blueberry & lemon cake with sour cream glaze

"Hey, Alanna, will you put up that recipe for the lemon and blueberry cake?"

"Why, yes, Sally. Yes, I can."

You know it's a good thing when people ask for the recipe. If you're not convinced just by the demand, my question to you is this: how delicious would you like your house to smell? 100 deliciouses? Okay. Now bake this cake. It is one of those fragrant, buttery, homely cakes that you'll want to eat out of the hot tin with a fork. But don't do that, because it needs to cool down and be turned out to be iced, and everyone (especially my mother) knows that icing is the best part.

a wedding: serena & dave

Check it! A bright and breezy wedding with rich corals, pale green gum and soft peach dahlias. I had the loveliest time meeting up with Serena for her wedding - thanks for letting me be a part of your day!

Images by Apple Tree Road Photography.
Oh, and there's totally a cake after the jump ; )

whipped dark chocolate ganache

I was baking wedding cakes with my friend Hanna the other day and we were stacking some {secret} caramel mud cakes with layers of white chocolate ganache when we realised the ganache we had made was far too runny to support the weight of the cake. "Oh well, we'll have to make some more", I thought; right as Hanna declared "It's okay, I'll just whip it."So she whipped it... and it was amazing!

Whaaaaaa? I didn't know that was a thing!

Anyway, now I do, and now I want to use it on every cake because it is rich, fluffy and oh so spreadable. I thought I should share it with you, in case any of you lovely people have missed this little phenomenon as well!

a wedding: xenia & simeon

Sometimes my involvement with a wedding is just being there to do whatever bits a pieces need doing on the day. This was one of those weddings, and it was such a joy to be able to hang out at the brides house on the morning of the wedding, making flower crowns & buttonholes, drawing up a seating chart, eating pastries and being a part of the joyous buzz.

[Hopefully] by now you'll recognise the incredible handiwork of my photographer friend & genius, Linda Truong. She just has this way of capturing tender moments, rich colours and dreamy light.

Oh! And I made a cake and covered it in flowers. The mother of the bride bought all the flowers for this wedding by choosing colours that she thought best encapsulated the personality of her daughter - how sweet is that?!

There are tonne more photos after the jump.

hazelnut & chocolate pie

Winter is here, y'all! It is my favourite season in Sydney - it is sunny and crisp and I love it. The chilly air will inevitably make you feel like eating pie. So I thought I'd help you out and give you a delicious pie recipe that you should most definitely make for dessert tonight.

When I think of hazelnut & chocolate together I immediately think 'nutella', and while I love nutella, this pie really doesn't taste much like it. Instead it is a fudgey chocolate filling, with chunks of crunchy hazelnuts inside a short hazelnut crust that is flaky and buttery. Sounds great, right? You'll forgive the not-nutellaness of it, I promise.

Click on for the recipe!

chocolate, marmalade & ginger cake

Feel like something gingery? Something chocolatey? Or maybe some marmalade? I wrote another guest blog over at Life & Co and baked together all these wonderful ingredients - you should pop over there and check out Nia's lovely corner of the internet and bake yourself a cake.

a wedding: susie & jonno

A cake and some flowers that I had the pleasure of working on for this lovely couple.

Photos by Rachel Muller (have a look at her page to see some fun photos she takes of confetti!)

little citrus cakes & browned buttercream

It is no secret that I am obsessed with browned butter. I truly believe it is the best form in which butter can exist. This is one of my all time favourite recipes, I've shared this browned butter pecan pie recipe with you, and I've even written a patronising post on how to brown butter for those who are yet to discover this culinary delight. So simple, so rewarding.

I don't know why the thought hadn't occurred to me - to turn it into icing - but when I stumbled upon it during a casual internet food blog trawl, I discovered that it was an actual thing that people have been doing for years. It is difficult to describe the taste - nutty, caramel-y, a much deeper flavour than your average buttercream. It is very easy to make, and particularly shines when paired with citrus fruits. Try it with some little citrus cakes!

evening flower crowns

Some time ago I had the pleasure of spending the evening with a beautiful bride-to-be and all her fun friends in a room full of flowers. Flower crowns are quite the thing at the moment - and understandably so! They're so fun to wear and surprisingly easy to make. Get yourself some blooms and some floristry wire and you're good to go.

