Easter Egg Nest Cake

It would not be an Easter series if I didn’t do a bake involving mini eggs. There is something so addictive about them that I take full advantage of every Easter. This year it went a step further – it has taken a lot of willpower to resist buying these mini egg inspired nail varnishes and I doubt I’m out of the woods yet. So to celebrate the best Easter treat, this cake was made.I have been meaning to bake this cake for several Easters now but every time I never quite got round to it and spent the week after Easter looking at it and realising what a fool I had been. A chocolate cake, topped with chocolate cream, and finished with chocolate decorations? What is not to love.I’m so pleased I finally got round to making this. It was more than worth the wait and looks like it may well become a new favourite! The flourless chocolate cake base is dense, truffle like and rich. The chocolate cream on top is surprisingly light despite the hefty layer and tastes just like chocolate mousse. It goes without saying that the mini eggs were delicious, but this cake doesn’t need to be confined to Easter – swapping the mini eggs for raspberries and strawberries would lighten the cake (a tad) and be amazing for a summer birthday cake. My tips for this cake would be to drastically under whip the cream – until it is only just beginning to hold its shape – because folding in the chocolate and spreading it over the cake continues to firm it up. I’ve also submitted this cake to April’s Love Cake event, where the theme is Springing into Easter. You can find the recipe here – enjoy!

Orange & Honey Torte with Mangoes & Passion fruit

I will only have butter on my toast. No jam, no marmalade, no Marmite or Nutella, no honey. I don’t know why, because I like most of these things in every other way (apart from Marmite), but I can’t stand them on toast. Really this just means that I have to get my honey fix in other, far more delicious, ways such as this summery torte… I don’t usually think of honey as a core flavour for a dessert. I’m sure I’ve added it to biscuits, cakes and flapjacks to add a bit of extra sweet and stickiness, but rarely used it as a main attraction. In this dessert blossom honey is combined with orange to make a really light version of a cheesecake – using just yoghurt and cream instead of any cream cheese. In my mind cheesecakes set with gelatine have a bad image of being overly firm and bouncy, but this is a really light set so it stays super creamy. Blanched almonds are added to the biscuit base (I used Nice biscuits because I thought the coconut would complement the other tropical flavours) which is such a simple idea but one I haven’t done before and was delicious – you know I’ll get almonds into anything somehow! My favourite part, however, was the accompanying fruit salad. Passion fruit instantly make me feel transported to a desert island and are without a doubt my favourite fruit. Combined with fresh mango and a sticky, ever so slightly spicy, ginger and lime syrup and I almost didn’t even need the torte. Almost. You can find the recipes here – enjoy!

Cappuccino Eclairs

When you bake a lot it can be easy to get stuck in a flavour rut. Chocolate, it probably goes without saying is a flavour I return to again and again. It is never a very long period of time that passes in between my chocolate bakes. I think every blogger or baker also has certain fruit they always have in their house and therefore bake with – for me it is probably lemons and apples. However, particularly when it comes to summer and there is lots of seasonal fresh fruit to use, I love expanding my repertoire and using new flavours. Whilst there are sadly still a few months until summer gets into its stride I have still recently been enjoying other opportunities to bake with underused flavours in my kitchen.Of course coffee isn’t an unknown or unused ingredient – it is estimated that in the UK we drink 70 million cups a day, pretty remarkable for a country with a population of 62 million! Nevertheless, it is definitely one I forget to use in baking, probably because it is such a standby I forget it can shine on its own. I was thrilled when Whittard sent me a package of this Brazilian roast coffee, giving me a chance to experiment. This was shortly followed by shock when I realised I’ve only done 5 coffee recipes on here in nearly 5 years of blogging and not one of my 300 To Bake recipes had coffee in! This time I really wanted the coffee to shine and be the star of the show, something which surprisingly I found quite difficult to do. So many recipes combined coffee with something else – normally chocolate, making mocha dishes, but I also saw it paired with flavours as diverse as lime or coconut. I must have seen hundreds of coffee cake recipes and whilst they are delicious I wanted to try something a bit different. Coffee éclairs were my first thought and after looking at lots of different things I couldn’t get these out of my mind. I really enjoy making choux pastry and making éclairs gave me a chance to practice my dreaded piping skills. As you can see from the photo, I ended up with quite a motley crew of shapes but they still all tasted good! I chose this recipe by Simon Rimmer from the TV show Something for the Weekend (now Sunday Brunch, which I love) because it has a double hit – the coffee whipped cream filling and coffee fudge icing. My only note about this recipe is that I managed about 15 eclairs instead of the 6-8 the recipe suggests and some of mine were already pretty big! I found the whole process strangely therapeutic and I was really pleased with the strong coffee flavour that came through in the end. Often éclairs can be very sweet with lots of chocolate or rich vanilla pastry cream so I think the bitterness of coffee really helps balance this. I am definitely looking forward to adding to my coffee recipe collection here in the future – I’ve seen a very tempting cappuccino pavlova by Nigella and espresso granita by Jacob Kennedy I’d like to try. Until then, enjoy the éclairs! :)

