I had lunch at a friend’s place over the weekend. She happens to make the most divine sweet things – most recently, a Noah’s Ark cake with little sugar animals – monkeys, lions, elephants. Clumsy me, I picked up an elephant to ooh and aah over it, and not only did the head drop off, but half of it’s ear also chipped off! So I don’t think delicate sugar art is really my thing.

Instead, for Habeas Brulee’s theme for SHF #26, I’ve raided my cupboard for some long-unused items. Along with a bag of coloured sugar and some maple sugar chips, I’ve used ye olde faithful icing sugar to decorate a batch of beautifully buttery shortbread biscuits. The biscuit is quite delicate with a nice snap to it, and an enhanced crunch and presentation factor thanks to the colourful sugar crystals. And might I add, a light dusting of icing sugar has managed to cure many a baking mistake of mine in the past. So here’s to the art of sugar therapy..

The recipe for these biscuits comes from Shannon Bennett’s My Vue. Instead of rolling each slice out individually as per the original recipe, I rolled and baked the dough as a large sheet, then stamped out the shapes after the shortbread was baked. The best part of making this, was nibbling on the trimmings!

Shannon Bennett’s Sable Biscuits :

450g plain flour
50g cornflour
400g butter, chopped into dice, at room temperature
200g icing sugar
4 egg yolks
pinch of salt

Preheat the oven to 160’C. Sift the flour and cornflour into a mixing bowl. Make a well in the centre of the flour mixture and add the butter and sugar, work together with your fingertips until no hard lumps remain. Add the egg yolks and salt, drawing in the flour. Work until the dough resembles coarse breadcrumbs. Do not overwork. Roll the pastry into a log and refrigerate for several hours. Cut the dough into 6mm slices and briefly knead each slice. Roll each slice out to a thickness of 3mm; they will be extremely delicate. Place on a greaseproof paper-lined baking tray, allowing space for spreading. Bake for 10 minutes, or until just golden on the edges.

The theme for December’s WBW, hosted by Culinary Fool, is sparklers. A perfect theme, considering it’s summer over here in the Southern Hemisphere, and this summer, you will hopefully find me at any spare moment, on a deck chair with a generous glass of this in my hand : a 2006 Two Hands Brilliant Disguise Moscato.

I was introduced to this gorgeous fizzy little wine fairly recently and since then have been keen to let other people know about it. Pale to clear coloured and made from the white frontignac grape, it comes from the Barossa Valley in South Australia – a region reknowned for it’s wines (Jacob’s Creek and Wolf Blass being among the larger, more well known producers) and Maggie Beer’s Pheasant Farm. At 6.5% alc/vol, it’s a light, fun drink that’s not overly sweet and pairs really well with fruits like mango, lychees, honeydew and muskmelon.

When you’ve just come home from a long day at work, battling the crowds on the train and it’s so hot, the back of your shirt has been sticking to you all day, you’ll be glad to have a bottle of this waiting for you in the fridge!

Cheeeers!

Another strange turn in the weather has left me confused. Do I have something light and summery, or something warm and comforting? I think this braised dish manages to bridge the gap between the two.

The recipe comes my current favourite cook book. Trout fillets (or in my case, salmon, because I couldn’t get trout when I decided to make this) are wrapped in sorrel leaves and flavoured with a mixture of diced tomatoes, capers, anchovies, thinly sliced lemon and chopped herbs. In the oven, these ingredients melt and meld with the fish, infusing it with a beautiful flavour. Extra flavour also comes in the form of the sauce of equal parts olive oil and Noilly Prat vermouth, in which the fish is braised. The crowning glory is a piece of fish crackling, made from the skin off the fillet. The recipe tells you to deep fry it, but I got a really delicious result just from baking it at the same temperature as the fish parcels. After that, all you need are a few small potatoes to mop the remaining sauce up with. Utterly delicious… The only thing that’s stopping me from making this dish again, is having to wait for my sorrel plant to recover before raiding it for leaves once more!