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
Recipes
Chickpea and Fennel ‘Risotto’
As is clear from a quick glance at my recipe index, I have a pretty big sweet tooth. So much so that I rarely feature savoury recipes on my blog. The truth is, baking for me is relaxation and with a busy job and a fair amount of travel, dinner, while often delicious, typically involves me and Alessandro staring into our empty fridge and trying to come up with something decent to eat. I love cooking big meals for friends, but the occasions where we all manage to get together around our big dining table are few and far between. The other day, save for a bulb of fennel, some onions and garlic, our fridge and vegetable basket were empty challenging me to come up with something edible based on the little food we had to hand! A quick glance in the pantry and I found what would be the star of our meal – a jar of chickpeas! While
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
Baked Wholemeal Blueberry Donuts
Like most of us, Alessandro loves donuts (and admittedly I am rather partial to them as well – in fact,
Some more inspiration from the interwebs – April edition
I have been busy book-marking new blogs and mouth-watering recipes so rather than let all of these links collect ‘dust’
read more Some more inspiration from the interwebs – April edition
Buckwheat Olive Oil Cacao Nib Financiers
Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night with some random thought that keeps me from falling asleep
Olive oil gelato
While living in the centre of Rome has plenty of advantages (my walk to work takes me down the Spanish
French Brioche
I learnt an important lesson last week: once in a while you should check the expiration date of your fast
Kamut Orange Pound Cake
It’s been a while since I baked a traditional pound cake, but when I came across Luisa Weiss’ post about an
Beetroot Muffins – one final nod to winter
A few years ago I lived off Southgate Road in North East London, it was the first flat me and
REAL SIMPLE FOOD 