u/Anastarfish

Doubles is a common street food from Trinidad and Tobago, consisting of bara (fried flatbread), channa (curried chickpeas) and a variety of different toppings. They were invented by Emamool Deen and his wife Raheeman Rasulan Deen in the 1930s, and they originally sold channa and bara. It was really popular, and customers started to ask for a second bara to sandwich the channa, and the doubles was born!

In my research I read that the condiments were what made doubles so special, so I decided to make a few of the most common ones (from top to bottom):

Roasted pepper sauce (roasted chillies, garlic, vinegar and salt)

Boiled mango chutney (green mango boiled with sugar, turmeric, amchar masala, cumin, garlic and culantro)

Cucumber chutney (grated cucumber with culantro, garlic, salt and pepper)

Tamarind chutney (tamarind boiled with sugar, amchar masala, garlic, cumin and culantro)

Bandhania chutney (blended culantro, garlic, hot pepper, salt)

Unfortunately I couldn't source fresh culantro anywhere. I have tasted it before and it's not too dissimilar from fresh coriander leaves, so I didn't feel too bad in making this substitution.

What's great about doubles is that you can customise your order to include as many or as few condiments as you like. They all add another dimension, so of course I added everything to my doubles. The roasted pepper sauce was especially fiery, so I made my doubles with "slight pepper".

This was a really delicious dish. I've made it before on my first cooking around the world adventure, but my bara weren't quite right that time, and I didn't make many condiments. This time was so much better! I hadn't realised quite how messily I'd plated up

All recipes were from Cooking with Ria's really informative website.

Drożdżówki are sweet yeasted buns from Poland. They have a little indent in the middle which is filled with sweet cheesecakey filling and topped with fruit and kruszonka (crumble/streusel). I made strawberry and blueberry varieties which were both delicious!!

This recipe is from The Sweet Polish Kitchen: A Celebration of Home Baking and Nostalgic Treats by Ren Behan.

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I have a background in languages and I've always been fascinated by translation: how do you accurately take words from one language to another without losing meaning, nuance, or style? This idea is central to R.F. Kuang’s novel Babel, where the magic system revolves around "match-pairs" engraved onto silver bars. The magic relies on the semantic gap between two words from different languages, and the plot follows bilingual Oxford students who create new silver bars to harness the meaning lost in translation - a power that can be used to heal or destroy.

I decided to quite literally make the silver bars with match-pairs described in the book, with a word at each end of the bar:

Understand / 明白 (Míngbai)

The English refers strictly to mental comprehension, whereas the Mandarin 明白 is composed of 明 (míng, "bright") and 白 (bái, "white/clear"), which evolved metaphorically to mean understanding.

Effect: Bright white light.

Burst / 暴 (Bào)

The Mandarin carries strong connotations of sudden violence or cruelty, whereas in English "burst" doesn't necessarily imply violence (for example, a bubble bursting).

Effect: Explosive force.

Treacle / Triacle

Triacle comes from Old French/Middle English (via the Latin theriaca), meaning an antidote to poison or disease. These antidotes were often mixed with sugar to make them palatable, and over time the English treacle came to mean only the sweet syrup itself.

Effect: Antidote / healing.

My dish itself is also inspired by the book. The characters frequently mention lemon biscuits as a favourite tea-time treat, so my bake consists of lemon shortbread, sharp lemon curd, and freeze-dried raspberries, all encased in a white chocolate shell. I carved the match-pairs directly onto the hardened bars and finished them with silver lustre dust.

This was a very high concept bake, and I'm delighted with how it turned out! Shortbread of any kind is delicious, but lemon, raspberry and white chocolate were delicious additions. These would make a great chocolate bar, probably without the lustre dust because that made everything messy and very difficult to photograph!

I've been looking to make Beef Wellington for ages, and have been close to making it for so many previous themes (2024: Week 20 Wrapping, Week 36 Encrusted, 2025: Week 6 A Technique You're Intimidated By, Week 48 Mise en Place) but every time I put it off because beef fillet is so expensive. For this week I knew I wanted to look at the gimmicky technique of deconstruction - something that almost always yields a product that's worse than the original, and looks like several disparate components on a plate.

I thought this would be the perfect time to play around with Beef Wellington because one big complaint is the soggy bottom, so cooking the elements separately seemed like it would improve rather than ruin the dish. I played around with the ingredients of a Beef Wellington and ended up making a seared steak cube with a duxelles swirl, a mushroom cream and a Parma ham crisp. I also decided to make tiny canapé-sized portions to avoid the plating issues that come with deconstructed dishes.

