Viewing entries tagged
sweet
These are slightly different from my other cookie recipes – they’re NYC-style: enormous, and molten and tender, to the point where they very nearly collapse when lifted. They’re saturated with chocolate and have the delicious crunch of walnuts and a touch of sea salt to counteract their sweetness.
What could be better than a mattress of focaccia painted with glistening peppery olive oil, the occasional crunch of salt crystals, and a soft, pillowy interior that creates an insatiable appetite for more?
Almost nothing, apart from simply another version of a focaccia – this time with a layer of succulent grapes folded into the centre of the dough. Grapes, which burst in your mouth as you bite through the focaccia.
It’s perhaps even more beautiful than the OG focaccia, and tastes sublime on its own, or paired with pecorino and a glass of Vin Santo.
This cake is heady with the spirit of Tuscany. The grapes combined with the harmonious perfumed trio of orange, almond and vanilla is particularly luscious, and peculiar to Italian baking. The use of olive oil instead of butter, and the addition of ground almonds make it so moist and sumptuous. The flavour tends to develop after a day, so I’d advise making this a day or two in advance of eating (storing it an airtight container or covering the top of the cake tin until ready to serve).
It’s the perfect cake for vegans and non-vegans alike: no weird gums or chemicals or frogspawn-y aquafaba, and it doesn't even need them. It’s moist, sticky and absurdly moreish. It can stand proudly beside any egg-containing cake, and win over any vegan cake-hating sceptic. When I say it’s easy to make, I mean it is exceptionally easy. It can be whipped up in under 10 minutes and, if you're making mini loaves, it bakes within 10 minutes too.
This cheesecake speaks for itself. It combines my three of my favourite things: lotus biscuits, white chocolate and passionfruit. The lotus biscuits make the perfect base, providing an almost umami, caramelised base.
I don’t understand why there’s a “season” for pumpkin spice themed dishes when delicious pumpkin puree is available (from a can) all year round. In honour of this recent discovery, I decided to make these cookies. I was influenced by a recipe on Bon Appetitwhich incorporated pumpkin and various spices into a cookie. However - I was very disappointed by the result: the cookies were mean and thin, with root canal problem-inducing sweetness, overly egg-y, and totally lacking in the promised pumpkin flavour.
So, I made my own to tick the 3 commandments of cookies:
- Chewy
- Molten
- Thick
I radically amped up the amount of pumpkin, and reduced the sugar. I also added both white and milk chocolate, so that, upon baking, they caramelized, creating a sophisticated toffee flavour. The added crunch and maple-flavour of the pecans add some complexity, too.
NB If you would like a more savoury cookie, you could switch the milk and white chocolate for dark chocolate. And if you’d like to have a supply of cookies for emergencies, you can freeze the scoops of uncooked cookie dough and bake them when desired.
150 unsalted butter, softened
80g light brown sugar
70g caster sugar
1 egg
40g pumpkin puree
1 ½ tsp vanilla extract
½ tsp cinnamon
1 ½ tsp ground ginger
¼ tsp ground nutmeg
1/8 tsp mixed spice
220g plain flour
heaped ½ tsp baking powder
½ tsp salt
100g white chocolate + 30 g white chocolate for topping (I use buttons but you can chop up a bar or use chips instead)
50g milk chocolate, roughly chopped
50g chopped pecans, + 20g for topping
2 large baking trays, lined with baking parchment
1) Put the unsalted butter, light brown sugar and caster sugar into the bowl of an electric mixer, fitted with the paddle, and beat until light and fluffy (about 5 minutes). If doing by hand, beat ingredients together with a spoon. Add the egg, pumpkin puree and vanilla extract, and beat until full combined.
2) Add the spices (cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, mixed spice), flour, baking powder and salt to the wet ingredients, and very gently fold together until almost combined, leaving some flour still visible. Add the chopped milk chocolate, white chocolate and pecans, and very gently fold them into the cookie dough until combined.
3) Cover the bowl and refrigerate for minimum 1 hour and up to 24 hours (until you’re ready to bake the cookies).
