It’s no secret by now how much I love cake. Cupcakes, muffins, teacakes, cakey breads, coffeecakes; iced, frosted, buttercreamed, or any which way, cakes are all good. They’re delicious and never fail to hit the spot (when done well anyway).

One of my favourite teacakes, though, is the financier. There’s a little bit of debate going around as to the origins of their names – some say it’s due to the traditional rectangular mold used to bake them in which makes them resemble gold ingots, others say it’s because the cakes became popular around the financial district of Paris, as finance-types found it easy to grab one of these very portable cakes on the way back to the office after lunch or meetings.

Whatever the etymology of its name, I personally remember wheedling my mum into a pit stop whenever we would pass by a Delifrance when I was a kid. Now, I know as well as you do that Delifrance really isn’t the gold standard one measures Parisian pastries against, but those financiers were (and still are) irresistable to me. I’d take a box of 6 home, and toast them one by one until piping hot and slightly crispy around the edges, and enjoy them in my room, as I took a break from homework or studying, with a glass of cold milk.

And the best part? The batter really couldn’t be easier to assemble. The basic financier comprises powdered sugar, egg whites, browned butter and almond flour (held together with a little extra cake flour), but there’s no beating to stiff peaks, creaming, or any elbow grease involved. This is, in fact, a perfect recipe for those without stand mixers in your kitchen. I did tweak my go-to recipe a little to incorporate my favourite nut, and it does add in an extra dimension of fiddliness since you need to grind the pistachios quite finely or the texture of the teacakes won’t be right. (The key to this is to do it in small batches so your grinder doesn’t overheat and the nuts don’t turn to a nut butter.)

The one thing you do have to pay attention during though, is the browning of your butter. There’s about 10-20 seconds tops that separates browned butter from burnt butter. And having learnt the hard way that there are some times when one shouldn’t multitask in the kitchen, keep an eye on your butter once it starts to bubble and foam. The moment you start smelling hazelnuts and the milk solids in the bottom of the pan have turned a deep brown, remove the pan from the heat and scrape the butter out into a cool bowl. (The residual heat from the pan – especially if you’re using a thick-based one – could easily bring your butter past the point of no return.)

Pistachio Financiers
(adapted from Sherry Yard’s The Secrets of Baking)

230g unsalted butter
55g almond meal
55g shelled pistachios, plus more to garnish
90g cake flour
280g powdered sugar
8 large egg whites, at room temperature

Melt the butter in a heavy-based saucepan over medium heat. Cook until the solids separate and brown to a dark golden colour, 7-10 minutes. Immediately pour off into a clean bowl, scraping out all of the browned bits at the bottom of the pan, and let cool at room temperature until it reaches around 20ºC. Be sure not to chill it, as it needs to remain in liquid form (but it also can’t be hot when you add it to the rest of the ingredients or the cake will turn out gooey and clumpy).

Preheat your oven to 180ºC. Adjust the rack to the centre of the oven. Spray or grease your moulds, and dust lightly with flour, tapping out any excess flour.

Finely grind the pistachios in a food processor, in batches if necessary. Toast the extra pistachios for garnish in the oven for 5-10 minutes, then pulse in the food processor to roughly chop, or crush with the base of a heavy skillet.

Sift together the almond meal, ground pistachios, cake flour and powdered sugar into the bowl of a standing mixer fitted with the paddle attachment. Turn the machine on low and mix the dry ingredients for 30 seconds. Add the egg whites all at once and mix on medium speed for 3 minutes.

Add the cooled browned butter all at once, including all of the browned bits. Mix for 3 minutes on medium speed, scraping down the sides of the bowl well (the butter tends to sink to the bottom). Financier batter will keep in the refrigerator for up to 2 weeks. When using refrigerated batter, be sure to bring it back to room temperature, then stir the entire mixture from the bottom up to the top to reincorporate any separated butter.

Fill each mold about two-thirds full, top with a little of the roughly chopped pistachios, and bake, rotating once halfway through for even browning, for 12-15 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted into the centre comes out clean. Let cool in the pan on a rack for 5 minutes, then invert the financiers onto the rack and cool completely before serving. Financiers taste best on the day they’ve been baked, but, wrapped airtight, will keep at room temperature for up to 2 days, or in the freezer for up to 2 weeks.

Yield: around 30 financiers

I’ve been in a little bit of a cooking-rut. I’m not entirely sure how it started or when exactly this happened, but for the last couple of weeks, I’ve been starting to feel like I lost my kitchen-mojo. The first instance I remember was when I left a rib of beef in the SVS for a few hours too long (borne out of my paranoia of oversleeping and not plonking the meat into the water oven early enough for dinner), and, although it remained very much edible, the texture was just a little bit off. Kind of like a cross between pastrami and roast beef (and I don’t mean that in a good way).

Then I had a few bread-baking mishaps – No-Knead Bread not turning out at all how I would have liked (and no idea if the fault lay with me or the recipe), and my first few attempts at making this milkbread went strangely awry, thanks to an overzealous addition of random ingredients on my part, and very uncooperative yeast. (It expired, apparently. Then I bought some new yeast, and it failed to proof in warm water, the bowl of yeasty water staring balefully at me and stubbornly refusing to froth. But I tried anyway – the dry ingredients were all weighted out and mixed together already – and when it rose, I may or may not have left it to rise for too long, in too warm a spot.) Finally, I tried to make some peanutella to cheer myself up, in spite of not having any home-baked bread to spread it on, but for some reason it turned out rather clumpy and dry. It tasted pretty good, but it wasn’t the delicious, glistening, oozy spread I’d envisioned either.

