A week ago or so I bought my first tub of buttermilk, despite not knowing what I was going to use it for. Since then I have spent time trawling for recipes but none of them really caught me. None of them made me want to get off the sofa (where I have generally relocated since getting the iPad) and actually make something. In the end I had a sudden craving for pancakes and it turned out to be a convenient way to use up the buttermilk, strawberries and creme fraiche I had in the fridge.
I first heard about Coffee Risotto when looking at the search keywords that people had used to find my blog. I get a lot of search hits for coffee recipes (usually coffee flavoured muffins or coffee macaron recipes) but occasionally I get something more interesting – something that sparks off a new idea.
My main memory of empire biscuits, isn’t as you might think of being a young child picking off the sweetie on top and licking off the icing. I am sure I did do that, it certainly sounds like me, but no. My overriding memory of Empire biscuits is much more recent and in fact within the past 6 years.
It has entirely happy recollections of early romance, when Matt and I would sit in the Boyd Orr cafe drinking coffee and eating Empire biscuits. Not too much later on I realised how the Empire biscuit was perfectly suited to giving you a much needed sugar high at 10 o’clock at night when you have a Uni deadline the next day.
Since I recently announced my semi-secret blog to the world, I’ve been having lots of discussions at work about food and photography. It felt about time that I bring in baked treats for the office, pictures and words are all very well but the essence of food is eating.
This Lemon and Blueberry cake has been on my list ever since it was on the front cover of BBC Good Food magazine for their March edition. They labelled it as the perfect Mother’s Day cake, but to me this cake says one thing – Spring!
It has hard to remember that spring is coming when it’s been raining all day, the winds are ferocious and snow is forecast for tomorrow morning. Yet there has been the odd day when the sun has broken through and you can almost remember what summer is like. This cake is for getting us through till then 🙂
I have tried to make a cake with pear before but it just didn’t work out, it sunk in the middle and wasn’t very appealing to look at. I never posted it, but I still have the pear cake bug, every time I see a pear I want to wrap it something fluffy and sweet.
This weekend I bought three pears with the sole purpose of forcing me to try again. I found this pear cake recipe by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall.
Yesterday in the UK the weather seemed to really turn a corner, there were blue skies, and you could feel the warmth from the sun. It was perfect and long past overdue!
I have been meaning to try these muffins for a while, originally because I thought they might give me a shot of sunshine despite there not being any really sun to speak of. However for once the recipe and the weather aligned and I got a perfect Spring muffins.
It’s a long time till Good Friday, but these are too good to wait for! I have a special love of fruit bread, especially those spiced with cinnamon, so hot cross buns have always been a favourite of mine.
The supermarkets have been selling Hot Cross Buns since after Valentines Day, but I am yet to buy a single one. I made a promise to try to make more things myself. At Christmas I refused to buy mince pies and instead made my own – and I would never buy them again now. Why should it be any different for Hot Cross Buns?
I don’t think my Valentine really likes Macarons, so I almost didn’t make this months MacTweets challenge. But I relented.
I went for a simple almond macaron, but piped them as a heart shape…
Which wasn’t particularly difficult. They weren’t the flattest macraons, but they did have feet.
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