4) Preheat the oven to 180°C. Then. either using an ice cream scoop, or a tablespoon, scoop the cookie dough into 40g dollops. I weigh each one to make sure they cook evenly, but if you can’t be bothered just estimate. Roll each into a sphere between your palms to ensure that they bake into near-perfect rounds. Place on the tray leaving about 4cm between each so that they have room to spread when they bake. Then, into each sphere, press a piece of white chocolate and a piece of pecan.
5) Place in oven to bake for 7-10 minutes, or until they are golden at the edges but still soft to the touch. Once they are removed from the oven, they will continue to cook on the baking tray so leave them to sit for a couple of minutes. Serve warm if you can’t wait, or keep them for up to 4 days in an airtight container. You can also freeze them in an airtight container for up to 3 months.
These chocolate brownie and peanut butter cookies are not hard to make, but they’re so good I wouldn’t recommend wasting them on frenemies.
Putting the words “vegan” and “cake” together can be dangerous territory. I’ve had some scarring experiences: vegan cake conjures up memories of synthetic, stomach-ache inducing, chemical-tasting, dry sponges.
I’ve managed to defy the stereotype before with these chocolate cupcakes and was beginning to fear that that is where my vegan cake adventures would end. I was wrong. These pistachio cakes are light, moist, and totally delicious – and they have no gross chemicals.
They have a semblance of a Moroccan/Arabian dessert with tangy lemon to cut through the sweetness, crunchy salted pistachios for texture and relief from the sweetness, and a touch of rose water not to make them too perfumed (which I also don’t like) but to add a hint of exoticness.
The batter is also dangerously good (so make sure your spatula isn’t too effective).
(makes 10 mini cakes or 1 large loaf cake)
Ingredients
100g roasted and salted pistachios, shelled (80g for the cake and 20g for the topping)
200g plain flour
8 cardamom pods
¼ tsp vanilla
¼ tsp salt
220g caster sugar (150g for the cake, 70g for the syrup)
80ml vegetable oil
200ml plant-based milk (I use oat or almond for their neutral flavour)
3 lemons (zest of 1 lemon and juice of all 3)
1 ½ tsp baking powder
¾ tsp bicarbonate of soda
¼ tsp rosewater (you can leave this out if you’re not a fan or can’t get hold of it)
200g icing sugar, sifted
10-holed mini loaf tin (each one is 10cm x 4cm), or large loaf tin (10cm x 20cm), greased with vegetable oil and dusted with flour, or a 12-hole muffin tin, lined with cases
Method
1) Preheat oven to 180°C.
2) In a large bowl, mix together the flour, 150g caster sugar, baking powder, bicarb, salt and the zest of one lemon.
3) With a pestle and mortar (or back of a knife), gently crush the cardamom pods so that you can remove the shells and are left with just the seeds. Crush the seeds to a powder. Then either in the pestle and mortar or in a blender, blitz 80g of the shelled pistachios until they resemble coarse sand. Mix them into the dry ingredients.
4) Pour milk, oil, vanilla and the juice of one lemon into the dry ingredients and fold together until combined (btw the batter tastes amazing raw). Spoon the batter into the mini loaf tins/large loaf tin/muffin cases, and place in the oven to bake until an inserted skewer comes out clean. The mini loaf tins and muffin tins will take 10-12 minutes, the large loaf tin will take 30-40 minutes, and you may need to cover it with tin foil after 25 minutes to ensure the top doesn’t burn.
5) While the cakes are baking, in a small pan over a medium heat, stir together the juice of 1 lemon and 70g of caster until the sugar dissolves. Allow to simmer for 3-4 minutes until the liquid becomes slightly viscous (almost like maple syrup).
6) Remove the cakes from the oven, place on a rack to cool, and pierce all over with a cake tester or toothpick. Spoon the heated lemon juice/sugar solution over the cakes. This will be absorbed quickly and make the cakes extra zesty and moist.
7) While the cakes are cooling, make the icing by mixing together icing sugar, 2tbsp of lemon juice (about 1 lemon) and the rose water until they form a smooth paste. Often weather can affect consistency: if the icing is too stiff, you may need to add a drop more lemon juice; and vice versa, if it is too liquid, you can add a touch more icing sugar. It should be a thick paste.
8) Once the cakes have cooled, drizzle the icing over, sprinkle with the remaining pistachios, and serve.
