I have a confession to make: whenever I’m at Ikea I always end up at the food market, I usually ponder how bizarre it is to get excited about food from a furniture store, and I always walk away with some lingonberry jam and Daim.
I love lingonberry jam…
It’s one of those preserves that has a delicious balance of sweetness and tartness – it’s used as a condiment in sweet and savoury dishes in Scandinavia where it grows wild.
I usually stir it into my porridge, use it in thumbprint cookies, or just on toast or pancakes.

I initially used lingonberry jam in this pie only because I was out of blueberry jam – which is what the recipe I found calls for.
This pie is buttery, sweet and slightly tart – a simple and truly lovely dessert.
It’s based on the traditional Icelandic ‘wedded bliss cake’, which from what I’ve gathered uses rhubarb or prune jam, but I think lingonberry jam works perfectly here too.
This first time I made it, I served it with vanilla sauce (using Bird’s Custard Powder).
It’s good with whipped cream, or ice cream or plain.
It’s also one of those pies that tastes better the next day – I call them ‘next day pies’

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I woke up this morning, looked outside my window and missed summer – for a brief moment, I longed for strawberries and daylight beyond 4pm.
I saw some pale-looking strawberries at the store this afternoon, and was almost tempted to get a few to make strawberry icebox cake.
I wish we had an abundance of strawberries in the winter.
I’m bringing dessert for a dinner on Christmas Eve and I still haven’t figured what I’m going to make.
The strawberry icebox cake still looks promising, except I feel it’s a summer dessert.
The last time I made icebox cake was back in August, and I used digestive biscuits that time.

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Strawberry Icebox Cake II
To make whipped coconut cream, refrigerate a can of coconut milk overnight, or freeze for the few hours.
This is so that the cream (coconut fat) would rise to the top and harden.
Open the chilled can of coconut and scoop out the fat leaving behind the watery liquid.
Combine the coconut with 1/3 cup of icing sugar and a teaspoon of vanilla, whip until light and fluffy.

INGREDIENTS

• 2 pounds fresh strawberries, washed
• 3 1/4 whipped coconut cream
• 1 teaspoon vanilla
• 400g pack of Digestive biscuits

DIRECTIONS

1. Slice strawberries, save some nice ones for garnishing and set aside
2. Grab a baking pan or a nice serving pan
3. Spread dollop of whipped coconut cream on the bottom of the pan
4. Start by layering with digestives, then more whipped cream and then add strawberries.
5. Repeat until you run out of strawberries, the last layer is usually whipped coconut cream, then comes the garnish.
6. Garnish with your nice looking strawberries, or drizzle some melted chocolate over, or whatever pretty garnish you dream up.

Every summer, if we’re lucky we get a shipment of apples and kiwis from New Zealand; this is one of the many little things that make my summers so awesome.
This year’s bounty arrived just as we were getting ready to head for the Sunshine Coast for a few days,
We packed our little cooler with apples and kiwis, gave some away to friends and neighbours, and for the next few days we snacked on apples and kiwis and tossed some in salads and smoothies.

For the past few years we’ve been getting Envy apples, a newer variety of apples from Enza.
I first wrote about Envy apples back in 2009, and a few years of eating them – they’ve become my utterly favourite kind of apple.
It’s available in limited quantities in grocery stores, so it’s really a treat whenever I get my hands on some.
Envy is bright red, big, crisp, and perfectly sweet; and resistant to browning.
It’s obviously an ‘eating’ apple, but with that many apples I had to try it in some recipe of some sort.

I love crumble, it’s such a simple and versatile dessert, it’s my quick and easy go-to dessert for when I want to use up my too many fruits.
This Envy apple crumble has a few of my favourite snack items; dried mango and flakes of toasted coconuts.
I also added a few slices of kiwi… just because.
There isn’t really a recipe for this crumble, but here’s a very good recipe I use as a guide for all my crumbles.
I use coconut oil for that warm distinctive coconut flavour.
This crumble barely stuck around!

Most people who know me (and I’m not talking about my 600 friends on facebook!) know that I’m a bit of a wallflower.
Well, maybe a lot.
It took me a little while to accept this, but it turns out I don’t mind being a loner.
I wouldn’t know what I’d do with myself if suddenly I were ‘the life of the party’
Unlike this mango-glazed cake, I mean look at it…. It’s so bright and so yellow!
It really stands out, definitely not a wallflower.
I finished glazing this cake and thought to myself “this cake is like the antithesis of who I am, but I love it!”

This cake isn’t just glazed with mango, it has bits of mango in it – I used dried mango pieces.
It’s a lovely light cake; I doubled the amount of glaze the recipe called for because I couldn’t get enough of the tart sweetness.
The recipe is from My Diverse Kitchen, I followed the recipe exactly except swap out one or two ingredients; ground flax seed for eggs, and coconut milk with apple cider vinegar for buttermilk.

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So long as there are sad looking browning bananas on the kitchen counter, I’ll find a recipe to throw them into.
Fluffy banana cake; this is my go-to use for bananas when I get tired of the old classic banana bread.
It’s an airy and light cake, with a hint of cardamom, vanilla and nutmeg.
A warm and comforting treat for the chilly days ahead.
Wonderful with slow cooked strawberries, this cake is vegan, simple and very easy to make.
The secret to it’s lightness is sifting the dry ingredients twice and getting the batter very smooth.

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