Sweet, Mate

So Mate, I thought I'd respond to the above text here, rather than there as I guess I have more to say than thumbs up emoji, though I do want to say that too. 

How exciting that you bought Sweet and how exciting that soon you will have it and soon you will bake from it! I wonder what the first cab off the rank will be. 

I am fully intending to buy it, but I bought this other book recently and have been cooking lots of things from it. 

Do you know this woman, Mate? She is part of that Melbourne food/design scene I guess. She's friends with Gemma. She lives in Brunswick and I follow her on instagram so I feel like I know her in the way one does in these weird times we live in. So when it came to handing over cash for Ottolenghi or Julia, I felt like I should buy Julia first. 

I've made a couple of savory and a couple of sweet numbers from her book and so far they've all been simple and pretty darn delicious. I've been trying to put my finger on what's good about it. When you make a Jamie Oliver recipe or even ottolenghi to some extent, the flavours are super bold and your mouth is having an intense time. It's a wonderful thing. But these recipes seem less reliant on a particular power ingredient and more reliant on some kind of process,  such as a very slow cook for the meaty stuff, or a super long prove for bread and stuff, or olive oil instead of butter for the sweet stuff (how is it that using olive oil in a cake makes it taste somehow more buttery than butter?).  The results are much more mellow and I think I like that. It feels like some kind of superior home cooking. 

I've just made another cake from the book to take to afternoon tea at your Mum and Dad's place, which my Mum is now coming to as well. I think we both know the emoji that goes with that!

Just jokes. 

Just jokes! I love my Mum!

This is the cake, as pictured in the book:

And here it is IRL:

My icing is pink because I used blood orange instead of tangelo. I'll tell you how it tastes later on. 

And here are some points I would like to note about baking.

1. I dislike it when a recipe says not to overmix something. What does that mean and why not? I want an explanation. 

2. I feel really good about myself when I thoroughly grease a cake tin and neatly place baking paper inside, instead of just smearing a bunch of butter in there in a slapdash fashion and and shoving the paper in quickly. 

3. I am trying hard not to eat so much batter/dough, but it's a lifelong problem for me and I think I'll always be in recovery for it.