When I originally started this blog, a big part of the point of it was keeping track of my more successful culinary experiments so that I could repeat them as needed. I haven’t really done that, but today I definitely need to, since I’m trying to work out a new recipe for pectin jellies. This is going to be a blog post without pictures, because it really is mostly notes to myself. But they might be of interest to other culinary chemists, too.
You might ask why I need a new recipe for pectin jellies, since the original one was so good. Unfortunately, at some point, I stopped being able to find the pectin I needed, at which point the recipe stopped working. I’ve been trying a few different pectins without success. The Lotus brand is the easiest to get hold of, but it just doesn’t work with the recipe I have. After discussion today with the lovely chocolatiers and patissiers at Savour, I learned that one of the reasons for this is that Lotus adds dextrose to their pectin, so it just isn’t as strong as I’m expecting.
(This isn’t an act of obnoxiousness by Lotus, by the way – when you make pâtés de fruits, you usually start by mixing the pectin with some sugar so that it doesn’t clump up and make your confections lumpy. Lotus has done this for you – I just don’t know what proportions they are using.)
(Note to self – I wonder if I could write to Lotus and ask what their ratio is?)
Anyway, while I am assured by Savour that they definitely use Lotus or Sosa Pectin Jaune for their jellies, they have evidently changed the recipe since the class I attended ten years ago, probably for the same reason I’m doing this now. Kirsten Tibbals very kindly gave me the two recipes they currently use, so that I could try to rework my own recipe.
I’m not going to reproduce it here, because I’m pretty sure that would be taking advantage of her generosity. Instead, you get my first two, semi-successful attempts. Hopefully by this time next week, I’ll be able to give you a proper recipe. Continue reading →
Wow, I’ve finally caught up with all the pre-programmed posts and here I am… in, it must be said, a rather less auspicious space than I would prefer to be at this time of year.
It’s been a difficult year for me. I’ve lost a lot of people to cancer, several of them friends who were close to my age. Our cat, Mayhem, went into acute kidney failure in May and had to be put to sleep. I have been having ongoing problems with my wrists and now also my knees, which might be arthritis, and basically there is always some part of me that is hurting. And work has been in the throes of a restructure which has been extremely stressful and is now reaching the pointy end. It looks like I’m going to find out on the day of the Christmas party whether I still have a job, whether it is still with my scientists or somewhere totally different, and whether my workload is going to double in the new year. (And also whether I win an Institute award, which is… an interesting combination. I mean, it would be sort of hilarious if I won an award at the same time as I lost my job, but I think that’s a form of hilarity I could do without.)
So I’ve been kind of depressed. Though the Employee Assistance Program chappie who came in to talk to us at work this week says it sounds to him less like I’m depressed and more like I’m having an entirely congruent reaction to a deeply shitty year. (And then he suggested that maybe one reason I’ve had trouble writing recently is that the ‘voice’ I use for writing no longer reflects my reality, which… may be true. On the other hand, does anyone really want to read recipes by someone who is alternating between depression and fury? Let’s find out!)
Anyway. These are the kind of cupcakes I make for a work fundraiser when I am actually really fed up with everyone and everything and also wondering why men who grow moustaches for Movember can’t bake their own cupcakes if they want to do a morning tea fundraiser. But since some of the men in question are my very own scientists who I want to support, and since I know full well that even if they did bake, they probably wouldn’t bake vegan cupcakes, and since I like my vegan colleagues and feel that they deserve morning tea, I pretty much have to bake vegan cupcakes.
But – and I want to be clear about this – I absolutely refuse to ice them.
Yes, that’s where my hard line is. I will, apparently, bake cupcakes in my spare time and when I don’t have to even when I am feeling angry and miserable and let down, because my scientists are the ones fundraising and I still love them (none of this is their fault, after all, except the moustaches), and also because everyone knows that vegan cupcakes are pretty much at the bottom of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, so it would be unethical not to provide them.
Icing, though? Icing is way up at the top of that pyramid, in the land of faffing around and spending lots of time on things, and that is something I reserve for organisations who actually value me.
So instead of icing, these cakes are topped with sliced apples and Viennese Christmas Sugar, which tastes good, and also is a really fast way to make a cupcake look pretty without putting a lot of effort into it.
That’ll learn ’em.
