Neapolitan pound cake

It's been a long time between cakes. Don't get me wrong - I've been eating them just not making them as I've been away from my oven and busy with work. But I had a birthday last week. I don't know what's happening, but as I get older, my taste in birthday cake seems to be regressing. This year, and last, my cake of choice has been this Neapolitan pound cake - basically a marble cake of vanilla, chocolate and well... pink. It's an Ottolenghi recipe so it's a little bit adult I suppose but there's nothing terribly mature about something smothered in pink drippy icing. But maybe that's the point. I made it for the first time last year to take on a houseboat called Wallamba so my friends who shared that adventure with me - and this year's smaller scale south coast celebration - now refer to it as Wallamba cake, which seems perfect as birthday cake should be whatever you want it to be. And certainly not second-guessed.

Welsh cakes

Once upon a time, I went to Wales. Well, it was May to be precise but the faraway is for its fairytale feel. My memories are of lush green, soft sun and sea mist. There were single lane roads (taken up with travelling tractors), and leeks on toast and Sunday roasts and... Welsh cakes. They were everywhere in Cardiff and the countryside - in specialty shops, in supermarkets, pubs and road side stalls. Eaten equally by builders, children and toffs in tearooms, there's something charmingly democratic about the Welsh cake.

Like a cross between a scone and a pikelet, Welsh cakes are a friendly tea-time treat. The traditional type are studded with sultanas, but you can use whatever you like - chocolate chips, orange zest, or any sort of dried fruit... Easy to whip up at short notice, these will keep in a tin to sustain you through a week of school lunches, a month of middle of the night football matches, or indeed, just morning tea.

Bakewell tarts

I'm sorry this post is so late. I can explain. You see, my cousin got married in London a week or so ago and I took advantage of being over the other side of the world to take a break and recover from the first half of the year, which has been - all cake, pies and tarts aside - pretty brutal. So I've been in my spiritual home, Scandinavia, eating my weight in cardamom buns and trying to sleep in for the first time in ages only to be in a particular place at a particular time of the year where the sun rises at 3.49am (after setting not that many hours earlier). But before that I was in Hobart. Hobart where stone fruit weighs down the limbs of backyard trees, where berries grow by the side of the road, free for the taking... but not so much in winter. Which is where jam comes in - jam made in the warmer months so even with coats and heaters on, it feels like summer. At least in terms of dessert.

I made these bakewell tarts back in early July with the assistance of my favourite Tasmanian red-haired baker, whose mum (an amazing cook in her own right) was responsible for the incredible jam that oozed out of these like a lovely sweet surprise... which sadly I don't have any photographic evidence of. On the southernmost tip of the southern hemisphere we were fighting fast diminishing late afternoon light when these came out of the oven. So you'll just have to trust me that they're good. Very good. Fruity, with smooth frangiapane, the crunch of flaked almonds, and a crisp, crumbly, shortcrust pastry. Save yourself the airfare and the jetlag, making these conjures summer in the depths of winter. And afterwards you can sleep in.

St. Louis Gooey Butter Cake

The New York Times had a pretty bad week. I am not here to defend peas in guacamole, but their cooking section generally, which is right more often than it is wrong. For a few months now, I've had bookmarked Melissa Clark's recipe for St. Louis Gooey Butter Cake, for the name alone. Apparently, the original dates back to the 1930s, when a baker miscalculated the quantity of butter in a coffee cake. Rather than throw it out, he carved it up, sold it by the square and Missouri was never the same again. 

It's a mashup of two very different cakes: an elegant, yeasted bottom layer - as refined and establishment as a twinset and pearls - and an over the top, brassy, bottle blonde bombshell up above. Unlikely friends but they complement each other beautifully, coming together in a single cake that is, as advertised, gooey and buttery... oozy and sweet and utterly moreish. The edges are particularly good - chewy and crisp. Grab a corner if you can.
  

Speculaas

Is it possible for a cookie to be seasonal? After making speculaas last weekend I'd be inclined to argue yes. When it's cold outside, you can't do much better than brown sugar, butter and cinnamon. There's something warming about all of those things, especially when baked into a sweet with an unpronouceable name (your best chance at getting it right is by trying to say it while eating one) and served with your hot beverage of choice.

The darkness comes from the brown sugar and spices (as much mixed spice as cinnamon) and is bolstered by rye flour and almond meal. This is a cookie for blissful hibernation. A winter warmer, designed for dunking.

