Beef and truffle pie


Inspired by the Taste magazine’s “Cook the Cover” feature in June for a Beef and Cheddar pie, I made another with tender beef and truffle cream – I have a fond memory of a simple but elegant fettuccine with truffles at Ortolana and wanted to replicate that flavour. A few weeks ago at Sabato I came…

Vanilla Bean Macarons with buttercream


I have been making all sorts of crazy flavours lately and my colleague requested her favourite flavour – vanilla.  A good vanilla dessert calls for good quality vanilla bean, not any of the imitation stuff. I’ve used seeds from vanilla bean to flavour the shells and then a Heilala vanilla paste to flavour the buttercream….

Salted Caramel Macarons


It happened to be my work’s third birthday a few weeks ago and in celebration I made these aqua blue macarons and paired them with my all time favourite – salted caramel filling. I might have to make a salted caramel cake next, such is my addition to the salty sweet caramelly  flavours. Watch this…

Black Forrest Macarons with freeze-dried plum powder


I wanted to introduce a secondary crunchy element to my macarons and was toying with the idea when I came across some Cadbury Berry Forrest chocolate. It had jelly and biscuit pieces in the block – perfect! As mentioned in an earlier post I love adding freeze dried powders to macarons. I added plum powder…

Milo Macarons


This one is for the kids. Remember the controlled drink dispensers in the home room at school? I used to put like 6 clicks of milo into the foam cup with a tiny splash of hot water, just enough to form a thick paste. I would have this as an afternoon “pick me up” during…