dessert
dessert May 28, 2022
Apple fritole with calvados crème anglaise
Naming dishes can be fraught with danger, especially when you are making up a recipe that hasn’t existed before and is a culmination of techniques and flavours picked from here and there. Calling these little beauties doughnuts feels wrong even...
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...
side dish March 12, 2022
Grilled pineapple with matcha tea, lime and coconut
Eating a ripe, chilled pineapple is a summer pleasantry in its own right. The sugar and acidity is in aggressive harmony, playing directly off each other. A simple way to light up the complexity of sugar is to caramelise it. The flavour is more...
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...
dessert November 27, 2021
Plump, ripe, fresh-picked berries, still warm with the heat of the sun, are true summer bliss. These fruits have a delicate nature, and are small and vulnerable, needing to be handled with care. I don’t think there are any berries I don’t like,...
dessert November 13, 2021
Îles flottantes (floating islands)
A good meringue is cooking sorcery. To those who have watched a soufflé go from a fluffy success in the oven to a deflated plate of sadness when served, I offer my sympathy. To achieve perfection in cooking, we sometimes need to cheat. The addition...
dessert September 11, 2021
In the northern rivers district of New South Wales at this time of year, ash regularly falls from the sky. It’s the result of burning sugarcane – a crop that is fairly prolific in this area but perhaps not as much as it used to be. Burning sugarcane...
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...
dessert May 8, 2021
Pistachio and raspberry mille-feuille
Nothing says “I love you” more to my mother than a bit of pastry frippery for afternoon tea on Mother’s Day. And what could be better than a slightly more modern take on the vanilla slice? A lovely pistachio and raspberry mille-feuille. While the...
dessert March 6, 2021
Nectarine and thyme granita with plums and ice-cream
Stone fruit generally arrives at the beginning of summer, whereas in a shaded corner, at altitude, in a southern orchard, those last remnants of ripe fruit can appear as late as the beginning of autumn. Previously, I have written about how fickle...