White Chocolate Pannacotta with Roasted Rhubarb

I love rhubarb, and I’ve noticed that I often seem to pair it with similar flavours. The early season forced rhubarb has such a shocking pink colour and distinctive tart taste that I serve it with creamy, white and almost blander flavours to let the rhubarb shine. One of my favourite dishes I’ve ever blogged was this Rhubarb Tart from Mother’s Day last year and with its rich cream cheese filling it is a prime example of my way with rhubarb. Similarly with the rhubarb custard tart where the baked vanilla filling contrasted nicely with the bold rhubarb. So when I had a lot of rhubarb that needed using up I made one unusual recipe I have to blog in the coming weeks, but used the rest in roasted rhubarb with white chocolate panna cotta. Well, who am I to break with such good flavour combinations?This time I opted to make my creamy background flavour a little bit more interesting and created a white chocolate pannacotta instead of just vanilla. I liked the result – it definitely felt rich and indulgent and had a really nice smooth texture despite the quite large amount gelatine. It also lasted for a week in the fridge so it was nice to have it always ready as a quick treat! White chocolate is a tricky flavour to make truly shine and I think in this case it would be more an issue of noticing if it wasn’t there rather than directly being able to pinpoint that the sweetness coming from chocolate. On their own the pannacottas were possibly a little bit too decadent, and I think they need an accompaniment to keep them interesting – another roasted fruit such as plums or fresh raspberries I’m sure would work well too. However I loved the rhubarb and found it the perfect thing to go alongside the pannacotta and delicious to eat just on its own as well. Enjoy!

White Chocolate Pannacotta with Roasted Rhubarb
Serves 5

Pannacotta: 500ml/18fl oz double cream
150ml/5½fl oz milk
100g/3½oz white chocolate, broken into pieces
25g/1oz sugar
4 Dr. Oetker gelatine sheets, soaked for 5-10 minutes in warm water, then squeezed dry

Roasted Rhubarb: 250g rhubarb, cut into even pieces
1 orange, zest and juice
5tbsp golden caster sugar

1. Heat the cream and milk in a saucepan over a medium heat until simmering.

2. Reduce the heat to low and stir in the white chocolate and sugar until the ingredients have melted and the mixture is well combined.

3. Remove the pan from the heat and add the gelatine leaves. Stir until the gelatine leaves have melted then set the mixture aside until it has completely cooled.

4. Pour the pannacotta mixture into ramekins, then chill in the fridge for five hours, or until set firm.

5. Meanwhile, tip the rhubarb into a tin so that they are in a single but snug layer (I used a 22cm square tin). Add the zest and juice of the orange and the sugar. Stir together to coat the rhubarb, then cover with foil and roast at 180’C for 15mins until tender but still holding its shape.

6. To serve, dip the ramekin bases and sides in warm water to loosen the pannacotta from the moulds. Turn out one pannacotta into the centre of each of plate and serve the rhubarb alongside.

