I love carrots. I love baby sized cakes. These carrot baby cakes made me want to cry tears of joy. I used this Bon Appétit recipe, it’s super yummy! Soft, moist, warmly spiced, and perfectly carrot cake-y. The only thing I did differently was I omitted those pesky raisins and nuts.. I like my carrot cakes completely soft and pillow-like. I did add some dried cranberries and toasted coconut on top for crunch though, I just don’t like the crunch being in the cake. I also scaled down the frosting recipe by to a third and replaced the vanilla extract with 1/2 a vanilla bean, and thinned it down with single cream because I wanted the frosting runny enough to drip down the sides temptingly, lusciously, irresistibly..

I’m not a big chocolate person so I can’t really judge how good a chocolate cake is. But that being said, I do quite like this flourless chocolate cake from the Bourke Street Bakery cookbook with berries and cream. I brought one for dessert to my friend Ian’s house when he cooked us a truly glorious Italian meal, and we had it with raspberries and blackberries and a big scoop of clotted cream ice-cream  It’s quite dense and very rich so a teensy slice is enough, and the cream and berries are so necessary. It’s truly a big pain to make though- I used every single bowl I own and several pots to make it! The eggs need to be whipped with sugar, chocolate melted over a bain marie, yoghurt and milk boiled in a small pan, a meringue needs to be made, AND cream had to be whipped.. argh.

However, I’m not quite happy enough with this recipe though, I think I’ll try River Cafe’s Nemesis cake next. The recipe is similar to this cake which is really good but.. somehow not what I’m looking for when I think of a flourless chocolate cake. It’s a super fudgy dense cake, like a chocolate fondant, but what I want looks exactly like this Bourke St one, lopsided and rustic with a sunken middle, but squidgier and mousse-ier instead of dense.. if you know what I mean? A simple solution would be to slightly underbake this but it kinda seems like cheating.. I think maybe I’ll try cooking it in a waterbath. But wrapping a loose bottom tin with a double layer of aluminium foil is a real bitch and water always leaks into it no matter how careful I am. Perhaps the problem with a flourless chocolate cake is the fact that it’s flourless..? Or perhaps it’s just my lack of enthusiasm for chocolate..

I haven’t had much luck with bread making lately. The problem is definitely my oven- the dough was soft and supple and rose beautifully but the tops getting burnt when they’re baked! Really annoying because the oven needs to be quite hot to properly bake it, but the tops get much too black. I’ve placed a piece of foil over the top but my oven doesn’t really deal well with this- it never gets baked properly.. I’m guessing the heat doesn’t really reach the bread/cake that’s covered with foil properly. It’s been burning quite a few of my cakes and bread lately, probably the temperature setting thingy’s malfunctioning or something. But on the other hand.. for an oven its size and capacity, it’s also produced a crazy number of good cakes, muffins, cupcakes, bread, cookies, pastries. So I still love it, oh yes mama still loves you little microwave oven *crazy eyes*

I went to London’s Borough Market today with Flora, Ian and Vishak who are my LCB groupmates and Jeremy and John from UCL/gym  (I lost them halfway through the day though..!) and we ate so much! Amongst the food that I’ve tried and eaten today were: many different kinds of olive oils, truffle oils, pesto, balsamic vinegar, mozzarella, smoked cheddar, goats’ milk ice-cream, falafel, chai tea, sangria, chorizo paella, pork burger, grilled cheese sandwich, baklava, brownies, truffle mustard, chocolate caramels, an orangette.. oh my god. My favourites were the truffle mustard and pork burger.. so good! I also bought 12 free range eggs for £2.80 which I thought was a pretty good deal, a nice piece of sirloin steak from the Ginger Pig, and a big chunk of ginger which I’ll use to make a hot ginger drink. I first drank the ginger drink at Koya and really liked it- but at over £3 for a small cup it was much too expensive! I’ve been making it quite often lately as it’s been pretty chilly at night- it’s great for warming you up. All you need is hot water, some rock yellow sugar which you can easily get from Chinatown or any asian grocer (honey or ordinary sugar will be ok too) and a generous chunk of peeled ginger- about a 5cm piece. Just put everything in a pot and boil for about 20 minutes until it has a strong gingery kick. Anyway, digression..

Triple M burger from Boston Burger: Pork burger, Colston Basset Stilton Cheese, onion marmalade and fresh rocket on a toasted english muffin.. really yummy and juicy.

Flora and her hokey pokey goat’s milk ice-cream

Ah Pimm’s.. summer is almost here.

