Rick Stein’s Prune and Almond Tart

Rick Stein is probably the first chef personality I became familiar with and remains the only one who I have any real affection for. I remember watching one of his TV shows as a child, French Odyssey – it was compulsory family viewing. I loved the sound of his voice, his dog Chalky and how he communicated directly and personally with the cooks, gardeners, growers and local food experts he met as they travelled by barge on a canal through south-west France. Rick Stein speaks as if everything is a marvel, a wonder. It’s easy to become absorbed in his language, moving with the intonations of his voice. To be a television chef engaging your audience is part of the job description but there is an authenticity to Stein and he seems so genuinely enthralled about the food and people around him, as if he too, like his audience, is learning and tasting things for the first time. Perhaps it was this show that first inspired a love of France – the countryside, the people, the language, but most importantly, the food.

When the show ended we bought the cookbook and after that our collection of French cookbooks seemed to expand – each one offering new ingredients, new stories and new recipes. But every year or so we come back to Rick Stein’s French Odyssey sometimes for a recipe, but often to look at the pictures and to read the words or the funny inscriptions Georgie and I wrote to Mum Christmas 2005.

Mother, my dearest,
This is your Christmas present
for you to use in 2006.
Make lots of dishes so delicious
our lips will be forever licked
Entrées and mains,
with this book you’ll be skipping
through French country lanes.
Savoury, sweet or sour,
everyone knows their mouths will devour!

Before Georgie came home for the summer she emailed us a “List of Delicious-ness,” all the things she would like for us to eat over the summer. Georgie wished for Caribbean pie, lamb and potato curry, Thai beef salad, chocolate self-saucing pudding, roast lamb, pork chops with caramelised apples and onions. Most of the items on the list are firm family favourites that we have been cooking and eating for years and like favourite films and books, none ever tire. I don’t dare to hazard a guess at how many times my mother has made lamb and potato curry. Every time all four of us sit down to a meal, the table set and wine poured, it feels so very long since the last time and even longer since this was habit and normal and the only thing we really knew.

I have been thinking about what I wrote a few months ago about working and what my working life will look like as it begins to take shape. I thought perhaps I would never have a regular 9 to 5 job, that perhaps I would always have irregular hospitality hours and irregular writing hours on the side. But it’s becoming clear that what I value and look forward to is cooking and eating, most especially dinners. Dinners are great. Irregular hours here and there are not conducive to great dinners, or even dinners at all.

So for Georgie’s last night in Wellington we had a great dinner, entrée and dessert taken from Rick Stein’s French Odyssey and the main event taken from Paris, another one of our French focused books. For the entrée Dad and I made seared scallops served on a muddle of lentils with a herb tomato sauce. The lentils were savoury and knubbly, the tomato sauce was bright and garden fresh and the scallops were sweet and tender. For the main course Mum made spiced duck with creamy, wilted, beautiful savoy cabbage. Then Georgie and I made prune and almond tart to honour the list of delicious-ness.

The pastry is short, almost shatteringly so, with a rich and buttery flavour. The prunes are meltingly tender, moist jubes of brandy sweetness. Then the almond, in its traditional almond role, pulls everything together, balances it out, gives the tart substance and body. The almonds, the brandy, the succulent semi-dried fruit remind me of Christmas flavours. And Christmas in our house really only means one thing – family dinners (and breakfasts and morning teas and lunches and afternoon teas and evening nibbles…)

This tart recipe reminds me of the economy of many French dishes. While at first glance the ingredients list may appear daunting and the instructions a bit winded, the case is often a little of a lot. This recipe uses only 4 tablespoons of brandy (we add more, as can be seen in our adapted version below), 35 grams of ground almonds and 55 grams of sugar. There is moderation to be found in French cuisine, which Rick Stein I think understands so very well.

Prune Almond Tart
Adapted from Rick Stein’s recipe. Many thanks to Georgie for the gorgeous photos.