But! That’s all over now – knock on wood. Before throwing in the (kitchen) towel and declaring myself officially kitchen-mojo-less, I decided to give it one last shot. I took Michael Ruhlman’s 5:3 bread ratio, swapped out about a third of the water for milk, and threw in a couple of teaspoons of sugar for a hint of sweetness. And – behold! – it felt like the kitchen gods were all smiling down upon me once again! My dough kneaded to a delightfully supple elasticity; it rose; it smelled wonderful! When I punched it down, it deflated happily, and was most amenable to being kneaded again briefly before its second rise, and subsequent baking, in a cast iron cocotte.

For those of you interested in bread-baking, baking the loaf in an enameled (or well-seasoned) cast iron Dutch oven is a great way to improve the texture of your bread, without having to invest in some high-tech steam-injection oven, or risk damaging your oven by spritzing the inside of your oven with cold water. The thick, heavy walls of the cocotte do a great job of retaining heat, and – covered for the first half of your baking time – steam in the cooking vessel, which in turn softens the outer layer of the loaf, allowing for a greater initial growth (also known as oven spring, which is the effect of the yeast’s last activity before it’s killed off by the heat of the oven), before the crust dries out and hardens.

There are two ways to go about doing this – one is to preheat your cocotte along with the oven (for about 20-30 minutes), and drop the proofed dough straight into the pan. The other is to let the dough proof directly in the Dutch oven on the second rise, and chuck the entire pot – dough and all – into your preheated oven. The upside of the first (potentially messy and slightly dangerous) method is an even greater oven spring, but I personally prefer the second method, as you don’t disrupt the structure you’ve just developed in your second rise. (Also, I’m a little prone to burning myself, and why play with fire, right?)

As you can see, this loaf gave me a delightfully airy (and fairly even) crumb, with a thin crust. It was fantastic fresh with a little salted butter – rather delicately straddling that bridge between tender and chewy, and it toasted up great – rendering the crust crisp and shattery once reheated – for breakfast the next morning, smeared with a spoonful of homemade blueberry jam. (Post on the blueberry jam to follow soon!) I really can’t think of a better way to have been welcomed back into my kitchen’s good favour, than with this beautiful boule. :)

Dutch Oven Milk Boule
(based on Michael Ruhlman’s Ratio – you can also find this book in my store!)

300g unbleached bread flour, plus more for dusting
5g salt
20g caster sugar
120g warm water (preferably at around 35-40ºC)
2g active dry yeast
60g whole milk

Combine the flour, salt, and sugar in a large mixing bowl.

Proof the yeast in the water, and let stand for 5-10 minutes, before combining with the milk.

Add this to the dry ingredients, and mix with your fingers or a wooden spoon till you’ve got a shaggy-ish dough. Dump the contents of the bowl onto a floured surface, roll your sleeves up, and start kneading. I like to press forward using the heel of my hand, fold the dough over and turn it 90°, then repeat. You should be going at this – dusting your hands and the surface lightly with more flour as necessary – for about 10 minutes. The dough will become smooth and elastic, and slightly tacky. Try not to add any more flour than the barest minimum to keep it from sticking, as too much flour will give you a dry dough and dense loaf.

Cut off a small bit of dough, and roll it into a ball. Gently stretch this piece between your fingers – if it can be stretched thin enough to be translucent (you should be able to just about make out the print of a newspaper through it) before tearing, congrats! Your dough has passed the windowpane test: this means long – and strong – enough gluten strands have been formed during the kneading, which will give your loaf structure, and hold up the air bubbles that the yeast creates. If it doesn’t, smush the little ball back into the rest of your dough, and knead until it passes this test.

Transfer the dough into a lightly oiled bowl, cover with clingfilm, and leave to rise in a warm spot – preferably around 20-25°C. Once it has doubled in size, tip the dough back onto a floured surface, punch it down to deflate it, and knead it gently to redistribute the yeast.

To shape the dough into a boule, gather the ends of the dough and pull them together, smoothing, tucking, and pinching the crease to form a smooth, taut surface on the opposite side. As far as my experience goes, it’s pretty much impossible to have the smooth side tight enough, so keep going at it till you’ve got a nicely formed ball. This will help the dough to rise upwards instead of spreading out during the second rise.

Dust the entire ball lightly with flour, then sit it, seam-side down, on a circle of parchment that will fit in your baking vessel. You can then either drape the loosely with a floured kitchen towel (the linen, not terry-cloth, sort), or transfer the entire thing into the Dutch oven to proof, depending on whether or not you intend to preheat the pot. Leave it to rise for about 1 hour, or until doubled.

About 20-30 minutes before the second rise is done, preheat your oven to 220°C. (If you’re preheating the Dutch oven, go ahead and pop it – lid and all – into the oven too, at this point.) Once the dough is ready, slash it a couple of times with a lame (I just use a Stanley knife, lightly oiled to prevent dragging, that I keep specifically for bread-slashing.) and pop it into the oven. Cook for about 20 minutes, covered, then uncover, turn the oven down to about 175°C, and bake for an extra 20-30 minutes, rotating the pot halfway through for even browning.

To check that your bread is done, you can either tip it out of the pan and tap the bottom – you should hear a hollow thump. Alternatively, insert an instant-read thermometer into the middle of the loaf (from the side, so you don’t mar the appearance of your gorgeous boule!) and it’s done once the thermometer reads 91°C.

