hanami

Four years ago S and I went on holiday to Japan – my first real big trip and a very exciting thing for me. For the first four days or so, I kept on pinching S and shouting at him ‘We’re in Japan! We’re in Japan!’. He bore it patiently and we're still together, so he must really love me (or maybe he just stopped listening after the fourth time I yelled). Growing up I never lacked anything, but my parents didn’t have the money to travel far. We spent many a happy summer at the Belgian seaside, in the Belgian Ardennes, and even a few summers in France. But holidaying in exotic locations was something for rich people.

When I was at university, my student club organised a trip to Istanbul. I remember passing the poster on the notice board and thinking ‘oh that must be nice for the people who can do that sort of thing’. Then I had a second look at the poster and almost fell over backwards when I saw the price of the entire trip: BEF 6,000. That’s about £100 (or US$200), for a weeklong stay. Flights and hotel with breakfast included. Of course I signed up for this trip immediately. The realisation that I too could holiday in exotic locations and that it wasn’t just something for the other half was one of those defining moments for me, as I’d always dreamed about travelling to far-off places, but never thought those dreams could become reality.

Of course as a student I didn’t have the money to travel far and extensively, so when I started working and earning a living, travel was high up on my list of priorities. Top of that list was, and always had been, Japan. And it just so happened that it was at the very top of S’s list as well. So off to Japan we went. Our trip was perfectly timed with sakura season so a lot of hanami was to be done. We encountered a lot of people taking photographs of the cherry blossoms and even saw two sweet old ladies, sitting in the park and discussing the beauty of the flowers and how the petals wafted to the ground. And of course all the sweet shops were filled with special sweets for the occasion.

I’m a big fan of Japanese sweets and there is a shop close to where I work, so once in a wile I treat myself to a nice mochi. The sweets always seem so intricate and complex and impossible to recreate at home. But among the presents I received for my birthday last year was Harumi’s Japanese Cooking. Which had just the recipe I was looking for: little read bean-filled crepes. Delicate looking, appropriately pink and super easy to make. I feel a bit like a cheat, because it was so easy, but the results were absolutely delicious. Since I followed the recipe to the letter and didn't tinker with it, I won't repeat it here, but the crepe batter was a mix of water and flour with some sugar and oil, with a few drops of red food colouring added to it. The red bean paste I simply bought in my local Japanese supermarket.

With all the DIY I’ve been a bit out of the loop in recent months, and I haven’t kept track of all the food events, but after I had made these little crepes I discovered the theme of this month’s Sugar High Friday, hosted by La Petite Boulangette, is Asian sweet invasion. Perfect for my crepes.

whoosh*

* that’s the sound of March flying past. And come to think of it, a good chunk of April as well.

I’ve been a very bad blogger these last few months, shame on me. Another whole month has passed without any baking or experimenting. The only action in the kitchen was that of an entire colony of mice, running around in plain daylight and eating everything in sight. Greedy little buggers. They’ve gone now; old-fashioned mousetraps with a bit of peanut butter did just the trick. I’m sure there were more than the four we caught, but the rest probably got fed up and decided to move somewhere else.

Also, last month S and I survived – barely – two very traumatic trips to Ikea. We’re scarred for life now, the mere mention of something blue and yellow Scandinavian and flatpack furniture reduces us to gibbering wrecks. Seriously, what is it with that store? Their website says everything you need is in stock, but the shelves in the warehouse are completely empty. And the personnel at the information desks think it’s much more important to chat with their mates and yell abuse at their co-workers than, I don’t know, helping out clients maybe? We did eventually manage to get an entire wardrobe puzzled together, miraculously nothing was lost when we had it delivered, we lived to tell the tale and our bedroom looks much tidier now. But those nine hours of our lives, we’ll never get those back.

Oh, and that long bank holiday weekend in March I had so many plans for? Three guesses how that was spent. Yep, even more DIY, resulting in lovingly restored sash windows, looking absolutely yummy. Sash windows aren’t edible though.

