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REAL SIMPLE FOOD

Daydreaming about food, one dish at a time

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  • Apricots – some ideas for what is possibly my favourite fruit to bake with
  • Fresh Turmeric and Lemon Curd
  • Portuguese Palmiers Recheados with Black Sesame Custard
  • These recipes are bananas! A round-up of unusual banana recipes
  • Baking your own sourdough bread – tips and tricks and common mistakes to avoid

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  • Dark Chocolate Brownies with Medjool Dates and Almond Butter
  • Melomakarona - Greek Honey and Walnut Cookies
  • Seedy Buckwheat Bread (gf)
  • Chickpea Flour Gingersnap Cookies

INSTANT FOOD

It’s always the small pleasures. I am sitting at home waiting for the plumber to arrive (and have a mountain of emails to clear from my inbox). But instead of heading straight to the office this gave me the chance to have a quick breakfast at home, something that happens rarely these days thanks to a lot of travel and free breakfast at work. And so I picked up some brioche buns from the bakery across the street and finally opened a small jar of Matcha Milk Jam I picked up at @sadaharu_aoki when I was in Paris a few weeks ago. And it is glorious. Beautiful texture and perfect balance of flavour - not too strong and not too weak and the matcha nicely balances out all the sugar. Now I want to try making my own milk jam, but maybe a kinako or hojicha version! Also, those flowers in the background are surprisingly long-living. Going on two weeks now!
Channelled my inner Christina Tosi today and made Dorito(!) financiers. I have never cared much for crisps and other salty snacks, but give me a bag of doritos and I can’t stop. I have already baked with toasted masa harina a few times (there is a great recipe for masa harina madeleines on the blog) and adore it’s strong corn flavour. Using powdered doritos is even better. It’s almost like eating cornbread, but in the form of these rich and buttery small French cakes. Extremely good if I dare say so myself. Speaking of Christina Tosi, I bet powdered doritos would work a treat in her corn cookies!
Rose water. Another essential ingredient in my kitchen. It doesn’t get used nearly as often as the bottle of Orange Blossom Water but when I do use it it makes all the difference. My favourite thing to do with is probably anytime I make something involving raspberries - the two just pair wonderfully. E.g. I love profiteroles filled with whipped cream flavoured with raspberries macerated in sugar and rose blossom water. You could also make a rose blossom water simple syrup and use that to brush on stale brioche if you are making bostock with fresh raspberries. But rose blossom water is also a fantastic pairing with apples, the tarter the better, and anything involving cardamom and pistachios. Just be careful - if you use too much you risk creating something rather soapy in flavour.
Coming back to one of my favourite topics: substitutions in the kitchen. And this time, I want to talk about fat! Yes, you might not think of fat as a very substitutable ingredient given the key role it plays in baking (and cooking). And yet, provided you stick to one basic rule (more on that below) it is totally doable. So what is the key rule? Substitute fat with fat! No, seriously, when it comes to baking you want to keep the fat percentage in your recipe the same regardless of what type of fat you use if you want to achieve the same result. And that’s pretty easily done when you remember that butter has a fat content of around 80 per cent and oil of around 99 per cent. So if a recipe calls for say 100g butter, you can swap this for 80ml of oil plus 20ml of whatever liquid you need for the recipe (e.g. milk or water). You may be asking yourself why you would want to swap one type of fat for another. And the reason for this is flavour - as much as neutral tasting vegetable oil is great for cooking, when it comes to baking it can be fun to swap butter for something more flavourful like olive oil or toasted sesame oil or coconut oil. And to get you started, here are some of my favourite ideas for fat substitutions (starting with the one pictured here and linked to in my profile): - Making financiers with Moroccan argan oil instead of butter - Making brioche with peanut butter or other nut butters - imagine how delicious a babka would be if made with a peanut butter brioche dough and some toasted and salted peanuts sprinkled on the filling! - Making a coconut loaf cake with coconut oil instead of butter for an extra intense coconut flavour - Making chocolate chip cookies with brown butter instead of regular butter - Making a saffron and cardamom pound cake with ghee instead of butter for an extra buttery flavour - Making brioche with olive oil instead of butter - I especially love this when pairing brioche with anything citrus flavoured, somehow the brioche with olive oil lets the flavour of citrus fruits through more (e.g. a lemon curd filling or candied orange zest in the dough itself) - hence why I love Gibassierso much.
The downside of my worktrips to Istanbul is that I end up spending half of my Sunday in taxis, on a plane or traipsing through airports. The upside is ending the week with delicious Turkish food all washed down with a glorious glass of Turkish wine.
The half-life of a babka is always much shorter than you expect. Especially when it’s a @honeyandco one. That filling is so chocolatey, it’s amazing. Added an extra generous pinch of sea salt to the filling and some Orange Blossom Water to the sugar syrup this time - will definitely do that again.

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Top Posts & Pages

  • Dark Chocolate Brownies with Medjool Dates and Almond Butter
  • Melomakarona - Greek Honey and Walnut Cookies
  • Seedy Buckwheat Bread (gf)
  • Chickpea Flour Gingersnap Cookies

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Christmas, cookies, holidays, Recipes, Uncategorized  0 Comments

December 17, 2018

Melomakarona – Greek Honey and Walnut Cookies

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bread, Christmas, German baking, Germany, holidays, Recipes, Uncategorized  3 Comments

December 3, 2018December 3, 2018

Saffron, Cardamom and Mahleb Stollen with Apricots, Figs and Pistachios

I am not quite sure I am actually ready to start talking about Christmas recipes just yet. But somehow we

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Supper Club, Two Kitchens, Uncategorized  0 Comments

November 4, 2018November 4, 2018

Big News: Launch of the ‘Two Kitchens’ Supper Club in Brussels

If you follow me on instagram, you will have already seen that the lovely Kaja from The Recipe Suitcase and

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Uncategorized  4 Comments

September 24, 2018September 24, 2018

Fig leaf panna cotta

This is a very quick hello so this space doesn’t go too quiet while I ride out the business that

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breakfast, German baking, Germany, Recipes  1 Comment

August 18, 2018

Cardamom and Tahini Custard Danishes and how I once applied for a stage in Ottolenghi’s test kitchen

One thing that fascinates me to no end about developing recipes is the recipe-testing part of the process, more specifically,

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Brussels, fruit, holidays, Recipes  5 Comments

July 16, 2018July 15, 2018

Honeyed Panna Cotta with Anise Seed and Roasted Apricots

  Panna cotta is one of those desserts that are as easy to make as they are delicious. Since you

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fruit, Recipes, Uncategorized  0 Comments

July 10, 2018July 8, 2018

Stuck in a fruit salad rut? Here are some new ideas

Hot weather does a funny thing to your appetite. Or at least it does to mine. Thanks to our little

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Drinks, Recipes, Uncategorized  0 Comments

July 4, 2018July 1, 2018

Toasted Cinnamon and Date-Sweetened Brown Rice Horchata … for the most delicious iced coffee!

We are currently in the midst of a heat wave in Brussels. Temperatures have been hovering around 30 degrees for

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Recipes, Savoury  0 Comments

June 28, 2018July 18, 2018

Zhoug … current condiment of choice for with … everything

I don’t share a lot of savoury recipes here. Largely because I always think of myself as more of a(n

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Recipes, Uncategorized  1 Comment

June 19, 2018

Muhallabia with Mahleb and Sourcherry Compote

Muhallabia was a dessert my parents often made for special occasions when I was growing up. I think partly so

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