Remove the bread from the pan and allow to cool completely on a wire rack before slicing. This bread should keep fresh for about two days, well-wrapped, at room temperature, or you can freeze it for about 3-6 months, well-wrapped in foil. If freezing bread, I prefer to pre-slice it and freeze it (fresh) in pairs, then you can chuck the whole foil package into a low oven (about 125°C) for 15-20 minutes and you’ll have steaming bread that tastes like it’s been freshly baked. :)

Yield: Makes one small boule (about 8 inches in diameter, 5 inches high) – good for about 8 good slices of bread, plus the two crusty ends (baker’s treat!)

Note: Active dry yeast is the same as instant yeast, only it needs to be dissolved in warm water first for the spores to be activated. If you use instant/bread-machine yeast, you can substitute it with the same amount. There will be no need for you to proof the yeast, so you can just mix all the ingredients together all at once. To proof active dry yeast, stir the yeast into a small amount of warm water (the water should be around 35-40ºC, or just warm to the touch), and leave it to stand for 5-10 minutes. Once bubbles form on the surface of the water, indicating microbial activity (if none form, there’s a pretty strong chance your yeast has expired), continue with the recipe.

As much as I pride myself on being organized (when it comes to cooking, anyway), every now and then, something beyond my control happens and springs a little surprise on me. Like a surprise birthday brunch with less than 36 hours to plan, prepare for, and execute. And, considering how most cake stores and restaurants need at least 2-3 days advance notice for a cake order, I ended up baking one.

Thankfully, one of the birthday girl’s favourite desserts is Banoffee Pie. If you’ve never made one of these, you’ll be surprised by how easy it is to assemble one of these babies. Of course, you could make life even easier for yourself and buy ready-made toffee in a jar or squeeze-bottle, but I tend to find those a little too sweet for my liking. You could probably also buy an aerosol can of whipped cream, and a pre-made biscuit or pie crust, and the only actual work you’d have to do would be to slice up some bananas and assemble the whole thing. It takes a little time to set, but you could easily whip it up the day before and ignore it till you’re ready to serve.

And although original recipe calls for a pastry base and dulce de leche made by boiling unopened tins of condensed milk, I decided to change things up a little by using a salted butter caramel sauce for the filling (I find straight-up toffee a little bit too sweet), and a biscuit base, which – according to the birthday girl’s sister – she prefers. I might try a different caramel filling next time though–this sauce was a little bit too liquid (and I was a little too greedy whilst filling the pie shell), so things got a little messy when it started to overflow.

My Banoffee Pie

For the base:
350g digestive biscuits
100g unsalted butter, melted

For the salted caramel sauce:
85g butter
150g sugar
250g cream
1 tsp fleur de sel
1 tbsp vanilla extract

For the pie:

4-5 ripe bananas
300g whipping cream
2 tbsp icing sugar
1 vanilla bean, split and scraped
30g unsweetened dark chocolate/cocoa powder/chocolate shavings

Preheat your oven to 180ºC. Crush all the digestive biscuits finely – my favourite method is to place them all in a ziploc bag and whack the back with a rolling pin – and melt the butter in your microwave (it should take about 30-60 seconds). Combine the butter and biscuits crumbs, then press the mixture into a 9″ tart pan (preferably one with a removable base). You want to ensure that the base is quite firmly packed in, and also evenly brought up the sides. Bake the base for about 8-10 minutes. Remove, and allow to cool completely.

Next, make the sauce. Melt the butter in a heavy-based saucepan, then add in all the sugar. Cook, stirring constantly with a whisk, until the sugar turns a deep brown and just starts to smoke. Remove from the heat and pour in half the cream. Be very careful, as the mixture will smoke, bubble and spit quite furiously. (You may want to wear an oven mitt to protect your hands.) Once the cream has been fully incorporated, whisk in the vanilla and salt, then gently whisk in the rest of the cream. Cool in an ice-water bath, then refrigerate until very cold.

To assemble, peel and slice the bananas into 3mm thick slices on an angle. Whip the cream with the icing sugar and the scraped seeds from your vanilla bean (reserve the pod for another use) to soft peaks. Pour most of your caramel sauce into the shell, you should have a layer of sauce about 5mm deep. Fan the banana slices out, overlapping the slices slightly. You don’t need to be too fussed about how it looks, as it’s going to be covered anyway, but just ensure that you’ve got a fairly even layer. Depending on the depth of your pie shell, you can also drizzle a little more caramel sauce over at this point. The key is to leave about 2-3mm of depth before you pile on the whipped cream. Finally, dollop on the whipped cream. I like to leave a little space around the edge so you can see what’s inside the pie.

The easiest ways to decorate this pie would be to dust the pie with cocoa powder, or just scatter dark chocolate shavings over the pie, but I loved the contrast of the chocolate sauce against the white cream. Melt some chocolate in a microwave (again, do this in a couple of 30-second bursts), then stir to melt the last couple of solid bits and cool it slightly. Once the sauce starts to thicken a little, drizzle it sparingly across the pie, in whatever pattern you’d like. Allow the entire pie to chill in the fridge for at least 2 hours to set, then serve with any leftover caramel sauce.

The pie will keep, refrigerated, for probably 2-3 days. (But they’ve never lasted that long in my house before!)

Yield: Serves 10-12

It all started when I was last in London, and I had a scoop of the most perfect Pistachio ice cream at the Fortnum & Mason cafe. Wanting desperately to replicate it, I trawled through the internet looking for pistachio ice cream/gelato recipes, but each and every single one of them called for this elusive ingredient – pistachio cream/paste. (All the online stores selling it only either shipped it in industrial-sized tubs, or wouldn’t ship to Asia due to customs regulations.) After a couple of weeks, I started looking to try and make this darned paste on my own, only to be shot down again – you need some specialized heated rollers to extract the oils out of pistachios and mash them into such a smooth paste. And as much as I love pistachios, I wasn’t about to go that far, so I all but gave up the hope of ever getting my hands on any, especially when I couldn’t even find it last December in New York.

