Remember the baking powder I brought back as a souvenir from Iceland (if you don’t, you can read about it here)? Well that tin can is just too beautiful to sit in my cupboard, unnoticed by the world. But I can’t just use baking powder as a random prop for any photo shoot, right? Well, it (finally) dawned on me that I had never featured a sponge cake recipe on this blog yet. How was that even possible? Continue reading
In my everlasting quest to make the perfect cakes suitable for my food-intolerant friends and colleagues, I have started exploring oat-based products more and more. This also applies to adapting the recipes I use when working with my students in order to include those who cannot eat dairy products. It’s important to be able to be allergy-friendly in the kitchen. It all started with oat milk and deveoped from that. In this recipe I’m using cream, and using oat cream makes this zebra cake suitable for people with a milk allergy. Continue reading
I have this habit that whenever I’m abroad I like to visit local supermarkets. I equally like to have my guests have the same experience, so I often take people grocery shopping whenever someone visits me in Sweden. It’s my favourite way to get inspiration for the meals we are going to share, and it’s a good opportunity for them to get in touch with foods that might attract them but that I may not have at home. This is how I ended up making gingerbread cake recently. Continue reading
Making banana bread can be a very good strategy to get rid of overly ripe bananas that had been forgotten or just neglected. There are people who will feed on all sorts of fruits whenever they find one within reach. Sadly, I belong to the other type – those who buy fruits, try to eat them regularly, then forget them in the fruit basket. Some fruits hold longer, and hopefully make it until the next time I feel like eating random fruits. Others will just sit and ripe and hope for the best. Continue reading
Oreo cheesecake has been on my mind for quite some time. I decided the time had come to try and make it when I found Oreos on discount at the store. It felt like a sign. The problem is that of course this lucky coincidence at the store happened two months ago and I’ve only found the time now to turn the cookies into the key feature of my most recent cheesecake. I’m not even going to blame work or lazyness here for not being able to make this cake earlier. The truth is that winter has finally (!) arrived and with -10°C outside the last thing I wanted to make was a no-bake cheesecake. Continue reading
Honesty talk – how do you think a 1 Kilo tub of stracciatella yoghurt ended up in my fridge? Answer: because it was close to its expiry date and therefore 30% cheaper. I decided to take it home and it proved just perfect for breakfast for two for three days, plus two cakes. This is how you invest on food and find motivation to make the softest stracciatella yoghurt Bundt cake. Twice. One on Wednesday and one on Saturday because you can never get enough of it. Continue reading
There are only a few little pleasures in life that can compare with whipping up an easy cake from scratch. Little effort, few ingredients, a simple procedure and your house suddenly smells like something sweet is baking in the oven. Even as experienced as I like to consider myself – on a domestic level, of course – and despite the fact that I enjoy the challenge of a complex recipe, I find that getting busy with a simple cake sometimes can be even more rewarding. Continue reading
Sweden is fattening me up. Ever since my first winter here, when in autumn nature dims the lights, my body starts demanding more food and I put up a couple of kilos. Then in the spring it’s all about getting rid of that winter fat. I must admit that I succeed pretty well at that, and the fact that in the spring I start biking everywhere again certainly helps. What does not help is the amount of delicious cakes and the overall fika culture that Sweden boasts. Continue reading
Baked cheesecake is one of my favourite desserts. The first version I have tried in my life is the Polish sernik, often made by my mom (in Italy with ricotta cheese). The Polish version of the cake, at least in the area where my family is from, often features raisins inside; a more appreciated (by me) variant is with pieces of canned peaches in the filling. I personally prefer it “bare” – just cheese. My favourite version is definitely the cream cheese-based American variant, also known as New York style cheesecake.
It was the spring of 2012, a bunch of lovely warm and sunny April days, and I was finally visiting the capital of Austria with my parents. Together we had crossed Austria at least thirty times before, while travelling from Italy to Poland by car, but had never stopped to explore Vienna. Then cheap airlines happened and we kind of stopped travelling to Poland by car, so the occasion never arose until we decided to drive again in 2012. I said I’d go only if we finally made a proper stopover in Vienna. Continue reading