spent many years experimenting in the kitchen to create the perfect cake. Her story and genoa cake recipe (below) are republished from Liz Harfull’s The Blue Ribbon Cookbook, which was recently reprinted by Wakefield Press and features recipes, stories and tips from South Australia’s prize-winning country show cooks.
Kangaroo Island’s Vida Symons was something of a legend in South Australian show cooking circles. At the age of 93 she made it into the final of the 2007 State Genoa Cake Competition. It wasn’t the first time; in the first 22 years of the contest Vida, her daughter Claire Stoyel and Claire’s daughter Mary-Ann won 11 times, often competing against each other.
This is no mean family feat, given the genoa cake is regarded as the “prima donna” of show cakes – demanding, delicate and potentially the hardest to get right even though winning is not considered quite as prestigious as in the State Rich Fruit Cake Championship, which Vida and Claire have also won.
Vida moved to Parndana with her young family in 1953 as part of a soldier settlement scheme that created the town and about 180 new farms. Claire remembers her mum always cooking for shows, first for Kingscote and then for the Parndana event.
But the challenge that was undoubtedly the focus of her energies was the genoa cake competition. Cooks battle it out at 11 regional semi-finals to win a spot in the finals, judged at the Royal Adelaide Show. Vida won the contest for the first time in 1993, while Claire, living in Mount Barker, took out the main trophy in 1991. Vida went on to win the contest four times, as did Claire, while the young and talented Mary-Ann won it three times in succession from 2004.
What is it about the contest that so enthralled these women? Claire is not sure, but she thinks it has something to do with the fact that while the recipe looks deceptively simple, it is extremely difficult to make perfectly: “There is the recipe and then there is the knowledge about how to do it … You have to fiddle a long time, experimenting with your oven and cooking times. Your oven plays a fairly big part in it, but it depends on the ingredients and how you mix it, too.”
Mary-Ann was still in school when she made her first state final. She urges more young people to have a go at competing and help preserve the traditions of show cooking and agricultural shows. “It’s a tradition and it’s exciting and a show wouldn’t be the same without it,” she says.
Before she died in January 2008, Vida was honorary patron of the Parndana event, started by the soldier settlers in 1957 to exhibit their produce and celebrate the new community. The show maintains a rural focus, including a separate section for honey and bee products, and a long-standing sheep shearing competition.
Genoa Cake recipe
Ingredients
250g butter
250g castor sugar
lemon essence (a few drops)
6 eggs (410g)
400g plain flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
170g currants
170g sultanas
60g lemon peel
60g dried figs, chopped
70g glace cherries
3 tablespoons milk
60g almonds, blanched and chopped
Method
Preheat the oven to slow (150C in a conventional electric oven).
Grease and line the bottom and sides of a deep 20cm-square cake pan, making sure there are no creases in the paper.
Cream the butter and sugar until light and fluffy and the sugar is dissolved. Beat in the lemon essence. Add the eggs one at a time, beating thoroughly in between.
Sift together the flour and baking powder three times. In a separate bowl, combine the currants, sultanas, lemon peel, figs and cherries.
Stir the flour and fruit into the butter mixture in four lots, alternating with the milk until combined. Lastly, fold in the almonds.
Bake for 2 1?2–3 hours, or until golden brown and firm to the touch.
Tips from the cooks
• Be very precise about weighing the ingredients for this cake and make sure you use good quality fruit, flour and sugar. Check the fruit for stalks and remove them.
• Sift the dry ingredients three times.
• Use fresh eggs and have the eggs and butter at room temperature before you start.
• Lining the cake pan properly and to suit your oven is a crucial factor. Vida used brown paper, ironed to make sure there were no creases. Some cooks put extra layers of newspaper around the outside of the pan to stop the sides from browning too fast.
• The genoa cake can be decorated with almonds but Vida preferred not to as it can cause cracks in the top and damage the texture when the cake is cut.
Tips from the judges
• The cake should be baked in a pan with square corners and straight sides.
• The cake is judged on the same criteria as a rich fruit cake. It should be a golden brown colour.
