Mulled wine pears recipe

Read to eat the mulled wine pears?

Spicy Pears, a perfect dessert If you’ve visited Morocco, I am sure one of your abiding memories will be the smell of spices in the souk. We discovered one tiny …

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Make the perfect coffee ice cream

Coffee Praline Icecream

 It’s all about the coffee

The first time I ate a Café Liègeois was in Ajaccio, Corsica. It’s a beautiful town full of grand buildings – blink and you might think yourself in Paris. A fitting place to discover a  grown up indulgent dessert.

The Café Liègeois is made with just three ingredients:  espresso coffee, coffee ice cream, and whipped cream: the French take on an ice cream sundae. Rather than getting its name from the Belgian city of Liège it was renamed from Cafe Viennoisduring the First World War in homage to the siege of Liège .

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Tasting times with Ice Smith

It’s so exciting being involved – even in a small way – with a business as it is starting up. IceSmith is a luxury ice cream brand based in Chipping Campden. We were asked to spend an evening trying some of the flavours that Jake Gadsby, the owner has created. The business is in its pre-launch phase.

I’ll bet you’ve never had an ice cream tasting menu before. In the spirit of the best restaurant tasting menus, ours was full of flavours  and teased and tempted our palates. We tried a dozen different sorbets, ice creams and sherbets. (A sherbets contain small percentage of cream and sit between a sorbet and ice cream).

IceSmith Tasting Menu

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Make mini berry rum babas

Mini berry babas served in ramekins

Clandestine Cake Club

She struggled into the packed room clutching a very large white box. “I don’t know what happened” she said. “I ended up making 3 cakes”. She opens the lid to reveal a beautiful towering cake which later proves to have no less than six layers.

A selection of cakes at Clandestine Cake Club Gloucester
Just some of the cakes at Clandestine Cake Club Gloucester

There are sixteen of us squeezed into a very pleasant room at the back of Peppers Cafe in Gloucester. We were given the theme last month, but the secret location was communicated by our organiser Julia,  just a few days before. This is the Clandestine Cake Club. Today there are 180 such local clubs not only in the United Kingdom but worldwide and as far away as New Zealand with more than 16,000 members. The clubs are the brainchild of Lynn Hill who around 5 years ago set up a secret cake club in her home town of Leeds.

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