300 grams dried or half-dried (mi-cuit) prunes
6 tablespoons brandy
1 large egg, lightly beaten
35 grams ground almonds
55 grams caster sugar
250 grams crème fraîche
icing sugar, for dusting
Extra crème fraîche to serve

Pastry:
225 grams plain flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
130 grams chilled butter, cut into pieces
1.5 – 2 tablespoons chilled water

For the pastry:
Sift the flour and salt into a food processor or a mixing bowl. Add the pieces of chilled butter and work together until the mixture looks like fine breadcrumbs. With the processor running on low or with the blade of the knife if making pastry manually, stir in the water until it comes into a ball. Turn out onto a floured surface and knead briefly until smooth.

For the filling:
Place the prunes in a medium bowl and pour over the brandy. Leave to soak for at least one hour, turning them over every now and then to help them soak up the alcohol.
Roll out the pastry on floured surface and then line a greased tart tin, roughly 25 cm across the base. Prick the base with a fork and chill for 20 minutes.
Pre-heat oven to 200°C. Line the pastry base with baking paper and a layer of rice or baking weights and bake for 15 minutes. Remove the paper and beans and bake for another 4-5 minutes. Remove the pastry base and brush with a little of the beaten egg before returning to the oven for a further 2 minutes. Remove the tart, set aside and lower the temperature to 190°C.
Pick the prunes out of their brandy bath and scatter them on the pastry base. To the brandy add the ground almonds, egg, sugar and crème fraîche and beat until smooth. Pour the almond mixture over the prunes and bake for 45 minutes until golden brown and a skewer inserted into the centre of the tart comes away clean.

Dust with icing sugar and serve warm or at room temperature with crème fraîche, yoghurt or whipped sweetened cream.

French Plum Cake

After Christmas Perrin brought me a bag of plums from his sister’s tree. He called to tell me he had picked a handful to make a cake. I remember smiling down the phone at this guy who picks me plums and suggests cake making. He brought the plums back in a supermarket shopping bag, the plastic threatening to tear. Nearly three kilos of small cherry-like fruit with dark skins and flesh the colour of a ruby sunset. The ripe skins were beginning to burst. We got to work fast.

This french plum cake recipe comes from an old Annabel Langbein book, the font and photos harking back to the nineties. It has been years since we have made this cake, maybe not so long ago as the nineties but I had forgotten the exciting bite of a plum cake – the soft buttery crumb with tart lush plums, their juices bursting, running red through the pale batter with the pierce of a fork.

Normally the plums sink as the cake cooks and the batter envelops the dimple of the cut half, but our plums were too small, light enough to gently nestle into the top of the cake. It was a polka dot cake and, when you think about, there is a happy simplicity to polka dots whether on a dress, around the lip of a bowl or spotted across the surface of a cake.

A few years ago, for a creative writing course, I wrote a story about making plum and apricot cakes. The story, the way it read, was largely fiction but the memories it conjured for me were true. My mother, sister and I picked the fruit from our elderly, dying neighbour’s tree. I wrote of standing on vinyl covered chairs at the kitchen bench with tea towels tied around our necks pulling the stones from the halved fruit with our fingers. The fruit in the story was over-ripe too, nearly stewing in their ripeness, I wrote.

It was summer time in the story and ripening stone fruit – the scent, soft fruit in hand, juices seeping from torn skin – then and now, create a sense of urgency; these need to be used, no waste. There were associations made between the fragility of a life of a plum and that of a person. Perhaps a more straightforward theme of my story was the simple pleasures cake baking can bring to both the cook and the recipient. These feelings are only heightened when the plums have been hand-picked off a neighbour’s or a sister’s tree.

French Plum Cake

This recipe, from Annabel Langbein‘s book More Taste than Time, makes two cakes; one to keep, one to give away.

