Maybe it has to do with our recent Roman holiday or maybe it’s the lovely Italian cookbook I got while in Rome but for the last few days, I can only dream of Italian food. And that’s how on a cold and gloomy day like yesterday, it felt just right to fill the kitchen (in our case kitchen and living area) with the smell of baking.
This is my first serious kitchen project in more than 2 months. We spent the last couple of months travelling through Asia and while it was a memorable trip, I’m glad to be back in the kitchen among the pots and pans.
Suikerbrood is a sticky sweet loaf of bread that’s traditionally eaten during Easter in Holland. I’ve never had an authentic Dutch one but since we’re in a cosy little corner in France with Peter’s parents nearby, it seemed like the perfect setting to bake a loaf of this sugary bread.
Exactly a week ago, we had a brand new stove with a brand new oven installed in our kitchen. Our existing one was quite old and its gas oven had broken down causing me much grief. I was ecstatic when we got the new one especially because it has an electric oven which is the kind I’m used to and I find it less temperamental than a gas oven. It’s not a fancy cooking range, just a simple four burner stove at the affordable lower end of the price range. So for the last week I’ve been, almost fanatically, scouring websites and magazines, looking for baking, roasting, stewing recipes especially with the holiday season in mind.
Quite a while ago, I was browsing through the food section on guardian.co.uk and chanced upon an interesting recipe by Dan Lepard. I’ve tried a couple of his recipes in the past and have never been disappointed. So I decided to try out the ‘roast pineapple, coconut meringue and rum cream’.
The only ingredient I forgot to put on my shopping list was the cream to make the rum cream so I replaced it with some raspberry sauce as there were some frozen raspberries lying in our freezer waiting to be put to good use.
Not so long ago, I discovered a wonderful spelt and yoghurt fruit cake at Tesco. I’ve had a packet of wholegrain spelt flour languishing at the back of the kitchen cupboard hoping to be put to good use for quite a while now. So when I was completely taken by that cake and then came across a Nigel Slater recipe for a blueberry spelt muffin, I couldn’t help but try and experiment with it myself.
The result of that experiment were spelt muffins laced with raisins and glaced cherries. I went by the general rule that when using wholegrain flours it’s a good idea to add an equal amount of plain flour that contributes the all important gluten essential in baked goods.