Your shopping list
1/4 cup glacé ginger
1 1/4 cups flour
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
4 tsp ginger )
1 1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/4 tsp cloves
1/4 tsp salt
1/2 cup canola oil
1/2 cup molasses
1/3 cup maple syrup
1/3 cup soy yoghurt
zest of 1 lemon
2 apples
2-4 tablespoons Viennese Christmas Sugar (this is a really coarse-grained white sugar – sanding sugar, I think, in US terms – mixed with pieces of star anise, hibiscus, rosehips, nutmeg, coriander, cassia and probably a few more things. You could make something similar with demerara sugar and whatever appeals to you in your spice cabinet) (also, this measurement is a complete guess, sorry.) Continue reading →
A while back, one of my Professors welcomed me back from long service leave with a copy of Deceptive Desserts: A Lady’s Guide to Baking Bad, by Christine McConnell. I was particularly taken by her recipe for Screamberries, and my brother and I originally had evil plans to make this as a birthday cake for Elisabeth’s first birthday (just think of the photos!), but for some reason (possibly because my mother was appalled?) we decided to make the orange and banana cakes instead.
Well, this year, what with one thing and another, it became practical to have my brother’s birthday party and my niece’s both on the same day. Obviously, this necessitated two cakes, and when I asked my brother what he wanted for this cake, the answer was ‘tentacles’.
So that was easy, then.
I made a few modifications to McConnell’s recipe. Vanilla mousse seemed boring, so I filled the waffle cups half with vegan chocolate mousse and half with berry mousse. Stabilised whipped cream seemed like way too much like hard work for a relatively small result, so I didn’t do that. And my first batch of waffle cones weren’t great, so I had to make another double batch in the hour between getting back from cantoring in Middle Park and leaving for birthday shenanigans in Canterbury. So I signally failed to follow the instructions and just dumped everything in together. I can’t claim that they were brilliant waffle cups, but they were fresh and they did the job.
And really, who cared about the waffle cups? The mousse was delicious, and really, we were all here for the strawberries and the tentacles, right?
Incidentally, you can make this recipe in advance and take the components in separate boxes to wherever you are going, at which point it takes about ten minutes to put together.
Why yes, this is indeed another Wedding Cake Leftovers post. Is anyone really surprised by this? This time, the cake bits in question were the vegan sachertorte cakes. I also had leftover dark chocolate, leftover milk and leftover cream – which is why these cake pops didn’t turn out vegan. But there is no reason why yours shouldn’t be! I was really just trying to avoid wasting ingredients, and decided that on this occasion, that was more important than feeding my vegan scientists. I’ll make something for them next time, don’t worry.
This is another super easy recipe, but I’m really pleased with how it turned out – the cake pops really taste like chocolate truffles, but they are much easier to make, because the cake crumbs make them a bit less sticky than pure ganache, and a lot more inclined to roll into nice, neat balls.
Because I had what seemed like acres of chocolate cake crumbs, I wound up dividing my mixture in two and flavouring half of it with freeze dried raspberry powder that I had discovered in my freezer, and the other half with six little peppermint candy sticks leftover from Christmas, which I found in my pantry. So despite being an extremely decadent, rich, fudgy chocolate truffle recipe, this also counts as an extremely frugal recipe!!!
Yeah, that’s not so convincing, is it?
But it is quite a good pantry-and-fridge-clearing recipe, which counts for something, I think.
You probably thought I was done with rainbow-wedding-cake related posts, didn’t you? Nope. Not a chance. I’m actually writing this a month before you are reading it (and a good thing, too, because right at this very moment I am almost certainly collapsed into an incoherent heap after running a conference all week) and if I dared look into my fridge right now, I would see, in addition to these cake pops, a large box full of chocolate cake crumbs, a big ball of white chocolate ganache the size of my clasped hands, a bowl of lavender whipped ganache, and half a carton of cream – ooh, and I’ve just realised what I should make next, but I’m not going to tell you what that is because that would be cheating.
In short, you would not believe how many leftovers that wedding cake generated, so having spent the last few Sundays reviewing the individual cake recipes, we are now starting on the Leftovers Chronicles.
(And yes,I’m milking this for as long as I can, because I do want to start blogging regularly again… but I don’t trust this current burst of energy and ideas to last, so I want to try to blog well ahead of time while I can so that if it all goes to hell for a month or two, there won’t be such a long gap between posts…)
Anyway, cake pops. Cake pops are traditionally made from cake crumbs and icing mixed together and dipped in chocolate or candy melts. I usually find them horrifically sweet, to be honest. But I also didn’t have many other ideas for what to do with epic amounts of cake off-cuts. So I thought I’d see what happened if I mixed them with the lemon curd that I also had leftover, and the results were actually pretty good, and not too sweet at all.
