It's that wonderful time again...

One of my favorite kitchen staples. I'm mainly making stews from beef or lamb with potatoes, or using them in combination with quartered chicken. The heat that softly stewed dishes provide are perfect in a colder season, as they warm up the body. Look into Claudia Roden's quince recipes.

Baking a Science? Not Under our Roof.

Remember the 4/4 rule for cake, 200 g of flour/butter/sugar each and 4 eggs? Well, forget that. If I can bake the traditional apple cake (3 cm/ +1 inch h.) with 90 g of sugar, you can too. Next time I may even use less.

The recipe I started from, is Torta di Mele on Youtube under Giallozafferano. Here are my changes (*):

7 apples (so freshly picked, one still had a lurking worm)
1 lemon: peel + juice; cut apples in pieces, and combine with lemon juice and chopped peel (for the Italian touch).

Prepare a smooth dough with:

100 g butter
2 eggs
1 teaspoon cinnamon
(*) 90 g sugar
(*) 200 ml milk (recipe called for whole, I used skim)

Then add the following to this mixture:
200 g flour
1 small pack of baking powder
1 pinch salt
(*vanilla flavored sugar, omitted here)

Lastly, fold the apples into the mix.

Bake for 50-60 minutes in a 180 °C oven in a buttered round cake tin (spring form).

Let cool. Omit the powdered sugar as decoration.

Cooked berry dessert

A cooked berry dessert, requiring only the most modest of gestures. Why slightly heated? Because the fruit is more digestible. Great for when you have leftovers of cake.

Serves two gluttons

150 g blackberries
150 g boysenberries
1 teaspoon (teaspoon!) of rapadura sugar
1 madeleine (or pan di spagna or a piece of cake)

Take a pan, turn up the heat, add the washed fruit, sprinkle the sugar on top. When the fruit starts to sizzle, let cook for a few minutes. Scrape the fruit together, make sure the mixture doesn't burn or dry. Whenever the boysenberries are soft, that's your key to serve one big spoonful per person.