I’m so glad I’ve met such a great bunch of people at Le Cordon Bleu. It helps so much to have someone that has your back in practicals when it gets stressful (and gosh practicals can get  so stressful) and to mess around and chat with in classes.. especially dull technical classes.  And also, of course, to talk about food and baking with! And everyone’s from a different country, so I expect there’ll be lots of travelling to everyone’s countries soon. First stop for me would be to Hong Kong to visit Flora! This Christmas break, maybe- so excited.

I made this croquembouche several weeks ago. It’s made with a pâte brisée base, 23 choux puffs and filled with vanilla bean crème pâtissière. It’s assembled with caramel, then decorated with crystallised rose petals I made the night before, nibbed sugar and spun sugar. It came up to only about 9-10″ tall,  so it was a really cute and teensy croquembouche.

It’s not too difficult to make, but it’s pretty nerve-wrecking! It needs to be assembled not too long before eating as the caramel that glues the whole thing together and the spun sugar melts relatively quickly. So don’t mess up- you won’t have time to redo the whole thing! No pressure, though.. ha.

I bought Williams pears last week and it’s been looking more and more pitiful as the days went by so I’ve finally baked a cake with them. It wasn’t really meant to look like this- I had planned on making it an upside-down loaf, with the sliced pears arranged neatly on top when it’s been flipped over. The pears floated into the cake batter instead of staying put at the bottom so it’s now.. a normal pear loaf, sans upside-down awesomeness. Oh well, was still delicious though- I used this recipe.

I left Maltby St market last week with a massive haul of fresh produce, amongst them 5 stalks of bright pink forced rhubarb. I roasted them with two (!) vanilla beans and added a splash of rose water at the end. I ate them atop oatmeal with some syrup stirred through, and in this occurrence, with greek yoghurt, oat bran and crumbled ginger biscuits.

 Baked Rhubarb
♡5 stalks rhubarb
♡250g sugar
♡250g water
♡2 vanilla pods
♡rose water

1. Scrape vanilla pods and place the seeds and scraped pod into a pan with water and sugar. Bring to a boil until the sugar has dissolved.

2. Rinse and dry rhubarb, then chop into pinky-sized chunks.

3. Pour syrup over rhubarb in a roasting tin, and bake for 15-20 minutes at 150º until “al dente”. Add a splash of rose water, to taste.

I love blueberries with green tea, I think it’s such a mellow and well-balanced pairing. I adapted Dorie Greenspan’s cheesecake recipe from her book, and changed it up quite a bit. I found hers slightly too sweet and salty, but texture wise, it was perfect for me- dense yet still fluffy..? And very creamy. Besides adding matcha powder and reducing the salt (I left the sugar amount as it was, as the bitterness of the green tea would need it) , I swapped the graham cracker crust for an oreo one. I just thought it’ll be a better crust for the green tea.

For an 8″ springform pan
1) Butter and line a springform pan and cover the base with 3 layers of foil. Preheat oven to 180ºC.

Oreo Crust
♡1 pack oreo cookies, cream removed
♡1 tablespoons sugar
♡55g unsalted butter, melted

1. Bash the cookies into crumbs, and mix with the sugar and melted butter.
2. Press into the base of the cake pan. I like to level the surface by pressing a slightly smaller cake pan into the one I’m using.
3. Bake in the 180ºC oven for 10 minutes

Matcha Cheesecake
♡600g cream cheese, at room temperature
♡160g sugar
♡1/4 teaspoon salt
♡1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla
♡3 eggs, at room temperature
♡215ml heavy cream
♡27g matcha powder

1. Beat the cream cheese with a stand mixer for 5 minutes.
2. Stream in the sugar and salt and continue beating for another 4 minutes until light and creamy.
3. Add eggs in 1 by 1 and then the vanilla.
4. Mix the heavy cream and matcha powder together. This will form a very thick paste. What I did was I thinned it with some of the cream cheese/egg mixture. When it’s slightly more liquid, pour this green tea “sludge” into the batter and beat it in. I do this so the matcha will be incorporated properly and won’t form lumps in the batter.
5. Bring water to a boil in a kettle and pour into a roasting dish larger than the cake pan, then place the cake pan in the bain marie.
6. Bake at 150ºC for 1 hour 15 minutes. The time varies according to your oven. It’s done when it jiggles only just slightly in the middle.
7. When baked, let it cool in the oven then chill in the fridge overnight. The texture improves after a few hours of refrigeration.

Blueberries & Cream

♡250ml cream
♡a handful of blueberries

1. Whip the cream to medium to stiff peaks and either simply spread it over the chilled cake or pipe it on. I chose the latter and piped it with a St Honoré tip.
2. Scatter blueberries over the cream.

