Chocolate Mousse Ice Cream

Another treat for chocolate lovers. It’s easy to make and it’s one ice cream that doesn’t need a professional machine to make it creamy and smooth. The chocolate does that easily.
Stuck in the middle of my copy of Gaston Lenôtre’s inspiring and beautifully detailed Lenôtre’s Ice Creams and Pastries, is a sheet of yellow copy [...]

Chocolate And Pecan Tart

The most time-consuming part of this dish is making the pastry. But if you’re an organised soul, this can be rather soothing. If you’re not, making pastry and cakes is the only time you should be.
This is the classic dish of the post food-processor era. It’s quite possible to do everything involved with this tart [...]

Passionfruit Mousse

No matter where you are, you can grow a passionfruit vine. Plant and wait, and pick and pick and pick and pick.
Passionfruit is one of those rare products of which you never get tired. Eat it fresh, crunching those delicious seeds as you go, or use its juice to flavour creams and custards and jellies [...]

A Simple Butter Cake: One For The Fridge Door

This heralds a change of life or, at least, a grasp of commonsense while baking. The rules you learn baking can apply to the rest of your life. The beauty of this recipe is that once you make the measures, the whizzer performs all the hard work.
I hate making cakes. This is cooking by routine, [...]

Mango Lassi

This is something of an Indian milkshake. It comes from Gopal Kulkarni, of Melbourne’s Bombay Brasserie restaurant. It’s a terrific hot day drink, and great for breakfast any day.

500 g fresh yoghurt
300 g mango pulp, sliced from the seed, or 1 x 425 g can mango, including juice
100 g caster sugar (less if using canned)
1 [...]

Mum’s Lamingtons

You might need to double the mix if you have a large tin. The recipe calls for a lamington tin, which is a rectangle with reasonably high sides. Remember, the mix will rise somewhat. The cake base is the same as A Simple Butter Cake: One For The Fridge Door.

½ cup good quality cocoa, sifted
½ [...]

Apple And Nectarine Tart

There are thousands of apple pie recipes; chunky apple pies, pies filled with purees, pies with lids and pies without. There are pies mixed with pears and quinces and dried fruits. And there’s this one, mixing two of the great fruits of autumn.
Autumn is the perfect time for fruit pies. When the nights get longer, [...]

Muesli with strawberries, bananas and coconut milk

Once I started to think seriously about breakfast, questions started popping up here there and everywhere.
Should we eat breakfast at all? Contradictions galore here from a stream of experts. When I was young I was sure the first meal of the day should be considered a visit to the fuel pump. Fill ‘er up. This [...]

A cake of rhubarb

Rhubarb, you might have noticed, is one of my favourite fruits. Well, it’s not really a fruit, but a stalk, but that’s for botanists. If you eat it like a fruit, then to me it’s a fruit, which makes a tomato a vegetable, although it’s a fruit, and who cares anyway?
Whatever it is, I have [...]

Cold rhubarb souffle, cream and air

I was cooking for my daughter’s first birthday, and wanted to provide something the mature three- and four-year-olds could go ooh and aah over and then stick their fingers in, causing parents to scold; something that would have them lining up for seconds. I went for a cold rhubarb souffle, light as a feather, held [...]