The Brick Kitchen

Mango and Corn Slaw with Peanut Tofu

February 23, 2025

Sweetcorn and Mango Slaw -the Brick Kitchen

Mango and corn slaw with peanut tofu – jump to recipe.

I’m often asked by friends what recipes I use for work lunch meals, and I have to admit I rarely prep food purely for lunch – it’s usually a dinner with excess leftovers. This is a prime example of that over summer. It may seem like a lot of chopping, but with a mandoline you can slice everything incredibly finely in 15 minutes tops (a kitchen must – we have this one which is great and absolutely not sponsored). The herbs are also key. Use as much as you like of coriander, Thai basil and either (or both!) regular mint or Vietnamese mint, depending on what’s available. The mango and corn slaw keeps well for around 3 days in the fridge, and the peanut tofu makes enough for 4-5 total serves. You can take it to work with extra avocado and Japanese mayo to make it fancy, and rice depending on hunger levels.

A few more ideas for summery leftover dinner-to-work lunches:

Make a Greek salad with chopped cos, cherry tomatoes, cucumber, feta, black olives and add tuna and/or chickpeas. Lots of cracked black pepper and salt. Dress with lemon juice and olive oil.
This pea, spinach and lemon risoni salad – add smoked salmon, use whatever green vegetables you have.
Ottolenghi’s corn, pumpkin and feta salad with hummus
Meera Sodha’s eggplant, green bean and thai basil stir fry
Zucchini soba noodles with peanut tofu
Zucchini ginger udon noodl es
Spring lemon, white bean, green beans and avocado salad

And when there are no leftovers? I keep a stash of good toast in the freezer to pull out to make avocado toast at work (try adding feta or smoked salmon to be extra luxe). A lunch worth looking forward to is important, in my opinion.

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Tiramisu Cake

December 21, 2024

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!

Tiramisu Cake

Author: Claudia Brick

Ingredients

200 g unsalted butter
200 g caster sugar
4 eggs at room temperature
1 teaspoon vanilla paste/essence
120 g almond meal/ground almonds
150 g plain flour
2 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
2/3 cup greek yogurt (full fat)
2 ½ tablespoons instant coffee granules, dissolved in 1 tablespoon boiling water
120 g dark chocolate finely chopped
4 shots espresso coffee (~1/2 cup)
3 tablespoons kahlua or similar coffee liquor

Mascarpone frosting

250 g mascarpone
250 g whipping cream
1/4 cup caster sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla essence/paste
1 tablespoon cocoa to dust

Instructions

Preheat the oven to 170°C. Grease and line 2 x 20cm cake tins with baking paper. You can also use 22cm cake tins for a flatter cake, they will just take less time to bake.
In the bowl of a stand mixer, cream the butter, caster sugar and vanilla until light and creamy, about 5 minutes.
Add eggs, one at a time, mixing after each addition to fully combine.
In a small bowl, dissolve the instant coffee in 1 tablespoon boiling water then stir in the yogurt. Add this to the batter and mix to fully combine.
In a separate bowl, whisk together the ground almonds, flour, baking powder and salt.
Fold this gently into the batter to just combine. Fold in the finely chopped dark chocolate.
Divide evenly between the cake tins (I alternate big scoops using a cup measure into each one).
Bake for 20-25 minutes until the top just bounces back to touch in the centre and a skewer inserted has a few crumbs- don’t overbake, they will continue to cook as they cool.
Leave to mostly cool then remove from the tins.
Mix together the espresso coffee and kahlua, then brush this over the cakes. They will soak up more liquid 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.
Place in the fridge for 10 minutes or so before frosting them if it's a hot day.
Assemble just prior to serving:
Beat together the mascarpone, cream, sugar and vanilla until just thick enough to dollop – be careful here as it’s a really fine line and if overbeaten the cream will be grainy and difficult to salvage. If this does happen, try adding more liquid whipping cream and stirring very gently until smooth.
Place one cake on your serving plate. Dollop with half the mascarpone cream and spread to the edges with an offset spatula or the back of a spoon. Carefully top with the second cake, and finish with the remaining cream. Use a sieve to dust with cocoa just before serving.
Leftovers are best kept in the fridge in an airtight container.

Plum, orange and ricotta cake

May 19, 2024

Plum Ricotta Orange Cake -the Brick Kitchen

Plum, orange and ricotta cake with almonds: jump to recipe here.

I would start with “finally, another recipe” but realistically long silences here have become the norm. My aspiration of regular weeknight recipes has remained aspirational – work-life balance is a work in progress. A long term goal, let’s say. This could quickly get personal but I think on this Sunday morning when my to-do list remains 20 points long we will stick to the recipe: a late summer plum, orange and ricotta cake. It is the sort of cake you put together in the morning when you realise people are popping over in a couple of hours, or need a vehicle for the not-quite-perfect stonefruit on the bench. Moist and bordering on cheesecake-like in the centre, it lasts well into the next day (although it may disappear before then).

It’s flexible – try nectarines or apricots, roast rhubarb in spring or maple poached pear in winter (just pre-bake hard fruit first). Don’t skip the flaked almonds and caster sugar on top if you can help it – it adds a sweet crust-like finish. Most importantly, don’t over bake it. This cake is much better slightly under done when the centre wobble is just disappearing: don’t be scared to remove it from the oven when a skewer inserted into the centre is still coated in crumbs. It will continue to cook and set as it cools, and is equally lovely served warm if your guests have already arrived.

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Summer corn, nectarine & haloumi salad

January 6, 2024

Corn Nectarine Haloumi Salad - The Brick Kitchen

Summer corn, nectarine and haloumi salad with fried zucchini, herbs and za-tar: jump to recipe here.