This was a dish that was straight from my own head and so I don't have proper recipes to link. The steak was so small so I had to work very quickly in a searingly hot pan to get a good crust whilst keeping it very rare inside. The duxelles and Parma ham usually play the role of moisture barriers in a Wellington, so I thought I'd give them a bit more of a starring role. I spread a classic duxelles mixture (finely diced porcini and chestnut mushrooms, shallots, garlic, parsley and thyme cooked down in butter until the moisture evaporates) over very thinly rolled-out puff pastry and rolled them up to create these mini swirls. I also sautéed porcini and chestnut mushrooms with more shallots in plenty of butter, then added the dried porcini mushroom soaking liquid and cream, and blended it into a smooth purée. Finally, I baked slices of Parma ham in the oven until crisp. Then it was just a matter of plating - or should I say spooning?

This ended up being an unexpected triumph. Is it as good as a Beef Wellington? Well I've never had one, if I think it's too expensive for me to make it's certainly too expensive for me to order! So I don't actually know. But these were delicious bites of food. I'll definitely be making the duxelles swirls again in a bigger size because they were really yummy in their own right!

I am half Chinese and have grown up eating Cantonese food with my extended family. I've previously made quite a lot of dim sum for various themes, so thought I'd continue with this, and try to check off most of the most popular dim sum varieties. Here's what I've made in the past:

Lo Mai Gai (糯米雞), Har Gow (蝦餃), Siu Mai (燒賣), Pai Gwut (豉汁蒸排骨), Dan Tat (蛋撻) - Nostalgic

Lo Bak Go (蘿蔔糕), Ham Sui Gok (鹹水角), Chiu Chow Fun Guo (潮州粉果) - Turnips & Radishes

Phoenix Claws (豉汁鳳爪), Beef Tripe Stew (牛雜) - Offal

This time I went with my favourite three that I hadn't yet made.

First up is Cheung Fun (腸粉), steamed rice noodle rolls. They come with all kinds of fillings but my favourite is prawn. The batter for these is a mixture of rice flour, wheat starch, tapioca starch, oil, salt and water and requires steaming in thin individual layers. This is extremely fiddly and time consuming, but you get these gorgeous slippery sheets with plump prawns inside. I do think that these should've been a little bit thinner so that you can properly see the prawns.

Next up is Char Siu Bao (叉燒包). I make char siu fairly regularly and it's pretty easy but does require an overnight marination. This dough is made with flour, cornflour, yeast, oil and water and has an unusual step of resting for couple of hours before adding the baking powder. I didn't shape these perfectly and so we had various levels of filling explosion. You can get baked or steamed versions of char siu bao but I much prefer these ones, even if the shaping is harder!

Lastly we have a sweet dim sum variety: Ma Lai Go (馬拉糕). This is a steamed cake that is traditionally made with a starter. I didn't have time for that so used a recipe that gets its colour from dark brown sugar, its flavour from custard powder and evaporated milk and its rise from baking powder. Steaming gives a really light and bouncy texture which is unlike your usual baked cakes.

I had a great time making these dim sum dishes, but they did take longer than expected. I do still have a few dim sum dishes that I haven't cooked yet, so I might do those in the future if the theme permits...

I am British and so do not really have a deep understanding of what a Science Fair is. From my limited research (and with some help from my friends on the Dishcord) I started to form an idea to try to explore something scientific in cooking, and I decided to study the effects of heat on butter in a dish. Baking recipes in particular have different instructions about what temperature the butter should be, because the butter performs specific roles when in different states. I made a blackberry and lemon frangipane tart with a brown butter and blackberry ice cream, brown butter streusel, lemon curd and almond lace tuile and looked at butter in cold, softened, melted and browned states.

State 1: Cold (about 5°C)

Pâte sucrée: recipe

Lemon curd: recipe

Combining cold cubes of butter with flour allows the butter particles to coat the flour proteins, inhibiting gluten production and creating a crisp and tender shell. Whisking cold butter into the warm egg and lemon mixture creates a smooth emulsion, giving the curd a rich, velvety texture and glossy finish.

State 2: Softened (about 20°C)

Frangipane: recipe

Softening butter to room temperature allows it to trap tiny air pockets when creamed with sugar. When combined with ground almonds, eggs, lemon zest, and flour, this trapped air expands in the oven to give the frangipane its light, fluffy bake.