As for the ruby chocolate… yes, of course I pre-ordered some from the first shipment in Australia. If you haven’t tried it yet, it’s quite an interesting taste – I think it’s like white chocolate, but with an acidic bite to it. It is not, to be honest, my favourite kind of chocolate, but it does go very well with lemon, which most other kinds of chocolate do not. If you can’t get your hands on ruby chocolate – which is not cheap, in any case – white chocolate would work just fine, but the overall result would just be a little sweeter.
Calling these cupcakes Sacher-cupcakes is probably an insult to Austrians everywhere and they will never let me go back to their country, let alone that hotel, but I do think it’s a fair description.
Sachertorte is a light chocolate sponge covered with apricot jam and chocolate glaze. These cakes are also light and chocolatey, filled with apricot jam and covered with chocolate ganache, and they are really delicious. I’ve made this recipe quite a few times in the last year or two for work events, because it’s incredibly easy and fast to make, works with gluten-free flour mix if it needs to, and once you fill it with apricot jam and load it with ganache nobody will believe that it’s vegan.
These are really quite basic cupcakes with a little bit of lavender in them. If you’ve ever made a plain butter cake, you probably used this recipe, but without the lavender. The only slightly complex part is the whipped ganache, which is a bit fiddly, but actually very easy. Once you’ve made the ganache once, you’ll probably want to make it again, because it gives you a delicately flavoured cream that holds up much better than whipped cream if it needs to sit around for a few hours.
The only thing to remember is that you need to start the ganache at least 7 hours before you plan to serve the cupcakes. Making it the day before is fine.
Also, I just love the flavour of lavender, but usually I make it either too strong or not strong enough. For me, this whipped ganache is in the magical Goldilocks zone – noticeably lavender, without making you think about soap…
Your shopping list
75 white chocolate
125 + 160g cream, both chilled
3 blackberries, crushed
1 tsp dried culinary lavender + 2 tsp for the cake
12g liquid glucose (yes, I know, I know. This recipe is usually made in a much larger batch. This is about 1 1/2 teaspoons, I think. Just think how much worse it would be if I’d only made a dozen cupcakes!)
250g butter, softened
300 g caster sugar
4 eggs
370 g self-raising flour
160 ml milk
500g blackberry jam
Now what will you do with it?
First, make the ganache. Chop up the white chocolate and put it into a bowl.
Put 125g cream in a small saucepan with the blackberries and 1 tsp of lavender, and heat until boiling point. Switch off the heat and leave for five minutes.
Pour the cream through a seive into another bowl. Press the blackberries into the seive with the fork to make sure their juice comes through. Return the cream to the saucepan.
Add the liquid glucose, which is, yes, a pain to use, but it does somehow make the ganache more stable. What I recommend doing is rinsing a teaspoon and your hands in cold water, then using the teaspoon to scoop out the glucose and your finger to push it off into the cream – the cold water makes the glucose stick less. And I’m sorry about the quantities. This is the halved version of the recipe, and even with 24 cupcakes, you are going to have more than you need…
Bring the cream and glucose back to the boil, and pour the mixture over the white chocolate in the bowl. Stir until the chocolate melts. If you’ve made ganache before, you are probably worried about these ratios, because this is a very thin ganache and about to get thinner. Don’t worry – think of this as whipped cream thickened with chocolate, and it will make more sense.
Stir in the rest of the chilled cream. You might add a drop of purple colouring to the mixture to make it more inviting if you like, but this is optional. Cover the ganache with clingwrap, which should be directly on the surface of the cream, and refrigerate for at least six hours or up to two days.
When you are ready to make the cupcakes, preheat your oven to 180°C, and line two twelve-hole muffin tins with paper cases. (Or do this in two batches, one tin at a time.)
Grind the lavender in a mortar and pestle (you can grind it with some of the sugar if you find this easier) until it is somewhat broken down.
Put the lavender into a medium-sized mixing bowl with the butter and sugar, and cream together. Add the eggs one at a time, then mix in the flour and milk, alternately.
Divide the mixture between the muffin tins, and put into the oven. Bake for 20-25 minutes, or until the cakes feel soft and springy when you poke at them gently. You might want to swap the trays around at the 15 or 20 minute mark, depending on how they are doing.
Remove from their tins, and let cool on a rack. Get out your ganache, and whip it as you would cream. The ganache has a higher fat content than cream, though, so it will whip up much faster – don’t put on a stand mixer and wander off to hang out the washing or something, this is probably only going to take a couple of minutes.