So I figured it was high time I put on my apron and baked something, before I completely lose skills like whipping egg whites. Or switching on the oven. And my good friend Claudia was just the woman to provide me with inspiration. I had been meaning to make her lemon and lavender pound cake for ages – in fact, it was the recipe that immediately caught my eye the first time I ever browsed through her book – but somehow I always got distracted trying other things. Not this time though.

The recipe is that of a very simple and basic pound cake – quite different from the one I normally make though, so it was a good ‘exercise’ to compare techniques and results. This one is certainly easier and a bit less work, withouth much difference in taste. I adapted the recipe a little bit: I omitted the lemon zest because I really don’t like lemon zest and cut down the quantities of the lavender quite a bit as I thought using the full four tablespoons might be a bit overpowering. The resulting cake was wonderfully moist and lemony with just a hint of lavender. I was convinced S wouldn’t like it, because of the lavender, but he obligingly tasted a little piece. And then… his eyes lit up, he started licking his lips and rubbing his belly, said ‘yum!’ and cut himself another piece. Maybe that 'whoosh' was also the sound of pigs flying past...

lemon and lavender pound cake
adapted from Claudia Fleming's The Last Course

200g butter
5 eggs
1 cup sugar
1 1/2 cup self-rising flour
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 tablespoon dried lavender

for syrup: 1/2 cup sugar, 1/4 cup water, 1/4 cup lemon juice

Melt butter with lavender, leave to infuse for 10 minutes, strain, discard lavender, and set aside to cool.
Beat eggs with sugar until thick and pale. Sift 1/3 of flour into egg mixture until thoroughly combined. Fold in rest of flour in 2 batches. Whisk one cup of batter with vanilla extract and melted butter, then add this to remaining batter. Bake cake at 150˚C for 45 minutes.

Make syrup (bring to simmer in saucepan and cook until sugar is dissolved). When cake is ready, poke all over with skewer and brush with half the syrup. Leave to cool for 10 minutes, invert cake and brush bottom and sides. Reinvert and brush with remaining syrup. Enjoy.

design dessert

Last weekend I finally got around to doing something with the sweet potatoes I'd had lying around for way too long - I don't use sweet potatoes all that often and all the lovely Thanksgiving posts I've been reading everywhere made me itch to try something new. I browsed through my cookbooks, thought about adapting and combining different recipes and was determined not to get myself into a catch-22 situation, where I end up making nothing at all because I'm unable to choose from all the possible dishes.

Also, I wanted to challenge myself a bit: I have a few cookbooks with complex dessert recipes, consisting of several components and looking oh so beautiful. Which I never get around to making, exactly because they're so complex. Not difficult - just a lot of work. Invariably, you need a gazillion different ingredients for all the parts, so it takes half a day doing the preliminary grocery shopping, another half day to make everything and when you're finished, the kitchen looks like a battlefield. And then, of course, just when you sigh and think 'that was ok', you take a last look at the recipe and you find that, under 'assembly' or 'presentation', a few more components and some complicated garnishes are thrown in for good measure.

So I often end up making just one component, rather than the whole dessert. Which tastes nice and looks fine, but not spectacular. And sometimes, you know, a girl just wants to show off and make something that looks as if it came out of a restaurant kitchen. This girl does anyway.

And so here it is, my first show-off (but no sweat) dessert: sweet potato and white chocolate flan on a gingersnap crust, sweet potato gnocchi and coconut custard, all flavoured with sweet massala spices. Very easy to make, because it doesn't use a million different ingredients, and looks like a million dollars. Just one warning: pretend you don't know how much butter goes into the whole thing.

