Victoria sponge, or Victoria sandwich as it’s more traditionally known, is about as quintessentially English as it gets. Visit any English country fair and it will be there, adorned with rosettes from the WI for the best one. So I could not think of anything more appropriate to make for my Coronation tea tomorrow than a classic Victoria sponge. [...]
French and easy – that’s a galette for you. I’m a bit of a fan of this Gallic free form tart with its endless options for fillings. Recently I embraced the flavours of southern France and made a tapenade and onion galette. This week I’m paying homage to Normandy in northern France, home of Camembert with a Camembert, leek [...]
Galette is pretty much the simplest French tart you can make. It’s just a flat sheet of pastry with a filling tumbled in the middle and the edges folded over. It can be sweet, filled with anything from apples or blackberries to figs or plums. Or it can be savoury, like this onion and tapenade galette. The inspiration for this [...]
It was drizzly and miserable in the Cape this past weekend, a reminder that winter is not quite done with us yet. So I spent my time huddled in front of a fire, paging through all my old recipe books. I came upon this recipe for apple buttercake scribbled in gran’s spidery handwriting. Sometimes these super old recipes are [...]
I think we can all agree that this Easter will be a first. Locked in our homes for our own protection as the world does battle with something none of us ever thought we’d see. I’ve probably baked more in the last two weeks than in the preceding year! Delicious carb (who cares) treats like Greek Easter bread, aka tsoureki. [...]
When it comes to French cooking, there are two schools. There’s the Escoffier 20-step/3-day frightfully involved kinda cooking. Totally fabulous – as long as you can afford to pay someone else to do it. And then there’s the kind that every French maman practices – stonkingly good food whipped up in hardly any time, using very few ingredients of the [...]