dessert

Baklava

October 21, 2012
Turkish baklava - a rich dessert of filo pastry, nuts and sugar syrup.

Leanne Kitchen’s Turkey has a piece in it about baklava, but no recipe. Kitchen declined to include one, because baklava is one of those things that’s best done professionally, by people who make it all the time, using those generations-old recipes and techniques that will live forever. Reading that did give me pause for thought, but [...]

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Fresh ginger cake

September 23, 2012
A spicy ginger cake made with fresh shredded ginger instead of the usual dried, powdered stuff. From a recipe by David Lebovitz.

Ginger is a common flavour in lots of cakes and biscuits, but the way it gets there is usually through the use of dried and ground ginger. Fresh ginger is more normally used as one of the first things in the pan at the bottom of an Asian or Chinese dish. In its dried form, [...]

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M’hanncha, or the Moroccan snake

March 25, 2012
Jamie Oliver's M'hanncha, or the Moroccan Snake

There are times when I hit a blogging brick wall, where there’s nothing left to say, or where the ideas and half-posts won’t form themselves properly. That happened this weekend, and after binning the third draft of something attempting to articulate what I think of minimum alcohol pricing (short answer: probably good, some reservations, could [...]

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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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Ready for Dessert, by David Lebovitz

October 4, 2011
David Lebovitz Ready for Dessert

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
Classic vanilla ice cream

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
The Perfect Scoop by David Lebovitz -perfect ice cream every time

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
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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