6 to 8 fresh plums or other stone fruit
3 tablespoons sugar
300 grams butter
1 1/2 cups sugar
3 eggs
finely grated rind of 1/2 lemon
1 teaspoon vanilla essence
1 cup milk
3 1/2 cups high grade flour
1 teaspoon baking powder

Pre-heat oven to 180°C. Slice plums into a bowl and sprinkle with the 3 tablespoons of sugar. (If plums are small like ours slice in half, but quarter if using bigger plums.) Toss plums and leave to sit while preparing the rest of the cake.

Cream together the butter and the sugar. Add eggs, lemon rind, vanilla essence then stir in the milk, flour and baking powder. Divide batter between two tins and arrange plums on top.

Cook for 60-65 minutes – the fruit will sink into the cake as it cooks.

Serve warm with yoghurt or whipped cream. Best eaten the day of making – the second cake can be frozen.

Roasted Carrot and Orange Salad

I remember how I began 2012: in Central Otago, the peak of summer, drinking local wines and eating freshly picked stone fruit. We all sat outside on the first day of the year, in short sleeves, probably drinking rosé, rolling the number around on our tongues, 2012. It sounded good, clean, even. It was going to be a good year and, for the most part, it was. I was sorry to see 2012 roll ever so easily into 2013, with little ceremony or pomp. Thank goodness for Christmas.

Christmas always seems a far better way to say good-bye to one year and welcome in the next, and our Christmas this year, well, we let 2012 go out with a bang. On Christmas Eve, the temperature in the late 20s (celsius), Mum and I made mayonnaise, furiously whisking until perspiration glistened on our foreheads. But it was beautiful mayonnaise, the real deal, a shiny yellow and a flavour that you just want to keep in your mouth.

The next day was hot, fan yourself with your napkin hot – the hottest Christmas day in Wellington since 1934. We started with fresh summer fruit – melon, green and coral pink, nectarines and white flesh peaches, strawberries and plump blueberries. We stuffed a turkey breast then set a leg of lamb onto roast. I stirred a handful of finely diced dill into half of the mayonnaise and wasabi into the other half, just enough to make the back of your throat tingle. We began with a smoked salmon platter – buckwheat toasts, fried capers popped open like crunchy salty flowers, gherkins and oat crackers, and so began our afternoon, a tide like motion of ebbs and flows between the kitchen and the table.


There were scallops marinated with citrus, chilli and coriander – their delicate orange and cream spheres bursting with a soft sweetness and a mere whisper of heat. There was the leg of lamb, rubbed down with rosemary and garlic and roasted to a perfect medium – sweet, savoury, herbaceous – New Zealand lamb at its best. A turkey breast nearly halved, flattened and therapeutically beaten then stuffed with Big Bad Wolf sausage, char grilled capsicum and spinach from our garden. Our favourite Christmas salad, a trio of red, green and white, green beans blanched to a pleasing snap and brighter colour, crumbled feta with plum coloured smudges from the roasted beetroot. Boiled new season potatoes, the joy of summer Christmas, with curls of butter and torn herbs.

Then this salad, my new favourite, roasted carrot and orange salad. It is no secret my love of roasted carrots - their tender sweetness and bright warmth pull me in every time, no matter the weather. The salad is a wonderful mess of shapes, colours and textures – long rectangles and full rounds, burnt orange and near yellow, flecked with dark spices.

In between courses we drank lemoncello, declared how much we all love it, and opened another bottle of Riesling. My uncle Adrian and his partner Nicola made dessert: fresh fruit of every colour, strawberries, grapes, nectarines, peaches and my first raspberries of the season. A dairy free and gluten free trifle that, had we not been told the slight nutty flavour was rice milk custard and the nubbly texture a ground almond sponge, would have fooled us for the more traditional cream and plain flour variety. We ate trifle by the bowl full. There were home made brandy snaps – thin and wafer biscuit like, holding within their lacy edges the taste of real ginger rather than a generic sweetness like the store bought sort. We filled them with cream as we ate them – fill, bite, fill, bite.

