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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Lemon, Olive Oil and Blackberry Loaf Cake with Elderflower – a classic light lemon cake studded with fresh blackberries and scented with fruity olive oil and a spring time elderflower glaze.  Jump to Recipe 

A preface: you may have noticed (if you aren’t running an ad-blocker already) that there are now advertisements on this site. I’m not entirely sure how I feel about them – to sum it up, I am a student with minimal income, and the costs of running The Brick Kitchen add up – ingredients, photography equipment, website hosting and more. Having ads is a way to generate passive income to help my blog to pay for itself. However, I am acutely aware that we are all constantly bombarded with targeted advertising, and it does feel uncomfortable to let that invade my tiny corner of the internet. Am I selling out? I don’t know. At this point it is a work in progress and any and all opinions are welcome. If you do feel like they ruin your experience or are particularly obtrusive, please do let me know. 

Currently: a few thousand metres in the air, somewhere between London and Barcelona. Mood: bittersweet (is that a mood?). Term time in Oxford is officially over – though I still have work to do, the town has emptied out (replaced quickly by summer tourist groups) and friends have departed for internships and holidays. It’s gone miles too fast, put it that way. Looking the other direction, the next few weeks have been obsessively google mapped out in pastries, coffees, tapas and spaghetti – Barcelona then Italy. Committed enough that yesterday I suffered the slight humiliation of attempting phone reservations in Rome with minimal, extremely mangled Italian (they put someone who spoke English on the phone very, very quickly). All the action will be over on my instagram stories if you want to follow along (i.e. watch me eat my weight in pizza and pinxtos with the odd side of the Colosseum or Park Guell). And if anyone has any must-see/do/eat tips for Barcelona, Florence, Rome, Cinque Terre or Venice, please send them through!

This lemon, olive oil and blackberry loaf cake with elderflower kind of sums up the last few weeks in Oxford. Filled with lazy picnics in Port Meadow – the kind where hot afternoons slide into evening sunsets over the river, and hours go by while flies circulate overhead and pots of hummus, carrots and beers (great combo I know) litter the prickly grass. Elderflower, new to me but ubiquitous over here, lines the riverbanks – and how could I not combine it with lemon after Claire Ptak’s triumph of a royal wedding cake?! Glorious summer berries have also hit the markets and I only wish I had the time to do them more justice than demolish them fresh from the carton. In a small shared kitchen, anything complex is out of the question. 

It’s a simple loaf based on a classic lemon yogurt cake I’ve been making since I can remember, scrawled out on an oil stained recipe card. It taught me to butter and flour a ring tin and how to test a cake for done-ness, and was regularly made for afternoon teas, dusted with icing sugar. I can’t find the exact origins but it seems fairly common in New Zealand especially, differing slightly to a similar Ina Garten recipe. Here I’ve given it a 2018 English summer update: swapping the vegetable oil for fragrant extra-virgin olive oil, studding it with ripe blackberries and adding a fragrant drippy elderflower glaze.  It’s a hard cake to get wrong, kept moist by the yogurt and oil, and can be made from start to finish in a food processor. The photographs aren’t my usual, but they’re all I’ve got – I took them in a rush on the pavement outside the kitchen before packing it up into my bike basket and cycling down to the lawns for a picnic. 

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Tahini, walnut & dark chocolate banana bread – a variation utilising honey, olive oil, spelt flour and tahini for a nutty, wholesome morning tea treat that doesn’t lack flavour!  Jump to Recipe

Happy New Year! 

I hope you all had holidays filled with the those three big Fs – friends, family and food. Over here it’s been a blur of lazy mornings (that ultimate treat of not waking to an alarm) blending into slow summer days. The kind where hours slip gently past until 5pm hits and all you’ve done is turn pages of a book, skin still sticky with residual salt from a beach cool-off, and even contemplating dinner feels a bit much. Lazy meals of bright summer corn, bursting cherry tomatoes and smoky grilled zucchini, tossed through with the garden’s abundance of basil. Olive oil, lemon, flaky sea salt, pepper. Fishing expeditions courtesy of my younger brothers have supplied fresh fillets of terikihi, snapper and speared kingfish – hours-old fish is a whole different ball game to the dull, days (week?) old supermarket stuff.

I tried my hand at wood-fired pizza, inspired by the pizza oven at the rental bach. A few different dough recipes – Jim Lahey, Jamie Oliver, Peter Reinhart.  Still can’t pick a favourite. Toppings? Pesto, hot smoked salmon, capers, red onion, cherry tomatoes, basil. Fresh tomato pizza sauce, anchovies, chorizo, mozzarella, basil. And with the last few pizza bases, a finale of melty, gooey nutella calzone, dusted with icing sugar and laden with a generous scoop of vanilla ice cream.

There were endless uses for stone fruit – apricots combined with nutty pistachio frangipane and buttery shortbread, nectarines folded into flaky scones, peaches collapsing and tender under the weight of an oat crumble topping. Cherries all alone, because I can’t walk past the bowl without grabbing a fistful (seriously, zero self control).

A fair bit of morning running to enable all this, but when you’ve got the beauty of the New Zealand coastline at your doorstep, it’s not difficult. Isolated beaches are dotted only with jellyfish and a few surfers, the roar of the waves continues uninterrupted by cars, and rocky headland tracks gift soaring views over the horizon – a just reward for climbing all those stairs.

More books than I’ve read the entire rest of the year combined – would recommend Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma (a vaguely frightening exposé on our food chain), Lilac Girls (think All the Light We Cannot See, but based on true events), Blood, Bones & Butter (Gabrielle Hamilton’s life journey traced through food), Force of Nature (slightly Girl on A Train-esque) and Orphan X (reminds me of Jack Reacher). I was given Salt Fat Acid Heat and am itching to get stuck into that, and am currently reading SweetBitter (so far enamoured).

So though I haven’t been short on time, I’ve been a bit absent from instagram and from this blog of late. But we’re back now, refreshed and refueled to hit 2018 running!

This tahini, walnut and dark chocolate banana bread wasn’t originally intended to be a blog post, but I got so many recipe requests after showing it off on instagram that I thought you all might like to try it too. Although I hate the word diet, am whole-heartedly against cutting out any foods (or food groups), and looove baking with butter and sugar (friends, not foes!), I have enjoyed experimenting with using more olive oil, honey and alternative grains in some of my baking – as much for the variants of flavour as for any nutritional benefit. The olive oil, tahini, honey and spelt flour here, combined with nutty walnuts, banana and a bit of dark chocolate (who could resist?!), make this a lovely morning tea banana loaf to have with your morning cuppa. Don’t worry, it doesn’t sacrifice even a little flavour or texture. I know I called it a bread, but let’s be real – it’s definitely cake.

It’s a very flexible recipe – feel free to change up the sweeteners and the flour depending on what you have available, or skip the dark chocolate if that’s not your thing. The tahini isn’t dominant at all – it simply adds a slight nutty, sesame backdrop. Enjoy!

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