State 3: Melted (about 40°C)

Almond lace tuile: recipe

Melting butter keeps the tuile batter fluid so it spreads paper-thin. When baked, the water content evaporates rapidly as the sugar caramelises, leaving behind the signature webbed, lacy structure.

State 4: Browned (about 160°C)

Brown butter and blackberry ice cream: loosely based on this recipe

Brown butter streusel: loosely based on the streusel from this recipe

Heating butter past its melting point boils off its water and caramelises the milk solids, creating deep, nutty aromas. In the ice cream, this infuses a toasted flavour while keeping the churn smooth; in the streusel, it adds intense depth while binding the crumbs without developing tough gluten.

This was one of my favourite creations so far this year, with the stand out being the ice cream (loosely based on this recipe but with an added blackberry swirl) - I'll definitely be making brown butter ice cream again. This week really made me stop and think about the versatility of butter, and the science behind the baking!

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If you look back at my post history carefully, you might notice that I'm a bit obsessed with Benjamina Ebuehi's recipes. I really like her flavour combinations and ideas, so I went with another of her creations for this week.

This is a pâte sucrée base filled with a baked salted honey custard filling, which gets topped with dollops of crème fraîche and a sesame brittle.

I used a lovely wildflower honey that I bought in the French countryside, which has a wonderful depth of flavour. I've used it in a few desserts now and this was my favourite yet - the complexity really works with the rest of the dish. I really enjoyed this tart and will definitely be making it again!

This week I decided to explore some Cantonese dishes that showcase the less desirable cuts of meat. Depending on the definition that you find, offal can either mean the internal organs of an animal, or more widely can refer to the offcuts. I've used honeycomb tripe, which is part of a cow's stomach as well as chicken feet and pig ears which are not widely eaten in the UK. As a meat eater I'm a firm believer in "nose to tail" cookery - I don't think we should just eat the prime cuts of an animal and waste the rest because the other bits are more effort to prepare, or still look a bit like an animal. This week's theme was a good personal reminder to buy and eat more offal.

I've grown up eating dim sum with the Chinese side of my family, and have made various types of dim sum before - Lo Bak Go (蘿蔔糕), Ham Siu Gok (鹹水角), Chiu Chow Guo (潮州粉果) for Turnips/Radishes and Lo Mai Gai (糯米雞), Har Gow (蝦餃), Siu Mai (燒賣), Pai Gwut (豉汁蒸排骨), Dan Tat (蛋挞) for Nostalgic last year. To continue adding to my repertoire, I decided to make a few more.

The first dish is one of my favourites: Phoenix Claws (豉汁鳳爪). These are braised chicken feet with fermented black beans, and were a must-order dish for all my childhood yum cha excursions. Before you can start you have to cut the nails off the feet, which isn't too nice. You first blanch then fry the chicken feet, then braise with ginger, garlic, bay leaves, star anise, dried chilli peppers, fermented black beans, light and dark soya sauce, oyster sauce, Shaoxing rice wine and sugar.

The second dish was less commonly ordered by my family: Beef Tripe Stew (牛雜 ). You clean the tripe really well and then boil it. You then drain and then braise it with ginger, star anise, light and dark soya sauce, sugar and sesame oil. After about 20 minutes you add diced daikon.

Lou mei is the Cantonese practice of cooking meat in a master stock. This varies from place to place but will contain soya sauce, rock sugar, Shaoxing wine, aromatics, and spices. I braised the pig ear in this way, then cooled and sliced. I should've stopped there - it's often served cold, but I heated the slices up so the layers started to separate a bit!

Overall I was happy with how my dishes came out this week. The honeycomb tripe in particular took ages to prepare for cooking, so that's noted for next time. I made this before Cantonese was announced as a theme, so I'll be back to explore even more dim sum in week 31!

Desperate Dan was the mascot character in the comic The Dandy which I used to read every week as a child. He is the world's strongest man and helps the sheriff to protect the town of Cactusville from outlaws. He gets his strength from huge Cow Pies that are cooked up by his Aunt Aggie. This was a British production, and Cow Pie in this context refers to a huge meat pie, baked with an entire cow with the horns and tail sticking out. I know it has a different meaning in American English, but I promise this has nothing to do with poo!

I made this recipe for Steak and Ale Pie which uses a hybrid pastry filled with a slow cooked beef shin filling. I puzzled a bit about how to make the horns and tail, I tried a few different methods but the one that worked best was a salt dough, so not made for eating. I coloured them with edible metallic paint and positioned them around the pie - the horns are held in place with toothpicks running through them. I served the pie with creamy mash, glazed baby carrots and cavolo nero.

