Roast Plum & Miso Semifreddo

I’m a little late to my own party, but another year has swung around and I’ve managed to hit the four years of blogging milestone. The first year was a learning curve: a mish-mash of family favourite recipes thrown in with cafe reviews (I no longer consider myself qualified to be a food critic!) along with the struggle to get a handle on the technical side – apertures, photo editing, SEO and wordpress. At the end of that first year (I wrote about a Momofuku style German Chocolate Espresso Cake), I discussed the shift from school excellence to university prioritisation, and the utmost enjoyment that running a blog had added to daily medical school life. The following year heralded the arrival of hospital placement, and a reflection on my photographic improvements and the surreal week that was a trip to the Saveur Blog Awards in New York (alongside a peach & blackberry pie topped with olive oil gelato).

Year number three came and went with lightning speed – my most stressful, high intensity year at medical school to date with final exams looming, which dictated a slow-down on the blogging front in favour of time spent cramming. Around a mass of photographs for a chocolate, cherry and coconut layer cake, I wrote about four things I’d learnt through the blogging journey. To be honest, rereading them a year later, I’m still very much continuing to learn them – knowing them in my head isn’t the same as acting out, or embodying, those lessons day to day.

I can hardly believe it’s already year number four. 2018 was a whirlwind compared to all of those previously – I left not only New Zealand but my adopted university city of Melbourne for 8 months in Oxford undertaking a research project. The consequent lack of a (high functioning) kitchen meant significantly less action over here, but I instead ate and photographed my way around cities I’d always dreamed of visiting – Barcelona, Rome, Venice, Copenhagen, Lisbon, Tel Aviv, Paris. I’ve now come full circle back to Melbourne to start my final year of medical school and it feels strange – as if one half of me had never left and the other has done and seen so much more that it can’t quite slot back neatly into university life.

As for this blog? I honestly don’t know what direction I want it to go in. All I do know is that I want to continue baking outside my comfort zone (and inside it), continue to cook up feasts for family and friends alongside easy weeknight student-friendly meals, and continue to explore food and travel photography. So that’s what I’ll do for another year at least, and I hope some of you stick around for it.

I haven’t gone for a celebration cake this year – I did attempt one (which still remains a work in progress), and instead this semifreddo was such a overwhelming success and seemed to me like the utmost celebration of summer stone fruit and relaxing warm evenings. You can take the stress out of the occasion by making it up to a week before you plan to serve, and then all you do is slice and plate up gorgeous slabs of tangy, salty sweet roasted plum ice cream, topped with a generous handful of buttery shortbread crumble.