I’ve always been under the impression Sushi was imposible to make and required great skill to get it rolled and that it would all fall apart until I’d spent months practicing. Astrid however was more optimistic, and with a few bouts of pestering me about the nori that had been in the pantry for over a year, I said ok, we’d make sushi.

It took two hours from start to finish – although we did make it again yesterday and it only took an hour.

(more…)

The past few weeks I’ve been playing with some new ingredients. In my quest to bake a decent cake with no butter, sugar or eggs I’ve begun work on removing butter – and had some success on the sugar front.

Replacing the butter, I’ve used coconut oil, which I’ve found works brilliantly as long as I also use it in conjunction with olive oil (50/50). If I don’t use olive oil the first part of the cake process (oil and sugar) doesn’t go white and fluffy. So the olive oil is great for adding volume.

I tried using agave syrup the other week – I used the same amount as sugar but it was far too sweet and made the cake go quite dark so that was no good. I’ve been told to try light Agave next time. In the meantime though I found my favourite honey brand from New Zealand has arrived in the UK, so I bought a jar of Northern Rata to use as my cake sweetener.

This time I used half honey / half sugar, alongside my half coconut / half olive oil mix. Complicated – but so far so good. And good honey isn’t cheap so the sugar stays for now.

My new discovery this week was Einkorn flour – the oldest flour known to mankind. It’s a lovely wholemeal flour and as I like to use a few different flours in my baking I’m happy to add this to the collection. You can substitute it out for spelt or anything else if you can’t find any.

You can also turn this recipe into cupcakes if you like – we did it once and they were lovely. Just decrease the baking time to around 15 minutes and bake until golden brown.

(more…)

Last weekend I baked the usual cake – I’d received my little parcel of Steenbergs edible flower petals and couldn’t wait to bake perfect cupcakes with lovely icing – so I baked a blueberry cake instead which I sprinkled with caster sugar and delicate blue and yellow petals.

More to come this weekend. Banana cupcakes with white icing and delicate little petals.

Edible flower petals from Steenbergs.

Our favourite London cupcakes, we were introduced to Violet Cakes in London Fields, by a school parent, who, one day came to a school picnic with the darkest, most moist chocolate cake ever, scattered with gold dust and topped with sugar violets. Hand stamped on the cake box and firmly etched in my mind – was Violet Cakes.

Today it was wet and a good day for a little drive out to East London.
We stopped at the fairly new Long White Cloud cafe – where you can get an oat milk latte. That makes me a happy lady. As did the large jar of Kiwi Marmite for £6.

So off on our drive up Hackney Road and an inspired idea to go to Violet Cakes.
Yes! They do take cards. A 50p charge if it’s under a tenner.

The girls cupcakes didn’t make it home for photographing. Edith didn’t get chocolate this time so she only licked the icing off the top of her mini lilac and mini pink cupcakes. We eat her cupcakes – which were amazing – they taste like cake mix. Divine!!

Definitely the best, prettiest, sweetest little cake shop in London.

www.violetcakes.com

There’s a bit of a pattern to my cake recipe. I only really have one recipe – but I change the flours, nuts, fruit and essences so I call it “One cake, 100 ways”.

Over the years I’ve tried using normal flour, buckwheat, brown and white spelt. My favourite is white spelt. I now also change out at least half the flour amount to be ground nuts. Usually ground Almonds. Especially since I bought 3 KG of organic ground almonds from Goodness Direct.

(more…)

Our girls love spaghetti – it’s pretty much the one thing they’re guaranteed to eat. But I also want to make sure they are actually getting some decent nutrients with it. One time I bought essential Waitrose spaghetti instead of the usual Biona or, their favourite, Carluccio’s. They were hungry within the hour so I always make sure I buy the best possible quailty.

As a child we always had spaghetti with a tomato sauce and it was only a few years ago I realised I could do spaghetti with, say, only butter and sage, or parmesan and lemon – it didn’t always have to be bolognese, or covered in sauce. I’ve now begun to experiment – and I really love adding pulses to pasta so today it’s chickpeas.

(more…)