A few weeks ago, my neighbourhood exploded in crimson. Like beads of blood shaken briskly from a deep wound, pendulous redcurrants started to dangle from the bushes lining the streets. Their weighty chain-like stems drooped abundantly, inviting birds and passers-by to gorge on their bright, tart goodness. And yet gorge they did not. Every time I wandered past I would survey the crop covetously, convinced that those who had an actual right to the bushes and their bounty would soon awaken to the ripeness of the harvest and take full advantage, but the day never came. The currants lingered. I waited. I decided enough was enough.
Read moreNorwegian(ish) blackcurrant custard buns
It is a myth universally peddled that Scandinavia has excellent baked goods. The British press, in particular, would have you believe that if you walk into any coffee shop or bakery across the entire Nordic region (they very rarely pause to acknowledge that Finland and Iceland are not, technically, part of Scandinavia) you will be greeted by an exquisite smorgasbord of soft, buttery delights, the gentle waft of cinnamon and cardamom softening the pungent accent of freshly ground coffee. And indeed this would be the case, were you to walk into any bakery across Sweden or Denmark. Norway, however, is another story.
Read moreMatcha lemon tart
I think I would consider lemon tart to be the most dangerous dessert. Not dangerous in the way of Japanese fugu or anything, I’m not claiming that it will kill you if incorrectly prepared, but dangerous in that capable-of-completely-abolishing-all-willpower sort of way. There’s something about the irresistible mix of buttery pastry, silky custard, and the snap of lemon that seems to prevent you reaching that overload threshold you get with other desserts. Because it has a welcome acidity from lemons, you can just keep on going without feeling yourself slip into a sugar coma. Until you do, of course, slip into a sugar coma, one that has crept up on you like some kind of saccharine ninja and left you defenceless.
Read moreLavender tea shortbread hearts
I never thought I'd be one of those bloggers, the kind that post gimmicky heart-shaped or red velvet creations to mark the otherwise utterly meaningless fourteenth of February. To be honest, these were made a couple of weeks ago, and they just happen to be heart-shaped, because I thought they'd make more interesting photos than simple rounds. But ignore that if you're a hopeless romantic: these would also make a lovely gift for your Valentine. Or your colleagues, as in my case. Or your friends. Or your mum. Shortbread doesn't make distinctions. Shortbread is always loving.
Read moreSpiced pumpkin pie and maple pecan cheesecake
The season for pumpkins is over!, I hear you cry. Well, not if you're me, and you've spent the last two months steadily stockpiling massive gourds so that you now have a small collection on your balcony, enjoying a radiant sea view. In my head I refer to them as The Gourd Gang, and they're a mighty attractive bunch, some with delicate slate-blue skins, some knobbly and dark green. I'm pretty sure I've burned enough extra calories from lugging them around town in my bike panniers (at one point I was carrying three, which is basically like having a pregnant bike) to justify an extra large slice of this recipe, which remains my favourite ever sweet dish with pumpkin. (Contenders for the savoury title are a lasagne, a Thai coconut noodle soup, and Italian pumpkin ravioli with sage brown butter. In case you were wondering, which I'm sure you were).
Read moreSpiced pumpkin pie tea loaf with apple and blueberry
A week or so ago, I was standing in our office kitchen at breakfast time waiting for the toaster to beep. This story requires you to be familiar with the concept of a Danish toaster, so we’ll get that vital detail out of the way first. The Danes, being the edgy, thinking-outside-the-box, design-conscious folk that they are, have quite literally turned the concept of the toaster on its head. They have horizontalised the toaster. Where us plebs in England drop our flaccid sliced Hovis into a fiery, gaping maw, where it sits clamped between metallic jaws and undergoes a thrilling gamble of a transformation that could either result in charcoal or warm dough, but never the sweet Goldilocks stage in between, and which requires you to either interrupt the whole process to check on its progress or to stick your face into the mouth of the beast and risk singed nasal hair, and which is really only appropriate for bread the precise thickness of a pre-sliced loaf or, at the very most, a crumpet – heaven forbid you should try and insert your wedge of artisanal sourdough or pain au chocolat into its tantalizingly precise orifice – the Danes have realized the many potential perils of this situation. (Not least, the possibility of dropping your house keys into the slot and causing a minor explosion, as my mother once managed to do in a feat of ineptitude that still astounds and perplexes me).
Read moreTen things I've learned about food while living in Denmark
There are few pleasures simpler or greater than excellent bread and butter. Particularly when the butter is creamy and salted, and the bread is a freshly baked Danish bolle, or roll, available in numerous varieties: peppered with walnuts and dried fruit, sprinkled with poppy or pumpkin seeds, flecked with strands of carrot or beetroot… These always have the most luscious dense, slightly sour crumb, and are deliciously chewy and wholesome, particularly when slathered in the aforementioned butter. I should also mention that the Danes even have a special word, tandsmør, which literally means ‘tooth butter’ and describes a piece of bread so thickly spread with the good stuff that you leave toothmarks when you bite into it. This essentially describes the diet to which I have been rigorously adhering since I moved here.
