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.

The post Roast Plum & Miso Semifreddo appeared first on The Brick Kitchen.

It’s my final recipe and blog post for 2018. How did that sneak up on us so fast? I’m going to keep this short and sweet because I (and most likely you too) am a little consumed by the holiday season madness. Reading a lengthy blog post is probably not top of your priority list. What might be higher up is planning a Christmas menu – though I’m not huge on tinsel, perfectly laid tables and piles of presents, I do love the number of big group dinner parties and gatherings that Christmas brings. For us they are relaxed affairs: summer barbecues with a few big salads – think Ottolenghi’s Simple vegetable dishes, fresh tomatoes and peaches, broccoli tabouli, lots of hummus and fresh sourdough bread. There’s no pressure on timing with make-ahead, room-temperature salads, and we serve up whenever whatever’s on the barbecue is done. However, a centrepiece dessert is always a must for me – again, something that can be made ahead is best. Apart from this strawberry tart, I’d also recommend:

– Chocolate Cherry Tart with Pomegranate and Torched Meringue
– Rhubarb, Raspberry and Dark Chocolate Bread & Butter Pudding Cake with custard
– Roast peach & honeycomb slab pavlova (you could also swap the peaches out for roasted strawberries if it’s more seasonal)
– Flourless Chocolate & Hazelnut layer cake
– No churn passionfruit, raspberry & pavlova ice cream
– And if you’re in the Northern Hemisphere – this carrot, ginger and white chocolate tart with whisky ice cream, and these sticky fig & ginger puddings with caramel sauce.

See you in 2019 for lots more recipes: both tried and tested here on the blog, and quick inspiration over on instagram, and more travel guides and where to eat around the world (yes, more travel is in sight). Do let me knw if there is anything in particular you would like to see more (or less) of – I’d love to hear from you.

Onto the recipe: it’s a festive, summery strawberry, pomegranate and pistachio tart. I’ve taken the classic strawberries and cream combination and served it up less English summer and more Ottolenghi-fied 2018. It’s my go-to shortcrust butter pastry, whizzed up in a food processor, topped with a rich, nutty pistachio frangipane studded with raspberries and pomegranate arils. Leave that to cool, and then dollop on a tangy, fragrant mascarpone cream tinged with pomegranate molasses and sumac. Then comes the impressive (or perfectionist) factor: strawberries carefully sliced up (middle pieces only for the prettiest result) and lined up in concentric circles over the cream.

Cook’s Notes:
It’s definitely at it’s best right after you layer up the strawberries (do this right before serving, it only takes 5 minutes). However, you can definitely make the tart right up until the strawberries and cream step the day before for ease on the day – just store in an airtight container in a cool place overnight. Another option is to make the pastry the day before, and then bake the pistachio frangipane the morning of – whatever fits into your entertaining schedule best.

The post Strawberry, Pomegranate and Pistachio Tart appeared first on The Brick Kitchen.

Three layers of my go-to dark, dense and rich chocolate cake sandwiched by balsamic cherry compote and an intense chocolate frosting.  Jump to Recipe 

Last week marked three years of The Brick Kitchen. Three years! Sure doesn’t feel like it. It started as a small thing and graduated into a medium hobby and now, at least to me, it feels like a decent piece of my life. And it was only on the back of a minor disappointment that it even occurred at all. I had just missed out on a position at the university college I stayed at, and whinged to a friend that next year I would be SO BORED with just lectures to fill my time. “You should start a food blog!” was the response. So that was that. Said friend later became one of my housemates in Melbourne, so it at least procured her a steady supply of baking!

It’s taught me more that I could have conceived at that stage, and not just from the writing/photography/website skillset. Here are four points that come to mind:

1. Don’t sweat the small stuff. Sometimes people won’t like what you do (ignore them), sometimes recipes refuse to work out, sometimes a photoshoot turns to crap, sometimes you get sick at the worst moment, sometimes (most of the time) you simply overshoot and don’t find enough hours in the day to get through that to-do list. It’s fine. Keep those high expectations but accept that not everything is always going to go your way. Breathe. Get some sleep. Tomorrow is always a new day!

