dessert

Banana bread trifle with custard and salted caramel
12Aug

Banana cake trifle

Our fridge has buckled during the heatwave, it has slowly given up on us and the amount of food we’ve had to throw away is tragic. We’re big on bananas but we haven’t been able to keep up with how quickly they have gone from green tips to freckled black, the perfect excuse to experiment with banana bread recipes. I have made banana bread with sour cream, yoghurt, buttermilk, black treacle. My work colleagues were sick of it and so was my family, my freezer started to work overtime to keep it all from going to waste. There are no rules when it comes to layering these trifle pots, mix and alternate as much as your glass is tall with banana, cake, custard and salted caramel. Top it with loads of caramelised nuts. Banana cake trifle (serves 3-4) For the custard: 150ml milk 150ml double cream 1 tsp vanilla paste 1 tbsp cornflour 3 egg yolks 50g sugar 1. Add milk, double cream and vanilla paste to pan and bring it to a slow boil, remove from heat and leave it to cool 2. Whisk the yolks and sugar until pale and fluffy, add to milky mixture, return to hob
3 mins read
2355 Views
vegan chocolate brownies
03Dec

Super fudgy vegan brownies

I don’t identify myself as belonging to any particular food tribes, whether it is clean eating, paleo or vegan. Sincerely, I love butter too much. This is not to say I don’t enjoy cooking and trying recipes from all of these tribes. Cooking with butter, cream and even meat is very easy as they have deep, rich flavours. But maybe I think like this because I am so used to cooking with these ingredients and any attempts to cook vegetarian or vegan recipes is something that takes a lot of effort. Fruit puree is what keeps bringing me back (made this dairy free cake a while ago), substituting it for dairy and eggs in a multitude of things.
2 mins read
1337 Views
26Apr

Banana split with brigadeiro fudge sauce

Things I am loving at the moment: I no longer listen to the radio. Some may think this is a bad thing but in my car I have a very narrow range of stations, mainly consisting of songs that are on the chart playing on a very annoying loop. I downloaded an app called Castbox and have started to explore the world of podcasts. My absolutely favourites are The High Low and Dear Sugar Radio. I can’t get enough of Cheryl Strayed and Steve Almond. I want to go out and have a beer with them. Weekends without my phone. It actually died and I didn’t even try to charge it. I forgot about it and it was all good. Re-watching old films that I was too young to understand when I watched it first time around: As Good As it Gets, Donnie Darko and Good Will Hunting eBay. I am planning my sister’s hen do whilst on my night shifts. I am going for a mermaid theme. All the glitter and streamers arrived on time and on point. Condensed milk. I’ve decided that ganache is well over rated as a sauce and that brigadeiro sauce should take the crown.
2 mins read
1123 Views
23Jan

Dark chocolate and ginger cheesecake

I always set my alarm to give me a good hour for breakfast before I need to leave the house. It always amazes me when my work colleagues say they get out of bed 5 minutes before they have to leave the house and then have their toast in front of their computer. I’m sorry but that would bring my quality of life down by about 10 points. I can’t function properly for the rest of the day if my day starts in a rush. Having my eggs with a cup of coffee in bed whilst catching up on last evening’s Bravo is my happy place. Then I leave plenty of time for my makeup and hair. All sounds very regimented right? Not so much because I never really plan my packed lunch/dinner and have to rush last minute to try and make a mediocre salad to eat later that day. I never make that a priority and end up leaving with a cereal bar or maybe a smoothie for lunch. Not cool. This week I prepped like a boss, got a few bits of tuppaware and stacked them with a nice turkey fried rice in the fridge. In the
3 mins read
1480 Views
13Jan

Recycling Christmas: Spelt and marmalade apple crumble

Merry back to normal. And I am actually glad Christmas is all over. It did not feel like Christmas to me as I was working and then as soon as I got my first day off of the season my immune system gave up. I have never been that ill, can’t-get-out-of-bed ill, the kind that you want to kick yourself for not appreciating all the days you were healthy. Even after what seemed like recovery I did not feel like myself. I decided to get back on track this week and it was hard, had to peel myself off bed to put my running gear on, and quite frankly felt sick and had to stop halfway through. Another thing that I had to tackle was the massive amount of leftovers in my fridge. I had my in-laws over and they brought a very, very generous amount of food. So trying to figure out what to do with it all has been a creative challenge, which I decided to call recycling Christmas! This is for sure the ultimate crumble recipe, and I say this as someone who has made many, many crumbles before and never got the crumble ratios of flour
3 mins read
1507 Views
18Jun

Homemade Coconut Milk and Coconut cream with strawberries and rhubarb (no sugar, dairy free, paleo)

I think everyone that is familiar with this blog knows that I have the biggest sweet tooth. And I am going to guess that most people’s first experience in the kitchen is around a sweet recipe. Who here has never helped their mum or grandma growing up by separating eggs or greasing a cake tin? Back home from the moment I was able to use the oven unsupervised I would religiously make a chocolate cake every Saturday, always the same recipe. The only changeable factor was that I would sometimes make marbled cake rather than a chocolate one. With time I grew in confidence and started to experiment with tarts, pies and mousses, but in my early stages of cooking I mostly made sweet recipes. Savoury and mains is a side of cooking that started much later for me. So does that prove my point that I am just a little bit partial to dessert? I am in the middle of a hard core paleo diet and there are a lot of restrictions around sweets which is not always fun but it does motivate me to cook recipes that are healthy and still appease my sweet tooth. We already use
4 mins read
1052 Views