Read moreSticky chai spiced candied citrus bread
I was distinctly unimpressed by my first ever sip of true, authentic Indian chai. In fact, I’d say my reaction bordered on revulsion. As someone whose journey in tea drinking had progressed from milky teenage cups of builder’s tea, through to Earl Grey with a slice of lemon, through to all sorts of exotic, loose leaf brews from the corner of the globe drunk strictly unadulterated – heaven forbid milk or sugar should make it anywhere near the teapot – I was unprepared for the assault on my tastebuds mounted by my first real chai, sipped in the ferocious sun atop a roof terrace in Delhi.
Read moreOlive oil and candied bergamot syrup cake
I often find it odd that Earl Grey is an almost ubiquitous beverage, whose tell-tale floral perfume scents teacups the world over, and yet its key ingredient, the bergamot, is a rare specimen whose glowing presence amidst the jumbled crates of a farmers market stall is guaranteed to send serious food-lovers into paroxysms of excitement (and, subsequently, to lead to heightened activity on Instagram as we first show off our esoteric citrus haul and, not long after, start crowdsourcing suggestions on what on earth to do with this highly underrated and underused knobbly lemon thing). Earl Grey is available in myriad forms, from high-class zesty loose leaves for infusing in china teapots to the tannic dust likely to fill your cup in a greasy spoon café or on an aeroplane meal tray. That the actual source of these plentiful, cosmopolitan cuppas remains elusive is one of the strange realities of our modern food supply system.
Read moreCarrot cake tea and pistachio shortbreads
Not content with the simple pleasure offered by a biscuit and a cup of tea, I have been experimenting with a very British method of gilding the lily: baking tea into the biscuit itself. It’s hardly an unprecedented move: just think of the humble Rich Tea biscuit, beloved by millions for its milky blandness and its perfectly calibrated texture, designed for dunking into a soul-soothing cuppa in the middle of the afternoon. I’m not sure if there is actually any tea to be found in the Rich Tea, but I’ve also come across excellent versions of Earl Grey shortbread, where crumbly butteriness blends perfectly with the refreshing snap of bergamot. Shortbread is the ideal foil for assertive tea flavours; comforting, rich, dangerously moreish, it can take a heavy-handed scattering of tea leaves through the mix.
Read morePlum, ginger and hazelnut breakfast crumble
I have made many a crumble in my life. I would count myself as something of a crumble connoisseur. I cut my teeth on the classics – apple, rhubarb – before graduating into a wild, wonderful world of pineapple, coconut and black pepper, or pear, chocolate and raspberry, or fig, blood orange and hazelnut, even venturing occasionally into savoury variations (tomato, rosemary and cheddar; butternut squash, sage and blue cheese). There is very little that I will not try to crumble, and there is very little that isn’t improved by being smothered in a blanket of butter, sugar and flour, rubbed together into an irresistible nubbly sweetness.
Read moreBergamot, rosemary and olive oil syrup cake
When I was seventeen, I worked in the kind of restaurant that I was far too much of a food philistine to appreciate. Why would a fussy teenager who lived off a diet of McDonalds super-size happy meals, cheese sandwiches and fish fingers care about organic food that was lovingly sourced from within a fifty-mile radius, with an emphasis on seasonality, ‘from-scratch’ cooking and unusual flavour combinations? Not for my anaemic adolescent palate the delights of duck liver and raisin pâté, pickled fennel, greengage pavlova or Moroccan lamb and preserved lemon tagine. Pass the chicken nuggets.
Read moreTea-infused banana and walnut cinnamon buns
I debated long and hard over what to call these. When I put a picture of them up on instagram the other day, my finger hovered over the keyboard as I found myself weighing up the merits of ‘cinnamon rolls’ versus ‘cinnamon buns’. Were I actually Danish, rather than simply pretending by living in Denmark, being relatively tall, cycling everywhere and knowing how to say ‘I’m dog-hungry, give me a big pastry now’ in Danish, I would simply call them kanelsnegler (cinnamon snails) and be done with it, but I’m not so there was pause for thought. (And even this appears to be hotly contested in Denmark, because alongside the kanelsnegl there also exist the kanelsnurre and even the kanelting, literally ‘cinnamon thing’, which definitely suggests someone somewhere is sick of the entire debate).
Read moreKaffir lime and coconut cheesecake
What can you tell about a person from the contents of their kitchen cupboards? When I was filmed for a cookery programme several years ago, the camera crew made me reveal, on film, the contents of my larder to prove that I was not your average student when it came to culinary ingenuity. ‘No pot noodles in my cupboard!’ they wanted me to declare with an impish grin, gesturing instead to the bottles of raspberry-infused balsamic vinegar, bergamot olive oil, buckwheat flour and dried edible rose petals. I refused, unwilling to abandon completely my dignity on national television, but they did have a point. You can infer a lot about a cook from rifling through their cupboards, whether they are of the Ottolenghi school of thought (giveaways: jars of za’atar and sumac, and wooden spoons forever tipped with purple stains from bashing out pomegranate seeds over every meal), the Nigella (fridge full of butter, double cream and bacon, mandatory carbonara-eating negligee draped over a chair), the Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall (weird offal in the fridge and boxes of home-cured meats lying around in various stages of fermentation), or an ardent follower of the Clean Eating brigade (chia seeds, bee pollen, cacao powder, a frankly alarming and small mortgage-worthy quantity of Medjool dates). Or, of course, an indifferent, fairweather cook (large quantities of pasta in various shapes and sizes, lots of canned sauces, a jar of 'all-purpose seasoning').
