I was pleasantly surprised by these iced filled buns, which are like homemade, fresh and delicious jam doughnuts. Or sweet hamburgers. Needless to say, the girls adored them.
As I’m not keen on strawberry jam, I opted to fill mine with raspberry instead. It’s not the most photogenic of jams, appearing dark and gelatinous in the photos.
With these filled iced buns I complete my Great British Bake-off signature bake challenge – better late than never. Continue reading
This year, I’m kicking off my Christmas baking by making butterscotch fudge.
I use my precious stash of butterscotch chips for two things – oatmeal butterscotch chip cookies and butterscotch fudge, and I’m always careful to keep a bag in reserve for this moment. Christmas just wouldn’t be as sweet without butterscotch fudge.
There’s been a hiatus in the Great British Bake-off project, but the girls were never going to let me get away without making the double chocolate tart.
Chocolate pastry is new to me. My go-to pastry recipes have little or no sugar, and I wasn’t confident that would be enough to balance the bitterness of the cocoa. The pastry recipe I followed starts by creaming the butter and sugar, which resulted in a biscuity-crisp crust. Continue reading
Cream horns are delightful things – and were completely new to me when I saw them on the Great British Bake-off the other week.
The concept is a simple one. Thin strips of puff pastry are rolled around a conical mould. Once baked, the pastry cones are piped full of sweet cream.
The Great British Bake-off signature bakes seem to be increasing in complexity as the weeks go by – which is as it should be I guess.
Still, I find myself watching in trepidation, wondering what challenge I’ll be inflicting on myself next…
When the Great British Bake-off contestants were tasked with making a sugar-free cake, I immediately thought of Claudia Roden’s orange cake.
This Judeo-Spanish cake relies on puréed whole oranges for much of its sweetness, which I thought would make it relatively easy to adapt. And because it calls for ground almonds instead of flour, it’s gluten-free as well, which seemed in the spirit of the challenge.
As this was my first attempt at baking with agave nectar, I did some reading first. The recommendations are to cut the quantity of sugar by about quarter, reduce the liquid in the recipe and lower the oven temperature – all of which I did.
I can’t see Paul and Mary being very impressed with this 1970s classic… But as a child, I was wowed by it, particularly the stripes. We called it skunk, but it doesn’t appear anyone else did – my Google search on skunk cake brought up very different results!
Crème brûlée is – without a doubt – my favourite dessert. I love the moment when you crack the crust of caramelised sugar, and the shards shift apart to reveal the creamy custard waiting beneath. I’m already happy before I even raise the first spoonful to my mouth…
Until now, all my crème brûlée moments have occurred in restaurants. But the fourth Great British Bake-off signature bake was crème brûlée, so it was time to give it a go. Continue reading
Peaches and basil both say “summer” to me – and in this peach-basil sorbet they can say it together…
I made this sorbet with those little flat white peaches that have been appearing in the shops the last few years. The lovely rosy colour was a pleasant surprise – the result of leaving the skins on the peaches when I puréed them. Continue reading
Strawberry shortcake is America’s take on the quintessentially British scones with cream and jam. Fresher, looser, less “proper”, and somehow more bountiful – for me, strawberry shortcake wins hands down. Continue reading
Move over lemon ice cream… there’s a new kid in town.
I made this chocolate-raspberry ice cream for the first time other day. It certainly won’t be the last – all four of us were completely wowed by it.
The recipe couldn’t have been easier. Four basic ingredients – cream, chocolate, sugar, raspberries. And being a Philadelphia-style ice cream, there was no messing about with egg yolks and custard. Continue reading
Rhubarb crumble ice cream is an inspired idea – tart rhubarb, silky sweet cream, nuggets of cakey crumble. It’s not the most visually seductive of ice creams, at least when made with the chunky green stalks of rhubarb from my garden patch. None of that delicate pink forced rhubarb for us.
Frangipane is such a beautiful word, conjuring up images of sugar and spice, flowers and French patisserie. These tasty little numbers with their moreish almond filling, tart slick of raspberry jam and flaky crisp pastry are as delicious to eat as the name suggests.
May is the start of strawberry season in the UK, and strawberries are going to feature large around here in the weeks ahead: strawberries on our cereal and in our smoothies, strawberry tops in our water, strawberry shortcake, strawberry ice cream, and Eton mess. Continue reading
Mini meringues are a great favourite with the girls – both making and eating them. For years it was deemed necessary to dye these mini meringues pink, but we’re finally moving past the “all things pink” phase. Continue reading
Frozen banana “ice cream” is a little bit of culinary magic – just sixty seconds in a food processor to transform frozen slices of banana into a smooth, silky dessert.