Also, because the flan squares tasted rather nice all by themselves and because - in my mind anyway - the sweet potato thing has a decidedly American feel to it (plus they are not too showy by themselves and won't upstage a brand new house) I'm taking them to Peabody's housewarming party.


sweet potato flan squares
inspired by D & C Duby's Wild Sweets

100g roasted and mashed sweet potatoes
100g crushed gingersnaps (by all means, make them yourself if you want, but store-bought will do just fine)
195g + 25g butter
130g white chocolate
3 eggs
80 caster sugar
1 tsp vanilla bean extract
1 tsp sweet massala spices

line a baking tin (I used a 20 cm square one) with baking paper, making sure it the sides of the tin are covered as well. Melt 25g butter, mix with the crushed gingersnaps and spread evenly on the bottom of the tin. Melt butter with chocolate (I used the microwave, in 30 second bursts). Combine sweet potatoes with eggs, sugar, vanilla and massala, then fold in the chocolate mixture and stir until thoroughly combined. Pour mixture over gingersnap base and bake in oven (150˚C) for 30 minutes. Refrigerate until ready to use.

sweet potato gnocchi
inspired by Hidemi Sugino The Dessert Book

125g roasted and mashed sweet potatoes
50g plain flour
1/3 whole egg
1 tbsp coconut milk
caster sugar with pinch of sweet massala spices

combine all ingredients in mixing bowl until incorporated. Cover bowl and leave to rest in fridge for at least one hour. Flour work surface and roll dough into a log, about 1 inch diametre. Cut into half inch cubes and cook in boiling water (they are ready when they float). Coat in massala sugar mix.

coconut custard
adapted from here

1 1/2 cups coconut milk
1 tbsp cornstarch
3 egg yolks, beaten
1 tsp vanilla bean paste
1 tsp sweet massala spices
1/6 cup sugar

Combine 1/4 cup coconut milk and cornstarch in a bowl and blend until smooth. Whisk in yolks, beating until smooth. Combine rest of coconut milk, vanilla, massala and sugar in a saucepan and carefully bring to a boil. When the mixture just boils, whisk a ladleful into egg mixture to temper it, then whisk this back into the cream mixture. Cook, stirring constantly, until the mixture is thick enough to coat the back of a spoon. Pour into jug and cool.

To assemble: dust flan squares with icing sugar, add a few gnocchi and a drizzle of custard.

oops

Pressies! A whole bunch of cook books and other goodies.

I woke up one morning and suddenly realised it’s October already. There was also this nagging thought in the back of my head - something to do with chocolate. And vanilla. And then it dawned on me. My little blog! So woefully neglected this past month! Oops.

Well, I guess that’s what happens when one spends weekends in Belgium visiting family (and stocking up on chocolate), frantically doing DIY preparing one’s house for a visit of said family, attending talks by certain food bloggers, and organising a big birthday party for oneself (my thirtieth, but shhh, don’t tell anyone).

Which didn’t leave much time at all for kitchen experiments. Or for the Daring Bakers September challenge, which completely passed me by. Check out all the other DBs cinnamon and sticky bun rolls here.

On the plus side, I now have beautifully oiled ‘dark Jacobean oak’ stained floors, which - I have already discovered - provide a perfect backdrop for food pics; the family (who all came over from Belgium especially for the birthday party) were suitably impressed with our house renovations and it was wonderful having them all here to celebrate with me; and, throwing yourself a birthday party of course means getting lots of presents, some of which will make appearances on vanille & chocolat in the not too distant future...

happy birthday darling!

Today is S's birthday, and the good people of France are so nice that they always organise a parade and fireworks especially for the occasion!

Last year I did actually take S to Paris for his birthday - our minuscule hotel was very close to the Eiffel Tower and we enjoyed the most splendid sight of the fireworks. A French girlfriend had recommended me Le Comptoir du Relais, a lovely tiny bistro at the Carrefour de l'Odeon, where we had S's birthday dinner. Which was absolutely wonderful, with the token rude waitress of course (it just wouldn't be Paris without them, would it). And lots of wine.