2. It’s SO HARD not to compare yourself to everyone else (’s instagram feeds). Social media has made the world a much smaller place – it’s built wonderful communities, but also puts us into other people’s pockets every time we switch on a device (the very polished, pretty, most perfect pockets of those lives, I should add). With that in your face, it’s near impossible not to wish you could do X like that or that you aren’t as good at X as someone else [insert whatever you look at: photograph, organise, design, travel, LIVE, be as thin/pretty/friendly/funny as…]. Just because their life looks like the pages of a magazine doesn’t mean it is, or that it’s any more fulfilling than yours. I’m trying to switch off more – I’m starting to find that scrolling through what should be inspiration too often means it ceases to be inspiration, and becomes a fairly negative distraction. 

3. Goals are not the be all and end all. Can I admit I still have no idea what I want to do? It’s a bit scary. I have no concept of the finish line right now. But as long as you find things you enjoy, put in the mileage for things that seem worth it, persist and improve – I’m sure you don’t need a spreadsheet mapping out quarterly goals for your 10 year life plan (if that’s your thing, go for it – it just isn’t mine yet!).

4. A few keys to energy balance while creating and loving food constantly (this remains a work in progress): surrounding yourself with family and friends who will help you consume it, moving your body every day, choosing your sweets wisely, baking cakes for occasions (my friends/family are very used to that slice that has already been cut and photographed!). I love butter and sugar, but when I eat them it has to be worth it – e.g. an Alison Roman salted butter chocolate chunk shortbread cookie vs a random store bought biscuit in the cupboard. Maybe some would say I’m a  food snob, but I’ll own that if it means I can make my cake and eat it too. Don’t stress about it or let it consume you. It comes back to Michael Pollan’s infamous food rules – eat food. not too much. mostly plants. 

Most of all, thank you for being here along for the ride!  Let me introduce you to this celebratory chocolate, coconut & cherry layer cake. It’s a solid 10, ok? Three layers of my GO-TO chocolate cake – dark, dense and rich but also very easy. The secret is lots of dutch process cocoa, tangy buttermilk, oil instead of butter and espresso to amp up that chocolate flavour. It’s sandwiched by Thalia Ho’s chocolate frosting – the best I’ve ever tried. No sickly sweet buttercream around here! And the best bit? A sticky, syrupy balsamic cherry compote infusing every bite. Enjoy!

Claudia x

• Most popular posts: Roasted Eggplant Shakshuka and Lemon, Almond & Raspberry Layer Cake
• 2 year post: Peach & Blackberry Pie with Olive Oil Gelato
• 1 year post: Momofuku German Chocolate Espresso Cake
• First post: Plum, Coconut & Lemon Syrup Cake

The post Chocolate Cherry & Coconut Layer Cake appeared first on The Brick Kitchen.

Chocolate, cherry & pomegranate torched meringue tart: an impressive festive dessert that can easily be made ahead. Jump to Recipe  

I’m writing from my usual December spot – roadside in a camping chair, under a huge sun umbrella, next to a fence lined with Christmas trees. As always, kitted out with gardening gloves, lots of red & green buckets and a portable eftpos machine, and set up for the day with soda water, a few good books and a functioning internet extender (anyone who did this job pre-wifi – hats off to you). I’m thinking we should invest in some extra tinsel to drape around the trees and signage for extra festivity points – try and out-Christmas the competition down the road. Seriously, the market is saturated around here.

We order the trees the evening before for the following day, making an educated guess on numbers, and they’re best sold fresh: each day that passes = a slightly droopier, drier looking tree. The newspaper informed us yesterday that a good dose of hairspray is the best way to keep them looking green (beats me – apparently it closes the pores on the pine needles to reduce moisture loss), but we stick with basic buckets of water.  The people are the most interesting part of the job – whether it’s the family with the kids doing the choosing (with parents desperately trying to steer them towards the prettier trees), the harried person who’ll go with whatever you’ve got left (the best) or the picky, grumbling couple who examine every inch of each tree for flaws (the worst – nature isn’t perfect, guys!).

Sitting outside all day does leave ample time for Christmas menu planning, however. And when the opportunity arose to collaborate with Westgold butter, I had the perfect idea in mind for your family do. Westgold is a local New Zealand company making premium, award-winning butter from pasture fed cows with environmentally sustainable practices – and when making pastry, you really do notice the difference. With this recipe, all celebratory boxes are ticked: something involving chocolate, because hello, you just can’t go wrong; something make-ahead, because nobody wants to be in the kitchen more than absolutely necessary on the day; something involving the very festive, seasonal juicy red cherries and jewel-like pomegranates hitting the shelves; and something with a bit of holiday table wow-factor, thanks to a swirled burnished layer of torched meringue. And so, this chocolate, cherry & pomegranate tart with torched meringue was born.

