It’s still rhubarb season for a little bit longer. I was thrilled to see my modest little rhubarb plant emerge this year. I would love to have a rhubarb patch and harvest lots of rhubarb, but we don’t have room for that, so I planted just one rhubarb plant last year in a large planter in our teeny back yard. It produced just a bit this year so I only pulled a few stalks to make this cobbler. I’m crossing my fingers that it will be more robust and plentiful next year. I combined it with some rhubarb from the market and some raspberries, fresh or frozen would both work. 

This is just a wee little cake for when you need a bit of cake and you don’t want a giant one hanging around for days afterwards. It makes six pieces, a perfect little size for a few folks to enjoy, or for one or two hungry people. For me, baking a tiny cake fulfills my childhood longing for an Easy Bake oven, which I always thought seemed like the most exciting possible toy. I never got one, and I suspect in reality, the easy bake treats may have been more than a little underwhelming. But this cake is rich, tender and really chocolatey, with a fudgy, fluffy frosting.

Cream tea means afternoon tea, served with scones, clotted cream and jam. Clotted cream is a bit of a specialty item if you are outside of the UK, but it’s worth finding. It’s thick, heavy, spreadable cream. Look for it in very well stocked supermarkets, in a small glass jar in the dairy case, or in British import stores or other specialty markets. In a pinch you could use whipped cream instead, but I really recommend finding clotted cream if you possibly can.

I love the salty, briny punch that olives add to this easy, crusty, no-knead bread. It feels a bit special, perfect for a dinner party, but it’s easy enough to just make for any time. No-knead bread only needs a thorough stir, rather than a lot of vigorous kneading, and then a slow rise, to form a lovely dough that’s very easy to work with and form into a rustic, country loaf.

Fruit feves part 5: passion fruit

I’m a fan of steam powered pastries. Which is to say, pastries that don’t use a chemical or biological leavener, like yeast or bicarbonate of soda, to rise and develop their texture and shape. Instead they rely on trapping water inside themselves, which in a nice hot oven, creates steam, which expands and blasts them into shape. Like puff pastry, which traps hydrated layers between fat layers, so the steam expands pushing the fat layers apart and generating dozens of puffy, flaky, crispy, tender layers.

Fruit feves part 4: yuzu

All of these Valrhona fruit and nut feves have been good, but I think that yuzu might be my favourite. They are so citrusy, in a way that seems like it should impossible to capture in chocolate. They seem actually juicy, sour and fresh. The other flavours are really good as well, and they do taste so much like each fresh fruit. The snozzberries really do taste like snozzberries.