I first discovered it in David Cohlmeyer’s The Vegetarian Chef in my student days, and have been happily whipping up batches of the stuff ever since. Continue reading
These pear and ginger oat puddings are a cross between a fruit crumble and a flapjack. They are quick to assemble, take only fifteen minutes to cook, and are so light and healthy tasting that I’m tempted to make them for breakfast. Continue reading
I remember reading about a study that demonstrated how forbidding foods triggers cravings. A group of schoolchildren with an equal liking for raisins and dried mango had access to one of them restricted.
Within a very short time, the denied snack was in much greater demand, with some children resorting to violence to get their hands on the forbidden fruit. Which may explain my childhood obsession with canned pudding… Continue reading
This is my go-to vanilla ice cream, and after lemon ice cream it’s the one we’re most likely to have in the freezer. I’ve made more complicated vanilla ice creams involving egg yolks and custard, ice baths and sieves, which produced delicious results. But in terms of time and effort needed to turn out a great vanilla ice cream, this recipe is hard to beat. Continue reading
These roasted pears with warm butterscotch sauce pull off the clever trick of being both light and decadent. They also make the kitchen smell wonderful while they’re cooking.
Until recently, I couldn’t have you the difference between butterscotch and caramel. But having Googled it, I now know that caramel is made with white sugar and butterscotch with brown. Continue reading
I’ve tried a lot of brownie recipes over the years — cakey brownies, gooey brownies, fudgy brownies, “ultimate” brownies — but the one I make most often is this family standby.
These brownies tick all the right boxes for me. The cocoa powder and flour give them some cakeiness, and adding chopped chocolate to the mixture ups the goo factor. The tops are nicely dry and crackly, and the insides moist and melty.
Also, while I’m all for using good quality ingredients, I’m a bit skeptical about recipes that call for 400g of top quality chocolate and six eggs to produce a pan of brownies… Continue reading
Apple crumble is one of the first things that my mum taught me to cook, as I imagine her mother must have taught her. Crumble always on the menu at my grandparent’s house: apple, plum, peach are the ones I remember best. She would serve it with tinned milk, cheaper and more readily available than cream. While Britain excels in the realm of cream – the range on offer in Canada is far more limited even now.
I was surprised to learn that crumble originated in World War II Britain, when food rationing meant pies were off the menu. Women made crumbles instead to eke out their supplies of butter and sugar. Which leaves me wondering why my English-born grandmother was such a crumble queen – given that she emigrated to Canada in 1927. Continue reading
It’s taken a while, but the UK has finally embraced Halloween. For years, ours was the lone jack-o-lantern in the neighbourhood, and four or five kids might knock on the door all evening. Last night, we had more than 150.
These days our neighbourhood association publishes a “trick-or-treat trail” of participating houses, and crowds of little witches and ghouls traipse round the route. The high street shops get in on it too, decorating their windows and handing out sweets.
This year the local dentist erected some scaffolding outside their premises to create a raised platform, and grinned maniacally at the kids as they passed below, complete with smoke machine adding to the atmosphere. Halloween is firmly on the calendar now, it would seem. Continue reading
I love applesauce – such bright, cheerful stuff, and a great way to reduce a trug of apples from our trees down to size. Every autumn, I make several batches to freeze for the winter. Our apples are pretty tart, so I generally add some sugar, but it’s not necessary.
I always make applesauce in a pot on the hob. My mum used to make it in the pressure cooker. I’m not sure why, as it’s so quick to make, but she did. In one of my earliest memories, I was sitting at the kitchen table while Mum was making applesauce. There was a problem with the pressure cooker lid, and she called for my dad to help. Continue reading
These baked spiced plums are wonderfully easy to make – plus they make the house smell of mulled wine. Good hot or cold, they keep for a week in the fridge, and freeze well too.
Another recipe from Nigella Lawson’s How to Cook, I cut back on the amount of honey after making it the first time, as I found the sweetness masked the flavour of the plums. They are delicious served with a spoonful of Barbados cream.
Much as I’d love to add another country to my country list, there is no evidence whatsoever that the delicious concoction known as Barbados cream originates from Barbados. I’ve now learned that Barbados sugar is another name for muscavado sugar – the lovely, molasses-rich, dark brown sugar used in this recipe. However, the name applies only to muscavado sugar that originates from Barbados, while mine is from Mauritius.
The recipe comes from Nigella Lawson’s How to Eat. I doubt she’d approve of my use of fat-free Greek yogurt, but the end result is plenty rich and delicious enough for me. Its tangy, creamy sweetness goes beautifully with cooked fruit and crumbles – I use it anywhere I would dollop a spoonful of creme fraiche or vanilla ice cream. Continue reading
I seriously over-estimated the quantity of limes needed to make 30 litres of sayonara baby for my birthday bash. As a result, limes have been featuring pretty large in our meals recently. Vietnamese chicken salad, salmon phyllo parcels, caipirinhas of course, and still a towering heap of limes dominates the fruit bowl…
…which inspired me to make a lime meringue pie. After reviewing a number of lime pie recipes, I opted to include some lemon juice to ensure the filling was tart enough to balance the sweetness of the meringue and biscuity base. Four more limes down, fourteen to go… Continue reading
I wanted to slip this recipe for summer blueberry tart in before summer officially ends on Monday. We’re having a lovely September, but there’s no escaping the feeling of something ebbing away. The warning bite in the morning air, the lingering mists, the falling leaves. Even at midday, the sun no longer packs an espresso punch – it’s filtered coffee sunlight for us from now on… Continue reading
I found this recipe for basil-lime sorbet in a magazine I was leafing through in the doctor’s waiting room. I thought it sounded interesting, and jotted it down. The first time I tried it, I didn’t much like it, but decided to try it again with Thai basil.
