Sicily

Since my last post I've had a birthday, been on holiday and done much baking. I just forgot to blog about it... 

Firstly, one of my best friends bought me the Cox Cookies & Cake book as a birthday present. I'd looked at it in a bookshop a while ago and thought it was full of glamorous and delicious cupcakes. There are so many recipes I want to try, but I decided to start with the black forest soft cookies recipe. I adore soft, chewy cookies and cherries are the king of all fruits, so it had to be done. The bitter chocolate really goes well with the kirsch soaked cherries and they keep well because they're meant to be soft. I slightly overcooked them, but it means I've resolved to buy an oven thermometer before I attempt macarons. My husband bought Pierre Hermé's Macarons book for me. I've been waiting for it to be translated to English for a couple of years, so I'm looking forward to trying out a recipe!

 

We finally managed to book a holiday, once I'd got round to renewing my passport and we could decide where we wanted to go. As we'd left it so late, it needed to be somewhere that would still be warm. In the end, we chose Siracusa in Sicily. We'd seen a few different parts of Italy, very briefly when on a cruise a couple of years ago, but not really explored it any more than that. Obviously the ice cream appealed to me, to start with, then I discovered all kinds of Sicilian delicacies that sounded right up my street.

 

Cannoli are great and we managed to eat three while we were there. They're little tubes of fried pastry, filled with a sweet ricotta cream. I thought the filling would be overwhelming and sickly, but it was really lovely. We managed to squeeze in an extra one before going home because our flight was delayed by three hours. The ice cream was amazing too. Flavours tried were cannoli (of course), cinnamon, coconut, watermelon, mandarin, cherry and zuppa inglese, which is supposed to be English custard/trifle flavoured. Oh and the hot chocolate! The richest, thickest hot chocolate I've ever had.

When we got home, I was instantly missing the cakes and ice cream. We had bought some Sicilian lemon cream before we left, strangely enough, so I knew I had to make something to complement that. I've never made a traditional tarte tatin before, just a savoury tomato & caramelised onion one. It's such a classic bake that I'm surprised I haven't made it before really. It took a while to peel and slice all the apples, but on the whole it was easier than expected. It did annoy me slightly that I felt my neatly arranged apples move when trying to tip it out onto a plate. It also didn't look very caramelised, unlike some other tarte tatins I've seen. I used a Mary Berry recipe, but I might be tempted to try another if I ever made it again. It tasted nice anyway, which is the main thing.