Most of the recipes that I share are centred around seasonal produce. We grow a lot of what we eat and eating with the seasons is a pleasure, not a restriction. But I like how my birthday cake this year…
To end what turned into a week of strawberry recipes, I bring you a variation on the cherry bubble cake, where cherries were substituted with roasted strawberries. The roasting, an easy extra step that is less work than pitting cherries…
Last week one of my best friends came for a visit. She lives 900 km away and this was the first time she and her family visited us here in the Netherlands. She’s one of my oldest friends and one…
When I was little, we used to spend a good chunk of every summer vacation at my mother’s friend’s house in a very small village in the western part of what was then the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic. There were always…
It’s been snowing in the Netherlands. You know what happens in the Netherlands when it snows? Chaos happens. On the first day of snow, the traffic jam in the country reached a record combined length of 1003 km, the railway…
This cake is another creation of Yotam Ottolenghi. Yes, him again. Because he’s that good. And because he apparently thinks that there is no such thing as too much chocolate, in a brownie or in a cake. I agree.
When I get a chance to eat as many cherries as I want, I’ll eat kilos of them. I don’t often get a chance. Last time was when I was sixteen and spent the first week of my summer vacation…
Some of the questions I had to answer while typing the recipe: – How do you draw a snowflake? – If you could control one element, which would you choose? (Answer: water) – How do you say “strawberries” in French?…
It seems that the two main harvest from the allotment at the moment are rhubarb and daffodils. No problem, I like both a lot. They both signal the start of a new garden season; daffodils are the first flowers that…
In case you felt sorry for my daughter for losing the big birthday cake dispute: don’t. I think that after eating the caramel-peanut-topped brownie cake even she did not feel sorry for herself (I mean – caramel-peanut-topped brownie cake?). Besides,…
Whenever I mention that we have an allotment, the reaction invariably is: That’s wonderful, but isn’t that an awful lot of work? The answer is: it’s not that bad, because we garden along the permaculture lines, which means no digging…
There was supposed to be a compromise about the cake for my husband’s and my daughter’s joined birthday celebration. But there was not. Because my husband, a peanut butter addict (as well as a coffee addict – but that’s a…
Birthdays usually present an opportunity to bake a cake that is too complicated, rich or time-consuming for lesser occasions. And I mean occasions like “it’s Monday and it’s been raining the whole day”, because I do bake cakes for such…
Because I come from the Czech Republic and my whole family lives there, this is where we go every summer. We usually pick lots of mushrooms and blueberries, but the wild growing damsons sadly only start ripening towards the end…