Raspberry Friands

I haven’t baked for weeks, mainly because I’m not allowed to eat any baked goods seeing as they’re high in cholesterol. It’s really hard to resist conjuring up pastries and cakes if you’re not supposed to use eggs or butter. I started using soy margarine now which should remove the dreaded artery clogging substance from my veins so I have to eat some “butter” but eggs or the yolks at least, are definitely banned.

Now that the picnic season is upon us, I’ve been lured into the kitchen once again to create some tasty bit sized summery snacks that will do my adorable polka dotted picnic blanket justice. I personally love a picnic, it’s the only kind of al fresco dining people without a garden can enjoy.

Anyway, I stumbled upon this Australian delight this week: blueberry friands, small cake like tarts with a little butter (which I naturally substituted with the soy equivalent) and no egg yolks! They were all out of blueberries at the market so I made a raspberry version. Feast your eyes on these babies:

• 50g soy butter, melted and cooled
• 100g icing sugar
• 25g flour
• 85g ground almonds
• 3 egg whites
• 80g blueberries or raspberries

1. Preheat the oven to 180C. Pop some cake cases into a cake tin.
2. Sift the flour and icing sugar into a bowl, and add the ground almonds.
3. Whisk the egg whites until foamy.
4. Make a well in the dry ingredients and tip in the egg whites. Add the butter and gently stir to make a soft, smooth batter.
5. Fill each cake case about three-quarters full. Top each with a few berries and bake for 20-25 minutes until golden brown and springy.
6. Leave to cool on a cooling rack and dust with icing sugar.

Leon: Ingredients & Recipes

aka the most beautiful cook book ever!

Leon is a trendy London restaurant chain that specializes is easy, tasty and affordable food for people in a hurry, nothing fancy but scrumptious, healthy and colorful, just like their luscious first book which is simply to die for and even comes with complimentary stickers making me as giddy as a schoolgirl.

I had been eyeing up this book for two years now but decided I wasn't going to buy it until I visited the restaurant which we finally did a few weeks ago.

The 300+ page visually stunning book is divided in two gorgeous sections (I cannot stress enough how pretty this book is) each with its own ribbon: ingredients and recipes.

Ingredients is basically self explanatory and is divided in several sections: vegetables, herbs, dairy, meat,... telling us where they come from, what to look at when buying, which are in season, how to prepare them, that sort of thing. It's filled with fun photo's drawing, charts, useful tips and everything you ever wanted to know from cheese to chillies.

The second part, recipes, ranges from breakfasts to desserts and everything in between. There's one chapter on meat but the rest of the book is vegetarian. Needless to say there will be a lot of cooking going on this weekend.

Feast your eyes on this:

Baking: the next generation

I’m trying to buy less cook books because our kitchen now contains more books than it does food. So instead of window shopping at the Book Depository, I now spend a lot of time at http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/ as I realized that all the recipes of my favorites TV chefs are on there. I usually buy the book whenever I love one of their shows but now, I just copy paste the recipes to my recipe file. No more clutter and not a penny wasted. How cool is that?

The website naturally isn’t as comprehensive as a book but I never make every recipe in there, so who cares. Consider this the highlights. And Nigella, Sophie, The Hairy Bikers, Delia, Jamie, Raymond, Michel, you name them, the gangs all there.

Now in my ongoing quest for (free) culinary inspiration and cultivation, I also stumbled across some new baking trends that are trying to banish the ever so scrumptious cupcake from its sweet and succulent throne.

Our first contender is the whoopee pie. I can’t help but smile whenever I pronounce it. Just like the cupcake, this trend started in the USA and is slowly but surely conquering the UK. It kinda looks like a macaron and was originally just two chocolate cakes with marshmallow filling. Yum yum.

But if you prefer some folklore, Amish women would apparently bake these back in the day and put them in the farmers' lunchboxes. When farmers would find these treats in their lunch, they would shout "Whoopie!"

What it boils down to, is that the whoopee pie a deliciously soft and sweet cream-filled treat that comes in wide variety of flavors and colors: red velvet, green tea, pumpkin with a tangy cream cheese filling, oatmeal and even maple-bacon buttercream.

Our next contender was created by Angie Dudley, who the baking bloggers among us probably know as Bakerella. She started out with our beloved cupcake and turned it into something original, fun and oh so pretty, the cake pop aka a cute little cake on a stick.

Although the concept is quite simple, her results are truly outstanding ranging from decorated balls to robots, baby chicks and even piglets. They may seem like a lot of work but trust me, it’s a piece of cake and a perfect bite sized portion of ingenuity to brighten up any get-together.

