Photographer: Margaret Paola Minero
Welcome to my blog centred around baking with delicious and interesting flavour combos as well as textures to uncover unusual bakegood gems. In addition, this blog discovers traditional sweet treats, opening up taste buds to different cultures and flavours from all over the world.
A far cry from traditional French crepes, these crepes are my little spin on a traditional treat with some interesting and complementary flavours.
Originally this bake session was for Almond, Lime, Coconut, Honey, Cinnamon, Cardamom and Raspberry scrolls…wow looking back that’s quite the number of flavours!
The scrolls were nice but the lime, Coconut and Raspberry were by far the most flavour stealing ingredients, making the spices unneeded.
The honey gave the sweetness and almonds the textural crunch, thus played a role in the recipe…however when I redid the scrolls without the spices and changing the volumes of ingredients the scrolls were still not what I was looking for.
The next day when strolling my local shopping community, I had a crepe and as I couldn’t recall the last time I had a crepe I decided to make some myself, incorporating the previous days bake ingredients into the dessert.
The outcome is this super easy, taste-bomb crepe with unusual flavours.
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High protein, healthy good fats (yes it does contain sugar but not a large amount), these bliss balls are super rich and decadent in flavour and texture.
So simple to make with limited ingredients, these treats take a whole of 10 mins max to make.
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Hazelnut Meal
Chia Seeds
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Rose Raspberry and Pistachio Cake
Ok so maybe not the most unusual flavours but this combo of sweet, sour, smoothness, crunch and softness is high satisfying with many texture sensations.
The lemon, raspberry and Greek yogurt tang dull down the potential for a floral overpower, delivering on a beautiful rose undertone.
A delicious and delicate fruity, floral and zesty cake.
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After being given a big jar of jolly ranchers I decided to make a sweet treat with some of the flavours.
The idea was to make fudge with the grape flavoured candy. Following a basic fudged recipe as the base, I didn’t modify the volume of condensed milk enough and ended up with a almost playdough like outcome….
Off the back of this I altered the volume of liquid to candy ratio as well as changed up the flavour to a more unusual taste. While the recipe seemed to work in terms of texture and taste the fudge just seemed a bit boring and not really worth the effort vs. just eating a jolly rancher.
I really did love the taste of the green apple flavour rancher, particularly as apple flavour is so hard to hero (generally it’s overpowered by other flavours).
That took me back to the bake drawing board, where I took inspiration from my last experimental bake and made cupcakes. To change things up a little I opted for lemon in the frosting for a complimentary flavour combo and used jelly crystals for an additional flavour boost.
I must say, the cupcakes are moreish but the frosting is absolutely the star – just superb.
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The randomness of this recipe… I was cleaning out the cupboards this weekend and noticed we had raspberry twists in which have been in the back of the cupboard for forever….
Knowing that we were not going to eat them anytime soon and being stuck in lockdown I decided to experiment with the raspberry twists much like I have in the past with musk sticks, red skin and fizzer lollies.
Taking inspiration from my white chocolate cupcake recipe I incorporated the lollies into the mix. The outcome of this however resulted in a very very dense cupcake bake that drooped in the middle.
Attempt 2 was using my never fail vanilla cupcake recipe with the lollies incorporated into the mix. This time I got great results but the bake was not as flavourful as I would have liked…
Cue adding 50% more buttermilk and 50% more raspberry twists and increasing the bake time, in which resulted in cupcake perfection.
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I know chai syrup is hardly rare/unusual/peculiar, so you ask why is this recipe on this website? It may not be a unique but it took a lot of attempts to get the ingredient ratio to perfection.
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Summer Ricotta Turnover
This recipe came from a desire to experiment with all my favorite flavors rolled into one sweet treat. I wanted a treat that was packed full of flavors, but not only that, flavors that all complemented each other.
The influence was summer flavors, so I started jotting down all the tastes that mean summer to me.
The first thing I thought of was Pina Colada, a reminder of my pre COVID-19 Hawaii trip (hello rim, citrus, pineapple, coconut). But these flavors were nothing usual so I then added cherries, berries and chocolate = flavor mix made from heaven. Lastly, almond to give the mix a new layer and a little mint for added freshness.
Add all these ingredients infused with fresh ricotta and wrapped in puffy pastry and you have yourself a scrumptious easy to make unique treat.
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Orange Peppermint and Chocolate Slice
After making delicious but super easy and hardly challenging chocolate, orange and peppermint cookies I loved the flavour pairing so much I decided to take the flavour to a more layered and textural bake.
Therefore, as a follow up to see if I could replicate the same taste but in a more interesting bake format I decided to make a chocolate cake with orange filling and peppermint icing. Though the bake turned out well the peppermint was quite overpowering unlike the biscuits I had made previously therefore, that taste I was looking for was just not quite there.
Following this I felt if I made a slice that had one layer with all 3 flavours then championed the orange in the middle and topped it with the chocolate and peppermint that maybe the intenseness of the peppermint could work with and not overpower the orange.
Outcome success! It did take a few goes of peppermint and orange ratios to get it right but I think this recipe hits the flavour I was looking for on the head.
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Saffron Cardamom Orange and Almond Profiteroles
This recipe came about off the back of an Indian spiced rice pudding recipe I recently had. Obviously rice pudding and profiteroles are very very different bakes – almost polar opposites, however it was the flavour combo I was influenced by in which I incorporated into my usual profiteroles. Cardamom, orange, almond, saffron and honey are the feature flavours in this bake, in which work complimentary.
I also wanted to make my filling low in fat and super quick therefore instead of the traditional whipped cream, ice-cream or pastry cream filling I have created a skim milk honey-based custard.
Traditionally the pastries are dipped into melted chocolate, however in this instance I have make an icing for a bit of a twist and extra orange hit.
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This recipe came about off the back of a cocktail and an impulse buy, A Midori and Cherry cocktail and a random melon essence purchase with no recipe to use it in.
The cocktail was super delicious but needed an acidic kick and the melon flavour of the liquor got me thinking of making a recipe with the essence I had brought.
Sometimes my recipes are as random as that.
I replaced the Midori with the essence and added lemon to balance the flavours (the sweetness without acid in the cocktail was quite overwhelming). As quite a bit of lemon was needed the recipe had to allow for a high yield of liquid, in which my head went straight to jelly, custard, ice-cream…etc. After playing around with some recipes the ice-cream was a solid winner. Super creamy, easy to make and so tasty with a lovely floral zest.
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Method:
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