Hazelnut coffee cake

Perhaps the most perfect place in all the world exists in Stockholm. On an island you can walk to from the city, in what was once the Swedish royal family's game park, is a biodynamic garden called Rosendals Trägåd. Amid the neat rows of plantings and greenhouses, and the nut-brown ladies with wispy white hair working in them, there's a café selling food made from what they grow, which you can take on a tray to picnic tables scattered about an orchard of ages-old pear and apple trees and lounge about in the dappled light, eating or reading or chatting.

I spent a week in Stockholm and went there three times. Three visits, three cakes. The first was a Swiss roll, sweet and sticky with jam. The second a fat slice of cardamom cake, speckled with spice. The third was a technically not a cake, but a cinnamon bun, so much better than any I've ever had at IKEA.

What I like so much about Scandinavian baking is its simplicity. There's nothing tricked up or fussy about it. Its modesty is magnificent - just like Rosendals Trägåd and so many other places in Stockholm. When I got home I craved it and the calm of cooking after so long away from a kitchen. So I made a cake - Swedish, naturally.

 

From Anna Brones and Joanna Kindvall's very lovely cookbook Fika (the Swedish word for the ritual of pausing expressly for coffee and something sweet) I baked the hazelnut coffee cake. This is not so much a coffee cake in the American sense, but one that contains coffee, a flavour that melds beautifully with the ground hazelnuts and butter to produce a simple but stunning cake that suitably sums up Scandinavia.

Grain salad with golden beetroot, apple and hazelnuts

Last week I lost my appetite. The cause was nothing too dramatic, just your garden variety head cold. But I couldn't get enthused about cooking and pretty well ate nothing but soup from Monday to Friday. As it abated, approaching the weekend, I began to feel like actually eating rather than just sipping from a spoon - food that made me feel like less of an invalid but wasn't too much of an afront to my dulled tastebuds and delicate system. As luck would have it, I happened on a bunch of golden beetroot. 

Granted my excitement threshold was dangerously low due to being stuck at home in bed for a week, but it was a bit like finding the golden ticket in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, the (wildly less popular) vegetable version. I'd learned to make this salad last year in Copenhagen where golden beetroot were as prevalent as the red sort we're used to here in Australia, sliced up on our burgers, and staining our clothing pink. The taste and texture are the same, but the colour... the colour! Subtle, where the other is strident. Glowing gradations of gold. 

The beetroot is roasted, then tossed with cooked grains, toasted hazelnuts and diced apple and the lot doused in a slightly sweet, lightly acidic dressing. It's chewy and crisp, crunchy and clean. You can use any sort of grain you like - I used farro - and if you can't get your hands on the golden sort, regular old beetroot would be fine, though your salad will be somewhat more pink. In any case, this feels like fighting food, as if you're getting better, stronger just by eating it, which is, in a sense, the real golden ticket. You can't say that about chocolate.

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.

Pear and hazelnut cake

On Friday night I flew down to spend the weekend in Anglesea with two friends I've known now for nearly twenty years. There was porridge (with apples, roast almonds and homemade dulche de leche). There were pies (from the local bakery). There were walks on the beach. There were dogs. There were antihistamines (I'm allergic). And, of course, there was cake. I'd spotted this Frank Camorra recipe in the Sydney Morning Herald a few weeks ago and ripped it out thinking it would be the one for this weekend: a sturdy shape (handy for carry-on), seasonal (autumn pears), and nuts and dark chocolate for post-surf (or post-surf watching) indulgence. 

I love the beach in winter. Or, better still, almost winter, when it's still pleasantly walkable but free of beach umbrellas and flying frisbees, when you can see for miles and it's moody and misty and the surfers in their wetsuits bob black like seals in the water - my friend Gill among them! - waiting for a wave. And we were waiting for her when she came in. With cake. Like Gill, it's worthy of applause. The pears are silky, the ground nuts buttery-smooth and the chocolate chunks a sweet surprise crunch. And it's made with brown sugar, which lends a deep caramel to the colour and flavour of the loaf. Not to mention a lovely (almost) winter warmth.