I highly recommend this pie recipe. The pastry is far easier to make than puff but has a beautiful flake and flavour, and the pie filling is really good. I went to the butcher's to get good quality beef and it was well worth it. I'll definitely be making this again, minus the horns and tail!!

I decided to use the initial group stages of the 2026 World Cup as inspiration for my dish this week. I looked at each of the 12 groups and decided to go with Group F: Japan, Tunisia, Sweden and the Netherlands. Last year I made pancakes from three different sister cities around the world which was really fun, so I took a similar approach here but chose sandwiches as the medium this time. Coincidentally, the four sandwiches all contained egg in some way!

The reason I chose this group was because I've wanted to make Tamago Sando for a long time. This is a Japanese egg mayo sandwich, but it's elevated compared to what I'm used to. It involves boiling eggs, separating the yolks from the whites and mashing the yolks with Kewpie mayo, salt, sugar, MSG, a dash of ketchup and sugar. This goes between slices of buttered shokupan with soft-boiled eggs in the middle. I've accidentally cooked these eggs too much as I wanted them to be jammier than this.

The second sandwich is Tunisian Fricassé. This bears no resemblance to the European fricassé, instead it's a street food made from fried dough filled with harissa, tuna, olives, boiled eggs, cubes of boiled potatoes and parsley. The dough is simple - just flour, yeast, oil, salt and water that you mix and leave to rise before you cut them into ovals then deep fry and fill.

Next up is the Swedish Räksmörgås. This is an open-faced sandwich of rye bread topped with lettuce, little prawns, hard-boiled egg, mayonnaise, cucumber, tomato, lemon and dill.

Finally we have the Dutch Uitsmijter. This is another open-faced sandwich of white bread with ham, Gouda cheese and a fried egg on top. The name translates to "bouncer", or "one who throws out", and the name supposedly came about as it was a dish served just before guests were thrown out of bars just before closing time.

So that's my dish. Egg sandwiches four ways to represent one of the World Cup groups. Unfortunately, all of these teams have now been knocked out, so apologies to fans of all these countries for jinxing it! All of these sandwiches were absolutely delicious and I'd definitely make them all again. Thank you Group F!

I saw this recipe from Benjamina Ebuehi in her Guardian food column, and thought it looked amazing. I love bubble tea so much, and it's the toppings that are the best bit. Tapioca pearls are obviously delicious, but I also liked the idea of the salted cream topping.

I changed the flavour of the ice cream to be matcha to match my regular bubble tea order. So here we have matcha ice cream, topped with brown sugar tapioca pearls and salted cream, finished with a dusting of matcha.

Overall, this was a surprisingly balanced dessert. The salt in the cream stops the whole thing from being too sweet. Really refreshing for this hot weather!

I love Ethiopian food, but unfortunately there is no Ethiopian restaurant anywhere near me anymore. Ethiopian Orthodox Christians practise tsom, which is a type of fasting, for various festivals across the year and also on Wednesdays and Fridays. This fasting means abstaining from all meat and dairy products. Yetsom Beyaynetu means a fasting selection, and is a completely vegan meal.

I chose to cook this because the whole meal is geared towards high fibre. The base of this dish is injera, a fermented spongy flatbread made from teff, an ancient whole grain. Sitting atop the injera are several different dishes made from legumes and vegetables, all ramping up the fibre content of the dish:

Misir Wot - red lentils

Kik Alicha - yellow split peas

Key Sir - beetroot and potatoes

Fosolia - green beans and carrots

Shiro - chickpea flour

Gomen - spinach

Timatim Salata - tomato salad

This was a lot of work so I split this over a few days. The process of making injera is pretty intimidating - it requires making a starter (ersho) and fermenting the batter for several days before heating up and gelatinising a small amount (absit) and mixing back into the main batter, fermenting again and finally cooking. But a lot of that time is passive, and the fermentation was pretty quick given that the UK is going through a heatwave right now. All the dishes are relatively straightforward but require a bit of planning out. Most use the same base of onions and garlic, so I made a big batch of that before making the individual dishes. I deliberately made a lot of each dish to prepare extra portions for my freezer to enjoy in the future!

In case anyone is interested in making any of these recipes, I recommend this recipe for the injera and this channel for the rest.

I've only got a very small garden with no produce ready at the moment. So for this theme I thought I'd take a different angle and explore something that's required for a lot of gardening: soil. I learnt a lot this week about soil horizons - the different layers present with their own composition and unique features. I thought that it would be fun to use a layered dish to illustrate these different layers. I decided to go with a Mexican seven layer dip.

