Tiramisu cake: jump to recipe here.

Tiramisu has been very of the moment over the last few years (or I’m just very late to the party). The standard iterations at Italian restaurants have paved the way for Embla’s chocolate ripple-misu, the restaurant drawer option, gelato messina’s many twists (matcha-misu, for example) and the very viral pistachio-misu versions. I have been equally guilty of asking my local café for 12 shots of espresso for my own (the best make-ahead crowd pleasing dinner party dessert, if you need convincing). This is it in cake form. The layers are a moist almond coffee cake, studded with tiny shards of chopped dark chocolate and soaked in a mix of espresso and kahlua. A very simple vanilla mascarpone cream and a dusting of cocoa finishes it off. Hopefully a welcome addition to the tiramisu repertoire. 

A few tips:

• I find it easiest to make the cake layers the evening before serving, although you could do the morning of if need be. The important thing is that they are completely cold before you layer with mascarpone.
• In these photos I have used 2 x 20cm cake tins, though I have also made it with 2 x 22cm cake tins which works equally well for a slightly flatter cake and a greater cake-cream ratio. Just watch the baking time as they cook especially quickly in the larger tins.
• For the coffee soak: straight up espresso is best for flavour, whether from your own coffee machine or the cafe down the road. Filter coffee and even plunger is a bit too watery. 
• The cake will soak up more espresso-kahlua than you think. I find it works best if the cakes are warm and the coffee is cold, or the coffee is still hot and the cakes are cold – if both are hot it can get too wet, and if both are cold it doesn’t soak in as well. 
• Be really careful when beating the mascarpone cream together, as it can go from perfect to grainy really quickly. I would actually take it to less whipped/slightly runnier than you think as it will even continue to thicken when you spread it on the cake. It just needs to be able to dollop. You can always put the cake in the fridge for a bit before serving too. 
  Let me know if you have any other questions! 

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Pear, Walnut & Dark Chocolate Crumble

A new recipe for you courtesy of work I did with Walnuts Australia towards the end of last year – incidentally perfect for Melbourne’s current ‘polar blast’ iciness and the dark evenings. It’s one of my favourite winter crumbles: thinly sliced pears in brown sugar, vanilla and lemon with a buttery, oat-y walnut studded topping, dark chocolate melted and oozing through the crevices. Previous iterations had involved cooking down the pears in a buttery caramel – which whilst delicious and still a recommended alternative, churns up significant time and dishes when you’re probably at the point of just wanting to get dessert in the oven. 

The walnuts themselves were outstanding: I’d never quite appreciated how good freshly cracked buttery walnuts could be compared to the almost-turning-rancid ones left at the back of the pantry. You can find the rest of the walnut recipes over on their website: a walnut raspberry frangipane slice; my favourite walnut cinnamon scrolls with cream cheese frosting; walnut and maple granola; cheese platter worthy spiced tahini walnuts with comte; and the gooey centred brown butter & dark chocolate walnut cookies. 

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Dark chocolate & honey pear tart: a sweet short pastry, rich dark chocolate filling and golden honey roasted pears. Jump to recipe.

Unfortunately very little has changed since the last recipe here – Melbourne remains in hard lockdown, work remains work, life remains limited to takeaway coffee from down the road and runs within a 5km radius and regular house cooking adventures because these are the small things we have left. (If you need inspiration, might I recommend Ixta Belfridge’s biang biang noodles heavy on the sichuan pepper, Alison Roman’s roast pumpkin with pistachio butter on yogurt, basically made to be mopped up with your fingers, and a morning tea rendition of these blueberry scones with lemon curd and cream). 

While our bubble shrinks, the feeling of helplessness only increased this week as we watched Kabul fall to the Taliban in a massive backwards step for women’s rights and heard the catastrophic predictions of the latest IPCC climate report – only for our government to continue to pretend it doesn’t exist. The onslaught of COVID news overwhelms even this: vaccine targets (will they or won’t they work), case numbers (linked or mysterious), “freedom” protests in Melbourne (the most disgusting and selfish super-spreader events we have seen yet). It’s hard to feel optimistic. I also have no answers to the above besides what we have all heard before and which many people can articulate much better than me. 

For the moment I only have a dark chocolate & honey pear tart. A small tangible joy. Pears sliced and oven roasted until golden and sweet and fragrant with honey and vanilla. Crisp buttery pastry. A rich baked chocolate and almond filling, somewhere between a ganache and a flourless chocolate cake. It’ll do anything from a lockdown house to a fully fledged dinner party. 

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Dark Chocolate Hazelnut Tiramisu Tart: a nutty, buttery pastry, silky baked chocolate ganache and pillowy soft espresso mascarpone cream. Jump to recipe.

Hello! It’s been an unintentional 3 month hiatus and I’m not quite sure how it’s already June. There was a scary amount of work (a recent 140 hour fortnight definitely bordered on illegal), an adventure to Western Australia (beaches and wineries and more beaches) and I finally made it back to Aotearoa aka the homeland for a weekend under the new and already suspended COVID safe travel bubble. Already suspended because we are in lockdown yet again in Melbourne. Round 4.0. Hence the new post I guess: you know I like to cook when I can’t leave the house. 

