It’s been a bit quiet round here lately, what with me moving house (twice) and Jo having a baby and moving house (once). I’m living in Rome now, in a rented flat, and it’s taken me a while to get used to not just a new kitchen, but also unfamiliar ingredients (for example, the innumerable types of flour available in Italian that don’t quite correspond to what we use in the UK).

When I did start baking again, mostly I produced old faves. But now I’ve been in Rome nearly three months I felt I really had to try and make a tiramisu, it being the quintessential Italian desert and all.

“But Daniel,” no one is likely to cry, “you don’t like coffee!” to which I reply, yes, but I do like sugar, chocolate, eggs and dairy products, so I’m sure I’ll cope.

I debated buying the biscuits – sponge fingers in British English, ladyfingers in Yankese and biscotti di savoiardi in Italian – but thought, no, I’ve got to do the whole caboodle, so I used this recipe. I could almost hear my old teacher abusing my piping technique.

For the actual tiramisu, I used a recipe from ‘Cucina Romana’ by Sara Manuelli.

Who I am to judge the authenticity of the recipe? A bit of research indicates many use cocoa instead of grated chocoate, and plenty of whipped cream, but this one’s all about the mascarpone and raw eggs, man. (Hence I couldn’t make it last week when my pregnant sister-in-law was staying.) Mascarpone is basically cultured cream, so I’d suggest you don’t really need extra cream.

I scaled it back slightly.

2 eggs
70g sugar, granulated (though caster would be fine)
335g mascarpone
1 and a 1/2 (ish) tablespoons Marsala
20g ish dark bitter choc, grated
10 biscotti di savoiardi / sponge fingers
210g coffee, made fresh

Separate the eggs.
Beat together the yolks with 35g of the sugar until thick and pale.
Gently blend the mascarpone into the egg yolk mix.
Whisk the egg whites to peaks, then blend in the other half of the sugar, the Marsala and half the grated chocolate.
Fold the egg white mix into the egg yolk/mascarpone mix.

Layer half the biscuits on the bottom on a dish and pour over half the coffee.
Cover this layer with half the egg/mascarpone mix.
Make another layer of biscuits, and pour over the rest of the coffee.
Cover with the rest of the egg/marscapone mix.
Sprinkle the remaining choc on top and chill, preferably for at least four hours.

Eat. Eat too much. Make yourself feel slightly unwell.

Moving house, so trying to use up as many oddments as possible. Got a huge tub of cocoa, odd flours, a load of ground almonds, a few flaked almonds and some foul orange and geranium chocolate. These were the result. Unless you really like icky geranium chocolate, I’d avoid it and use orange choc, or even just a good dark choc, and add some orange zest, if you have any oranges.

It was experimental, and I played around with it as I went along, so this just approximate.

Preheat the oven to 160C (or 140C ish fan oven).

Cream together 100g unsalted butter with 120g sugar (I used soft brown, as that’s all I had left, but other recipes  use caster or granulated).
Beat in two eggs and 60g (or 60ml if you insist) of orange juice. It curdled, but don’t worry about that.

Sieve together 100g flour (I used rice flour with some SR, but preferable to use plain), 80g cocoa and 3/4 t of baking powder.

Beat a little of the sieved mix into the creamed mix, then when it’s cleared, fold in the rest. Fold in 100g of ground almonds.

Fold in couple of tablespoons of flaked almonds (though blanced almonds, roughly chopped would be preferable), and around 60g of roughly chopped chocolate.

Divide the mixture into two, and form it into logs. Put the logs on baking sheets and bake for around 30 minutes.

Slice the loaves into pieces about 15mm thick, and put these back on the baking sheets. Bake for about 10 minutes, then turn over and bake for another 10. You’re drying out the biscuits, to make them hard and crunchy – perfect for dipping in your coffee or whatever.

Oh, and for etymology geeks, biscotti, like the English word “biscuit”, ultimately derives from the Latin bis – “twice” – and coquere – “to cook”. So, “twice cooked”. Or indeed, twice-baked.

Apologies for crappy mobile snap.

(Oh, and Jo – the title isn’t busting the line for me. If it is for you – tough! I don’t want to put “choc” instead of “chocolate”!)

This one’s from an old Katie Stewart recipe book my mum used a lot when I was growing up. It’s a cake we used to make a lot, but I’ve not eaten it for years. So we revisited it on my dad’s birthday a few days ago. We were hard at work shifting scalpings around for the garden, so this one was perfect as it’s quick to make. Stewart says, “This delicious cake with a crunch, sweet topping is quickly made at short notice.”

Preheat the oven to 190C.