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From top to bottom we have...

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Chopped coriander sitting atop everything, to represent grass or other growing plants.

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O Horizon (Organic)

The top layer of the soil, rich in organic matter.

Represented by grated cheese.

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A Horizon (Topsoil)

A mixture of organic matter and mineral particles.

Represented by the mixed components found in pico de gallo.

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E Horizon (Eluviated)

Pale leached layer.

Represented by sour cream.

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B Horizon (Subsoil)

Layer where materials from above accumulate.

Represented by guacamole.

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C Horizon (Parent Rock)

Partly weathered parent material with little organic content.

Represented by ground seasoned beef.

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R Horizon (Bedrock)

The solid and unweathered rock layer.

Represented by refried beans with olives.

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This was a really yummy dip! I'd definitely make it again, probably in a more sensible dish next time!

I will preface this post by saying that I am not at all into tarot cards or anything else from the occult. So, when this theme was announced, it’s fair to say I was less than enthusiastic. I had no idea what to make until I had a cursory glance at a tarot deck and saw the first card was called The Fool, which apparently represents innocence, new beginnings, and spontaneity. I immediately thought of the British dessert, so I decided to channel my inner Fool, make a spontaneous choice, and make the dish!

A fool is a light dessert consisting of fruit compote swirled into a creamy base. My grandma always made hers with a mixture of whipped cream and Greek yoghurt, so that’s what I’ve gone with here. The traditional fruit to use is gooseberry, but unfortunately, this theme was announced just before the season started. Gooseberries aren't commonly sold in supermarkets as they aren't a super popular fruit - they’re very tart when raw, so they need time, heat, and sugar to become delicious. Annoyingly, they are just coming into season now, but the dish is already made!

I decided to use a flavour profile that I really enjoy for this version: strawberry, lemon and elderflower. I made a roasted strawberry compote infused with elderflower cordial, then layered it with a lightly sweetened whipped cream and Greek yoghurt mixture, alongside fresh strawberries, lemon zest, and lemon curd. To finish, I made a batch of shortbread, which is a traditional accompaniment to a fool (mine is flavoured with lemon zest), and picked some fresh elderflower for decoration instead of the elusive gooseberries.

To echo the idea of just being too early for a crop, I'm posting this just a little before it's Thursday in the UK (but it is Thursday in some parts of the world so it still counts!).

I love coffee - not just for its caffeine kick but also as a flavour in desserts. One of my favourite pairings is the coffee-chocolate mocha, so I made two things with this flavour profile this week.

I first thought that it would be fun to make something that looked like coffee beans. These cookies were the obvious choice for me as I already had all of the ingredients. They are just your usual cookie ingredients with cocoa powder and instant coffee (I doubled the amount in the recipe). You roll them into ovoids and then press a line into each one - I did this with a bamboo skewer. I baked one tray and decided to do an egg white glaze on the second batch to give a little bit of shine to the cookies - I had one spare anyway because the recipe only uses a yolk.

Next I thought I'd make something that was all over the internet a while back - Dalgona Coffee. This is a whipped mixture of instant coffee, sugar and hot water which is served over ice and milk. I decided to lean into the mocha flavours here too and made a quick chocolate syrup (just golden syrup and cocoa powder) to smear over the bottom third of the glass first, and I dusted some cocoa powder over the finished drink as well.

Overall I was really impressed with both of these recipes. The cookies packed a good flavour punch of both coffee and chocolate and had a lovely crumbly texture, and the Dalgona Coffee was sweet and refreshing and went really well with the cookies. I'd make both again - they were really simple but delicious!

I decided to take inspiration from the Instagram account @symmetrybreakfast, where Michael Zee posted the daily breakfasts that he made for his boyfriend. Breakfast was the only meal that they would definitely have together so Michael decided to make the meal special. I think it's such a lovely and romantic idea! He's since written a book exploring breakfast around the world, but I kept my ideas a bit more basic and more like the origin story.

I made stuff I'd make for a normal lazy weekend breakfast for my husband. He prefers savoury so I made bacon, eggs and avocado toast, and I like some sweet things too so made a berry smoothie bowl, extra mixed berries and orange juice. My husband isn't a fan of smoothies in the first place and didn't see the point of putting it into a bowl - he said this makes it just sweet cold soup...

This was a fun idea and nothing was particularly difficult, except trying to find crockery that matched! My usual approach to buying cute plates and bowls is to just get singles of everything! These blue and white plates are a set of four seasons and so they're similar but they all have different designs... I also learnt that making two identical fried eggs is hard and instead of being wasteful I just went with what I made!