Ruby Red Amaretti Crumble

Quite a fancy name for a crumble, but then it is a Nigella recipe and she is famed for her choices of phrase: chocolate digestives are crushed ‘until they look like dark Mexican mud’, chocolate cake is ‘a confection to exult in, not to regret’ and about peanut butter she says ‘Why, I feel the urge to just rub it all over my body!’ So in retrospect, she went pretty easy on this dish. Plus, this is so good it deserves a glamorous title. In essence, its a Plum, Orange and Amaretti Crumble but its probably the best crumble I’ve ever tried. Apple Crumble is good, the deep purple of Apple and Blackberry even better. Peach is nice in the summer and Pineapple for something a little bit different. But trust me, none are as good as this!The changes that make it stand out are small but effective. The plums are cooked lightly first in a bit of sugar, orange juice and zest to give it a little brightness, make the whole thing smell gorgeous and infuse it with orange. Crushed amaretti crumbs are sprinkled over the plums once they’re in the dish, and then a whole heap more are stirred into the crumble mixture. The combination works so well and smells absolutely intoxicating! We made another one for a friend shortly after ours was all gone, and it proved very tricky to give it away without diving in. With heaps of cream, a rainy evening and the finale of Downton Abbey this crumble made the perfect Sunday night. You can find the recipe here (as well as watch Nigella make it in her classic style) – try it and you might become like my family, planning to add amaretti to every single crumble in the future. Enjoy!

Keeping it Simple

Sometimes, simple is just what the doctor cook ordered. Simple because you’re tired, simple because you’re ill, simple because the cupboards are bare. Maybe simple because that’s all you need to evoke a happy memory. This summer, my family went to Cornwall for a week. It rained pretty much the whole time – a bit of a shock just back from sunny Italy – but whilst it was exasperating I don’t think it mattered that much. It was a rare occasion for us all to be together: no friends, no parties or shopping. The whole week we were craving scones, but kept missing the opportunity to buy ingredients and the rain kept us out of teashops. On the penultimate day of the holiday we finally caved and bought some, and the wait was worth it. Thick layers of jam and cream – and a hearty debate about which should be spread on first – and the rain was all but forgotten.As a result of the Guild of Food writer’s competition, I recently spent a wonderful afternoon at delicious. magazine. The office is rammed with food, and they were kind enough to give me some samples for me to take home, including a big pot of clotted cream. I’m sure there are lots of adventurous recipes involving this sinfully rich product, but I was only ever planning scones. They’re a classic! I used this Ballymaloe White Sweet Scones recipe, but halved it as it makes a massive amount and I still managed a decent 12 and some of these were huge. Fittingly, it rained for the whole duration of making and baking these, but then again would I expect anything different in London in October? Enjoy!

Raspberry Panna cotta

Note to self: don’t try and transport panna cottas. It proves rather stressful. I had to transport these, precious glasses and all, on a car journey to my Granny’s as I was providing the dessert at lunch. They were placed in a shoebox, wrapped in tissue paper, padded with tea towels and strapped in to the car with a seatbelt. Probably unsurprisingly, they and the precious glasses got there unharmed but perhaps next time I’ll stick to cake!I was inspired to make these after having these from M&S and loving the combination of rich creamy panna cotta and bright raspberries. I’ve made a vanilla pannacotta before, so I chose to combine the two layers of the supermarket version into one delicious raspberry panna cotta. I was nervous this would be too bouncy and jelly-like in texture because of the two sheets of gelatine, but I needn’t have worried as they set nicely but still stayed delightfully creamy and rich. The results were summery, absolutely chock full of raspberry flavour and a really pretty shade of pink. The recipe is from Nigel Slater’s fruit volume of Tender, but it can also be found here. You don’t taste the rosewater, it’s just there to stop the raspberries being too tart, although I suppose you could up the amount to make it a key flavour but I wanted to let the raspberries shine on their own. Enjoy!