Fast forward to last month, where you’ll find the bunny and I trundling around Tokyo on a quick weekend trip. We were staying at the Ritz, which is conveniently located just off Roppongi, above Tokyo Midtown, aka home to patisserie Sadaharu Aoki (where you’ll find the best eclairs in Tokyo), and a Dean & Deluca store. While nosing around D&D one morning, I happened across an entire shelf of these petite clear bottles, each containing 5oz of a pale green paste. I swept as many bottles off the shelf and into my basket as the bunny would allow, and – grinning to everyone I skipped past – exultantly made my way to the cashier.

Once I got back to HK, I started digging around my bookmarks for all the recipes I’d found, and came across a rather recent addition – just one month prior, a recipe for Pistachio Eclairs had been posted over on Cafe Fernando. The bunny not being a fan of chocolate, I made a few tweaks, subbing a salted caramel sauce for the chocolate glaze, and reducing the sugar slightly in the pastry cream.

All I can say is, I regret not buying more pistachio paste. But all’s well – a bunch of friends are headed to Tokyo in July, and a few thoughtfully proffered eclairs have ensured that they’ll be saving some space in their luggage for my next stash of pistachio cream. :)

Pistachio Eclairs

Pistachio Pastry Cream (adapted from cafe fernando):

280ml whole milk
3 large egg yolks
2.5 tbsp cornflour, sifted
30g caster sugar (2 heaped tbsp)
140g (5oz) pistachio cream

Prepare an ice bath in a baking dish about 2-4 inches deep. In a heavy-based saucepan, scald the milk, then set aside. While the milk is boiling, whisk together the egg yolks, cornflour, and sugar until pale.

Whisking constantly, slowly pour the hot milk into the egg yolk mixture to temper it. Once all the milk has been added, transfer the mixture back into the saucepan and cook over medium heat, whisking vigorously, and bring it to the boil. Boil for 1-2 minutes, still whisking, then remove from the heat, and whisk in the pistachio cream. Place the entire saucepan into the prepared ice bath, and – stirring frequently – cool the mixture to 60C.

Scrape all the mixture out into a piping bag, clipping the mouth and tip as close to the pastry cream as possible, creating an airtight seal, and refrigerate until cold. The pastry cream will keep for 2 days, refrigerated.

Yield: About 2 cups

Salted Caramel Butter Sauce (from David Lebovitz’s The Perfect Scoop):

40g unsalted butter
75g caster sugar
125ml heavy cream
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
1 tbsp coarse sea salt (fleur de sel)

Melt the butter in a heavy-based saucepan over medium heat. Once the butter has liquefied, add all the sugar and cook, stirring, until the sugar turns a deep golden brown and just starts to smoke.

Remove the pan from the heat and whisk in half the cream (be careful – it will splatter!) until smooth. Whisk in the rest of the cream, then add the vanilla extract and salt. If there are any lumps, whisk the sauce over a very low heat until it has all dissolved. The sauce keeps for 2 weeks in the refrigerator, and can be rewarmed over a low heat on the stove, or in the microwave.

Yield: Makes about 3/4 cup, which is much more than you’ll need, but it’s excellent drizzled on pancakes, ice cream, and pretty much anything else you can think of.

Pâte à Choux (from Sherry Yard’s The Secrets of Baking):

1/2 cup bread flour
1/2 tsp sugar
1/8 tsp salt
1/4 cup water
1/4 cup whole milk
3 tbsp unsalted butter
2-3 large eggs

Preheat your oven to 220C with the rack in the centre of the oven and place a heatproof baking dish or pan on the floor of the oven. Prepare a baking sheet by lining it with parchment paper (you can glue each corner of the parchment to the sheet with a dab of choux paste to keep the paper in place). Sift together the flour, sugar, and salt in a medium bowl. Set aside.

Bring the water, milk and butter to a boil in a medium-sized saucepan over medium heat. At the boil, remove the pan from the heat and add the flour mixture all at once. Using a wooden spoon, beat vigorously to combine.

Return the mixture to medium heat and stir constantly in figure eights. Cook for about 4 minutes, or until the mixture has a smooth, mashed-potato-like appearance. This helps to break down starch and develop gluten. Remove it from the heat, and continue to beat for 2-5 minutes, to cool the mixture down to about 80C. Add 2 of the eggs, one at a time, mixing until thoroughly incorporated before adding the next. Pinch off 1 teaspoon of the dough between your thumb and index finger, then pull your fingers apart – the dough should stretch rather than break. If it breaks, add the last egg. (I didn’t need to add the last egg.)

Fit a large plain tip into a large piping bag and fill the bag halfway with pâte à choux dough, pushing the contents towards the tip. Pipe 2″ strips, leaving 1″ of space between each strip. If desired, before baking, score each eclair with the tines of a fork or a sharp knife to aid the expansion.

Place the puffs in the oven and pour a cup of hot water into the pan on the oven floor. Quickly close the door to keep all the steam in the oven. Bake for 10 minutes, or until the puffs begin to rise, then turn the oven down to 175C and rotate the baking sheet. Prop the oven door open slightly with a wooden spoon and bake for an additional 10-12 minutes, or until the puffs turn nutty brown.

Remove from the oven and cool completely on a rack, about 15-20 minutes, before filling and serving.

To fill: either cut the eclair shells open horizontally, or use a piping nozzle with a long tip to pierce the side and fill with the pistachio pastry cream. Spoon or brush a little salted caramel sauce onto the tops, allowing it to drip down the sidest.

Yield: about 25 mini eclairs.