A record low single recipe here in 2023 – at least the bar for improvement is low. It’s not that I didn’t cook, but the cycle of study, exams and work meant time and motivation for recipe development and photos was missing. The rise of Instagram reels and Tiktok has resulted in a decline in traditional food blogging as it was when I started: many of my favourite bloggers have stopped all together, or switched medium to cookbooks, videos or pure social media content.

I’m not quite ready to give it up yet. Food remains both a huge way to show love (dinner parties and birthday cakes are IN for 2024) and a creative outlet, and combining those here in this format of words + photo + recipe is the only way I can continue to squeeze it into life in a more permanent way than disappearing moments within a deep phone scroll. Maybe an optimistic statement – only time will tell whether this holds me slightly more accountable!

This is the first of what will (hopefully) be a series of my favourite meals for weeknights or work lunches or dinner parties – mostly, for food with friends. It’s a summer corn, nectarine and haloumi salad, a favourite in the ‘fruit in salad’ category. The most important thing is perfectly ripe, juicy and sweet but not bruised or floury stone fruit. Nectarines or peaches ideally. Gooey haloumi fried at the last minute, smoky charred corn, fried zucchini for heft, lots of herbs and a lemon-y olive dressing make it a salad that can do it all: barbecue, pot luck, work lunch or quick dinner. Variants have been on repeat around here- use peaches and tomatoes if that’s what you’ve got, swap the haloumi for feta or a ball of burrata, use basil and shaved parmesan and add walnuts or pinenuts for a more Italian take.

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Passionfruit, lemon and olive oil cake

July 1, 2023

Passionfruit lemon olive oil cake - The Brick Kitchen

Passionfruit, lemon and olive oil cake, otherwise known as sunshine in cake form. Jump to recipe here.

IIt’s difficult to believe it has been a year since my last post here – thank you to the friends who reminded me that the pear chocolate crumble had sat at the top of the homepage for too long. My only excuse is study. The physician exams I sat this year were undeniably harder than anticipated or could imagine. Everyone told us to expect the most challenging period of medical training we may ever face, but you still had to dive into it with the assumption that you’d be fine – or it would be too daunting to ever start. It already feels like there is very little choice in the matter: you’ve come this far, right? You got into medical school, you got through your university exams, you started working (which got easier and more satisfying), you found an area you loved with a future you could imagine, and this was just the mandatory next step on the road there. Unsurprisingly, studying full time on top of work drained a lot of the fun out of it. We are still sitting in the unfortunate anxious period of not having exam results yet, which is a black hole where every time you accidentally relive exam day you deduct another 10% from your imaginary mark. Best avoided if possible. Maybe I’ll look back at this with rosier tinted lenses on the other side!

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Pear, walnut & dark chocolate crumble

June 13, 2022

Pear, Dark Chocolate & Walnut Crumble - The Brick Kitchen

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.

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White chocolate, rhubarb and raspberry cake

May 2, 2022

White chocolate, rhubarb and raspberry cake with almonds, a hint of orange and topped with cream cheese frosting. Jump to recipe.

Apparently you can expect recipes to be a rarity from me this year – cake has slid further down the priority list than I would like. It seems like a fact of life that every year gets busier (with a brief pause there with lockdown baking time), but the addition of exam study and attempts at research on top of work has really tipped it over. I’ve always wished I was one of those people who could be incredibly productive until the small hours of the morning and survive on less sleep than the rest, but sadly sometimes fatigue means only a meaningless phone scroll (maybe an episode of euphoria) and bed is possible.

I am still eating (and therefore cooking) so maybe badly lit iphone photos of a thrown together risoni salad is all I can offer – but maybe that’s all you are out there making too? The reintroduction of social lives and the end of WFH really spelled the end for sourdough projects and time to page through cookbooks.

In better news, the New Zealand borders finally opened and I managed to escape back for a few weeks of annual leave. This white chocolate, rhubarb and raspberry cake was a product of Mum’s successful rhubarb plants (we also had rhubarb and raspberry tart for those with similar crops). It’s a variation on a theme – my favourite cakes are buttery, moist and rich, often nut based (almonds, pistachio, coconut or walnuts) and full of seasonal fruit, whether that’s apricots, plums or berries. It’s one layer (cleaning up 2 cake tins is just too much) and hastily dressed with a swoop of citrus-y cream cheese frosting. This one is studded with chopped white chocolate which partially melds with the batter – normally I find white chocolate too sickly (dark all the way) but it stands up to the sharp rhubarb and raspberries here perfectly.

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Baked spinach and ricotta gnudi in roast tomato eggplant sauce

March 7, 2022

Baked spinach and ricotta gnudi - The Brick Kitchen

Baked spinach and ricotta gnudi in roast tomato eggplant sauce. Jump to recipe.

Gnudi: Tuscan dumplings, akin to extra large ricotta gnocchi without the shaping and boiling steps. It often takes people aback when you say it, like they might have just heard you suggest nudes of some variety (gnudi does literally mean naked in Italian). The name apparently comes from the fact that they are similar to ravioli filling, only disrobed without their surrounding pasta. The term gnudi is more commonly used in areas near Florence, whereas they are also known as malfatti (meaning badly made) in Siena. This version were born of a day during COVID isolation when a friend dropped off a care package including ricotta, cherry tomatoes and a sourdough baguette (a friend that knew me well, clearly). True comfort food in a bubbling dish, and much easier than either ravioli or gnocchi – less potential for mishap.

As a sidenote, friends dropping off coffee and treats really got us through that home isolation period and I would highly recommend it to anyone else (especially New Zealanders right now who are in the midst of a COVID outbreak). Who knew how exciting a door knock would become when you weren’t allowed to leave the house – our days were bookmarked by what might come through it.

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