picau ar y maen My mother’s heritage was Welsh and she and my father were both talented amateur singers who were brought up in Ipswich, in Queensland, a town with a proud heritage of coal mining, Welsh immigration and eisteddfodau. As a child she went to a Welsh speaking church and one of my favourite memories…
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This luscious tart marries gently roasted vanilla plums with a crisp puff pastry and a rich creamy filling. With the last of the season’s plums now available it seemed opportune to make this tart for an autumnal dessert. Find the recipe for the plums here, but you could also roast peaches or apricots the same way…
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Last month I went on a grand adventure with two friends to New York. We attended the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women and then spent a week exploring the city. It was an amazing experience in all respects and I grew very quickly to love New York – the city scape (look…
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Cake baking is best when it can be deeply enjoyed – no pressure of time; no interruptions; and no requirement that it turn out perfectly. Just relaxed time in the kitchen and the bringing together of beautiful ingredients to create something wonderful. This chocolate cake was the result of a holiday afternoon baking session. The house was filled…
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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, although I did read that…
Read MoreChocolate self-saucing pudding is the ultimate winter comfort food – fudgy and rich and warming. There are lots of recipes available for this pudding, as it is an Australian staple. My recipe however, has a little more cocoa than the standard ones, because I love the chocolate to predominate. Try to get some dutch process…
Read MoreToday, to finish our long weekend in style, I made this lime and ginger cheesecake – my take on the classic recipe made with cream cheese, condensed milk and lemon juice. What makes this recipe a bit different is the use of ginger biscuits and pecan nuts in the crumb crust, which adds a little bit of spicy…
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When life gives you lemons, make lemonade. When life gives you flour, butter, sugar and eggs, preheat the oven. One of the advantages of occasionally working at home is that at lunchtime you can decide that the time is right to make a cake, get up from your desk, and get started. I was thinking this…
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I have been working my way through my mother’s recipe book, revisiting memories of her baking biscuits and cakes for our family, and looking for recipes to tweak, develop or share just as they are. I have four siblings and we are all close in age with only seven years between the youngest and oldest,…
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This classic – the carrot cake – is simple to make, full of sweetness, spices and walnuts, and covered with a glorious cream cheese icing. I’ve been making it since I was about twenty (a very long time) so why it took me seven goes to get it cooked and photographed and onto this blog…
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Simple food 