Photos by my incredibly talented friend, Linda. Click for more!

fig tart & a new adventure

I have two very exciting things to share with you today. Number one, I made a delicious tart out of figs and pecans and maple syrup. Number two, I've totally levelled up in the blogesphere game by becoming a guest blogger! (ha, I'm such a dork.)

But seriously, over the last few months I've had the pleasure of meeting and getting to know a whole bunch of creative, blogging geniuses across Sydney. One such lady goes by the name of Nia Neve, and she is proving to be just as cool as her name sounds. She has the most lovely blog and is the mastermind behind the whole #postaparcel operation that has taken instagram by storm. (If you want to learn more about postaparcel click here, here & here.) Little did I know that while I was busy putting a parcel together, Nia was stalking this blog and hatching a plan for me to become a regular contributor to Life & Co. I was seriously so blown away by her proposition and am so excited to work with her.

So, voila! The guest blogging begins with a warm, gooey, autumnal fig tart that is sure to please fig lovers and fig doubters alike. Head on over to Life & Co for the recipe and more pictures!

a wedding: jess & dan

Some floral work I did for a wedding a little while ago. Stunning photography by Jo Bartholomew - I have fallen in love with her photography, so please check her out! 

strawberry & rose petal jam

Strawberries are crazy cheap in Sydney at the moment! 

I grew up in Asia, where we did not have access to any of the colder climate fruits (think berries, peaches, nectarines...). We could eat all the mango, honeydew melon, and coconut we wanted - but berries were not an option. No, berries were the things of fairy tales, the things you ate once you'd travelled the long journey home to the far-off land of Australia. As a result some part of my brain still thinks of strawberries as an incredibly luxurious fruit, bought only in small proportions for special occasions. I've been back in Sydney for twelve years already and I still can't shake the feeling that turning a whole bowlful of beautiful fresh strawberries into a little jar of jam is doing them an injustice! 

But it isn't! Because when the strawberries cost less than a jar of store bought jam, and the jam tastes this good - justice is served in the berry kingdom. This jam is thick, sweet and caramel-ly and would make a great spread for some sourdough toast, but should probably be eaten with whipped cream on some lemonade scones. 

spiced pear & ginger crumble

I love winter.  Oh boy, do I love it. I love a serious, committed winter, where the snow sticks to the ground and it is an invigorating kind of cold that makes your cheeks go pink and makes you wonder whether you still have all ten toes. But at the same time I love winter in Sydney because the breeze is cool and brisk but the sunshine is so warm. You get to sleep under a big cozy doona and wear clunky old ugg boots. It makes running much more pleasant and means you can sit by a fire and drink tea cups full of mulled wine.

And you get to turn winter fruits into crumble. Delicious. I've made a bazillion many apple crumbles, which are always the classic cinnamon-y, caramel-y kind of crumble that is a sure crowd pleaser. But when I was asked to make a crumble for a dinner party, I wanted to make something a little more interesting. 

Behold, the spiced pear and ginger crumble. I was told by guests that it tasted warm and spicy and even a little middle-eastern. All good things. It's up to you if you want to be a little less heavy handed with the spices.  

Have you worked with fresh ginger before? It is ugly. It's covered in this papery bark and comes in all kinds of strange shapes and sizes. Don't be intimidated, it isn't at all difficult to work with. All you need it a vegetable peeler.

panna cotta with raspberry and thyme

Sometimes food is better in single serves - do you agree? 

When I have to share food I often get a case of food anxiety. I feel like I have to eat really quickly if I'm going to get my fair share and end up stressed. I dread the moment when you sit down for dinner in a restaurant and someone in your party says "how about we get a few plates to share?"

No, no, no. I want my own meal, on my own plate, so that I can eat in my own weirdly organised way (I have this thing about piling food neatly on the back of my fork which can be ... time consuming). Just let me be! Okay, the truth is I don't always feel this way. There is definitely something lovely about having a long table of old friends sharing a classic family style feast - but let's just make sure we each have our own plate, why don't we?  