Use a small knife to cut a conical circle (I’m sure that is terrible geometry, but the right words escape me) in the middle of each cake – basically, you want a nice, round, section of cake, slightly pointed in the middle, which you are going to cut in half to make the butterfly wings, so don’t eat it!
Place a small spoonful of blackberry jam in the centre of each hole, and pipe or spoon the lavender ganache over the top of it.
Gently place the two ‘wings’ into the cream, pushing slightly inward as you do, to help raise the cream.
Dust with icing sugar or little purple stars.
Feed to the people you love.
Variations
Well, there’s no reason this has to be a lavender cake, I suppose, but isn’t that rather a waste? You might make the cakes with raspberry jam and a little rosewater in the ganache (add half a teaspoon with the cold cream, then taste and see if you need a little more), in which case I’d keep the cakes plain vanilla, because it is far too easy to wind up with overly-perfumed rose cakes.
You could replace 50 grams of the flour with cocoa, and then fill the cakes with cherry jam and add kirsch to your ganache. Apparently, I’ve decided that black forest is the variation I want for every cupcake I’m doing. Or just go ultra-chocolate – I bet this would be amazing with dark chocolate whipped ganache and a caramel filling, or a raspberry one, or maybe you could add peppermint essence to your whipped chocolate ganache, and have a choc-mint cupcake. At which point you should probably decorate it with shards of Peppermint Crisp, because that is the law.
In terms of dietary requirements, I don’t think you are going to be able to avoid dairy here, but if you have a good, basic vegan vanilla cupcake recipe you could certainly make this ensemble eggless. It is obviously free of nuts. It would work just fine with my gluten-free self-raising flour mix, and the result should also be low in fructose, though certainly not in lactose.
So, judging by the reaction I’ve had every time I’ve shown anyone any photos of this cake, this is probably the first recipe I ought to be sharing. Because, let’s face it, that was one spectacular-looking cake.
It’s also a lot easier than it looks. Seriously, if you can make a passable marble cake, and have access to good-quality food colouring, you can make this.
I actually found the prototype for this recipe online, and I’ll share the YouTube video below, because I didn’t actually take photos of the various steps, being as I was engaged in just trying to get the thing to work.
I changed a handful of things for this recipe. For one thing, I made it gluten-free, using a modified version of my gluten-free flour mix. For another, I decided to flavour it with orange flower water instead of vanilla. Using orange blossoms in the bouquet or bridal wreath is a very old bridal tradition, and I thought it would be nice to give a nod to that, especially given how interested one of the brides had been in my use of rosewater and lavender in cupcakes. I kept the flavour pretty subtle, because too much orange flower water can be very much like eating soap.
But you know what was the big thing I did that changed this cake into a proper rainbow cake?
I baked it in a smaller tin.
That’s it.
And the smaller tin meant that the arch of the rainbow was raised, giving a much more impressive rainbow effect than it might otherwise have had.
I’m going to suggest two different decorating ideas for this – the one I used in my practice run, and the one I used for the actual wedding cake. It really depends how formal you are feeling…
Your shopping list
150g butter
160g sugar
3 eggs
270g gluten-free flour mix
3 tsp baking powder
½ tsp salt
120g yoghurt
60g milk
1 tsp orange flower water
red, yellow, green, blue and purple food colouring pastes (these are far more vibrant than liquid food colouring)
200g white chocolate
65 ml cream
500g white icing OR lots of hundreds and thousands
You will also need a 5 inch (12.5cm) round tin with tall sides.
Now what will you do with it?
Grease the tin with butter, and line the bottom and the sides. You really don’t want all your good work to come to nothing when you turn the cake out! Preheat oven to 170°C.
(Also, you need to know now that you are not going to use all this mixture in a cake tin this size. You need somewhere between 2/3 and 3/4. You can make the rest into really psychedelic cupcakes, if you want.)
Cream the butter and the sugar, then beat in the eggs one by one.
Beat in the dry ingredients, then the yoghurt and the milk. Mix in half a teaspoon of orange flower water, and taste to see if it’s strong enough. Add the other half teaspoon if you think it needs more (I’ve found that some brands are stronger than others).
Divide the mixture between six bowls, and colour them red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple. Orange requires only a tiny amount of red compared to yellow, and I strongly recommend that you buy a purple colour if you can – you can never get a really vibrant purple from red and blue colour.
Make sure the mixture is super-bright. Now is not the time to worry about the chemicals in food colouring – you don’t want a pastel rainbow, and baking will bleach the cake slightly.
