baking
dessert March 19, 2022
How do we find favourite recipes these days? There are, of course, books and magazines for inspiration, and newspapers, but so much of our world is now online. For me, inspiration is often found in the images that flit by while scrolling through...
dessert February 12, 2022
Upside-down peach, almond and polenta cake
One of the interesting things about food and eating is how throughout your life your tastes can morph. I spent most of my life blissfully on the fence about the idea of cake. There were some delicious ones of course, but my cravings generally veered...
dessert January 15, 2022
Andrew McConnell’s chocolate cake
Pierre Hermé is a fourth-generation pastry chef. Originally from Alsace, he is now chef patron of a series of Paris’s best pastry shops. No other people take their food as seriously as Parisians, and Hermé is food royalty to the French, a national...
baking November 20, 2021
I have been making shortbread as a Christmas gift for many years now. I have no recollection of where this particular recipe came from, but I have always enjoyed the fact it is not too sweet and has a lovely firm crunch to the biscuit. On many...
baking August 7, 2021
It seems many of us have returned to a winter of discontent. Bright sparks are few and far between. As restaurant kitchens slumber or pivot, with a near-hysterical glint, to takeaway offerings, I have retreated to my farm looking for some external...
dessert June 19, 2021
A bee sting cake is a staple of the German cake stand. It is usually baked in a cake tin and then split and filled with a vanilla pastry cream. It’s not a cake, though; it’s actually a bread. In my version here I like to make oversized individual...
breakfast May 1, 2021
I’m making a huge assumption but, due to last year’s Covid-19 lockdowns, I figure most people now have access to a sourdough starter/mother. If you don’t have your own, I recommend sweet-talking a friend into lending you some of theirs and building...
condiment April 10, 2021
Green tomato cake and green tomato and zucchini relish
As we have tripped over the autumn equinox, it is time to start farewelling the vegetables that have filled our summer and early autumn months. It is also the time to start thinking about what to do with green tomatoes. I have to confess that my...
baking October 24, 2020
I came across a very unnerving statistic the other day. Apparently 24,000 cookbooks are being published annually. This doesn’t include the bloggers and other contributors to recipes on the internet, or, of course, weekly columns such as this one in...
baking September 12, 2020
I feel a little like I have fallen down a rabbit hole and joined Alice’s tea party in Wonderland. It started when I asked a long-suffering locked-down Melbourne friend if there was anything she particularly wanted me to write about. Her suggestion...
baking July 18, 2020
Midwinter heralds the best of Australian oranges. They bring a lovely cheer to the drab, grey days. And for many, this certainly is a winter of discontent. Not only does Australia produce fantastic oranges – perfect as a healthy snack, as an...