Graham crackers

In January this year, I did a road trip with a friend down Highway One, on the west coast of the US. The starting point for our trip was San Francisco and before leaving, we stocked up on snacks at the Ferry Plaza Farmers market down at the waterfront. In addition to the many stands outside selling the most amazing fresh produce (and Blue Bottle coffee), there were permanent stores inside just as incredible - cheeses, meats, and bakeries galore... which is how I found myself at Miette, a San Francisco institution, surrounded by delicate pastries, decadent cakes and countless other dazzling sugary treats. My fellow road-tripper Christina, a New Yorker, but frequent visitor to San Fran and Miette, pointed at a downright homely looking cookie - brown, flat, and round. That, she pronounced emphatically. That is what you want. I looked around at the other more obviously enticing choices - pretty pastel macarons, chocolate sablés glittering with salt crystals, elaborate multi-layer cakes - then at Christina's face, which said trust me and I ordered the graham crackers. I'm so glad I did.  

I'd read about graham crackers for years. They were always in American recipes as the biscuit base of a cheesecake, or in children's books as an after school snack. What were they, I wondered? Like a milk arrowroot? A gingernut? A shredded wheatmeal? Or maybe they were savoury, as the name cracker seemed to imply, like a Vita-Wheat or a Salada. (It occurs to me as I write this how oddly-named every country's traditional biscuits/cookies are) It turns out there is no Australian equivalent. 

Graham crackers are basically buttery, honey-flavoured cookies made with wholemeal flour. As noted, they're nothing to look at, but their homeliness is their greatest strength. There's something incredibly comforting about this unassuming cookie. They're warm (honey! brown sugar!) and delicious and easy to make, the sort of everyday cookie you can rely on. You know what else is everyday? The sunset. I saw plenty of those that trip, as I ate my way through that box of graham crackers. And both were spectacular.

Cocoa hazelnut brownies

Some good friends of mine moved house on Monday. I, by contrast, have not moved very far from my computer in the last month with a seemingly neverending string of deadlines. So to make something for their move, that required me to move only as far as my kitchen, where all the ingredients were waiting for me, I turned to these brownies. The ones I usually make require a bit of forethought, as they contain prunes that need to be soaked for three days, but these cocoa hazelnut numbers take about as long to make as the decision to make them, which you'll see, after your eyes graze over these images (or these, from the original source) is not very long at all.

Most brownies are made by melting butter and dark chocolate, but here, the chocolate is swapped for cocoa. I'd been looking for a recipe to showcase the contents of the catering size bag of Italian Pernigotti cocoa I'd lugged back from Seattle (of all places) last year and this proved perfect. Dense, dark, delicious. Worth moving for. Whatever the distance.

Wholemeal chocolate chip cookies

You'd think it would be impossible for someone like me, such a devoted devourer of baked goods, to discover anything new about the chocolate chip cookie. But you'd be wrong. For I've recently stumbled across not one but two game-changers. The first is evident in the title of this post: wholemeal flour. Now, I've got nothing against the plain white stuff, as the recipe index of this blog will attest. But wholemeal flour with butter, brown sugar and bittersweet dark chocolate chips is a total revelation, adding a layer of nutty, chewy complexity to a classic cookie combination. So the second revelation: you can freeze cookie dough. Not as one big lump - that would defeat the purpose - but as individually rolled balls, to be taken straight from the freezer, popped on a tray, sprinkled with sea salt and baked to order. 

This means you can have freshly made cookies any time you like. In just sixteen minutes. For unexpected guests. For totally expected cravings. For no reason at all other than to amaze your friends and distract them from the crossword puzzle they insist on enlisting your help in solving even though you are (despite being a writer) totally hopeless at them. A picture tells a thousand words. Say no more.

Swedish cinnamon buns

Cinnamon smells like morning. I've been seeing quite a bit more morning lately, courtesy of my hectic football-watching schedule. And when you're getting out of bed while it's cold and dark outside, you need a little extra incentive. 

Cinnamon buns were something I'd always asssociated with America. Maybe because inevitably the first thing you encounter after getting through customs at the airport is a Cinnabon franchise selling enormous, puffed-up, heavily-frosted buns. I like a bit of excess from time to time but that much sugar too early in the morning threatens to put you back to sleep rather than wake you up. When I was in Copenhagen recently - a place with no shortage of delicious pastries - I was pointed in the direction of Café Rosa by the brilliant English-language blog A Guide to Copenhagen, which introduced me to so many of my favourite places when I was there. Linn, who writes the blog (as well as her own super-cute cooking one which you can check out here) is a Swede living in Denmark and claimed that the buns sold here were as good as any she'd had at home. I'd only had the American version to compare to, but really, after the first bite, there was no comparison. Speckled with cardamom, lightly sweet, with a ribbon of buttery cinnamon threaded through the interior, the Swedish cinnamon bun is pretty well perfect. Especially with a cup of strong black coffee as you watch the sun rise in Sydney, and set on screen in Rio.