Now for the fun bit! Get a big dollop of the red mixture – about 2/3 – 3/4 of what’s in the bowl, and plop it carefully into the middle of the tin. Bang the tin really hard on the bench to make the red mixture spread out a bit. It won’t go all the way to the edges yet, and that’s fine.
Get a similarly sized dollop of the orange, and plop it carefully into the very centre of the tin on top of the red. Bash the tin on the bench again – the orange will spread out with the red spreading out further under it, so you have concentric circles. Well, circle-ish things.
If this is confusing, have a look at the video below. This is where I got the recipe from – so thank you Emma, for this fantastic method.
Dollop the yellow on top of the orange, and repeat the banging bit, then do the same with the green, then the blue, then the purple.
If you are miraculously good at this, you should be able to see a little bit of red, a little bit of orange, a little bit of yellow, a little bit of green and a little bit of blue, all in concentric circles under the purple. I wasn’t that good, but it still worked pretty well.
If you are about 2/3 of the way up the tin, you can stop here. If it’s only half full, go for a double rainbow. The next layers will be a bit smaller, but that’s OK.
Put the tin in the oven, and bake for about 45 minutes to an hour. If, after 45 minutes, it’s browning too fast but still wet in the middle, reduce the temperature to 165. It will bake eventually, I promise, but deep cakes are a bit tricky. This one should pass the skewer test when it’s done.
Turn the cake out onto a wire rack to cool.
Once the cake is cool, your next step is to make the cake nice and flat on top, because you want to serve this cake upside down from where it was in the tin, so that you have a rainbow rather than a series of colourful smiles. I have no tips for this. My cakes almost always turn out looking drunk. I fluked the wedding cake, and it was still a tiny bit crooked, frankly. Just do your best.
My practice cake looked very drunk, but nobody cared once I covered it in sprinkles.
Now you are going to cover the cake in ganache and then either white icing, or sprinkles.
To make the ganache, chop the white chocolate finely and put it into a bowl.
Bring the cream to a boil, and pour over the ganache. Cover the bowl with a lid for a minute or so, to start the chocolate melting, then stir the mixture until it is smooth. Use a spatula to coat the cake thinly in ganache.
If you are looking for a nice, formal cake, you want the white icing. Sprinkle your work surface with icing sugar, and knead the icing firmly until it is soft enough to work into a smooth ball.
Use a rolling pin to roll it out. It wants to stick to the surface, so what you do is this. First, sprinkle more icing sugar on the work surface, and roll the rolling pin over the ball twice, away from you, so that you have an oval. Pick it up, and turn it over, and then rotate it 90 degrees and roll the rolling pin over it twice more. Turn it over and rotate it again, and keep going until the icing is about 3-5 mm thick, and big enough to cover the cake with several centimetres to spare on each side. So about 35cm diameter, maybe? The reason you are turning it over constantly, by the way, is that this helps the icing not to stick to the work surface, so don’t forget to do that bit.
Now you need to drape it over the cake. This is a pain, and the trick is not to stretch it. Pick it up carefully and place it gently over the top of the cake. Use a spatula or smoother (or your hand…) to smooth down the top of the cake only.
Now smooth the cake down the sides with downward strokes, a little at a time. If you are about to get wrinkles, gently pull the bottom of the icing outward, being careful not to stretch it, while you smooth down the side from top to bottom. If you are lucky, this will result in no lumps or wrinkles. I strongly suggest watching some YouTube videos (look up ‘covering a cake with fondant’) until you think you can replicate the method. That’s what I did…
If this sounds like way too much faffing around, go with the sprinkle topping instead!
To do this, cover the cake with ganache again, but this time, get out a big metal skewer and skewer the cake from bottom to top.
Make a layer of 100s and 1000s or other coloured sprinkles on a long, flat tray or your working surface, and use the skewer to place the cake on its side at one end of the sprinkles. Carefully push the skewer all the way through the cake, and use it to roll the cake along the layer of sprinkles until it is completely coated.
Now draw back the skewer a little, and use it to lever up the cake and place it face down into the sprinkles (or alternatively, get the cake back onto a cake plate, and leave the top white, or cover it with sprinkles by the more traditional, sprinkling method).
Carefully lever the cake up onto a cake plate.
Serve to someone who needs more colour in their life!