We didn't have any particular plans for the weekend - the weather was amazing and we just roamed around and relaxed, enjoying delicious pastries, croissants and confit de canard all weekend long, in the tiniest unassuming bistros. With polite and friendly waiting staff, which threw us a bit, but we were quickly reassured by our encounter with a rude waiter in a creperie who totally refused to speak French with us.

All by accident (a good thing of wandering around a city at leisure) and long BB (before blog), I discovered Sadaharu Aoki's shop in the Rue Vaugirard and E. Dehillerin, where I asked the shop people if I could move in but they wouldn't let me, so I had to settle for buying some baking moulds.

This year, S requested dinner at Locanda Locatelli for his birthday - he is quite a fan of the cookbook already and wanted to try the restaurant. I didn't take a camera with me, so no piccies, but I can assure you the whole experience was absolutely divine! The restaurant was very smart of course, but not in a stuck-up way, with extremely friendly and efficient staff who didn't rush us. And the food, ah, where to start! Home-made Parmesan grissini, a basket full of delicious breads, amazing salads with the perfect dressing and sweetest cherry tomatoes ever, wonderful calamari with chili and lots of garlic, lovely flaky monkfish, yummy baby cow, and delicious desserts. I of course tried the most unusual thing on the dessert menu, while S went straight for the vanilla ice cream. Which he declared to be the best one ever (in fact, his exact words were: 'eat this, Häagen-Dazs!'). No fancy schmancy dishes; everything was fairly simple (not the kind of simple you'd make at home though) but the ingredients were the freshest and bestest, top-notch quality. Another restaurant we can tick off our 'must try' list, but we've now moved it to our 'must go back' list.

Still itching to go back to Paris though.

S starring in the kitchen (and a white plate guest starring)

S bought me a white plate! ‘For your food pictures’ he said. Sweet, non? But the plate is only guest starring, so let’s quickly move on to the real star.

Quite a while ago, S came home after work one day with a copy of Giorgio Locatelli’s Made in Italy: Food and Stories. S has a completely food-unrelated job in a food company, and one of the food people at his office had told him it was an excellent book. S also happens to be mad about pasta; he could eat it 24-7. He even eats it uncooked. But then he also eats stock cubes, flour, coffee and bread crumbs (preferred method for these:‘inhaled’ straight from the packet with a drinking straw) and after more than ten years together I’m used to these little quirks.

The book is not one I would buy myself – my first impression was that it looked a little bit messy. There is a lot of background story and explanation intermingled with the recipes, and I prefer it somewhat more separate and organised. When I started reading however, I found myself completely absorbed in Locatelli's family stories and anecdotes. He is clearly very passionate about good food, cooking, and conveying to his readers an understanding of Italian cuisine. And of course the title of the book is food and stories, so both are of equal importance.

The first thing S made from the book was pesto a la Genovese – a beautiful and delicious intensely green paste, which we added to pasta, sandwiches, chicken and lots of other things. Last weekend he was feeling a bit more ambitious and decided to make ravioli from scratch. Now I love me a good ravioli – I usually buy mine home-made from Lina’s, a wonderfully old-fashioned, family-run Italian delicatessen in Soho (18 Brewer Street) – so I wasn’t about to pass up on that offer! Also, S had a new toy to try out; a little pasta-shaping-mould thingy that we bought on our last trip to Antwerp.