Old-fashioned chocolate cake

If you're a kid and it's your birthday, then there's only one cake you want. And because all of us have been kids (or perhaps have never really grown up), chocolate cake brings out our inner seven year old, and we too hoe into it with gusto. Anyone who likes to bake has a go-to recipe for chocolate cake and this is mine. I'm not a parent but the average person (baker or not) with a lot on their plate can appreciate a recipe where all you have to do is pile the ingredients into a food processor and press ON. Especially when the results would indicate it was a lot more work - the most delicate crumb, a perfect balance of tangy and sweet, and a sturdy structure which allows it to be comfortably held by fingers big and small.

It's so good in fact, it befits two choruses of happy birthday - one with candles, one with sparklers. The secret is sour cream, which enriches both icing and cake and cuts the sweetness of the sugar in each. It also makes it beautifully moist, which means the slice you get to take home will be just as delicious the next day.

Lemon moon cake

American cops - or, more accurately, American cops in American movies - are renowned for their great love of doughnuts. The Danish police force, on the other hand, are synonymous with the more romantic-sounding lemon moon cake, or citronmåne. To be fair, it's a cake that's most readily available in long-life form on supermarket shelves, but even still, the flavours are a little more complex than deep-fried dough (much as I love a doughnut). It's citrussy and lightly sweet and in colour, pale gold, like the Scandinavian sun.

When I came to Copenhagen I wanted to learn how to cook something Danish. And one night, in Hellerup, in the cosy kitchen of a lovely Danish family, I was taught how to make this cake. Like a lot of Danish desserts and baked goods, it's made with marzipan, something I'd previously only associated with the icing on wedding cakes. Though you can get it in Australia, I tucked a small package of it in my suitcase to take home with me, just in case. Because I needed to have this cake again. It's that good. This recipe comes from the organic bakery chain emmerys, whose wares I sampled widely while I was in town. The quantity makes one large cake, which traditionally are cut in two to make half-moons, hence the name. Each half moon easily feeds six people, or (as the joke goes) one Danish policeman.

Apple brown betty

 

If Hans Christian Andersen's right and to travel is to live, then I've been doing a lot of living lately. This Easter long weekend, I was in Tasmania, where my friends have a lovely kitchen with a view of the Hobart city skyline, a backyard full of apple trees (four different varieties!) and a twelve year old who makes the most incredible vanilla bean ice-cream. And on Sunday, these three things came together for dessert.

Though I love bread, I've never been terribly excited by its dessert possibilities, which are usually variations of soggy-sounding puddings. But this - the superlative brown betty - is made with fresh crumbs (rather than stale slices) tossed with (rather than soaked in) butter, brown sugar and cinnamon. When they're popped into the oven atop of a layer of fat apple slices, they crisp. While cooking, they crackle, and, when bitten into, crunch - a lovely contrast with the tender apples beneath, and the silkiness of the ice-cream melting into a milky pool beside it.

There are many different recipes out there - the brown betty dates back to the 1800s - but this one uses a combination of apple slices and puréed apple, which gives the filling a nice body and added texture. And the layer of crumbs on the bottom of the dish handily soak up any excess water from the fruit. It's best eaten with Edie's vanilla bean ice-cream but if you don't have the very good fortune to know Edie, then the stuff you buy at the supermarket (or make yourself!) will do nicely.
 

Strawberry sonker

My Danish has not come along a great deal in the three weeks I've been here. My one complete phrase which translates to "Do you speak English?" consistently elicits blank stares and when I revert to actual English to say it, I am met with relief, a smile and "of course". But - what I have picked up here and there have been words I see again and again - økologisk for example, which means organic. And, lately, jordbær - strawberries - because they're everywhere: red, fat, and juicy. This is not a Danish recipe, but something I'd been meaning to try out since reading this fantastic article in The New York Times about regional pie variations in the United States. I could have made a grunt, or a crisp or a crumble, but it was the sonker from North Carolina that called me.

It's my general belief that strawberries should really not be messed with at all. They're best eaten fresh, at room temperature, but when it's really, really cold outside - still! turns out Danish spring is icier than Sydney winter - you want something a little warm in your belly. So, the sonker. Apart from its charmingly strange name, it had the advantage of being made with items I already had in my kitchen, and needed to use up: milk, butter, flour, sugar. Despite the simplicity of the ingredient list, it turns out it's not as straight forward as just combining them into a batter to pour over the fruit. There's a definite technique to the sonker. And multiple saucepans and bowls. But the end result is well worth it - tender, jammy fruit tucked beneath a lightly golden, pancake-style crust. Another word I've learnt during my stay is hygge, which roughly translates to cosiness, the cornerstone of the Danish way of life. It can be seen here everywhere and in everything - in candles on tables set for dinner (or even breakfast!), pots of bulbs and herbs in the windows of apartments, impromptu gatherings anywhere outside when the sun is shining no matter how freezing the actual temperature, children clustered together in custom-built boxes on the front of bicycles pedalled by a parent... This dessert, while nowhere near Nordic, encapsulates that philosophy beautifully. Homey and warm, simple and sweet: wholly hygge.