(Adapted from So Vegan)
These cookies are thick; they’re chewy; and they have a a molten Nutella centre with oozy chocolate and crunchy toasted hazelnuts. I’m not even going to feign modesty: these cookies are the apotheoses of cookies. Make sure you have at least two reserved per person because eating one is never going to be enough – be warned.
It throws 5:2, Keto, raw food, Mediterranean and intermittent fasting out of the window. If you’re disillusioned with all those malware-laden pop up adverts on illegal streaming sites that you secretly clicked on promising flat belly magic trick, let me right that for you.
All those Instagram/YouTube stars chronicling the secrets to peachy bums, thigh gaps, hotdog legs and concave stomachs have been holding back their industry secrets. It’s not food groups that need to be cut out, but letters. All the foods (and often drinks) that stand in the way of a lean, rippling bikini bod have something in common: biscuits, cookies, bread, chocolate, cake, bagels, beer, cocktails, champagne, and brownies. Yes. That’s right – you’ve wasted money and/or time logging on to My Fitness Pal, consulting dieticians, and calorie counting when I have just given you the secret to fat loss. Cut out the Bs and Cs and you are on your way to fitfluencer stardom.
Turns out feasting on gulab jamun, breakfast, lunch and dinner dosas, curry upon curry, daily afternoon tea and even straight up jaggery does that to you. This drastic increase from two to five months’ gestation in the space of two weeks, plus a stomach of steel allowing evasion of the revolting bug that had churned up the rest of my family’s insides, meant that a new diet and regime was mandatory. And when my dad commits to something, he is an all-or-nothing person. And let me tell you, cutting out B and C foods is far easier than you might think. In fact, it’s practically seamless. Don’t worry about cheat meals or relapses because this is a diet that works perfectly with whatever lifestyle you were already leading.
He heroically turned down the molten chocolate brownies that I brought into work. He didn’t even respond to me when the exotic perfume of these thick, soft and chewy spice cookies wafted round the house (commendable).
His resolve has been so strong that cookies are now banned from our house, as are bagels, biscuits, chocolate and brownies.
My dad has had five of these spice ookies today and he’s still fully committed to the diet - and so can you. Just like that one calorie that gets left floating in the can when you have diet coke, so all the muffin-top inducing calories are left behind when the B and C’s are seamlessly spliced from your favourite treat.
There’s no freezing, chilling or resting meaning that they can go from flour packet to final product-in–mouth in about half an hour (pausing en route for some of that dough). I know cookies can be a very subjective, personal and emotional topic, but these are undeniably the top tier: slightly crisp on the outside and soft thic(cc)k and chewy. If you fear that the batch may disappear before you get a look in, feel free to double it – the results will be the same. They can also be stored in an airtight container in a freezer for up to three months which is ideal if you want to whip them out for unexpected occasions (emergencies).
220g white spelt flour (or plain white flour, if you prefer)
2 ½ tsp baking powder
60g caster sugar
1 tsp ground ginger
½ tsp ground cloves
1 tsp ground cinnamon
1 ½ tsp baking soda
100g unsalted butter, at room temperature, roughly cut into cubes
100g golden syrup
20g treacle
¼ tsp salt
1 tsp mixed spice
large baking tray lined with baking parchment
1) Preheat oven to 160°C.
2) If using a food processor (super quick), pour in all the dry ingredients and whizz to combine. Then add in the butter and pulse until the mixture becomes like damp sand. If making by hand, in a large bowl stir together dry ingredients. Then add in the butter and rub into the dry mixture with your fingertips until it reaches a damp sand-like consistency.
3) In a small pan over a low heat, pour in the syrup and treacle, and stir until combined and warm. Pour into the sand-like mixture, and pulse until it just about comes together into a dough, taking care not to over mix. If making by hand, pour the treacle into the sand-like mixture, and stir together until it forms a dough.
4) Make the cookies by breaking off pieces of the dough with your hands and rolling them into a sphere. I make each one 35g to ensure that they bake consistently. Then space the spheres on a baking tray at least 5cm apart. Place in the preheated oven to bake for 8-12 minutes until golden but soft to the touch. They will continue to bake once removed from the oven so taking them out slightly underdone ensures that they have a chewy centre.