And so last Saturday, S set about making dough and filling. We don’t have a pasta machine (it’s on our wish list), so getting the dough thin enough was a bit tricky and it ended up a bit on the thick side. For the filling he used my favourite: spinach and ricotta – very simply blanched spinach, wrung dry and chopped mixed with a tub of ricotta cheese. He served it with a tomato and basil sauce – even more simply a tin of chopped tomatoes, reduced in a pan with a bit of olive oil – and of course some parmesan shavings. Pasta, a nice glass of red and Billie Holiday in the background – the perfect Saturday evening.

weekend experimenting

Being a big fan of Keiko’s beautiful blog Nordljus, I got intrigued about all those delectable-looking Hidemi Sugino cakes and tartlets that keep on popping up on her blog. Keiko links these entries to the Japanese Amazon store and Sugino’s cookbook Le Gôut Authentique Retrouvé. Encouraged by the French title, and since amazon.co.jp is, well, in Japanese, and my Japanese doesn’t stretch much further than some touristy phrases, I enlisted the help of my Japanese friend M in Fukuoka and asked her to check for me whether this book was written in French. If so, Mr Sugino and I were in business. No such luck though, the book was written in Japanese only. However, M informed me that he did have a second cookbook, called The Dessert Book, written in Japanese and English. Not only that, she also very kindly sent me a copy of this book. Thank you M-tyan, arigatoo gozaimashita! The recipes in this book are fairly simple, basic and easy to make, but elegant. The one that immediately caught my eye was a tiny tartlet with a rhubarb and mascarpone filling, topped with cherry tomatoes, basil and balsamic caramel, and served with a celery sorbet. And so, last weekend – jetlag forgotten, three weeks of laundry and ironing all done and itching to start baking again – I knew this was just the thing I wanted to try.

cocoa pastry cases? Nope, just burnt pastry cases...

I had some cinnamon sweet pastry dough in the freezer (leftovers from a Claudia Fleming recipe), a bunch of dainty baking moulds I bought in Paris last July and hadn’t used before, I had finally figured out how to get pastry dough thinly rolled out without it sticking to the work surface (roll it out between two sheets of baking paper), and so I set about fumbling around making the pastry cases. It took me a long time to roll the dough, drape it in the moulds and trim the excess, but I had fun with it. I wonder though how these things are done in professional pastrychef land – if you have to make, say, 800 rather than eight. After the rolling, draping and trimming I bunged the whole lot in the oven and there it all went horribly wrong. I followed the baking instructions to a T but of course the oven decided to not cooperate and my dainty rectangular pastry cases came out rather dark brown and smelling quite burnt. For a minute, I toyed with the idea of pretending that it was cocoa pastry, but there’s not much use making a tartlet that looks nice but is inedible. Luckily the somewhat larger, less dainty moulds I had put in a different place in the oven came out fine. A bit darker than I would have liked, but still very much on the right side of burnt and inedible.

The baking bit over and done with, I proceeded to the tomato and caramel bit. I had never made caramel before but I remember some stories about boiling hot things exploding on stoves, so I thought I’d better be careful with this. Sugino’s recipe said to melt butter (I used salted rather than the unsalted specified, which gave it a slight edge) in a pan, cover it with a layer of sugar, cover the sugar with a layer of honey and then, when the whole lot starts caramelising, add balsamic vinegar and sauté cherry tomatoes in this mix. It all looked rather strange, but worked perfectly. The balsamic vinegar added a nice twang to the caramel, as did the juice from the tomatoes, which also prevented the caramel from setting to a rock hard substance.

Moving on to the filling bit, I realised I had completely forgotten about the rhubarb, so I had to make do with just the mascarpone, which I mixed with sugar and shredded basil. The celery sorbet I had decided to skip altogether. You see, I was pretty sure S wouldn’t be jumping up and down with enthusiasm for this dessert, as he’s more of a vanilla and chocolate kinda guy. To his credit though, he does taste everything I make. And when he says ‘mmmmmm, yeeeees, it’s… ok’ when trying some weird concoction like, I don’t know, a dessert with tomatoes, basil and balsamic caramel, that means I’m on to a winner.

The finished tartlets were just a tad too sweet to my liking – that rhubarb I forgot would have been perfect to cut through all the sweetness of the mascarpone, caramel and tomatoes. And of course, the celery sorbet would have provided the finishing touch. Next time I’ll make sure to put celery and rhubarb on my shopping list. And not trust my oven…