Crème Brûlée with Pistachio Nut Butter & Pistachio Shortbread

Creamy crème brûlée with a shiny crackly crust

Dessert, for me, is all about decadence. While a main meal tends to provide sustenance in addition to satisfaction, pudding provides an opportunity for sheer indulgence. You’re hardly going to get your five-a-day from chocolate, cream, sugar or any combination thereof, but that’s not really the point. What it fails to do for your health, dessert doubles for your happiness.

And what could be more decadent than a dessert that requires its very own bit of kitchen equipment? Continue reading →

12Jul2011

Millionaire’s shortbread with maldon sea salt

Millionaire’s shortbread with flakes of sea salt

A couple of weeks ago one of our friends managed to shatter his leg jumping off a wall.

Ouch.

This weekend just gone we went up to visit, and I wanted to bake something suitably delicious to take his mind off things (this littleloaf isn’t really a bunch of grapes kind of girl). Sugar is a good remedy for trauma – hot sweet tea always seems to be offered up to people in shock – so maybe it was some kind of subconscious association which directed me to this restorative, tooth-itchingly sweet recipe. That, or the fact that the ‘short’ from which ”shortbread’ takes its name has been used to describe a ‘friable, brittle, crumbling texture’ since medieval times . . .

Continue reading →

15May2011

Salty Snickers macarons

Salty chocolate & caramel macarons

There’s no denying it, the Americans know how to do dessert. The rise of mouthwatering confection meccas like The Hummingbird Bakery means we’ve come to think nothing of putting away giant slabs of brownie, cupcakes smothered in inches of icing and whoopie pies the size of cricket balls. Dessert has become super-sweet, super-sized, and certainly not subtle.

Continue reading →

19Apr2011

Chocolate & Dulce de Leche Brownies

If you’ve read many of my previous posts on this blog, you’ll know that I love chocolate and I love baking. It’s been a while since I last made brownies, and a pre-Easter dinner party at a friend’s flat this week seemed like the perfect excuse to try a new recipe. I’ve been reading David Lebowitz‘s gorgeous blog for a while now, and amongst a number of delicious looking recipes, I’d bookmarked these amazing looking Dulce de Leche brownies.

If you’ve not tried Dulce de Leche before, now is your moment. Literally ‘milk sweetness’ or ‘milk candy’, it’s an unctuously thick caramel-like sauce made from sweetened condensed milk, and one of the most delicious things you’re ever likely to put in your mouth. Continue reading →