Bunny Cake

I’m spending the entire day baking, you heard me. A while back I agreed to take on the daunting task of making a cake for 80 people. No biggie, I was thinking at the time. Making the batter isn’t that much work seeing as I’ve done it hundreds of times before, the glitch is shoving cakes in and out of the oven for several hours leaving me with little else to do than some necessary cleaning and paper work seeing as I’m pretty kitchen bound at the moment.

Paul Verrept has book presentation tomorrow at the Groene Waterman because he is the star author of Larrios, a new branch of Epo publishing. He’ll be reading to the kiddies and talk a bit about his career which will all be leading up to the main event, namely my hopefully delicious cake featuring one of his characters: a bunny aka God.

The pressure’s high seeing as I’ve never baked for so many people but it’s a challenge and I’m enjoying myself. The only thing that could go wrong, is that my cakes start imploding, again. But I’m about 80% sure they won’t. Still… Either that or my sweet pea messes up the rabbit, meaning no cake for him, ever again.

The Book Club Cookbook

I recently became the proud owner of The Book Club Cookbook which once again affirms my geeky love for books and baking. I was pretty excited when I stumbled accross it to be honest.

What I really love about the BCC is that it combines your typical book club review book (i.e. a short review of the book, author and period) with a lushious literary cookbook. Each book that is featured, is accompanied by a lovely recipe that is either part of the story or would be devoured by the characters during the period in which the book takes place, adding a little more authenticity and not to mention culinary delight to those delectible meetings.

I know for a fact how important food is to our beloved book club meetings so this book will probably add an entirely new dimension to the mix, opening up the floor for some tasty food related discussions. Like we need an excuse...

Bye Bye Baking Blues

I finally got a chance to test my gorgeous Hummingbird Bakery cookbook. I was hesitant to buy this at first because I already had most of the recipes scattered in a couple of dozen other books but at €5 I just couldn’t resist this mouth-watering masterpiece. Thanks to this book I baked decent cookies for the first time in my life. After countless attempts over the past few years I simply gave up as the result was always rock hard and semi-raw, don’t ask. But now, I was able to bake deliciously divine oatmeal and raisin cookies that actually looked and tasted like real (meaning store bought) cookies and not as some homemade mess. There are still a lot of recipes I want to try but if you love to bake, you can’t go wrong with this book seeing as these recipes are spot on!

Another new addition to my overflowing shelf of cookbooks is The Hairy Bikers' Family Cookbook which is filled with traditional British dishes combined with spicy oriental influences. I basically love their shows and their perpetual witty banter so I desperately wanted one of their books. I’m trying some recipes tomorrow but all I can say for now, is that the book looks great and is filled with charming anecdotes and funny photographs.

For those of you who don’t know the Hairy Bikers phenomenon, it’s slightly similar to the Two Fat Ladies show and it consists out of Dave Myers and Si King who have travelled the world and Britain on their motorcycles while cooking local dishes in the most unusual locations. This combination of cookery and travelogue is also just so darn funny!

Magnolia Bakery

I've been suffering from baking blues lately. In December we got a new oven and since then, every cake I bake simply implodes. In the oven it looks all crisp and voluptuous but as soon I take it out, it simply caves in. Faulty technology or a diabolical plot to stop me from fattening up my sweet pea?

Anyway, I’m now on a quest for the ultimate experience in blissful baking. For the next few weeks, I’m going to let the world’s top bakeries guide me with their full proof recipes so that even a fickle piece of machinery can’t keep me from nirwana.

First up is the world famous (due to several cameo's in Sex and the City) Magnolia Bakery in New York. It opened in 1996 at 401 Bleecker Street and is renowned for its cupcakes and old-fashioned Depression era icebox cakes which I'm dying to try. This bakery is so famous in fact that they have to limit cupcake purchases to 12 per customer.

Allysa Torey and Jennifer Appel are the owners and authors of the glorious Magnolia Bakery Cookbook which will hopefully restore my faith in creative confectionary concoctions. They started off as an ordinary bakery but making bread proved to be impractical due to time and space constraints so they moved on to smaller sensations.

The cupcakes were born in early fall of 1996 and personally started the 1990s cupcake craze. They were Allysa's brainchild and the result of batter that would otherwise have gone to waste. Originally they were just plain vanilla cakes with vanilla butter cream icing tinted pink. Now they are available in a wide variety of flavors and colors and soon they will also appear in my very own kitchen.