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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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!

When you’re exhausted it’s hard to have the emotional capacity or time to be creative, so baking went mostly by the wayside. I still cooked enough to feed myself – salmon dill and lemon risoni salads (a riff on this recipe) into too many tupperware containers, zucchini and melty goats cheese frittatas after work, eggplant tomato spaghetti dolloped with ricotta and showered in parmesan for pre-exam comfort. And it was friends who got me through it more than anything else: Lilli with home cooked Ottolenghi on the days I arrived home late and frazzled; Chloe for shared commiserations and study sessions over tubs of Luther’s scoops croissant and honey ice cream; Marnie for long run debriefs followed by butter drenched fruit toast (Wildlife is the winner); Anna and Eleanor with the frequent work escape long blacks; the best study group friends for pizza and wines and sharing the load – to name only a few. Mum and Dad always on the other end of the phone to listen.  

My window for complaints though is rapidly closing. I am typing this from a cafe in Paris (!), eating a slice of cherry studded clafoutis (from Gramme, would highly recommend), golden topped and densely creamy (and now at the top of my list to recreate next summer). I was lucky to get my mandatory 5 week block of annual leave now, after exams, so have joined the mass exodus of Australians and New Zealanders to sunnier climates. You can follow along over here for more of the holiday photographs if you like. 

In the meantime, this lemon, passionfruit and olive oil cake is pure sunshine in cake form. It’s zesty and fragrant, light and fluffy but still stays moist for days with both the yogurt and oil. It’s based on a cake we made when I was growing up frequently – the easiest one bowl people-pleasing cake in the repertoire with a side of nostalgia. The bundt tin allows a large capacity and means it cooks very evenly (it’s a versatile tin and makes the easiest afternoon tea cakes – would recommend if you don’t have one). Just make sure to grease your tin well and turn the cake out after about 5-10 minutes cooling time to ensure no sticking. 

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Hello again! I can’t quite believe it’s already March and this is my first post of 2020. Work as a junior doctor started in January and it’s been a whirlwind learning curve. As much as medical school prepares you (largely to know when to ask for help), there are huge gaps which can only be picked up on the run – or three coffees deep on a Saturday evening when your pager continues to buzz.

Despite the increase in responsibility and the inability to skive off at 2pm, it’s 1000x better than being a student. The stress-induced exhaustion of the first week or two has faded – it’s incredible how an increase in workload becomes the new normal. My job isn’t exactly House of God (though elements of it continue to ring true – a good buff or turf absolutely exists), and some days feels more like administration with endless faxes, phone calls and electronic discharge summaries (can report that typing speed has also improved), but being part of a team and a useful cog in the wheel is hugely satisfying.

And this recipe! A nectarine, blueberry and walnut cake with passionfruit cream cheese frosting. It’s a favourite combination of fresh summer fruit and a nutty, moist cake – this time helped along by toasted walnuts and juicy nectarines. The cake itself isn’t too sweet, relying on pockets of stone fruit and a tangy passionfruit note to the frosting. I brought it into work the other day and it quickly disappeared – would love to hear what you think too.

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Pear, ginger and hazelnut cake with maple cream cheese frosting. Jump to Recipe

I recently realised that although there are plenty of stacked up celebration cakes around here (this lemon, almond & raspberry cake, this chocolate hazelnut cake and this rhubarb, caramel & pistachio cake are a few of your favourites), there are fewer options for those erring on the side of simplicity. As much as I love sky high cakes as an opportunity to pull out the stops, the majority of the time a single layer is what I choose. Maybe frosted, maybe dusted with icing sugar – the kind of cake you make on a slow Saturday morning, or for when friends are stopping by. To take to work, to use up those pears ripening on the counter, or just because you feel like it. This is one of those cakes: a pear, ginger & hazelnut cake with maple frosting. I couldn’t help myself with the embellishments – salted caramel drizzle, toasted hazelnuts and dried pear – but you could equally give it a simple dusting of icing sugar and call it a day.

It’s a cake that required more than a few tests (and significant oven frustration) to reach what I envisaged – dark, caramelised and richly spiced with fresh ginger and cardamom. Toasted hazelnuts are ground to a slightly chunky meal, and, along with the olive oil, keep it moist, nutty and give texture. Full of fresh pear chunks, it’s got satisfying height. It’s also not a super sweet cake, but that’s balanced by the tangy maple cream cheese frosting. Dark brown sugar is crucial and definitely worth seeking out (it’s stocked in most supermarkets). Would love to hear what you think!

Baker’s notes

• Seek out dark brown sugar if you can – it’s crucial to the dark, caramelised interior.
• To decorate, I used dried pear, chopped hazelnuts and a half batch of the salted caramel recipe here. Leftover caramel freezes well for future cakes or desserts. Dried pear can be found at specialty bulk food stores in Australia.

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I really didn’t mean to let such a gap open up between posts – it’s been almost three months since my last recipe over here, I’m sorry. It felt like the longer it got, the more inertia there was to overcome to write something up here again. And it’s been busy. Ugh. The worst, most boring excuse in the world, I know, especially when evenings spent sleepily watching Killing Eve and Game of Thrones took priority. Six weeks in London slid past far too fast – crammed around weekdays of hospital placement were dinners out blowing any scrap of a budget I had, bargain show tickets (Nigel Slater’s Toast, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime and Come From Away), Sundays spent perusing various markets and afternoons spent traversing London – walking through Kensington, Notting Hill, Marylebone, up through Hackney and the canals, round my local Peckham and Dulwich. Plus fleeting trips to Dublin and Amsterdam, the latter of which I published a travel guide on here.

I arrived back in Melbourne with a thump, straight into my next rotation, intensive care. Busy and confronting and fascinating and difficult all at once. It was (is) job application season too for next year, with CVs and cover letters to be written, documents compiled and the growing sense of incredulity that my six years as a student are all but over. And to bring you completely up to speed, I’m now spending a couple of weeks back home in New Zealand on my mid-year break. Recharging amongst lots of recipe developing (or just making an utter mess of the kitchen).

That brings me right round to this cake. It’s a whole orange, dark chocolate & almond cake, rich, fudgey and not too sweet. The chocolate is perfumed with oranges, boiled whole for almost an hour until your kitchen smells like a warm citrus orchard (or what I imagine that to be). They are then combined with olive oil and blitzed in the Vitamix jug (or alternative blender or food processor) until silky smooth. Add the eggs and dry ingredients and briefly blend again, as your sunny yellow blend turns a deep chocolate brown. Meanwhile, the base of your cake tin is lined with honey-coated flaked almonds, sweet and nutty, so when the cake is finished cooking and is flipped, the ombre almonds end up on top. It’s impressive but easy, gluten and dairy-free for anyone with intolerances, and only gets better over a few days. The high powered Vitamix blender (I have the Ascent) makes it incredibly easy with minimal dishes, and also means there is no residual grittiness of orange peel that I have previously experienced with other blenders – it blends it absolutely smooth in seconds.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy this cake and I promise I’ll be back here sooner than three months time! If there’s anything in particular you’d like to see more (or less) of here please let me know.

This post is sponsored by Vitamix. I received compensation, but as always, all opinions and content are my own. Thank you so much for supporting the companies that support The Brick Kitchen.

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