The first time I’d heard of snickerdoodles was sometime early this year. It was on some food blog or other (sadly I can’t remember where I originally saw this whimsically named cinnamon-sugar encrusted cookie), and I was hooked. I mean, c’mon. They’re called snickerdoodles – how can that be a bad thing?

Long story short: I completely forgot about them, having neglected to pick up a jar of ground cinnamon on any of my supermarket runs. (Bunny isn’t a fan of cinnamon, so I don’t use it all that often.) That is, until Deb of Smitten Kitchen posted about them. This time, the pictures were so gorgeous and so tempting that I pretty much immediately ran out to citysuper to get supplies, and boy were they good.

For one, the entire house smelled heavenly. I mean, it tends to, when you’ve got little bombs of sugar and butter and cinnamon in the oven. And it took so much self-control to not eat them as I pulled each snickerdoodle off the baking tray and onto the cooling rack. They were the perfect mix of crisp-edged and chewy on the inside.

It’s taken me long enough (about 3 more batches have since been baked in between) to post about them, but now that I have, it’s your duty to make some. Your sweet-toothed, cinnamon loving friends and family will love you all the more for it, and, because they keep for about a week when wrapped air-tight, they’d probably make the perfect Christmas gifts. No prizes for guessing what my friends will be receiving this year – which reminds me, I’ve gotta get baking! :)

PS: Merry Christmas everyone!

Snickerdoodles
(From Smitten Kitchen)

2 3/4 cups all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons cream of tartar
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt
8 oz unsalted butter, at room temperature
1 3/4 cups sugar, plus more if needed
2 tablespoons ground cinnamon, plus more if needed
2 large eggs

Preheat the oven to 200°C, with one rack in top third and one rack in bottom third of oven. Line baking sheets with silicone baking mats or parchment paper.

Whisk together flour, cream of tartar, baking soda, and salt to evenly mix and aerate then set aside. In the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with a paddle attachment, cream the butter and 1 1/2 cups sugar on medium speed until light and fluffy, about 4 minutes. Scrape down sides of bowl. Beat in eggs, one by one. Add dry ingredients, and mix on low speed to just combine. Chill the dough for at least one hour (or overnight) in an airtight container to facilitate scooping.

Once the dough has chilled, in a small bowl, combine remaining 1/4 cup sugar and the ground cinnamon. The original recipe says to use a small ice-cream scoop to form small balls of dough, but I found it much easier to weight out 20g pieces of dough and roll them into small balls with my hands. Roll them in the cinnamon sugar, and arrange about two inches apart on the prepared baking sheets. Bake until the cookies are set in center and begin to crack (they will not brown), about 10 minutes, rotating the baking sheets halfway through. Transfer the sheets to a wire rack to cool about five minutes before transferring the cookies to the rack.

Yield: I didn’t count (and, also, many of the finished cookies disappeared into waiting and eager mouths once they came out of the oven…) but I think I made around 4 dozen 2 to 3-inch snickerdoodles.

I don’t even want to know how many cherry-dish posts have been so titled. But it’s alright, I’m not gonna think about it. Nor am I going to think about how I didn’t even actually make Cherry Pie, but Cherry Clafoutis.

I first became a little obsessed with making a clafoutis over a year ago, when I kept seeing recipes popping up in the food magazines I often flip through, and for some reason none other than one filled with ripe, sweet, nuggets of cherries would do. I’m not even sure why – considering my aversion to cherries (chalked up to one too many sour ones that I’ve over-enthusiastically bit into). Then the season passed, and the idea was pushed to the back of my mind, lost in a tangle of all the other ones filed under “To Make”.

Fast forward to a weekend, early last month, where you’d have find me wandering the aisles of a supermarket, picking out ingredients for an upcoming dinner party. I did a double take as I ambled by the produce section, where there were a few trays of Royal Rainier Cherries stashed between their usual deep red counterparts.

For those of you who’ve hesitated making clafoutis, you really shouldn’t – take it from me. It’s a ridiculously simple process, and if you’ve ever made pancakes from a box, then you’ve got all the necessary skills. Cherry Clafoutis is originally made with unpitted cherries, which imparts a slightly nutty, almost almondy flavour to the pie. I didn’t really like the idea of one of my guests crunching down on a pit and breaking a tooth, though, so I’ve added in that nuttiness by means of amaretto and some ground almonds. As Rainier Cherries are also quite a bit sweeter (and somewhat lacking in tartness) in comparison to the more common Bings, I’ve also added in a little lemon zest to perk it up and reduced the amount of sugar.

Rainier Cherry Clafoutis

500g Rainier Cherries, pitted (substitute with other types, or other fruit if unavailable)
100g ground almonds
100g all-purpose flour
4 large eggs
100g granulated sugar (increase the amount accordingly if using different fruit)
1 tbsp amaretto
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 1/2 (375g) cups whole milk
pinch of salt
100g pine nuts (optional)
butter for greasing
icing sugar for dusting

Preheat oven to 175C. Butter a 9 inch pie tin (or another appropriately sized baking dish), and add the cherries in.

Combine the ground almonds and flour in a large bowl, and whisk briefly to combine. In a separate mixing bowl, whisk together the eggs, sugar, amaretto, vanilla extract, milk and salt until thoroughly blended. Gradually pour this into the flour mixture, whisking continuously, until all the liquid has been added and there are no more lumps. Gently pour this into the prepared pan over the fruit, then scatter the pinenuts over the batter, if using.

Bake for 40-50 minutes, or until lightly browned and a toothpick inserted into the centre comes out clean. The clafoutis will still jiggle a little when you shake the pan.

