Miss 16 and I made hot cross buns on Easter Sunday, and they were deliciously light, spicy, soft and sticky – a triumph. They were also enormous, the result of inaccurate yeast measuring, or making them too big. We called them mutant hot cross buns, but wolfed them down anyway, fresh from the oven and…
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There are many appalling things that were done with and to food in the 1970s – for a comprehensive overview I recommend following the 70s Dinner Party on Twitter, but for a sampling consider salad in aspic and grapefruit prawn cocktail as two examples that had plenty of traction in the era of tight, tight…
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“Reader, I married him.” Jane Eyre My husband and I are soon to mark 25 years of marriage and one of the things I appreciate most about him is his unfailing support of my dreams and goals. He photographs most of the recipes for this blog in his spare time, and helps bring to life…
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I don’t drown my sorrows..I suffocate them with cupcakes. Anon. Everyone needs a no-fail, go-to, whip-it-up-in-a-flash cupcake recipe, and this is mine. It works every time and is soft and moist and delicious. The lime gives a refreshing tang to counter the sweetness of the cake and icing, and the almond meal has a nice…
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When my sister-in-law died just over three years ago we inherited a blueberry bush, which, in my part of Australia, is not a common thing. It has the most beautiful blossoms and the fruit changes from a pale watery green with a pinkish blush to deep blue when the fruit is ripe. Each year there…
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“The air was fragrant with a thousand trodden aromatic herbs, with fields of lavender, and with the brightest roses blushing in tufts all over the meadows. . . .” William Cullen Bryant I gathered a bunch of lavender late one afternoon a couple of weeks ago for my friend Claire. This spring our lavender plants…
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Patience is a conquering virtue. Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales This is food at its most basic. Flour, water, salt, and time. The flour and water are mixed and then natural air-borne yeasts and good bacteria develop a culture, or starter, over several days. When combined with more flour and made into dough, this culture…
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“Oh my dear. When has cake ever been for hunger? It’s for flavor, and, in this case, comfort.” Meena van Praag This cake is very dark and rich, spicy and sweet, and with a slight undercurrent of bitterness from the use of treacle and rapadura sugar, a dark brown, unrefined sugar from Sri Lanka. The blood…
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“The measuring and mixing always smoothed out her thinking processes – nothing was as calming as creaming butter – and when the kitchen was warm from the oven overheating and the smell of baking chocolate, she took final stock of where she’d been and where she was going. Everything was fine.” Jennifer Crusie It is…
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Sweet and tender and crumbly, these sugar cookies are based on what I think is a traditional American recipe – although there seems to be an almost endless variety of sugar cookie recipes available, both in recipe books and online. It is hard to say for certain the true provenance,…
Simple food 