Welcome to Litsy!

In which Mr Ottolenghi's chocolate cake gets a warm chestnut puree blanket :-)

Another one from Mr Ottolenghi's book. I prefer the chocolate cake but this one got good feedback too :-) And the mango icing is a fun touch.

I LOVE this dessert cookbook! ❤️ Notable:
✅Use of savoury herbs (sage, tarragon, bay leaves, basil, thyme, rosemary, saffron, juniper berries)
✅Roasting fruits beforehand (rhubarb, plums, cherries, apricots, strawberries)
✅Halva as an ingredient in baking
✅Use of vanilla seeds instead of extract
✅Cakes baked in tin cans & sliced into rounds
✅Unusual ingredients: date syrup, Italian 00 flour, quince paste, mahleb (ground kernel of St Lucie cherry)

I can confirm that Mr Ottolenghi's chocolate cake recipe is amazing. I substituted chocolate frosting with a Nutella variant and added some Ferrero as tonight's dinner was on an Italian theme.

I used the fruit purée buttercream recipe from this cookbook to frost a birthday cake. It‘s a French style buttercream that requires drizzling hot sugar syrup into beaten egg yolks before incorporating cubes of soft butter. Trickier than I expected; I ended up with sugar syrup stuck hard to the side of the bowl, impossible to fully mix into the custard, so the icing isn‘t as sweet as it should have been. I will pretend that was my intention. ?

Any fans of star anise out there? It‘s not my favourite. I would substitute something else in the recipes that call for it in this cookbook, which include pineapple tartlets with pandan (above), shortbread with orange, friands with blackberries, cheesecake with passion fruit, and chiffon cake with pineapple.

One of the Tahini and Halva Brownies from the tagged cookbook fell apart when I was transferring them to a plate. It‘s time for a break from cleaning and baking in preparation for tonight‘s poetry salon, so I have taken the opportunity to taste test. Instructions are to take the brownies out of the oven when there‘s still a slight wobble in the middle and it‘s still gooey inside. They do firm up after they are cool.

My latest baking adventure: speculaas from the tagged cookbook. 😊

Another success (well, haven‘t tasted it yet, but it seems like it will be good) from the tagged cookbook. It‘s a Vineyard Cake, made with grapes, olive oil and dessert wine.

Did some baking this morning while I listened to an audiobook. The recipe is Lemon & Poppy Seed Cake from the tagged book, but I didn‘t feel like trudging through snow to the grocery store, so I used what I had on hand: lime instead of lemon; perilla seed instead of poppy seed; yogurt instead of heavy cream. Turned out delicious. 😋

I need a bunch of special occasions because there are so many recipes I want to try, including Beet, Ginger & Sour Cream Cake. It calls for a crushed tablet of vitamin C, used to help preserve and set the brilliant colour of beets in the cake.

Chocolate O Cookies made for tonight‘s Feminist Book Club. (The filling is a water ganache flavoured with mandarin peel, cinnamon and red pepper flakes.) We will be discussing Ariel Levy‘s The Rules Do Not Apply.

Cookbook has won over true crime for breakfast reading. Free carrot cupcake (the bakery was closing when I went in yesterday) has won over oatmeal for breakfast eating.

Banana cakes with rum caramel

Banana bread can sometimes feel like the place overripe bananas go when no one else wants them. These decadent cakes, on the other hand, feel like the place they go to party, a bottle of rum in hand.

I like the authors‘ advice, given “rolling pin in hand, waving it in the air for emphasis,” to bake and rebake the same recipe over and over in order to investigate your own tweaks. “Bake something enough times for it to become yours. Then you can move on to the next one of ours.” I‘m always tweaking when I‘m in the kitchen; it‘s the place where I feel the most creative.

For the record, I resisted the urge to buy this book for two weeks. A doomed effort from the start. I mean, just look at the cover...

It's finally coming! I cannot wait to get this in my kitchen.

One of my rare dessert disasters: I offer my kid's fourth birthday cake for his party tomorrow. All the components taste delicious. Yellow butter cake ✔️ boiled fudge frosting ✔️ Leaning Tower of Pisa ✔️

Patiently waiting for this one to come out - October 2017! #sweet #junebookbugs

I rarely #galleybrag but I'm so damn excited to be given this. Will keep my physical book pre-order in place but sooooooo excited about getting an early opportunity for this one!!