I don’t want to linger too long on our virus resurgence and lockdown repeat, but suffice to say it feels a little (a lot) like 2020 all over again. The chilly autumn mornings, the weekend queues outside bakeries as everyone attempts to eat their feelings via the best carbohydrates Melbourne has to offer, the classic walk + takeaway coffee catch ups and multiple house dinners because for once we don’t have anywhere else to be. Even Masterchef is back on. The best: a house brunch (french toast using @bakerbleu challah with Ottolenghi’s rum spiked mascarpone creme and caramelised bananas, if you must know. It was outrageously good). The worst: the return of live streams of case numbers and daily anxiety inducing updates. Only this year there’s an extra layer of disappointment and fatigue that even 2020 couldn’t manage. We were just piecing ourselves back into some semblance of normality, you know? It’s like we almost passed go but went directly to jail. 

What you CAN have in lockdown (or not in lockdown, you lucky things) is this dark chocolate hazelnut tiramisu tart. I’ve been obsessed – actually, it’s probably fair to say that Melbourne has been obsessed – by tiramisu lately. We had the choc-a-misu version at Embla, a scoop dumped unceremoniously on a plate layered with rich dark chocolate cake. The more subtle individual (or for two, if you feel like sharing) version by Capitano with finely chopped roasted hazelnuts throughout. The traditional extra-large ladyfinger and cream-laden cube at Gilson, this time best shared – we almost ordered two and our waitress looked at us like we might have three heads. A shout out to possibly my favourite of them all at Lilian back in Auckland. 

This version is a whole lot less like a traditional tiramisu and a whole lot more like a chocolate tart, but the coffee mascarpone cream brings it all together so we’ll call it tiramisu anyway. It’s inspired by a tart at Coffee Pen in Auckland (which you should 100% go to if you’re not also barred from entry to the country) that I’ve seen floating on the internet but have never actually tasted. This is what I think it might taste like. A dark chocolate roasted hazelnut crust, which is a little on the crumbly side thanks to the hazelnuts but just patch it back up in the tin and no one will know the difference; a silky smooth baked ganache filling that you whisk together and bake for 15 minutes until it’s set with a tiny jiggle; and finally a creamy espresso-heavy mascarpone – swirl it with the back of a spoon and dust it all with cocoa. Call yourself Nigella and eat the remnants for breakfast the next day. You deserve it, lockdown or not. 

It’s also a perfect make ahead dinner party dessert: do the crust the day before, bake the chocolate layer at some point in the day and just make sure to do the mascarpone within a couple of hours of when you plan to serve. 

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Apricot, Raspberry & Pistachio Galette – crisp, buttery pastry and a nutty pistachio base topped with bubbling tender fruit. Jump to recipe.

Normally. In any other year, I mean. Pre-quarantine and border restrictions? That normal. I would be currently home enjoying the New Zealand summer, full of family road trips and pohutakawa and corn and peach salads and barbecues and Christmas tree remnants and everything that a summer at home entails. BUT this is 2021 and we are almost (this is depressing) at our first COVID anniversary – and I remind myself that I can still do many of the above activities within the confines of state borders, and feel very grateful to be protected from the worst that people all over the world are experiencing (particularly health care workers in countries being hammered by this virus and everyone still living under strict lockdowns). I feel like many of us normally start a new year with a burst of enthusiasm and renewed motivation, brimming with yet-to-be-broken resolutions and a blank diary (that fresh book smell), the year already earmarked with weekends away or that holiday you’re saving for. Instead it feels anti-climactic, like the events of 2020 haven’t been neatly left behind like we naively hoped, and are instead dragging on like the prolonged live streamed daily press conference phenomenon. Repetitive. 

Although I’m not a resolution person normally, I’m hoping a couple of goals will make it feel slightly more new-year-ish, even if they don’t quite work out (isn’t that the point of a good new year’s resolution anyway?). If I have one in relation to this blog it is to be a bit more regular with new recipes over here (monthly!?!), and to make better use of the stack of cookbooks sitting proudly on our new bookshelf. Aside from a few Alison Roman / Ottolenghi dinner party adventures of 2020 and a foray into sourdough, it was also a year of too much food repetition. There are only so many zucchini and goats cheese frittatas I can make (actually quite a few, considering it was a near weekly occurrence). Ottolenghi’s Flavour and Hetty Mckinnon’s To Asia with Love and Meera Sodha’s East deserve to be more than living room eye candy. 

The latest delivery from Prahran Market of rose harissa and preserved lemons and new tahini and huge bunches of herbs and bundles of stone fruit did help the January creativity – we had a Israeli style salad of peaches and tomatoes on a bed of creamy hummus (recipe will follow on instagram soon) and Julia Ostro’s roast and marinated zucchini on burrata with mint and toasted walnuts, pooled in olive oil. Plums paired with miso and hazelnuts in a buttery crumble (again, keep an eye out next week); tomatoes were slow roasted with harissa and tumbled through fresh pasta (courtesy of The Fresh Pasta Shop, not homemade – shortcuts are smart sometimes) with mountains of grated pecorino and basil and a raw zucchini pinenut salad; and the rest of those apricots ended up right here. 

Galettes are a wherever whenever summer dessert – I’ve rolled out pastry with a wine bottle and used the most dilapidated ovens and battered berries and even if it’s messy, it’s a delicious beautiful mess of crisp buttery pastry and bubbling fruit and melting dollops of ice cream. No soggy pie bottoms in sight. This version has a ground pistachio base which muddles with the overlying apricots and their juice into an almost frangipane like layer atop the pastry. A little bit of cardamom (I know I’m obsessed) and lemon completes it. Feel free to ad lib with whatever over-ripe fruit you have on hand.

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