White Chocolate Crème Brûlée with Passion fruit

I had quite a lot of inspiration to make this crème brûlée. Firstly, an article in the Times for a similar recipe which had passion fruit infused in it but no eggs – it was a simple ganache style recipe. Secondly, a random abundance of cream in my fridge that needed using up. Thirdly, it is my sister’s 20th birthday today and she loves white chocolate. As part of her birthday present I made her a book of 20 white chocolate recipes – truffles, cheesecake, tart, cake, mousse – every bake you can think of! A white chocolate crème brûlée was recipe number 16 and so I decided to combine the flavours of this brûlée with the Times passion fruit ideas. I’d never tried making a crème brûlée before but it is a dish I have often ordered at restaurants and enjoyed. I was apprehensive about doing it – visions of cream and eggs turning into a scrambled mess, slight concerns about setting the kitchen on fire with  a blowtorch – but it was actually easier than I thought. In this version, the white chocolate adds extra rich and creaminess to the custard that always contrasts so well with the dark caramel crunch of the topping. The tropical passion fruit works really well in cutting through the richness, preventing the dish becoming sickly and making it fresh. In a lot of white chocolate recipes the specific chocolate flavour gets lost, but happily in this recipe it is clearly distinguishable despite the actually rather small amount involved.White Chocolate Crème Brûlée with Passion fruit, adapted from a BBC recipe
Ingredients: 284ml double cream
50g white chocolate, broken into pieces
1 tsp vanilla bean paste
3 egg yolks
1 tbsp caster sugar , plus extra for topping
4 passion fruit

1. Preheat the oven to 160'C/140'C fan. Heat the cream, chocolate and vanilla bean paste in a saucepan until the chocolate has melted. Take off the heat and allow to infuse and cool for 10 minutes.
2. Whisk the egg yolks and sugar until pale, around 5 minutes. Pour in the chocolate cream. Strain into a jug and pour into 4-5 ramekins.
3. Place in a roasting tray and pour boiling water halfway up the sides. Bake for 20-25 minutes until just set with a still wobbly centre. Chill in the fridge for at least 4 hrs.
4. To serve, sprinkle a teaspoon of sugar on top of each brûlées and caramelise with a blowtorch or briefly under a hot grill. Leave caramel to harden and cool for a few seconds. Halve the passion fruit and scoop the pulp of one onto the top of each crème brûlée, then serve.

Roasted Pineapple, Coconut Meringue and Cointreau Cream

January is always a tricky month. It’s that after Christmas feeling, the broken new year resolutions, the rain and the freezing cold, the return to work and school. Citrus bakes seem to dominate the blogosphere at the beginning of the year as people use fresh flavours and bright colours to forget about the grey outside. The vitamins and zing of fruit desserts also fit into the spirit of January detox that some crazy people undertake. Today I stuck with the fruit theme, but used tropical pineapple to transport me away from the London grey to a Caribbean island beach far away.This dish really did transport me far far away. The meringue was delicious with a marshamallowy centre and packed full of coconut flavour. The pineapple was sticky and caramelised, strongly spiced with cinnamon and mixed spice. The spices also added some warmth to the dish, which works really well for this time of year. The Cointreau cream added more tropical flavour and toned down the bite of the spice in the pineapple. The black sesame seeds added unexpected nutty crunch and contrasted with the colours of the rest of the dish. Perfect!The dish was also really easy to make, so I think it would make a really pretty summer dinner party dessert. I made the meringue and the pineapple the day before, then whipped the cream and assembled the meringue right before eating. I halved the recipe so it was just a two-egg white meringue (it worked perfectly) that made four meringues, but I kept the full quantities of pineapple and cream. I loved the roasted pineapple and that alone with its sweet caramel spiced sauce would be a gorgeous breakfast treat once the meringues are finished. If you’re feeling a January low, or even if not, I would truly recommend this sunny sweet dessert – find the recipe here. Trust me, it will make you smile. Enjoy :)