Cool in the pan on a rack, then serve, dusted with icing sugar and a dollop of whipped cream (or vanilla ice cream).

Yield: Serves 6-8

I’m really sorry for having let an entire month go by without posting a single thing. (It also feels like every other post I write starts with an apology on how infrequently I’ve been posting!) But I only had about 13 days in August where I was in HK, and I spent about a week of that time fretting over my laptop which decided that harddrive failure was the way to go to keep me on my toes. I’m picking up the laptop tomorrow (finally) and I’ve got 98% of my drive recovered in a new external harddrive right here! But on to the post proper:

Now, I’ve mentioned once before that the bunny isn’t a fan of chocolate. (In fact, she downright dislikes the stuff!) So you can imagine my surprise when one day she requested for Marble Cake, and the quizzical expression I had when I asked, “Doesn’t marble cake have chocolate in it?!” But nope, along with Hot Chocolate, Marble Cake falls into that strange twilight zone of chocolate things that apparently don’t taste of chocolate.

It’s all the better for me anyway, since marble cakes are incredibly easy to make, and the asymmetrical swirls of chocolate batter through an otherwise blond cake generally seem to inspire many an admiring recipient. And I’m pretty sure all 5 of you who read this know what a big fan I am of dishes that look a lot more difficult to make than they actually were! And this one – a recipe taken from one of my favourite baking books, whose recipes never fail to give me a delicious, beautiful and consistent result – is one of those that can be whipped up in a flash, even if you’ve got three screaming kittens making a disaster zone of your house while trying to get your attention, and you’re in the midst of stressing out over a failed harddrive :P

Marble Cake
(From Martha Stewart’s Baking Handbook)

4oz unsalted butter, at room temperature, plus extra for the pan
1 3/4 cups cake flour
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1 cup sugar
3 large eggs, at room temperature
1 tsp pure vanilla extract
2/3 cup buttermilk, at room temperature
1/4 cup + 1 tbsp Dutch process cocoa powder
1/4 cup boiling water
Milk Glaze (recipe follows)

Preheat the oven to 350F/180C. Generously butter a 9×5″ loaf pan (I used three mini loaf pans); set aside. Whisk together the cake flour, baking powder and salt; set aside.

In the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, cream the butter and sugar together on medium-high speed (about 5 minutes). Add the eggs one at a time, beating for a minute after each addition, and scraping the sides of the bowl as necessary. Mix in the vanilla. With the mixer on low speed, add the flour mixture in two batches, alternating with the buttermilk, and beginning and ending with the flour. Divide the batter into two bowls – with two thirds in one bowl and one third in another.

In a bowl, mix together the cocoa and boiling water until smooth. Add the cocoa mixture to the smaller bowl of batter, and stir until well combined.

Spoon the batters into the prepared pan in two layers, alternating spoonfuls of vanilla and chocolate to simulate a checkerboard. To create marbling, run a table knife through the batters in a swirling motion. Be careful not to overswirl the batter, or the marbling won’t be as pretty!

Cake, rotating the pan halfway through, until a cake tester comes out clean, 40-50 minutes. Transfer pan to a rack to cool 10 minutes. Turn out cake from the pan and cool completely on the rack. Pour glaze over cake, letting it drip down the sides. Cake can be kept in an airtight container at room temperature for up to 3 days.

Milk Glaze
(From the same book)

1 cup confectioners’ (icing) sugar, sifted
2 tbsp milk

In a medium bowl, whisk together the sugar and milk until completely smooth. Immediately drizzle glaze over cake.

I feel like I’ve been on some perpetual search for the elusive perfect cake most of my life. To me, it should be moist, but with a light, tender crumb. The buttery richness shouldn’t be outweighed by a heavy handed baker adding too much sugar, the eggs should give it a beautiful golden hue. There should be enough flour to give it structure and density, but not so much that it becomes leaden, dense or dry. A playful whiff of vanilla would be a fantastic foundation, and perhaps a citrusy glaze or an asymmetrical marbling of chocolate to build the complexity of flavours never hurt. But the search is over.

Having been sorely disappointed by one too many store-bought cake slices, I usually end up baking a cake for myself when the craving strikes. Some days, I’ll want to experiment; to trawl through my cookbooks for one of the earmarked recipes, but often it’s the familiar that I crave. When I’m in the mood for the latter, it’s my favourite cake that I invariably turn to – blondies. It is perfect on its own, doused liberally in a butterscotch or salted caramel sauce, yet somehow that perfection is surpassed when topped with a generous quenelle of home-made ice cream. The best part? It’s really simple and quick to whip up – it takes about 30 minutes to whip up the batter, and in the time it takes to bake, the dishes miraculously clean themselves, and you still have enough time to make the sauce. Really, the hardest part is waiting for the cake to cool and for the golden crumb to swell and soak up the caramel sauce.

And of course, it goes perfectly with that afternoon cup of tea. Hits the spot, every single time.

The only thing about baking an entire cake is that if I don’t want to gorge on an entire 9-inch, double-layered cake within the fleeting window when it remains at the height of perfection, it generally means there’ll be a distribution run to a bunch of happy friends. And after the last gazillion requests I’ve received for this particular recipe from said sticky-fingered recipients of the leftovers, I figured it was high time I just posted it up here. That way, the rest of you can enjoy it too. :)

PS: Sorry for the slightly long break I took between posts – I’ve been in and out of the country, and have had visitors in town (the HK Sevens was this weekend!), and also somehow managed to catch bunny’s non-contagious sinus infection. I have a couple more posts in my draft folder so will try to bang those out once I get a couple of minutes to breathe.

