I made a full recipe of the Banana Schmutz as directed and combined that with a half recipe of the Vanilla Ice Cream so that it would fit in my ice cream maker. The schmutz was slightly overcooked as the brown sugar made it hard to tell when to take the pan off heat. I omitted...
I baked this in a 13×9 baking pan which fit everything nicely. The plums I used were Damson ones, which are small and quite tart. Baking made them even more acidic so a good accompaniment for this is ice cream. My last batch of Crumble SurpriseTM, an odds-and-ends frozen baggi...
These didn’t turn out the way I wanted. I added a few drops of strawberry essence that I bought from Cuoca in Tokyo and a few drops of red food colouring. Neither contributed very much to the macaron batter. I let them sit for an hour but they didn’t flatten out: I should try ...
After reading so much about them via food bloggers, I finally had a chance to sample macarons while in Hong Kong at Le Goûter Bernardaud. They really are as good as everyone says they are. For my first attempt, I tried the chocolate macarons recipe from David Lebovitz. His bat...
After tasting the wonderful cakes at Toraya Café, I wanted to try reproducing them in my kitchen. Armed with an ingredient list and a jar of their an paste, I tried modifying a chocolate chestnut cake, substituting sweetened, puréed red beans for chestnuts. I scaled back the s...
In the many years since I bought my ice cream machine, I’ve never made plain vanilla until this weekend. The recipe I used is fairly standard, using eight yolks to a quart of cream; I’ve seen some using a dozen! My canister of vanilla sugar had exactly one cup of sugar left pl...
I’ve never made the classic apple dessert but had a basket of apricots and tried this variation. The caramel was far too dark as I let it cook too long and made the sauce a little too bitter. As the recipe notes, apricots do turn quite sour after cooking. The pastry is very cr...
The crust is made with ground hazelnuts and was very easy to roll out between plastic wrap, although it was very thin. It’s unbaked when the filling goes in, so it comes it soft and tender. I hadn’t used redcurrants before and found the raw fruit to be very acidic, so I only u...
A delicious, well-balanced tart that is fairly simple to make. I thought the use of lemon juice in the mousse was odd, but it makes the filling a little tangy and not overly sweet. The blueberry topping was really runny, perhaps some cornstarch would have helped, or further re...
This is a variation on the Cornmeal-crusted Lemon Tart recipe in her book. The crust is crumbly because it’s made with cornmeal and is just patted into the pan; it had a lot of cracks after baking. I cooked the filling in a glass bowl over simmering water; usually, I use a sta...