Variations
This is a gluten-free cake, obviously, and it is also low in fructose, and nut-free. You could probably make a vegan version – just start with a vegan cake recipe that has a fairly wet, but not liquid, consistency. You don’t want something that is too pancake-batterish, but you don’t want something really stiff, either. I’m sorry – I don’t have any recommendations for this one.
If you just need it to be gluten and dairy free, you can, of course, use a good dairy-free margarine like Nuttelex, and a soy or coconut milk and yoghurt.
I’m sure you could use natural food colours for this, but I think you’d have to work hard to stop your rainbow from being too pastel – though that could be pretty, too, in the right circumstances.
Taking a break from the travel diaries to write down a recipe that has been a bit of a lifesaver for me this year. It tastes like comfort food, it’s full of vegetables, it creates copious leftovers, and it takes maybe ten minutes of preparation time. Probably less, really. And because the vegetables are all soft, I can even make it when my wrist is acting up and doesn’t want me to chop things.
You can serve it with all sorts of things, really. It goes with bread and hummus (or you can fling some chickpeas in to bake with the rest of the ratatouille), or grilled haloumi (which you can also chop into chunks and throw in to bake for the last ten minutes); with roasted or boiled potatoes and felafel or grilled fish or chicken; it’s great over giant couscous (again, with chickpeas), or stirred through pasta, or even made into a bake with bocconcini and more pasta.
You can serve it hot, or warm, or at room temperature. Tonight, I’ll be serving it hot with some little pies from Zaatar – lamb, and haloumi, and spinach. And probably with some roast potatoes because everything is better with roast potatoes, especially when you are eating super late because it took nearly two hours to get home from work and your husband hasn’t even managed to leave work yet and it’s nearly 9pm…
This is not as fancy as my other ratatouille recipe, but it tastes very nearly as good and takes far less time. It’s Friday night-worthy, which is really saying something, especially after a fortnight like the one I’ve had, with lots of stress and very little sleep. (Though one of my scientists did bring me cake to cheer me up, which was possibly the nicest thing anyone has done for me ever.)
Oh, and it doesn’t create a lot of washing up, either. Just one giant baking dish.There’s really nothing not to like, unless you are entirely anti-vegetable.
Your Shopping List
3 large capsicums, preferably in different colours
2 red onions
2 medium zucchini
1 largeish eggplant
olive oil
lavender salt
black pepper
rosemary
dried mint
400g cherry tomatoes
500ml – 750 ml (whatever size bottle you have) tomato passata
dried basil
(I know these amounts are very vague. It really is a sprinkle of this and a sprinkle of that, and it is very much to taste. If you don’t have lavender salt, a pinch of salt with some culinary lavender is good, or skip the lavender and add a little fennel, and rather more rosemary. It will be fine.)
When I got back to work after my long service leave earlier this year, I discovered a cookbook on my desk, courtesy of one of my Professors. This is an excellent way to come back from long service leave and I highly recommend it to any who are considering such a thing. The book was Deceptive Desserts: A Lady’s Guide to Baking Bad! (which I see is actually discounted at the Book Depository right now), and it is a rather brilliant collection of recipes for ill-advised treats – face-hugger cake, cannoli with little kitten faces, Frankenstein’s monster cake, terror-mi-su, cinnamon buns shaped to look like serpents ready to strike, cat-lady jello, and my personal favourite, screaming strawberries in vanilla mousse with chocolate tentacles.
The illustrations are truly a thing of beauty – Christine McConnell, who is a stylist and photographer as well as a baker, photographs herself in vintage costumes that coordinate with her various disturbing desserts, with the occasional cat in the background, looking appalled.
The recipes are also nicely varied – it isn’t the sort of cake book that gives you six basic recipes at the start and then focuses on how to decorate them; there are recipes for sugar cookies (decorated to look like gravestones), waffle cones, various mousses and jellies, lime meringue cakes, devil’s food cakes, donuts (disguised as fried chicken and vegetables), banana bread, caramel popcorn, peppermint brownies, and apple pie, to name a random assortment. I would note that the recipes are American and thus tend to have rather more sugar than I prefer in my cakes, but this is a minor quibble for an extremely fun and comprehensive book.
Welcome to my online table! My name is Catherine and I love feeding people. By day, I am a scientific co-ordinator in a medical research institute. By night - or by weekend - I am generally found cooking like a maniac, rejoicing in farmers' markets, or talking endlessly about food.
While I am an omnivore, the vast majority of recipes on this blog are vegetarian, and many more are vegan, gluten-free or allergy friendly. You can find them through the menus above, or click on What if there isn't enough food? to learn more about this blog.