Blondies
(Adapted from Sherry Yard’s The Secrets of Baking)

2 cups all-purpose flour
1 tsp baking powder
½ tsp salt
6 oz unsalted butter, softened
65g caster sugar
1 cup packed light brown sugar
4 large eggs
1 tbsp plus 1 tsp light corn syrup
1 tbsp vanilla extract
200g chopped toasted pecan halves (optional)
1 cup Salted Butter Caramel sauce (recipe below)

Preheat the oven to 175°C. Adjust the rack to the centre of the oven. Grease a 9×13 inch baking pan and line the base with greaseproof paper. Grease the paper.

Triple sift the flour, baking powder and salt into a medium bowl and set aside.

Using a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, beat the butter on high speed until soft and creamy (about 1 minute). Slowly add the sugars and beat on high speed until fully incorporated and the mixture is light and fluffy (about 10 minutes). Stop the mixer and scrape down the sides of the bowl with a rubber spatula as needed.

Add the eggs, one at a time. Be sure each egg is completely incorporated and scrape down the sides of the bowl before adding the next one. Add the corn syrup and vanilla.

Slowly add the dry ingredients and mix on low speed until just combined.

Pour the batter into the prepared pan, and smooth the top. Bake for 25-30 minutes or until a toothpick inserted into the centre of the cake comes out clean.

Poke holes in the surface of the cake with a skewer or fork. Pour the caramel sauce over the cake. Let the cake cool in the pan on a rack, then cut into 2-inch squares before serving.

The blondies will last wrapped airtight at room temperature for 3 days, or frozen for up to 3 weeks, but frankly they never survive that long around my house. :)

Yield: About 2 dozen 2-inch squares

Salted Butter Caramel Sauce
(Adapted from David Lebovitz‘s The Perfect Scoop)

85g unsalted butter
150g sugar
250ml heavy cream
1 tsp vanilla extract
2 tsp coarse salt (fleur de sel)

Melt the butter in a large, deep, heavy-based saucepan or Dutch oven. Stir in the sugar and cook over medium heat, stirring frequently, until the sugar is a deep golden brown and starts to smoke.

Remove pan from the heat and immediately whisk in half of the cream and stir until smooth. (Wear an oven mitt since the mixture will steam and splatter, and may bubble furiously.) Stir in the rest of the cream, then the vanilla and salt. If there are any lumps of caramel, whisk the sauce gently over very low heat until they have been dissolved. This sauce can be stored in the refrigerator for 2 weeks. Rewarm it gently in a microwave or by stirring in a saucepan over very low heat.

Yield: Makes about 1.5 cups (so you can either just dump it ALL over the cake, or save the remainder for drizzling a little extra over the cake when you serve it. I am lazy and normally just opt for the former.)

Okay, bad rhyme. But I can’t help it – cheesecakes just get me into a certain sort of silly mood. As with most desserts, I’m generally not too hot on funny mutated variations, and I keep my tweaking to the minimum flavour-wise. Cheesecake doesn’t get any special treatment from me in this respect – I love it plain, rich, heavy, and with a buttery biscuit crust. No Oreos, no chocolate, no marbling, no fruits. Well, maybe I could do with a little compote or coulis on the side, but it should never be baked INTO the cake. I’m also not too fond of the Japanese souffle-style light cheesecakes. I want a cheesecake that’s so rich I can barely eat more than a sliver at a time – I just keep going back to the fridge for multiple slivers :)

This recipe is one that I found in my mom’s little scrapbook of recipes, where she’d paste her magazine and newspaper cutouts haphazardly, faded black and white pictures interspersed along with the recipes, and her scribbles on the notebook alongside the scraps, noting down changes she may have made. I was particularly intrigued by this one because it was on a tiny 2×2″ square of paper, with no title and only the vaguest of directions. It was barely more than the ingredients and the instructions to “combine ingredients, pour over crust, bake at low temp for 40 min”. Goodness knows where she even copied it down from. Over the past 10 years, my mom and I have experimented with this cake and I’ve now got my version of it, and hopefully with my notably more long-winded instructions, you’ll be able to add this to your list too.

Because of how rich the cake is, I can never eat a normal-sized slice at once. I like to bake it in an 8.5″ or 9″ square cake pan so that I can cut it into small, neat squares (or not-so-neat other shapes), but you could always use a 9″ round springform pan instead.

Cheesecake
(Adapted from my mom’s recipe scrapbook)

10 McVities Digestive Biscuits
60g unsalted butter, melted, plus more for greasing
3 x 8oz packets of Philadelphia cream cheese, at room temperature
100g caster sugar
1 tsp pure vanilla extract
fine sea salt
4 large eggs, at room temperature

Preheat the oven to 160C. Grease an 8.5-9″ square cake pan or a 9″ round springform pan well with butter (both the sides and the base). Line the square pan with a strip of greaseproof paper that hangs over the edges of the pan (this will make unmoulding the cake a lot easier), or the base of the springform pan. Butter the paper as well.

Place the digestive biscuits into a bowl or a resealable plastic bag and crush. It doesn’t need to be 100% homogeneously crumbled into a fine dust but you don’t want any huge lumps. Add the melted butter and a pinch of salt, stir together (it should look like damp sand), then press this firmly into the base of the prepared pan. Keep the pan in the fridge while you assemble the cake.

Beat the cream cheese in a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment at medium speed for 2 minutes to further soften it. Gradually add the sugar and a pinch of salt, then cream for 5 minutes on medium-high speed until it’s fluffy. Add the eggs one by one, scraping down the sides of the bowl between additions, then beat in the vanilla extract. Pour the cream cheese mixture into the prepared pan, then transfer the pan into the preheated oven and bake for 70-80 minutes, or until the middle is just set. If you prefer that the surface of your cake not be browned, you can also tent some foil loosely over the pan.