5) Allow to cool before eating (they will be too friable when straight out of the oven), then devour. Once cool, they can be kept in a sealed airtight box in a freezer for up to 3 months.
Moreishly light & flaky pastry swirled with chewy & caramelised cinnamon dusted apricots & sultanas
Candlelit dinner in a restaurant suddenly eye-wateringly expensive, a single rose rattling in its cellophane wrapper, chocolates filled with chemical cherry liqueur, and greetings cards covered with hearts and teddy bears and hearts and pictures of champagne and hearts: these are contemporary references to St Valentine’s Day.
How much more seductive would it be to celebrate Lupercalia as the Ancients did?
On the 15th February, naked youths of noble birth, anointed with the blood of sacrificed goats, and carrying strips of the animals’ hide, would run through Rome in a spirit of hilarity and lash waiting females in order to promote fertility and assist with pregnancy.
If this sounds too overtly carnal, how about taking the advice of Ovid in his Ars Amatoria on how to secure a woman or man, how to seduce him or her, and how to keep him or her from being stolen by another? His tips include knowing where to look to find the beloved as he or she will not just fall from heaven.
According to Ovid, the theatre is a particularly good place to meet beautiful women. He warns men to wear well cut and spotless togas, and to avoid having dirty, long fingernails and visible nasal hairs.
Beware, too, the persuasive effects of low lighting and alcohol which can mask a woman’s true looks, he says.
Women, however, he advises, should use to their advantage all the tricks that cosmetics can offer, while not letting any man observe their application: hide the work in progress, he suggests. Wear simple, unostentatious clothes, revealing a slightly exposed shoulder or upper arm. Sing, play an instrument and learn to play board games, he tells women, and beware of fops.
But if all this sounds too much like hard work, I heartily recommend that you make these cookies. Simple to make, they are rich and decadent and infinitely seductive.
Ingredients (Makes 24)
300g good quality dark chocolate (70% cocoa)
160g Nutella
45g unsalted butter
225g plain flour
35g unsweetened cocoa powder
1/4 baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
4 large eggs
300g caster sugar
finely grated zest of 2 medium-sized oranges
1 tbsp fresh orange juice
80g icing sugar
2 baking sheets, lined with non-stick baking parchment
Method
According to most newspapers, January should be the month of indulgence deprivation. With the weather cold, grey and bleak, we’re being told that now is the time to eliminate everything that affords even a hint of pleasure. I admit that it may be time for me to cut down on the panettone habit: I caught myself tearing off fleecy chunks of the ambrosial, yellow, sultana-studded fluff and crowding my mouth until it overflowed.
My brother actually created a time-saving method which anticipated the bolus of food that would develop in the gullet by compressing the panettone in his hands first before devouring. I was impressed.
Fortunately, but lamentably, my mother prevented me from importing from Italy to England the 5 kg of panettone that I’d bought (with the pretence of giving as gifts). To cope with the withdrawal symptoms, I made these instead.
I refuse to deprive myself of pleasure - these can be a happy halfway house. So numerous that they can be popped into the mouth in one without anyone noticing that the supply has been reduced, so light that they can be enjoyed without having to loosen waistbands to accommodate them, and so small that they make gorgeous bejewelled petit fours at dinner parties without the guilt attached, in my case, to eating an entire pavlova.
The dark chocolate base adds a touch of sophistication and slight bitterness to undercut the sweetness, and the raspberry provides that much needed astringency to cut through it. Crunch, creaminess, chocolate and tang, all in one mouthful – who needs 5kg of panettone?
(makes 70 mini meringues - halve the recipe if you would like fewer)
90g egg white (the whites of 3 large eggs)
175g caster sugar
150g good quality dark chocolate (70%)
200ml double cream
350g raspberries (approximately 1 per meringue)
30g icing sugar (optional)
2 large baking sheets lined with baking parchment
A piping bag fitted with a round 1cm nozzle to be used twice: first to pipe the meringue, and then the cream. It can be marginally larger or smaller than 1cm. If you lack a piping bag, you can use a freezer bag and cut off a corner to replicate a 1 cm sized nozzle.
