Week 40: A Sweet arrival

Week 40 brought a much anticipated cookbook in the mail (I know! I have a problem!): Sweet by Yotam Ottolenghi and Helen Goh. I am a huge fan of the other cookbooks from Ottolenghi. When I found out that he would be putting out a dessert cookbook, I was excited to the point of pre-ordering. I am not typically a pre-ordering kind of person. Well, of course I read it through (twice) the day it arrived and I must say that it does not disappoint! So many recipes on the mental docket for future bakes. Ahem, rolled pavlova, neapolitan bundt cake, and various things involving figs.....

Lavender shortbreads

First things first, though. For this week, I needed to be mindful of the season and wanted to do something with the sweet lavender that was growing outside the back door. Mary Berry to the rescue! I threw together some of her lavender shortbread cookies with a combination of my sweet (British) lavender and some dried lavender buds. I seemed to have gotten the proportions just right and the cookies were not too "soapy." The sugar on the outside of the cookies gave them a nice crunchy note. Not sure if I like the rectangles or not. Maybe a nice oval shape would be more appealing.

Cardamom-tahini pistachio shortbread resurrection

I also made another batch of the cardamom-tahini and pistachio shortbreads that had met their untimely demise. They were so tasty that it seemed imperative that the team get to have a taste. (However, it appears that the replacement brownies that were provided were a huge hit, as well. So maybe all's well that ends well?) I was a smidge too lackadaisical with this batch and let it brown probably just a touch too much in the oven so the end result was a bit drier than the first batch. Still delicious.

Bake. Fail.

Oh the humanity!

Finally, I just couldn't help myself and decided to make one of the recipes from Sweet. Since one of our ultimate frisbee teammates is gluten-free, I decided to try my hand at the almond and coconut cake from the cookbook in order to bring a treat that she could actually partake of. Despite every single alarm bell going off in my head and the additional obvious warnings in the instructions, I insisted on making this cake in one of my fancy Nordic Ware Heritage loaf pans. I thought to myself: "The pattern would look so nice! It would be great to drizzle leftover caramel into those rivulets! I can make this work!" In case you're not familiar, almond flour based concoctions are super sticky. And patterned bundt/cake tins are super prone to sticking. So, guess what, the cake stuck. No amount of coaxing, nudging, careful wiggling, and outright thumping was going to get this thing out of the pan in one piece. Bake Fail. But I packaged up all the little pieces and brought them for the team, as well. The cake was extremely moist and delicious - tasted a bit like the filling of some of those coconut buns you can get in the Chinatown bakeries. And the teammate that this cake was intended for didn't even make it to the game to witness the failure. Best of all, in my new cookbook I now have the following note to myself:

(I'm the dummy. The dummy is me.)