dessert

Maple syrup, walnut and pear cake

October 17, 2011 Food & drink

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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Ready for Dessert, by David Lebovitz

October 4, 2011 Books

Baking is one of the most difficult forms of cookery, at least in my opinion. It’s more a branch of science than a culinary endeavour, one that needs precision and technique, both of which are some way beyond me. I’m also not an habitual eater of dessert. I like the odd cake every now and [...]

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A proper vanilla ice cream

August 21, 2011 Food & drink

Vanilla ice cream. It’s so boring it’s almost a joke, you’d think? That maybe true of the mass-produced, bland, tasteless soft-scoop rubbish you get at any mediocre supermarket, but the real thing is something else altogether. At it’s best – at it’s very best – vanilla is the king of ice creams, fantastic on its [...]

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The Perfect Scoop, by David Lebovitz

July 30, 2011 Books

For a few years, I looked after an allotment. The ground was full of rocks and half the plot was shaded by a line of enormous trees that plunged the canal into darkness on one side and the bottom half of our plot into a kind of permanent semi-gloom on the other. We did OK [...]

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Rhubarb and ginger cake

May 26, 2011 Food & drink

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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Moroccan coconut cake

February 9, 2011 Food & drink

I made a curry a while ago that called for a couple of tablespoons of dessicated coconut. As you can’t buy just a couple of tablespoons of dessicated coconut, the rest of the massive, opened packet has sat in the cupboard ever since, waiting to be thrown out in the next Great Clear Out, sometime [...]

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Tarte Alsacienne

November 24, 2010 Food & drink

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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Crostata di more, or Italian blackberry tart

September 4, 2010 Food & drink

Every year, I make the mistake of going blackberry picking in shorts. The thorns on the blackberry canes are fine – I can avoid those – it’s the nettles that always seem to grow around them that get me every time, but foraging food isn’t meant to be easy. You should put a bit of [...]

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Alfajores, Spanish spiced fruit and nut biscuits

July 21, 2010 Food & drink

The coincidence of a week in Barcelona and a publisher sending me a copy of Frank Camorra’s staggering Movida Rustica cookbook has left me cooking a lot of Spanish food. I make no apologies for this, but warn that it may continue for a while yet. Movida Rustica is three hundred and sixty-eight pages long. [...]

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