It’s mid-January already. Christmas feels long gone and with it, 2012, but the feast we shared that day seems a good a way as any to welcome in a new year. There is not much we can do about the speed at which the years change, except to live each year wholly and fully. Perhaps that is why I loved 2012 so much and, also why I have barely realised 2013 is well under way.

Roast Carrot and Orange Salad
Taken from the Cuisine Christmas issue 2010 The salad is a cinch to make if you happen to have a bottle of orange blossom water lying around, but I’m sure it will be fine without.

600 grams carrots, scrubbed and halved lengthwise
4 tablespoons olive oil
1/4 teaspoon cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon ground cumin
sea salt to taste
4 oranges
1 1/2 teaspoons sugar
1 teaspoon orange water
1/4 cup finely sliced mint

Pre-heat oven to 200°C. Place the scrubbed and cut carrots in a bowl with 1 tablespoon of the oil, cinnamon, cumin and salt. Stir well to combine. Place on an oven tray lined with baking paper and roast for 40 minutes or until tender.

Meanwhile place the juice of one orange in a large bowl with the remaining oil, sugar and orange flower water. Slice the rind and the pith off the oranges and slice into rounds. Set the orange slices to one side.

When the carrots are cooked add them to the orange vinaigrette and set aside. The salad can be served warm or cold so just before serving add the sliced orange rounds and sliced mint, toss well and place on a serving dish.

This salad goes very well with lamb.

December + Chocolate Oat Cookies

It’s nearly Christmas which in a strange contradictory way feels like it should come as a great shock, as in “good grief, what happened to November, or the rest of the year for that matter?”, but at the same time I feel I can wave my hand nonchalantly and say Christmas schmistmas (try saying that out loud, difficult.) Not because I don’t care and not because I don’t crave more than anything a day or two to spend with family and friends eating and drinking, but because when it all boils down, that’s really all we need to worry about in our house – the food and the wine.

In November blog readers around the world were inundated with Thanksgiving recipes and stories and photographs of turkey. Most writers spoke of the comfort that can be found in having the traditional Thanksgiving menu year after year, while other writers posted recipes for the new and the different. After several weeks of pumpkin pie recipes and cranberry sauce and tales of gathering at the family table I had had enough. If I read another turkey stuffing recipe or ideas for how to use the leftovers I might have screamed. My animosity towards Thanksgiving might very well stem from jealousy, I’ll be the first to admit it. I would love another holiday so close to Christmas, another opportunity to cook and eat with the people I love, but I must wait to Christmas here.

So I became eager and excited for the days when our family could plan our Christmas meal. We usually try new things, experiment with new flavours. There are special ingredients, like scallops, that we save for days like Christmas but otherwise the wonderful thing about our Christmas table is the food doesn’t seem too far from our everyday. This makes our Christmas menu sound a bit boring, perhaps? As if quick week night meals were on par with our Christmas fare. The difference between the everyday and Christmas is time – we have all day to prepare our meal. We spend the day pottering and tinkering about in the kitchen, occasionally taking breaks to eat chocolates, pour more bubbles, open presents or lounge in the sun (the joys of a southern hemisphere Christmas). Then, suddenly it’s 2 in the afternoon and our table is full.

I love the rituals of our Christmas, the unstated guidelines our family has about how long to spend in your pyjamas in the morning, how we set the table, the bowls of chocolates or roasted nuts for people to pick at during the day and the annual trip to Kirk’s Christmas shop to choose our decoration. This reflection on Thanksgiving and Christmas, family and food, prompted me to think of my family’s favourite recipes – the ones held constant throughout my life. There are quite a few on this list but whether they were held constant in the reality of my childhood or whether I have fabricated their near perpetual existence in my memory, as I am prone to doing, I cannot say. But they are good and I hope to share them all here, one day. First though is the chocolate oat cookie, revered in Lowe family lore.