Brandy Snaps

One of my major weaknesses as a baker is baking times. As my Mum will happily tell you, I burn things. A fair bit. Mainly cookies. I like to blame it on my oven, but I’m not too sure what the reason really is. Generally I start by putting whatever it is in the oven for 5-10 minutes less than suggested, but then I just spend the last ten minutes putting the timer on for two minutes more, then two minutes more, then two minutes more etc etc. So I knew when I attempted brandy snaps it would be a good challenge for me because they rely so much on perfect timing. And yes, I did burn the first mini batch – but who’d want to break a tradition?Before last weekend, I’d seen but never eaten a brandy snap, let alone made them, so it was definitely a learning experience all round! I was inspired to make them after seeing them on the Great British Bake Off and then thoroughly explained on a follow up programme, the Masterclass. The idea of crisp, caramelly biscuit filled with softly whipped cream definitely appealed so it wasn’t long before I started baking.I was nervous about making them but once you’ve started the process is fairly simple and repetitive so you can get a little system on the go. My mixture went very strange and not at all like what it was meant to be like – you’re meant to drop it off a teaspooon in to the baking tray whereas mine was pretty solid and had to be rolled into balls. However, I don’t think this affected the final product and was probably down to inaccurate liquid measuring because I think digital scales are really important in this recipe and I don’t have any – yet! Overall, despite the mishaps, I was pleased with how these turned out for my first time. I flavoured my whipped cream with Cointreau which worked really well with the crisp biscuit. Definitely a bit of a fancy biscuit – perhaps for a treat with coffee after a dinner party – but the taste is well worth it! You can watch the masterclass and get the recipe here – enjoy :)

Strawberry and Passion Fruit Meringue Roulade

So I’m back from my holiday! Whilst I recover from jet lag and organise my photos, here is a post I wrote earlier (Blue Peter styley). A few weeks ago, on a rare sunny London summers day, my Mum and I visited Books for Cooks in Portobello Market. Books for Cooks is – as the name just about suggests ;) – a bookshop containing pretty much every cookery book you could imagine. Sweet and savoury, old and new, American authors and English authors, books for every country’s cuisine. But not only is it a fabulous place to browse and discover new gorgeous books (whilst trying not to buy everything you see) the shop also has a tiny restaurant at the back. From Tuesday to Saturday the resident chef chooses a three course menu from different books in the shop. You don’t know what will be served until you get there and you have to turn up early in order to bag a highly coveted seat. The day I went, the menu was this… The trip really gave me a chance to try new things that from a bigger menu it is unlikely I would choose. The soup was amazing. I’d never tried prawns and still found their texture a bit strange for me, but the actual soup broth was so unbelievably full of flavour. There was garlic, lemongrass, chilli, tomato, kaffir lime leaves, all manner of different sauces – it was incredible! I’m gutted I was too busy eating to photograph it. Next came the chicken – again delicious, bursting with flavour and different to what I normally eat. Then, the puddings. There were four cakes to choose from: Chocolate Caramel Pecan Cake, Elderflower and Lemon Cake, Raspberry and Almond Cake or Mango and Passion fruit Roulade. I went for the roulade and, yet again, was not disappointed. The meringue was crisp on the outside and marshmallowy on the outside and there was plenty of bright fresh fruit tucked inside. The best lunch I have had and will have in a long time!  Once home, I knew I wanted to recreate the pudding. I also want to attempt the fabulous soup – but am nervous it just won’t live up to the Books for Cooks version! I swapped the mango for strawberries because whilst I love mango I wanted to take advantage of some fresh English produce. On the way home from Portobello Market we passed a grocer selling large bowls of 12 passion fruit for just £1 – bargain! This meant I could be much more liberal with the number of passion fruit I used in the roulade which was great as I adore their sweet scent and tropical flavour (I think in the end I used 8-9). Meringue is so easy to make that I’ve vowed never to let a spare egg white go to waste again. Whilst the actual rolling of the roulade was a little tense, the finished product was delicious. I used this recipe, but used all cream (not cream and yoghurt) and added passion fruit. Enjoy!