Phew. Lucky for freaks like me this particular dessert is best made in single serves, that way you'll have the best chance of having a panna cotta that will hold its shape. Or you can be lazy, like me, and not even bother turning it out - just eat it right out of the mould. I served these at my mother's 50th birthday and they went down a treat. 

Spiked with real vanilla bean and covered in tangy, herbed raspberries, this panna cotta is easy to love and very easy to make! 

stephanie, the birthday girl (and her incredible wedding).

There are many people in the world who are precious to me, but few that are more precious to me than this girl. Today is her birthday.

Over the years I've had the privilege of going to school with her, singing beside her, writing songs with her, traveling with her, shopping with her, blogging with her, partying with her, road tripping with her, drinking coffee with her (although, weirdly, she orders a hot coffee and waits until it is ice cold before she'll drink it.), wrapping things in brown paper with her, freaking out with her, drinking red wine with her, giggling with her, talking until all hours of the night with her, praying with her and crying with her.

She is an incredible woman of God who is passionate, creative, confident and fiercely loyal, and I am so thankful to have her as a friend.

Although it is hard to chose, I think my favourite time spent with her was at her wedding. It was raw and honest and breezy and just lovely (Steph's all time favourite word). They had it in a little beachside town in a backyard that we transformed together into a magical land. It was this wedding that really started my love for weddings and for which I made my first ever wedding cake.

There are a million things I could tell you about this wedding, but I'll just let the photos speak for themselves. Click, click! 

(Photos by Jes of Ruth&Rose, Flowers by The Sisters)

a purple english garden cake

Oh, look! I made a cake and covered in flowers!

Predictable. Reliable.

This beautiful and massive cake was made for a friends parent's double 60th birthday party. The brief was for layers of dark chocolate and honey lavender cake smothered in white chocolate icing (this recipe to be exact). The flowers: a purple hued English garden. I've never been to an English garden, as I've never been to England, but I guessed that roses, lavender and lisianthus would be about right. I snuck some Australian foliage in there - this is Australia though so it's only fair.

There is not much in this post that you haven't seen before, except that I'll show you a neat little trick on how to secure fresh flowers to a cake.

mojito birthday cake

I woke up the other day remembering that it was a friends birthday. I would be seeing her in two hours and would be a bad friend if I didn't bring her a birthday cake, so I frantically filed through the 'cakes-to-make' list in my head and chose one that I thought was achievable in the short time that I had. Settling on a mojito cake, I dragged myself out of bed and whipped this cake up in no time... And somewhere between adding the single egg, pouring the mixture into a smaller-than-normal tin and seeing the end result I realised that something had gone wrong.

The cake was TINY. It was embarrassingly small for the group of 8 people that were supposed to be consuming it. Not small enough that it could be a joke but definitely not big enough to properly feed everyone. Sigh. Somewhere amid my freak out I checked the recipe book one more time to see what I had done wrong, and there it was, right in the heading, the recipe was for teeny, tiny, mini Mojito cupcakes.

Okay, so it wasn't that bad. We did all get a slice of cake even if it was a tad smaller than the standard sized slice. It was delicious, (like, stupidly delicious) so that made up for it! 

the loveliest of kitchen teas

This is an event that I can take absolutely no credit for. It was mainly the handiwork of my dear friend Caity. But I had to show you because it was oh so pretty. Vintage tea cups, bunting, crocheted table cloths and flower wreaths... I know you've seen them all before, but they still get me every time!

simple rosemary sugar syrup

I love to cook. (Obviously.) But sometimes the urge to cook is just as easily satisfied by making something as simple as a humble sugar syrup.

You can do anything with this kind of syrup. Make a sweet lime and rosemary cocktail, pour it over a butter cake to give it an unexpected twist of flavour and stickiness, or just drizzle it over some fresh fruit. I mixed it through some stawberries to dress up a pavlova.

Directions: Bring 1 cup of water to the boil. Add 2 cups of sugar and 3-4 rosemary sprigs. Stir until the sugar has completely disolved. Allow it to simmer for about 5 minutes giving it time to reduce and infuse, but don't over cook it or you'll end up with syrup that is too thick to drizzle.