Friday, September 26, 2014

Mocha Shortbread

Oh I love shortbread.  It's buttery, crumbly and very hard to refuse another piece. The Hubs and his Mammy are both big lovers so I decided I'd make a variation on the traditional recipe by adding coffee and chocolate.  When I was in France last year, I bought a box of espresso sticks - powdered instant espresso which you can drink or use as an ingredient.  Two little sticks gave enough oomph to turbo charge the shortbread from something nice into a special treat loaded with coffee and chocolate.  Sure, what else could you possibly want?


Sunday, September 21, 2014

Review : Bake Like an Italian

Although she's a Wicklow girl like me, Catherine Fulvio loves all things Italian and marrying a Sicilian, the very dapper Claudio, was the start of her amore Italiano. She's written four books already, all with a very distinctive Italian influence and this fifth offering, Bake Like an Italian, explores baking.  Anathema to carb haters, it's subtitled "more recipes for the good life" and is definitely written with la vita è bella in mind.


There's a very vintage feel to the book cover with three very home made cakes and beautiful panelling in the background.  Inside, more delights await with Graham Thew in charge of design, Harry Weir on photography and new author Kristen Jensen as editor.  Together, they've helped to create a beautifully illustrated and cleanly edited book which is a pleasure to peruse.

Sunday, September 14, 2014

Hit The Floor Cake

This is a story of great triumph over adversity.  In work, we get a delivery of fruit every week to keep us all healthy and at the end of the week, there's usually a few apples or nectarines lying in the box.  I hate waste, so I brought home some nectarines and plums to turn them into a cake for work.  I made a stupendous cake and there were some very excited colleagues looking forward to Monday morning so they could have cake for breakfast (yes, I'm looking at you Cora & Karen...).  I was walking up the stairs from the carpark to the office laden with a handbag, laptop bag and a cake carrier.  Yes, you guessed it, the cake carrier went tumbling to the ground after being hit with a door.  The cake hit the floor with a tremendous bang and scattered all over the stairwell,  CAKETASTROPHE!

The cake was unsalvageable - it had hit the four corners of the lobby and was inedible.  With a very heavy heart, I scraped the remains back onto the plate, into the cake carrier and into the boot of the car.  I was heartbroken. Not as much as my colleagues, who told me that they would have eaten the cake off the floor- and they were serious.  Dirty beasts.  So that's how my gorgeous cake came to be known as the Hit The Floor cake.



Friday, September 5, 2014

Review : The Nation's Favourite Food FAST! by Neven Maguire

Pressure.  We're all under it and the one thing we consistently lack is time.  That means that we need to clever about how we eat well without resorting to ready meals or fast food.  This is where Neven Maguire comes in.  Subtitled "100 best-loved recipes for busy lives", this is his tenth (I think, I'm rubbish at maths though...) cookery book.  Neven is familiar to many of us from his TV show Home Cook on RTE and is also the chef/owner of MacNean House in Blacklion, Co. Cavan.  With a family of his own to feed, he's had to revise his way of eating and The Nation's Favourite Food FAST! is a great solution.