All four of us have made this recipe countless times and nearly every time the cookies have turned out differently. Someone may have added too much butter and the biscuits become flat crisps. Other times perhaps the butter and sugar were not creamed properly, or maybe a smidge too much baking powder and we have high, fluffy, scone like biscuits. Every time these biscuits have been good, perhaps made in haste but never without love. These inconsistencies are not a fault of the recipe, instead they are testament that with chocolate, oats and butter there is not a lot that can go wrong.

Sometimes these biscuits have been made with chocolate chips, other times with a roughly chopped block of dark chocolate. A few times we have abandoned the chocolate altogether and used raisins instead. These days roughly chopped Whittaker’s dark chocolate is the way to go; the hunks of chocolate are molten fresh from the oven but hold their shape within a thin seal ready to burst into warm fudge as you bite through. The binding flavour here, what differentiates this cookie from a regular chocolate chip, is not the chocolate used, or the (significant) quantity of butter, or the addition of sweetened condensed milk, but the oats. That nutty, soft flavour I find irresistible in so many things seems to bring me home every time I eat them. Chocolate oat cookies did that perhaps, and for that I am thankful.

Chocolate Oat Cookie

Once you’ve added the flour and the rolled oats, the ratio of dry to wet ingredients seems a bit out and the mixture too dry. Work it well with your hands or a really large spoon and all will be ok.

250 grams butter
3 tablespoons sweetened condensed milk
3/4 cup sugar
1 and 1/2 cups flour
1 and 1/2 cups rolled oats
1 teaspoon baking powder
150 grams roughly chopped dark chocolate

Pre-heat the oven to 180°C. Line a baking tray. Cream the butter, condensed milk and sugar together for at least 8 minutes. Add remaining ingredients and mix well. Cook for 15-20 minutes until a nice golden brown.

Nana’s Boiled Sultana Cake

On 7 June my dear Nana passed away. She was 5 months short of her 90th birthday. I think she was holding out for this milestone; Nana loved any chance to get dolled up. She was a beautiful, graceful and elegant woman. Even when ill in hospital she wore lipstick and had brightly painted nails. The nurses would comment on her smooth, unlined skin, and I like to think they asked her the secrets of her beauty regime. It broke my heart to see her hands, to which she had so diligently applied moisturiser all her life, bruised and blackened with needles and IV entry points.

Until I was fifteen and we moved into Wellington, Nana had always been there, just a short bike ride away. She was simply my Nana who gave us biscuits, always had sweeties and let my sister and I play with her make-up. She was as fit as a fiddle, and as long as she drank gin and played bridge once a week, everything was as it should be. It wasn’t until I grew older that I began to wonder who Nana really was. Who was Nana to her friends? What did they talk about while they drank their tea and played cards? What was Nana like as a girl, a young woman, a new mother? What did she dream of and hope for?

Sadly, it wasn’t until she became ill and we spent hours at her bedside that I began to put pieces of her life together. She was a woman who fiercely loved her husband, Ken. He was tall and handsome with blond curls, and as the story goes, women used to stop and stare at him in the streets. A few months ago, while lying in her hospital bed, Nana told Mum and I of the day her and Ken got married. Her eyes were closed as she spoke, and her voice was slow. They were married at St Andrews on the Terrace at 11a.m on 6 September 1947. Nana said no one came to their wedding; it was a quiet, private ceremony.

Her and Ken returned to the church for their 25th wedding anniversary. They signed the guest book and the chaplain saw they were married in his church 25 years before; he gave them his congratulations. I have walked past St Andrews on the Terrace many times, but now it means something different to me.

Just after Nana died my auntie Barbie came to stay. She told us a story that will inspire the romantic in all of us. My nana was a nurse in Wellington Hospital for a few years while her and Ken were courting. Ken worked on a dairy farm in Otaki, a small town an hour (by modern car, on modern road) north of Wellington. Every Sunday, after rising early for milking, Ken would bike into Wellington and take Nana out for a picnic lunch. After a few precious hours Nana would go back to the hospital and Ken would cycle back to Otaki ready for the evening milk.