This tart is loosely based on a pear tart that we learnt in class a few weeks ago, but I’ve used apples instead of poached pears and flavoured the frangipane with loose earl grey tea leaves. Earl grey has such a lovely, fragrant flavour and I thought honey would pair well, so I drizzled some over about 10 minutes before I took it out of the oven so to slightly caramelise it.

Apples

♡4 medium sized eating apples. I used Cox Pippin because I had it at hand.

1. Peel, core and slice the apples to about 1/4cm thickness.

Pâte brisée
♡200g flour
♡100g butter, cold and cubed
♡5g sugar
♡5g salt
♡1 egg
♡1 tsp vanilla
♡10ml water

1. Rub in butter into flour until sandy
2. Whisk eggs with vanilla and water
3. Pour all the eggs into the butter/flour mixture and mix lightly until it forms a ball. In school, we “fraser” the dough a couple of times to properly incorporate the ingredients. Be careful not to overwork the dough, otherwise it’ll shrink. It’s not very important for this tart though since it won’t be baked blind, and the filling prevents it from shrinking.
4. Flatten into a disk, clingfilm, and chill in the fridge for at least 20 minutes to relax the dough.

Frangipane
♡115g softened butter
♡115g sugar
♡2 eggs
♡1/2 teaspoon vanilla
♡115g ground almonds
♡50g flour
♡1.5 tablespoon earl grey tea leaves, crushed slightly
♡honey
♡butter
♡caster sugar

1. Cream the softened sugar and sugar together and add the egg and vanilla in bit by bit. It may split and look curdled, you can try to bring it back together but don’t worry too much about it.
2. Add the ground almonds, flour and earl grey leaves, mix together.

Assembly & Baking:

1. Remove the pâte brisée dough from the fridge and roll out to 3mm thickness. Line the tin, and chill it with the overhanging dough untrimmed for 10 minutes.
2. After chilling, dock the bottom of the dough with a fork and trim the edges.
3. Spread the frangipane in the tart, making it level.
4. Arrange the apple slices on the frangipane in concentric circles.
5. Scatter pea-sized pats of butter over the apples and sprinkle on some caster sugar. This is just so the apples don’t dry out.
6. Bake at 190ºC for 35 minutes, then lower to 160ºC for another 12-15 minutes. In the last 10 minutes, drizzle some honey over the tart and place back in the oven to caramelise and for its flavour to permeate the apples.

Although I’m in the “milky/creamy” camp when it comes to picking desserts, lemon is definitely one of the exceptions. I love tart, lemony treats of all kinds- lemon tarts and slices and drenched syrup cakes. This particular cake, however tops the list of lemony cakes (for now). It’s flourless, so its texture is crumbly but really moist and dense from the ground almonds and it is seriously lemony. It’s sharp flavour balances the heft of the cake, and you don’t realise just how rich the cake is- it’s definitely not shy on the butter.

I don’t claim credit for this recipe as it’s one of those wildly popular cakes here in the UK. I’ve compared and tweaked several recipes and have come up with this one.

♡225g unsalted butter, room temperature
♡225g caster sugar
♡225g ground almonds
♡3 large eggs
♡115g polenta (cornmeal)
♡1tsp baking powder
♡1 vanilla pod, seeds scraped
♡4 unwaxed lemons, zest and juice
♡2 clementines, both zested 1 juiced
♡Pinch of salt

1. Preheat oven to 150º

2. Grease and line a regular sized loaf tin. There will be some extra batter- you can make mini cakes or alternatively, you can use a 7″ or 8″ round cake tin. I’m not too fussy when it comes to choosing a tin, I like shaking things up and make cakes of different shapes and sizes.

3. Zest the lemons and clementines and juice the lemons and 1 of the clementine. Strain the juice to remove the seeds and pips.

3. Cream the soft unsalted butter, vanilla seeds and the sugar until pale and fluffy. Fold the ground almonds into the creamed butter and sugar mixture. Add the eggs one at a time, mix well after each addition. Add the lemon zest and juice.

4. Fold in polenta and baking powder over the egg batter, the mixture will be runny- that’s ok!

5. Pour the mixture in to the prepared cake tin,  and  bake for 1 ½ hour. Test by poking a skewer in the middle of the cake- if there’s wet batter clinging to it, bake for another 5-10 minutes.

6. Remove from oven and cool until just slightly warm before removing from tin.

Lemon Glaze

♡100g icing sugar, sifted
♡juice of 1 lemon, sieved

1. Slowly add the lemon juice to the powdered sugar, stirring constantly. Not all the juice may be needed- the glaze should be and opaque white and pretty viscous.

2. Use a spoon to spoon the glaze onto the cake, pushing the glaze over the edges of the cake so it drips prettily down the cake.