For the cake:
225g self-raising flour
1 t baking powder
85g butter
85g caster sugar
1 egg
142g milk

Sieve together the flour and BP.
Crumble in the butter.
Stir in the caster sugar.
Combine the egg and milk, then stir that into the dry ingredients.
Beat to a smooth batter.
Put the batter in a greased, 22cm (9in) round loose-bottomed tin.

For the topping:
Combine 30g SR flour with 60g of soft brown sugar.
Melt 30g butter, then add this to the flour/sugar and mix with a folk to create a lumpy, crumbly mix.
Put this mix on top of the batter.

Bake 40 mins. Cool 5 mins in tin, then turn out and cool completely.

Went for some old-school doily action with this one.

The recipe is from Dan Lepard in the Guardian – his original version is called “Hemp and ginger cake“, but as I’ve got so many different types of flour, and am hoping to move house soon, I didn’t want to add hemp flour to my collection too. So while his recipe calls for150g plain flour and 75g hemp flour, I used 100g plain flour, 50g wholemeal flour (stoneground at the watermill in Winchester), and 75g of rice flour.

Also, his recipe uses a cream cheese icing, but I just went for a basic buttercream filling, and the aforementioned doily and icing sugar pattern on the top.

The soft dark brown sugar and treacle give the crumb a lovely colour, while the crystallised ginger is great for chewy chunks of flavour.

Still had some ganache left over in the freezer from the wedding cake, so these seemed like a good idea. Very pleasant they are too. The biscuits are fairly crumbly when you bite them, and they use peanut butter, giving them a slight saltiness, which contrasts nicely with the richness of the ganache.

They’re from a series of biscuit recipes Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall did in the Guardian Weekend magazine. All the recipes can be found here, but here’s this one in particular. It includes a recipe for ganache:

For the biscuits
240g plain flour
2 tbsp cocoa powder
½ t baking powder
¼ t salt
180g butter
140g smooth peanut butter
100g caster sugar
100g light brown sugar
1 egg
1 t vanilla extract
For the ganache filling
100g double cream
200g dark chocolate
30g butter, softened

Sift the flour, cocoa powder, baking powder and salt into a bowl. In a separate bowl, beat the butter and peanut butter until smooth. Add the sugars and beat until light and fluffy. Add the egg and vanilla, beat until smooth, then stir in the flour until well combined. Pat into a disc, wrap in clingfilm and refrigerate for an hour or two to firm up, as this is quite a soft dough.

Heat the oven to 170C. Line baking sheets with parchment (you may need to bake these in batches).

Lightly dust a work surface with flour, and pin out the dough to about 4-5mm thick. Cut into circles with a 5cm plain biscuit cutter. Place on the baking sheets about 2cm apart, and bake for 15-17 minutes, until the edges are slightly darkened. Transfer to a rack to cool.

Ganache: In a small pan, gently heat the cream until bubbles appear at the edges. Break the chocolate into small pieces and put in a bowl. Pour the hot cream over, stirring to blend, then add the butter a bit at a time, stirring until the mixture is smooth.

Leave to thicken slightly (can speed this up by putting it in the fridge), then pipe or spread the ganache on to half the biscuits, and sandwich together.

The drizzled white chocolate isn’t as elegant as it probably should be, but this was still quite a handsome cake. Especially in this nice pic, c/o Fran.

The source recipe used fresh fruit on top, but as I had some freeze-dried raspberries, I used some of them instead – and added a handful to the batter too.

Grease and base-line a 2lb loaf tin and pre-heat the oven to 180C.

In a bowl, mix together:
150ml natural yogurt
75ml corn oil
3 eggs

In another, large bowl, sieve together:
175g plain flour
2 t baking powder
Then stir in:
75g ground almonds
160g caster sugar

Add the liquid to the dry and beat till combined.

Stir in:
25g poppy seeds
And a handful of freeze-dried raspberries, if you have such a thing…
You could also add white choc chips.

Bake for an hour, or until a skewer comes out clean.

Cool in the tin for 10 mins, then take out and cool fully on a wire rack.

Melt 65g white chocolate in a bowl set over a pan of simmering water, then drizzle that onto the cooled cake. With berries – fresh or freeze-dried.

Nice. But not as nice as Jo’s lemon drizzle cake.

A bloody great cake, Lawrence, Ivy and Jo, on the big day – 19 December 2010.

The cake itself was based on my old fave recipe, Mollie Katzen’s Cardamon coffee cake, which I’ve used for previous wedding cakes. I’ve continued to tweak the recipe (for example, reducing the butter in my metric conversion slightly), and in this cake we did alternating layers – chocolate and cinnamon, with a layer of nuts and plain choc in the actual sponge; vanilla and cardamon, with a layer of nutes and white chocolate in the sponge.