On the night Nana died, when mum and I had cried our tears and called the people who needed to be called, we opened dad’s bottle of whiskey. We cooked steak and drank whiskey on the rocks; Nana would have approved. Mum and I started chatting, sharing our thoughts about Nana just to fill the quiet, really only the things we already knew – how she died without having had a gin and tonic in months; and that she would most certainly not miss the hospital food. But then mum told me that Ken taught Nana to cook. When they began their married life Ken showed Nana the basics: soups, stews, how to re-use leftovers, and maybe a basic cake. I like to think of a young newly-wed couple in their farmhouse kitchen cooking, of both donning an apron and preparing a meal together.

When I think of Nana in the kitchen I think of her boiled sultana cake: plump sultanas held within a dark, loose-crumbed batter. It is a satisfying cake, warming and hearty and seems to hark back to farmhouse kitchen days. But, dare I say it, a slice for breakfast would be a good idea; this cake is light and sweet from sultanas. One day when I was 9 or 10 I biked over to Nana’s house to ask for the recipe. She handed me a piece of paper, brown with an illustration of kitchen instruments along the top. Nana dictated the recipe to me and in my newly learnt cursive, I wrote it down. I’m not sure why I remember this so clearly, perhaps it seems like a definitive grandmother-granddaughter experience: the sharing and passing on of recipes.

And so now I share it here. This cake is perfect for a large crowd, a cut and keep sort of cake. We made this cake a few weeks ago when we had friends over to honour Nana. She would have like it: we drank bubbles and gin and tonic. There were beautiful cheeses and red grapes, little sandwiches and savouries. Nana would have held court at one end of the room, gin in one hand and probably my hand in the other.

Boiled Sultana Cake

450 grams sultanas
225 grams butter
3 eggs
2 cups sugar
2 1/2 cups flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
a few drops vanilla essence

Pre-heat the oven to 180°C and line a large round tin. Place sultanas in a pot and cover with water. Bring to the boil and simmer for 5 minutes. Pour off most of the water, leaving a few tablespoons. Chop the butter into the sultanas and leave to melt.

In a separate bowl beat the eggs with the sugar for a couple of minutes, or until slightly thick and pale. Stir in the vanilla. Add the egg mixture to the sultanas and butter, then add the flour and baking powder. Stir until well combined.

Bake 1 hr 10 minutes, but no longer than 1 hr 15 minutes.

A Simple Cake Base

 My mother is not much of a sweet dessert person. She enjoys the flavour of ginger, vanilla, lemon, raspberries and blueberries. If my mother has chocolate it is dark and bitter with cocoa. She would be perfectly happy with a strong piece of cheese, a few oat crackers and maybe a handful of grapes or slices of firm pear.

When it comes to cakes, simple is best. Fruits are the stars of these cakes: pears, plums, oranges or apples. They are very rarely big cakes, never the sort with a few centimetres of icing on top. They are of the understated flat variety, like wide discs. Perhaps with a drizzle icing, a shake of icing sugar, or nothing at all.

For my mother’s birthday last week I made Nigel Slater‘s English Apple Cake from his book, The Kitchen Diaries. This is perhaps my most loved cook book. It is simple in its progression through the year. A northern hemisphere year but easily translated. In February there is slow roast lamb with chickpea mash, a treacle tart, a recipe for sausage and black pudding with baked parsnips. In May there are orange and ricotta pancakes, a white bean and tarragon soup and salmon and dill fishcakes. The book is written like a diary, each recipe has an introduction; the inspiration for the recipe, or what occasion it marked. Some entries contain no recipe at all but are titled “A feast of plums” or “An extravagant supper of rare beef, red salad and cheeses.” I love that the word supper describes nearly every dinner dish in the book. Let’s have supper.