Read moreLemon curd and blueberry twist bread
I don’t think I ever tried a piece of the lemon meringue pie that they used to serve in my school canteen, but it sticks in my memory because of its frankly alarming neon-yellow colouring. I watched friends manipulate chunks of this rubbery, radioactive stuff around their plates, reminiscent more of glow-in-the-dark wallpaper paste than of anything that was once rooted in the earth. I was oddly fascinated by it, the way its jelloid luminescence was able to support a crest of snowy meringue, the way it resembled that fluorescent putty you give children to play with. Its presence on a plate seemed somehow outrageous. Too yellow. Too lurid.
Read morePanettone French toast with raspberry compote
You know those moments where you take a good, hard look at your life? My most recent one involved surveying the two bulging suitcases I had packed to take back to Denmark after a month in England for Christmas. Nestled among the paperback novels (an English-language book in a shop in Aarhus can easily set you back the equivalent of £22), January sales clothing purchases, frivolous impulse-buy cashmere items, and actual essentials (toiletries, socks, thermal tights, Scandi crime drama DVDs, scented candles infused with tea, etc.) were the following:
- 800g of new season Yorkshire rhubarb
- 2 boxes of M&S clotted cream
- 7 packets of tea, including ‘Blueberry Hill’, ‘Wanderlust’, ‘Yoga Tea’ and ‘Gingerbread Chai’
- 2 packets of pecan nuts, nestled into the toe of my shoes (packed shoes, not the ones I was wearing)
- 1 bag of toasted quinoa
- 2 packets of pistachio nuts (ditto)
- 1 huge panettone
If this reads like a list of ingredients, the recipe would be for ‘not missing out on seasonal home comforts in your life abroad’, and the method would read simply: ‘smuggle home via Ryanair. Unpack. Gorge’.
Read moreVilana cake
Vilana cake is an unusual sweet from the beautiful tiny volcanic island of La Gomera, in the Canary Islands, and is named after the ‘vilana’, or tin pot, in which it is traditionally baked. Thanks to its sub-tropical climate, La Gomera boasts fabulous produce – avocadoes, fresh fish, bananas, tomatoes – but the region is best known for its potato recipes, making the most of the island’s flavoursome root vegetables which arrived there shortly after the conquest of America. This simple, hearty cake incorporates mashed potato into its moist, buttery crumb, along with other key ingredients from the island: almonds, spice and dried fruit.
Read moreSweet plum bread with chestnut and vanilla cream
That auspicious transitional period between the years has arrived, and with it the impulse to invent unattainable goals as a coping mechanism, to quell the anxieties of liminality and assert some control over the unnerving blank space that is ‘2017’. While I will not be treading the same path as my friend’s husband, who last year decided that his new year’s resolution was simply and decisively ‘to be better’, it strikes me that using this threshold period as a time to consider ways of improving the year ahead is no bad thing. It’ll take more than a few facile resolutions to tackle the quagmire of misery, post-truth and political turmoil that was 2016, so let’s turn our attention instead to the more manageable, the smaller but still significant: our appetites; the food on our plates; how we eat. Since my life, and my years, are inevitably mapped out around the intricacies of food and cooking, it struck me that there are a few issues we food bloggers, writers, chefs and cooks may want to consider over the coming 365 days in order, ahem, ‘to be better’.
Read moreEggnog custard tarts
Given that my blog sings the praises of the nutmeg, it stands to reason that I should advise you all to go out and drink more eggnog at this time of year. Not only does it have a wonderfully charming name, but this beverage is the ultimate form of edible central heating, and showcases the musky warmth of my favourite spice, with its extraordinary power to transform and enrich dairy-based concoctions. It’s undeniably rich, being a mixture of milk or cream, sugar, spirits and whipped eggs, but a little dram is ideal for those lingering winter nights, particularly if you’re the kind of person who likes your desserts drinkable and enriched with booze.
Read morePersimmon, date and walnut scones
I never thought I’d be one of those expats who pines for tastes of home and can be found looking shifty around the security gates at airports, nervously anticipating the moment they are forced to unveil to the bemused staff their suitcase, tightly packed with jars of Marmite and cylinders of Digestive biscuits. Then again, I don’t like Marmite, I haven’t eaten a Digestive biscuit in years, and the usual suspects hardly register on my radar of desire either: baked beans I consider an atrocity, Yorkshire tea is unpleasantly bitter, and Branston pickle is a surefire way to ruin almost any food.
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