Once the cake is done, set the cake, in its pan, on top of a wire rack to cool completely, then unmould and refrigerate until completely cold. I love it as is, but you can always top it with some whipped sour cream, strawberry or blueberry compote, or I suppose no one will stop you if you even want to drizzle some chocolate sauce over!

Yield: Serves 6-10

I’m really more of a cook than a baker. I like the heat of the kitchen, the reliance on taste, sight, smell and feel to prepare and execute a dish whose flavours meld together on a warmed dinner plate, hastened by that rush of adrenaline where everything has to be brought together, seasonings corrected, and plated to be served in the last 60 seconds. But it’s not to say that I don’t enjoy baking – baking to me is something to be done on lazy afternoons, or in the middle of the night. When I have a craving that needs to be satiated, or when I want to gift someone with a homemade present (a plate of pasta really wouldn’t survive sitting around for a couple of hours, wrapped up in foil, before it is consumed), it is usually to baked goods that I turn.

Another of bunny’s friends recently gave birth, and it’s become a habit of mine to bake something for the family (hopefully to be shared by all of us!) when we visit the new baby. Along with the loot that I brought home to Hong Kong from our recent trip to Singapore, I also acquired The Cake Book by Tish Boyle. Now, I’ve already got a number of baking/dessert tomes, but having one fully devoted to cakes is my idea of heaven. I love this book not just for the way that the recipes are sorted, but also because of the clear and precise instructions, and the beautiful results I’ve had so far.

This cake is really a ginger pound cake, baked in a bundt cake pan for an elegant presentation, which is soaked with a ginger syrup while it’s still warm. Once cooled, I whipped up a ginger-crème fraïche frosting to punch up the presentation a little, and garnished it with the leftover slices of crystallized ginger that already went into the cake itself. It turned out beautifully – both in terms of flavour and presentation – with the subtle heat of ginger complemented by the tart fragrance of the lemon. The cake itself is very moist and has the tenderest of crumbs; in short it’s what all pound cakes should taste like!

Note: The original recipe called for sour cream, not crème fraïche, but I couldn’t seem to find any, which is why I made the substitution. Feel free to revert to the original – I’ve used the latter in my recipe below as it’s what I used. I also used the leftover to make the frosting, so if you’re buying sour cream for the cake, feel free to use it instead for the frosting in equal amounts. Just omit the lemon juice (which I added as crème fraïche is a little less tart), unless you feel that you need to loosen the consistency, which can also be done by adding milk.

Lemon Ginger Bundt Cake
(Based on the Lemon-Soaked Ginger Pound Cake recipe in The Cake Book by Tish Boyle)

Ginger Pound Cake:
302g all-purpose flour
57g cake flour
2 1/2 tsp ground ginger
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
227g unsalted butter, softened, plus more for greasing
350g granulated sugar
4 large eggs at room temperature
30g peeled grated fresh ginger
80g finely chopped crystallized ginger (plus more to serve)
2 tsp finely grated lemon zest
1 tsp vanilla extract
242g crème fraïche

Lemon Syrup:
80ml freshly squeezed lemon juice
133g granulated sugar
20ml water

Ginger-Crème Fraïche Frosting:
115g icing sugar, plus more for dusting
15g peeled grated fresh ginger
1 tsp freshly squeezed lemon juice
80g creme fraiche
pinch of salt

Start by making the cake: Position a rack in the centre of the oven and preheat the oven to 180C. Grease the inside of a 10 inch bundt pan generously, then dust with flour, shaking the excess out. Set aside.

Sift together the flours, ground ginger, baking power, baking soda and salt into a large bowl. Set aside.

In the bowl of an electric mixer using the paddle attachment, beat the butter at medium speed until creamy; 2 minutes. Gradually add the sugar and beat at medium-high speed until the mixture is light in texture and colour; 3 minutes. Beat in the eggs, one at a time, beating for 30-40 seconds after each addition. Scrape down the sides of the bowl with a rubber spatula as necessary. Beat in the grated ginger, crystallized ginger, lemon zest and vanilla extract. Reduce the speed to low, add the sifted flour mixture in three additions, alternating it with crème fraïche in two additions. Scrape the batter into the prepared pan and smooth the top with a spatula. Bake for 50-55 minutes or until a toothpick inserted into the centre comes out clean.

Cool the cake in the pan on a cooling rack for 10 minutes, then invert it onto the rack set over a baking sheet.

Meanwhile, make the syrup: Combine the lemon juice, sugar and water in a small non-reactive saucepan. Cook over medium heat, stirring, until the sugar dissolves; 3-4 minutes. Remove the pan from heat. Using a pastry brush, dab the syrup generously all over the surface of the warm cake, allowing it to soak into the cake before reapplying. Dab any syrup that has dripped onto the baking sheet onto the cake. Let the cake cool completely.

To frost: Sift the icing sugar into a medium-sized mixing bowl. Place the grated ginger into a four-layer square of cheesecloth/muslin, and squeeze to extract the juice. There should be about 1 tbsp of ginger juice. Combine this with the rest of the wet ingredients and salt, whisking to form a smooth, thick liquid, then whisk it into the sugar until there are no more lumps. Drizzle it over the cooled cake, allowing the frosting to drip down over the sides, then scatter over some thin slices of crystallized ginger and allow it to dry at least 30 minutes before serving. Once dry, dust the cake with icing sugar.

The cake will keep for 4 days in an air-tight container at room temperature, or refrigerated for up to a week.

Yield: One 10-inch bundt cake, which serves 10-12.