Piña Cola-di-da Cake

Picture by Nadine of Nadine Bakes

Last year I baked this coconut and pineapple chiffon (Piña Cola-di-da) cake for a cake competition (hence the "action shot" below). Cake competitions are pretty scarce in the Netherlands, why I do not know. But when I got wind of one relatively closeby, at a food festival, I hád to participate. So I went out to Nadine's house, who lives near where the festival is held, and together we baked our cakes. The competition was judged by the Dutch Bake Off winner, as well as a Michelin star restaurant chef, a professional baker and a lady with a good palette - I'm not making this up, she was introduced that way. You're all probably dying to know whether I won - well I didn't, and neither did Nadine unfortunately. That didn't spoil any of the fun however. It is just incredible when you get around people who understand what you're talking about and who are into the same thing as you, whether it's baking or (in my case) medieval books. This year, I'll be entering the competition again, I'm not quite sure what I'm going to bake as of yet. I am leaning towards a tart. Yes that is entirely possible and okay, since the Dutch word for cake ("taart") is also used for pies and tarts!

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Honey and Vanilla Bundt Cake

I'm not a big fan of honey. There, I said it. You might be awfully confused right now, but it's just that I cannot eat honey in its purest form. My dad is a beekeeper, and when I was young I got to smell large quantities of honey. Honey has to be "swung" out of the honeycomb in a centrifuge and is then transferred into large barrels fitted with a spigot (to make filling the honey pots easier). The honey in those large barrels smells pretty horrible. I won't go into details, because this is a blog where things are supposed to be Yum (with a capital Y!). Luckily, when I bake with honey, its best qualities are revealed. As they are in this Honey and Vanilla Bundt Cake, which is bursting with vanilla and honey-caramel flavor.

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Sourdough Ciabatta

Ah, the joys of Pinterest! Somewhere last week, I noticed a big spike in my statistics. My Apple and Vanilla Tartes Fines were viewed A LOT. Wondering where all that traffic came from, I found out a lot of it came from Pinterest. Apparently, Pinterest users, some with more than 3 million (!) followers, had pinned my recipe on their boards en masse. It felt really good, and blogger-affirming, to have taken a picture and produced a recipe which was good enough to have stood out in the Pinterest haystack of food pictures. So thank you, Pinterest users!

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Dried Plum Tart with Crème Fraîche Filling

I'm baking in the Frisian motherland again! Yesterday, I moved all my things from Leiden (visit if you're on vacation in the Netherlands, it's awesome for tourists) and stuffed everything back where it belongs. Mostly in the kitchen, as you might have guessed! Turned out that while I was gone, some teeny tiny bugs had taken over my baking cupboards, and so I had the "pleasure" of throwing out loads of baking ingredients. I cleaned everything out and got rid of those nasty intruders. It took me quite a while to vacuum and scrub, so I decided to treat myself to a yummy bake today. Enter this dried plum tart!

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