It layers a flaky, buttery cream cheese short pastry with a decadent, intensely dark chocolate filling,  not unlike a cross between fudgy brownie and a silky chocolate pot-de-creme. It’s studded with ripe cherries, and briefly baked just until set, so when it cools you still get the rich gooey-ness in the middle. Just before serving, pile it high with italian meringue, and for extra ooh’s and ahh’s, blow torch it in front of your guests. They’ll think you’re a culinary genius.

Timeline for a festive do: 

• 2 days before: make the pastry
• 1 day before: blind bake the pastry, make the chocolate filling and bake (you can also do this on the day as long as it has a couple of hours to cool before you top it with meringue)
• Day of serving: make the torched meringue

This post was created in collaboration with Westgold Butter NZ. As always, all opinions expressed are my own, including my appreciation of quality New Zealand butter! Thank you so much for supporting the companies that support this blog

The post Chocolate, Cherry & Pomegranate Torched Meringue Tart appeared first on The Brick Kitchen.

A wintery pear pie, lightly spiced and sweet with salted caramel, encased in a crispy, flaky all-butter crust and topped with fresh ginger gelato.  Jump to Recipe 

Hello! I feel like I should be saying ‘long time no see’, or ‘welcome back’. It’s been seven weeks since I last wrote anything down here – the longest break between posts since this blog began back in 2015. Not on purpose, but between travelling and university, time has slipped and slid past more quickly than anticipated. In some ways this pause has made it harder to get restarted, more difficult to gain momentum – each week blurring into the next. As if I’m starting from a standstill rather than already in the rhythm of running. Let’s hope muscle memory kicks in.

A quick recap (which you might know a bit of from my instagram stories): I spent the winter holidays overseas – even more perfect than imagined, if that’s possible. London was bigger and more diverse than I’d thought, Prague more beautiful and featured more great coffee and food than I assumed, Berlin more cultural and with wonderful food markets, and Paris was just – Paris. Like something straight out of a movie, complete with morning wanders for patisseries (pistachio and dark chocolate escargot from Des Pain et des Idees, anyone?), three euro bottles of rosé on the St Martin canals, sleepy afternoons in the gardens of Versaille and picnics under the glittering Eiffel tower.

(I will put together individual travel posts for each city with photos and my food highlights/recommendations when I get my act together – hopefully soon, but my track record recently hasn’t exactly been flash!)

I stepped off my 30 hour journey back to Melbourne straight into “lecture week” – essentially a condensed tour through paediatrics, with eight jet-lagged, coffee fueled hours each day of information overload. So, no posts happening then. Juggling around my schedule, I briefly escaped back to Auckland for a few days of catching up on those niggly appointments (yay for haircuts, but NOPE to dentists) and loading up the family with baking. No ingredient costs (thanks Mum!) + three brothers to consume everything in sight makes for the perfect environment to test recipes.

Holidays are now very much over – it’s the countdown to exams. THE exams. The last exams that really matter in medical school, testing all the clinical knowledge we have gained over the past four years (which still isn’t all that much in the scheme of medicine, but it feels like a lot right now, that’s for sure). Weekly posting as per usual is off the cards, as is any significant time spent in the kitchen – but I’ll be over here sporadically when time and stress levels allow. And eating pie. Definitely eating pie.

That pie today is a salted caramel pear pie with ginger gelato – a hug of wintery warmth in a mouthful. Tender, lightly spiced pears cooked in a slightly salted, vanilla scented butterscotch sauce; a crisp, buttery all butter pie crust courtesy of Four & Twenty Blackbirds; and a kick of sharp melting ginger gelato to tie it all together. Plus more caramel sauce, if you like. The pears bubble through the gaps in the rustic, sugar-coated lattice, filling the house with comfort.

ALSO: if you have time, check out this quick interview of me with a look at my home kitchen up on Stuff NZ last week. A bit of fun, and both the recipes seen will be coming to the blog in the coming weeks (/months, let’s be honest).

The post Salted Caramel Pear Pie with Ginger Gelato appeared first on The Brick Kitchen.