Germany

Rye, Walnut and Cardamom Crescents

Earlier today I heaved a rather large suitcase (heavy from Saturday’s frantic run around Brussels to buy various Christmas presents), a large bag, a laptop bag and a handbag onto the Thalys to take me home to my parents’ place in Essen, Germany. After 14 years of having to fly from various places in Europe to see my family, it is amazing to be able to take a direct train to go home, with no risk of delayed trains or bad traffic to get to the airport or long queues to get through security. Like every year, I am dividing my time between Germany and Italy and after spending Christmas with my family, I will be flying to Rome on Friday to join Alessandro and his friends and family for further Christmas celebrations and to ring in the New Year. After what can only be described as a very ‘full’ year, I am looking forward to a bit of downtime

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German Peppernuts with Indonesian Long Pepper

If you have been reading my blog for a while now, you will have noticed that I am a big fan of bold and unusual flavours and that I don’t shy away from baking with ingredients we typically associate more with savoury preparations. So it was only ever going to be a matter of time before I started playing around with all the wonderful and different types of pepper. In fact I have been playing with pepper quite a lot over the recent months as I have been developing some recipes for the Peppermongers using their incredible range of different types of pepper, including lesser known varieties like Indonesian long pepper and cubeb pepper. I first came across the Peppermongers when I read their interview in CEREAL magazine last Christmas and it was that interview which really sparked my interest in creating sweets with pepper and kick-started what is still an incredible learning experience. Armed with Christine McFadden‘s Pepper bible and a whole plethora of different types

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Could this be the best carrot cake?

Like many other food bloggers, homebakers and homecooks, I shy away from calling a recipe the “best” ever recipe for whatever it is I have concocted – tastes, preferences and favourite ingredients are liable to change over time. Besides, what do people even mean when they say that something is the “best” ever cake/muffin/cookie recipe? Surely such judgment is highly subjective. Take brownies for example, some people have to have nuts in them, ideally walnuts, others abhor any kind of nuts in their brownie, most people want their brownies to be perfectly fudgy, while others find fudgy brownies cloying. What constitutes the perfect brownie for one person can be miles away from the perfect brownie for someone else. With that said, below is what I would call “my” best carrot cake recipe – “my” in the very loose sense of the word since the recipe is not my recipe at all – I think it was my sister Helena who originally discovered the recipe

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