THE ULTIMATE STRESS BUSTER

Yes so my post title might speak volumes to some of you out there- for those who know how therapeutic baking is to fight away stress, and well it just happened to be that I had one of those stressful days and when upon coming back home the eggs, sugar, butter and flour was just calling my name!

The thing is that sometimes in these situations you don't necessarily have all the ingredients at hand and you have to do with what you have. No-fuss baking is what I like to call it. For some reason, apples is something that resides permanently all year long in the kitchen- and although I'm not a huge fan of apple-based desserts, an image I had come accross not too long ago on the Australian Gourmet Traveller website (and just fyi- I dont live in Australia nor am I from there, but when I see their summery dessert features in this cold month of February, it sure makes me want to bring some of their sunshine over to wintery Paris!) caught my attention and it just happened to contain apples.

I skipped the recipe part and just kept the image in my mind, trying to reproduce my own version of what could ressemble what I saw. Okay okay, so mine might not had turned out as beautiful as on Gourmet Traveller, and yes it did not contain raisins or ginger, and it did contain flour even though the original recipe title contains the word "flourless", but the important thing was that everything turned out sweet and lovely and I guess that's what counts, no?

A blend of apples, almonds (another staple ingredient that we have all year round in the kitchen!) and caramel.


Recipe for Apple, Almond & Caramel cake
(for a 20cm diameter round cake mould)

100gr butter
120gr brown sugar + some kept on the side
2 eggs
4 tablespoons caramel syrup
100gr flour
60gr ground almonds
1 teaspoon baking powder
2 medium sized apples, thinly sliced
Almonds, chopped
1 tablespoon melted butter

Preheat oven to 180C. In a bowl, cream the butter and sugar together. Add the eggs and caramel syrup and mix. Follow with the flour, ground almonds and baking powder- mix well. Transfer batter to cake mould lined with parchment paper (or greased & floured), arrange the apples on top and drizzle over the apples the melted butter and finish by sprinkling some brown sugar and the chopped almonds. Bake for 60mins.

SWEET BUTTERY GOODNESS

And so here we go- more cookies. Sweet buttery goodness, cute innocent shaped sables made from a fantastic base recipe that can lead to infinite variations. I went for orange-poppy seeds & caramel-with-a-pinch-of-salt.

Nothing better then a sable with a cuppa tea to comfort us throughout this unbearable winter cold....

Creamy butter with chunky orange zest... sinful, so wrong but so good!

Finally- the poppy seeds I brought back from Budapest came to use! (did I tell you that poppy seeds were all over the place in Budapest?)

I like that the orange zest was chunky

DONE! Fragrant crunchy delicious orange-poppy seed sables!

That's not it... at 2 in the morning (yes you read right- 2 in the morning!) I went down to the kitchen and got back to baking- salted caramel this time! Afterhours baking is the best :)

Base recipe for sables- just 3 ingredients & no eggs!

makes approx 20 sables

180g butter, softened

80g icing sugar

300g flour

Preheat oven to 160C

Whisk butter with icing sugar until creamy. Add the flour until crumbly, then mix by hand to form a consistent cookie dough texture. Roll out, cut out shapes and place on a baking tray lined with parchment paper. Bake for 15 mins. Remove and let cool.

For orange-poppy seed:

add 2 teaspoons of orange zest into the butter & sugar.

add 1 tablespoon of poppy seeds with the flour

For caramel-with-a-pinch-of-salt:

add 3 tablespoons of caramel sauce into the butter & sugar

add 1/2 teaspoon salt with the flour (taste if you feel you want more saltiness)