The English Apple Cake I made for my mother was perfectly fine. It was light and reasonably moist. The cake itself had the pleasing taste of a simple butter cake while the apples on top were slightly stewed and sweet all of their own accord. But I wanted something a little bit more. There is a reason why most apple cake recipes call for cinnamon, mixed spice, or ginger, or chopped dates, broken walnuts, or rolled oats and brown sugar; apple cakes are better with these flavours.

So I made another cake. The equal parts of butter to sugar to flour is a simple cake base to work with and embellish as you please. Apple and Ginger this time, perfect for a blustery autumn day. The warming smell of ginger and the sweet scent of apples was almost overwhelming. It was maple syrupey and slightly heady with spices. This cake was for our friend Jason on his birthday. We had a wonderful birthday dinner on Monday night: a Pegasus Bay riesling with blue cheese and brie to start, then Ollie and Jason’s famous roast chicken and this little cake for dessert with sloppy whipped cream.

We lit birthday candles, Jason made a wish, and then it was gone. This cake barely touched our plates. My mother (and Mr. Slater) would enjoy it.

Apple and Ginger Cake
Adapted from Nigel Slater

130 grams butter
130 grams brown sugar
2 eggs
130 grams plain flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 tablespoon ground ginger, plus 1 teaspoon for apples
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1 small knob of fresh ginger, finely grated
2 medium apples, un-peeled & diced
juice of half a lemon
2 tablespoons sugar, brown or white
1/2 cup roughly chopped crystallised ginger

Pre-heat oven to 180°. Line a small, shallow round or square tin of about 24 cm. Cream butter and sugar together until lighter in colour, about 4-5 minutes. Add eggs, one at a time. Beat well after each addition. Sieve dry ingredients and stir through the mixture until just combined. Scrap mixture into tin. Set aside.

In a separate bowl toss together diced apples, lemon juice, sugar and the extra ground ginger. Sprinkle apples on top of the cake with the chopped crystallised ginger. Bake for 45-50 minutes until the batter is golden at the edges and the centre is no longer gooey.

Serve warm with thick yoghurt or whipped cream.

Baci di Dama

When my sister first moved to Central Otago to begin her summer working on Felton Road vineyard she had no idea what to expect, and neither did we. We were not familiar with the environment: we did not know the roads she would be driving, or the house she would be living in, or the spectacular scenery she would be surrounded by at the vineyard. From Wellington we could only remind her to wear sunscreen and make sure she was eating something other than toast.

Georgie made these biscuits during her first few weeks of work to take to the vineyard and share with the other workers. I thought it was a good sign she was baking for other people rather than to comfort herself in moments of anxious self doubt and homesickness with half a dozen biscuits.

Last week Georgie was home and my family spent the week cooking and eating and drinking together. It was a good week. Georgie and I made Baci di dama on Monday evening while Mum cooked a piece of aged sirloin (aged sirloin on a Monday night!!). We drank bubbles, ate cheese and Dad conducted a little wine tasting. These biscuits are very easy to make and I imagine they would be more so without all the distractions of wine tasting and bubbly drinking and cheese eating.

Baci di dama means lady kisses in Italian. Eating these biscuits, though, I would liken them more to a tenderly spiky kiss from a softly bearded gentlemen. They are not the sort of satin pillow softness of, say, a mother’s kiss, but they do have a delicate crumb and crunch to them. Ground almond adds a more interesting note than a normal yo-yo biscuit, the sort made with mostly butter and icing sugar.

When you make these biscuits, wherever you are in the world, whoever you are with, bearded gentlemen or little ladies, know that they will be enjoyed by all.

Baci di Dama
These biscuits can be sandwiched together with chocolate or Nutella. I think an almond butter cream could be nice also.

