Baking

Maple syrup, walnut and pear cake

October 17, 2011
Maple, walnut and pear cake by David Lebovitz

This last week or so have been quite tough, and the coming ones aren’t shaping up particularly well, either. What to do? Well, baking a cake often helps. So, that’s what I did today, cashing in half a day’s holiday tucked away for a rainy day and heading off home in the wind and through [...]

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Gingersnap biscuits

September 25, 2011
Gingersnap biscuits or cookies

These biscuits didn’t really come out as they were intended. They should have been thinner and much more fragile, but the slightly thicker and heavier versions I ended up with have a good heft to them. They’re not what they were meant to be, but they taste good and that’s all that really matters. Beat [...]

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Foosteeyeah, or sesame and peanut slices

July 8, 2011
Foosteeyeah, or sesame and peanut slices from Nouha Taouk's Whispers from a Lebanese Kitchen

It’s often said that simplicity in cooking is a virtue, that ingredients should be allowed to speak for themselves. This recipe has just four ingredients, and at a push, you could drop one of those, but they’re carefully combined into something quite exceptional, something that won’t hang around for very long once it’s cooled. The [...]

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Rhubarb and ginger cake

May 26, 2011
Rhubarb and ginger cake

We’ve got a North facing garden, shaded by next door’s garage and four stories of Edwardian brickwork. There isn’t a lot of light back there, and the ground has a tendency to hold too much water because of the high clay content.  I can successfully grow only two things – those Jurassic style ferns that [...]

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Wholemeal shortbread biscuits

May 18, 2011
Wholemeal shortcrust cookies

This is a guest post from my son, Ethan, aged 8. Ethan has been learning about imperative verbs at school, and for one of his exercises, he had to complete a task and write a set of instructions about what he did, using words that connect each step and are very direct. We thought Ethan’s [...]

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Bagels, step-by-step

March 23, 2011
Peter Reinhart's bagels

People often talk about bread making as a bug of some sort that people catch. Well, I’ve definitely caught it, and in an effort to move up a rung on the artisan bread making ladder, I made a batch of bagels. This isn’t a quick recipe. You need to time things carefully so that you’ve [...]

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How to bake bread

January 9, 2011
Baking bread at home

A lot of people are scared of baking their own bread. There’s a lot of misconceptions out there: It takes too long – not true.  A very decent soda bread can be made in under an hour, start to finish.  Granted, a proper loaf needs time for the yeast to work it’s magic, but even [...]

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Tarte Alsacienne

November 24, 2010
Thumbnail image for Tarte Alsacienne

Every now and again, my freezer becomes so full that the door barely shuts. Obviously, this is a sub-optimal condition for a freezer to be in, so something has to come out before something else goes in. Yesterday, the thing that had to give was a shortcrust tart case – too bulky, too awkward and [...]

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