What a transformation… The liquorice-cinnamony Thai basil combines beautifully with the sweet lime syrup to produce a palate cleansing, mouth tingling, refreshing sorbet. I often serve it with strawberries, but blueberries also work really well. Continue reading
Grasmere gingerbread is something I make when supplies are running low. It has only five store-cupboard ingredients – and doesn’t even call for an egg. I came across the recipe in the Observer newspaper years ago, and remember they included two versions – one simple, the other slightly fussier. (I’ve since discovered the original recipes are from Jane Grigson’s English Food).
I tried the simple one first, and decided after only one bite that it was plenty good enough for me. The recipe is so easy, it sounds like the crust one might make for a cheesecake or square. But there’s definitely more going on here. The crumb is exceptional, with an initial give before you encounter a chewy resistance in the middle. Continue reading
This blueberry crumb cake is the first thing I’ve baked in the new oven. While I’m obviously very happy to have a new appliance, I was used to the old one’s idiosyncracies and adapted my cooking to accommodate them. It’s going to take while to suss out this new kid in town… Continue reading
This lemon ice cream is a stunner. It’s unanimously our favourite ice cream around here – and that’s including chocolate. The salt is absolutely key to this dish – creating a perfect balance between sugary sweet and lemony sour.
I was given this recipe by a friend, after she served it at a dinner party, so have no idea who to credit for this marvellous creation. It’s delicious with fresh strawberries. Continue reading
I make these baked peaches every summer without fail. They take only ten minutes to prep, smell wonderful while cooking, and are delicious warm or cold. I also enjoy the cleverness of adding an edible “pit”. Elizabeth David includes this dish in Italian Food, but my version is based on the recipe in Sundays at Moosewood Restaurant. Continue reading
At the supermarket yesterday, I saw a pack of twenty cherries on sale for £3.99. That’s 20p a cherry! Growing up in British Columbia, we ate delicious Okanagan produce all summer long – especially Bing cherries, peaches and tomatoes. My grandmother’s cherry tree produced so much fruit she could scarcely keep up with it, and she dried bucketfuls of cherries each year.
Stopped at the Iranian grocers on the way home and picked up two kilos of cherries for £7 – a much more reasonable price. We scoffed half of them straightaway, after which I made this cherry sorbet. The recipe comes from David Liebowitz’s cookbook, The Perfect Scoop. Continue reading
This is what I feel like having for dinner tonight – but I’ll probably have some World Cup food leftovers first… I always make this ice cream when strawberries are in season. The recipe is David Lebovitz’s strawberry sorbet from The Perfect Scoop – I just add some cream before churning. Continue reading
Brigadeiros are little balls of chocolatey deliciousness rolled in sprinkles or shredded coconut. The girls were very happy indeed when I produced these a second time in just over a month. I followed a recipe I found in the June 2014 Waitrose magazine. Continue reading
This is the first time I’ve ever made chocolate mousse. I looked at a few recipes before deciding on this one by Raymond Blanc. It’s pretty straightforward, though I should have been a quicker about stirring the egg whites into the melted chocolate, and ended up doing more folding than I otherwise would have (and it was still a bit lumpy). Continue reading
These Portuguese custard tarts were surprisingly easy to make, and delicious to eat when sitll warm. Another Simon Rimmer recipe I found online. Continue reading
Nova asked me to make a black forest cake for her 13th birthday – which worked out neatly as Germany were playing France in the World Cup that evening. Baking is not my strong point, and I found this cake a challenge. For the cake layers, I followed a recipe from The Prawn Cocktail Years by Simon Hopkinson, but went off piste when it cake to filling and decorating. As I didn’t have a 20cm cake pan, I used one that was a little bit bigger. This was a mistake – if I make this again, I’ll opt for a smaller pan, which should make slicing the cake into three layers a whole lot easier. Continue reading
We had this tiramisu for dessert on Italian World Cup night. I don’t follow a recipe for this — I just thin a tub of mascarpone with cream, flavour and sweeten it to taste, then layer in a bowl with coffee-soaked biscuits or cake, and top with grated chocolate. The longer it sits, the better it gets… Continue reading
Ten More Bites 