100grams butter
1/2 cup caster sugar
1 cup ground almonds
3/4 cup flour

Chocolate filling:
100grams chocolate
2 tablespoons butter

Preheat oven to 180°C and line a baking tray with baking paper.
Beat the butter and sugar together until light and creamy.
Stir in the flour and ground almonds until a stiff dough. (Initially the mixture might look like bread crumbs, just keep working it quickly until smooth).
Form walnut sized balls and place in the oven for 12-15 minutes or until golden.

Melt the chocolate and butter in a heat proof bowl over simmering water. Allow to cool and thicken. Once biscuits and chocolate have cooled, sandwich biscuits together with chocolate mix, or filling of your choice.

Thank you for the photos and recipe Georgie, x.

Christmas

Christmas truffles with tea

My father finishes most meals in our house in much the same way. If one of us says, “oh, I’m quite full.” He will reply with “You’re not a fool, Harriet.” We respond with a comment about our hilariously witty father and everyone has a chuckle and rolls their eyes. A strange family joke that secretly I hope will continue for many years to come. My father will then turn to my mother and sort of shake his head in disbelief at his empty plate and say, “We do eat well in this house.”

Christmas, for us, is a celebration of not only beautiful food, but the beautiful food we eat all year round. Simple, seasonal ingredients prepared in a relatively straightforward way – never too much of a stretch from what we would eat on a normal weekend.

One of my earliest food memories of Christmas is eating croissants with butter and raspberry jam and freshly squeezed orange juice for breakfast. Even for just the four of us we drank our orange juice out of the crystal flutes and the jam was spooned into a little white dish. We set the table with the damask cloth, my sister and I taking great care to not let jam dollop onto it. Normally we were still in our pjs, wrapping paper strewn across the floor and the Mariah Carey Christmas album humming softly in the background.

The day moved slowly from one meal to the next. One year for an entrée we had avocado halves with smoked salmon draped around the dip in the middle. I must have been one of the only children to look forward to Christmas day if only to eat avocado and smoked salmon.

At about 2 o’clock we sit down to lunch: a ham, with orange marmalade glaze; sometimes a beef fillet or a piece of lamb; new seasons potatoes dripping in a minty butter; and a green salad, often with the first cherry tomatoes of the season and crisp, peppery radish. I do love a summer Christmas.

Cake mix in the summer sun

There is dessert: a trifle, or cheesecake, or tiramisu. Or simply raspberries and chopped strawberries left to macerate in icing sugar for a half hour served with citrus-spiked, softly whipped cream.

But the real event, the part that truly welcomes Christmas into our house is the cake. It is an historic event – my mother has been making this cake since 1976. It is an Alison Holst recipe and the book includes other such 70s delights like mock chicken savouries and a scramble eggs with a tin of spaghetti. The pages are brown and slightly faded with grease stains in the top right corners.

Every year my mother tells the story of the year she forgot the raisins. She had meticulously cut the papers to fit the tin, measured all the ingredients and mixed everything together. She placed the cake in the oven only to turn around and find the bowl of raisins sitting on the bench. She pulled the cake out of the oven, scooped the mix out, scraped the gooey batter off the paper and stirred through the raisins. It worked out fine; the cake is a keeper.

As the cake goes in the oven Mum always says, “Go get the brandy.” I like the pop as the cork is pulled out. I like the feel of the glass bottle: it is like beach glass washed smooth by tides. I lift the bottle to my nose and inhale deeply. I like to feel my torso shake and my neck stiffen with the strain of breathing brandy fumes so intensely.

When the cake comes out of the oven we gather around. We meausre a quarter of a cup and pour it on the piping hot cake. The alcohol fizzes and bubbles. We all lean over the cake, inhaling so deeply our nostrils feel singed and we all stand up spluttering and coughing. We lean in for another hit; Mum pours on another slosh of brandy. Mariah Carey continues to fill our house…

two year old, brandy infused fruit mince

We do eat well in this house! Merry Christmas