salted white chocolate lemon almond loaf

I’m well aware that a lot of people have a problem with this word, but there’s no getting around this: this loaf is moist.

The building blocks of many of my day dreams is to come up with a desired flavour combination and then challenge myself to offset it with a contrasting texture to keep things exciting. What’s happening here is pretty obvious: fresh lemon zest highlights the white chocolate swirled through, with the dense texture of the loaf yielded with the ground almonds and further enhanced by the crushed roasted almonds within the cake itself and also on top of the lemon drizzle. For something so simple, it stands up as an elegant afternoon tea (or in this cake, pre-midnight snack) in its own right.

peppermint no-bake slice

Apparently all I like to do is cut things into quadrilateral pieces, because slices (bars) are becoming a bit of a treat theme here. I was vaguely disappointed to discover that beyond my contribution, the only other St. Patrick’s-related adornment to my workplace were some clover-printed socks (concealed with scrubs). I was unintentionally overzealous with the green food colouring when making the peppermint filling, and I initially intended for it to be a rather elegant shade of light pistachio. Not the case. Thankfully the garish colour did nothing to put people off, even a few chocolate-mint naysayers (someone even went as far as to say that things were always more delicious when covered in green icing. I’m not so sure I agree with such hyperbole but gold star for enthusiasm). I was inspired by Jane’s Patisserie for this recipe, but also used what I had on hand to make a slightly more robust filling to the slice, because apparently I like things thick like that.

No bake slices are so easy – they’re pretty much the ultimate method of combining various delicious things, so it’s hardly surprising that these taste good. They’re very forgiving and totally adaptable for whatever you want to stuff them with.

double-glazed banana blueberry cake

This is 100% the result of endeavouring to produce an impressively presented cake with the leftover ingredients I had on hand, and the bananas that needed mashing in the fruit bowl. Given that I had no butter, the cake itself is actually dairy free, and the cream cheese glaze could easily be substituted for a simple lemon drizzle made from icing sugar and lemon juice for it to be such in its entirety. I feel like it’s seriously hard to go wrong with a banana cake destined to be moist (I don’t hate this word as much as I probably should), and the topping brings it to the next level. This is seriously low maintenance baking: I didn’t even bother lining my springform baking tin.