Baking with Olive Oil

Pistachio Olive Oil Miniature Cakes

I once read an article about that strange feeling of returning to a city where you once used to live. To discover that this city has not been preserved in some kind of time bubble. That life in this city has moved on. Your friends have made new friends, filling that small hole your departure might have left. Shops have shut or moved. Restaurants have come and gone. How odd this is, whether or not this city has a special place in your heart or whether you were in fact glad to leave it when you did. It feels like I have spent most of my twenties either moving to London or moving away from London. After university and law school there I spent some time in Germany, working in a law firm to save up enough cash to travel around Argentina and Chile for a few months (which, incidentally is where I met Alessandro). I came back to London

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Cacao Nib and Buckwheat Crunch Cookies

  Since moving to Rome in November, Italy has not stoppped to surprise me – while healthfood stores are hard to track down and most Italians think nothing of eating sugar-laden pastries for breakfast, a pile of pasta for lunch and a pizza for dinner (which might also explain the mountain of prunes on offer in most supermarkets!), it is surprisingly easy to find a huge variety of different types of flours and sweeteners. My small local supermarket stocks spelt, buckwheat and kamut flour (in addition to a whole plethora of different types of wheat flours for baking and pasta-making), I know a couple of places where I can buy chia seeds and I can get my hands on maple syrup, agave syrup and molasses with a simple detour during my lunch break. While my impression is that there cannot be a big market for these ingredients in Italy given that I have yet to eat a homemade birthday cake

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House-hunting in Rome & Inspiration from the interwebs – May edition

House-hunting – the bane of my existence. While the past 12 odd years of moving across Europe (Germany-Austria and back, Germany-UK and back (a few times), UK-Brussels and back and, lastly, UK-Italy) have taught me a great deal about minimising the stuff we all drag around with us (well, except for my cookbook collection, but I am not willing to part with that) and to wrap my beautiful bowls I bought when we went to Japan carefully enough to survive a move half-way around Europe, the one thing I am still utterly crap at is house-hunting itself. I know what websites to use, what sleazy property agents to avoid, what questions to ask prospective landlords, what hidden costs to look for etc, but at the end of the day I struggle with the simple fact that, at least if you are renting in large cities, you will never find a place that ticks all your boxes. Now add a boyfriend to the

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Orange Mocha Marble Cake

While I am researching different eclairs recipes and different methods and ingredients for making pastry cream for a new recipe (which I am already very excited about sharing), I baked an Orange Mocha Marble Cake the other day to have on hand for easy breakfasts at home and to nibble on during the day. But before we talk about the Orange Mocha Marble Cake, I wanted to say that I was super excited to hear that my recipe for Toasted Rice Blancmanger was featured in the Guardian’s Cook section under the theme ‘WOBBLY’ last weekend! I absolutely love creating recipes and it is even better when others like my creations! Back to this marble cake – chocolate and orange is one of my favourite flavour combinations but the addition of coffee was new to me until very recently. I first came across this in the form of a Chocolate Orange Tiramisu at Jamie’s Italian which opened fairly recently in my

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