The whole lot was covered in plain choc ganache (I made 3.5kg of the stuff… didn’t need it all!), and decorated with chocolate leaves (plain and white), madewith bay leaves from the garden, as well as sugar paste ivy leaves (all made by Fran). The ivy around the bottom is silk.

Another delicious Dan Lepard recipe, originally published in The Guardian Weekend magazine in October 2007. This is a pale cousin to brownie, utilising the reliable flavour combination of white chocolate and banana, and also including a delicious Brazil nut praline.

Here’s the recipe, on Dan’s forums.

I disagree with a few of the instructions in his recipe though. For example, I don’t like to chop up the praline “finely” – seems a shame to not have nice chunks of nut in the finished result.

I find it easier to blend the mix if you mash the bananas first.

Also, he says line the tin with foil – huh? That baffles me, as foil sticks and tears. Line the tin with baking parchment to make life a lot easier.

And finally, watch that baking time – 35 mins is a too long for my oven, even when it’s set to 170C; it dries it out too much. You want that nice chewy, slightly under-baked texture like with a good brownie. (Yep, this batch is slightly over-baked!).

Love this cake, and I know Jo and Lawrence similarly love cakes involving ground almonds and chocolate, so it’s surely a good choice to make for the day after Jo’s birthday.

It’s probably not a proper Sachertorte - that apparently has two layers of cake, filled with apricot jam. Instead, it’s a tried and tested recipe from the marvellous Unwrapped: Green & Black’s Chocolate Recipes, which the book credits to someone called Lorna Wing.

Grease and line a 23cm springform tin.

Preheat the oven to 180C.

Then, melt 200g dark choc (proper dark choc that is – with at least 60% cocoa solids) in a bowl over simmering water.
Meanwhile, separate 5 eggs, then beat the the yolks, along with 1 more whole egg, with 310g granulated sugar, until thick and creamy. (I used an electric hand-held.)
In another bowl, whisk the whites to stiff peaks.
Add 150g ground almonds, 1.5 t of ground coffee and the melted chocolate to the egg yolk/sugar mix, and combine.
Next comes the tricky bit – you have to fold the whites into that mixture, to give it some lightness and life. The egg/almond/choc mix is pretty heavy, so I add a tablespoon of the whites initially to lighten it up a bit, stirring them in well, then gently fold in the rest of the egg white.

Bake for 1 hour. Check – carefully – at 40 mins, and if it looks like the top is going to burn, cover with foil.

Cool on a rack, with the ring of the tin removed, but the base left in place.

When it’s fully cooled, brush all over with melted and strained apricot jam (abou 5T), then spread with icing made from 100g chocolate, melted as before, with 40g unsalted butter beaten into it.

Thanks to Jo for the pic.

The taste of these isn’t exactly anything to write home about, but hey, the look is fun. Though not so fun that it would justify doing this recipe a lot, as the dough handling is a tad convoluted.

So anyway, you make two dough mixes, for the light and the dark.

Light dough:
Sift together 175g plain flour with 1/4 t baking soda, pinch of salt, 1 tsp ground cinnamon and 1 tsp ground ginger.
Rub in 65g unsalted butter, until it resembles crumbs.
Stir in 75g caster sugar, 2 T maple syrup, and one beaten egg yolk.
Bring dough together, knead briefly, then wrap in cling film and chill for 30 mins. (The dough, not you.)

Dark dough:
Sift together 175g plain flour, 1/2 t baking soda, pinch salt, 2 t mixed spice, 1 t ground ginger and 25g cocoa.
Rub in 75g unsalted butter, until it resembles crumbs.
Stir in 75g light muscovado sugar, one beaten egg.
Bring dough together, knead briefly, then wrap in cling film and chill for 30 mins.

The assembly involves dividing both doughs in half.

Roll out half of each dough in a rectangle 28x4cm, then slice each of these, long ways, into 7 strips.
Lay the strips side by side, alternating between light and dark.
Roll the other half of the light dough into a sausage shape, 28cm long, then place this in the centre of the stripey rectangle you just created (long-ways – it’s the middle of a tube basically).
Roll up the stripes around the sausage, to make a stripey tube.
Roll out the remaining dark dough into another rectangle 28 x 15cm… ish – the latter figure might need to be bigger. Basically, this is to enclose the tube with a kinda dark sheath.
Tighten up with a bit of rolling, then wrap and chill for another 30 mins. (Insert same gag if required.)

Preheat the oven to 180C and grease a few baking sheets.

Slice the dough into discs around 8mm thick.

Bake for 12-15 mins, until starting to colour.

Leave on the tray to firm up for a few mins, then cool on racks.