In the UK, jam is the name given to the fruit preserve that goes on toast and inside sandwich cakes, and jelly is the name we give to the wobbly gelatine-based dessert that Americans call Jell-O. One of the finest British desserts that uses jelly is the trifle, traditionally made from layers of sponge cake, fruit jelly, custard, and cream. We read The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman in our Discord book club a while ago, and I felt inspired to bake something quintessentially British, to channel my inner Joyce.

I have made a couple of non-traditional trifles before (Black Forest and apple crumble) and they were great, so I decided to make a version of trifle that would showcase both jelly and jam, using the Ispahan flavour profile. This was created by Pierre Hermé during his time at Ladurée and combines the flavours of raspberry, rose, and lychee which is a combination I really love. Possibly this is a bit beyond the classic desserts that Joyce would usually go for, but the rose element is a nod to Bobby Tanner’s aggressive cutting of rose stems in his flower shop!

My take on an Ispahan Trifle consists of (layers from bottom to top):

- Raspberry jelly with fresh lychees

- Lychee jelly with fresh raspberries

- Swiss roll filled with raspberry jam and buttercream

- Rose custard

- Rose whipped cream, topped with fresh raspberries and dried rose petals

I took this to an afternoon tea party and I actually prefer the photo I took outside, despite it being a bit messier and less staged! I think the jelly layers are more visible and the colours pop more in the natural light. It had sat for a while at this point, so the custard had seeped into the Swiss roll and the cream got a bit squished during the car journey, but it was delicious. I really enjoyed this variation and will definitely continue to experiment with non-traditional trifles in the future!

When discussing this theme on the Discord, u/mentaina mentioned that a calico cat is also known as a gatto tricolore in Italian. I love calico cats, and had just met a really friendly 23 year old (!) calico just down the road from me so felt inspired to make something to celebrate this beautiful coat patterning. I’ve made calico cat cookies for a previous baking theme, so wanted to do something a little bit different so u/Kauyon_Kais suggested making them into ice cream sandwiches. I thought this would be a really fun idea, and I could also use the famously three-coloured Neapolitan ice cream too.

I used this recipe for the cookies and dyed a small amount orange with food colouring, and a small amount brown using cocoa powder. I then rolled out the cookies and used little pieces of the orange and brown doughs and cut out cats using my set of cat cookie cutters. I decided that I needed a firm set on my ice cream and my no-churn recipe is quite soft, so I bought a tub of Neapolitan, left it to soften slightly before refreezing in narrower layers in a loaf tin. After the cookies were baked, I cut out slices of my Neapolitan ice cream and then stamped out cat shapes with my cookie cutters. The whole thing felt a bit like an assembly line, stamping out precise blocks and stacking together like LEGO blocks.

When assembling the ice cream sandwiches I realised that you could barely tell that the filling was also tricoloured, so I also put a couple of Neapolitan ice cream cats on the plate as well - luckily I took a picture quickly because they rapidly started to melt. These were good but I would probably use a different cookie next time. I chose a sugar cookie for the precision of cutting out into cat shapes, but I think a chewier, thicker cookie is a bit nicer in an ice cream sandwich.

Ever since I was little, I have loved penguins. I have always wanted to visit Antarctica to see the dramatic, stark landscape and penguins in their natural habitat. In my 20s, I even saved up most of the money for an Antarctic cruise. When I told my now-husband, he called that idea "irresponsible". At first, I thought he meant the financial cost of blowing my life savings, but he was actually referring to the ethical cost of Antarctic tourism. It was a bit of a wake-up call - I hadn’t considered my own carbon footprint or the irony of contributing to the climate change that threatens the very animals I wanted to see.

As Antarctica doesn’t really lend itself to any specific dish, I decided to represent the abomination that climate change is inflicting on this environment. This board features:

- the residents: fiddly penguins made from olives filled with cream cheese, with carrot beaks, carrot feet, and black sesame seed eyes.

- the landscape: white sesame artisan crackers (adapted from this recipe), rolled thin and baked at a low temperature, then broken into jagged shards to mimic the craggy, mountainous terrain.

- the icebergs: a landscape of Brie, Wensleydale, Chavroux (soft goat’s cheese), and Parlick (a hard sheep's cheese).

I deliberately placed one penguin on a tiny, precarious iceberg of Parlick to illustrate the imminent risk these creatures face as sea levels rise and glaciers retreat.

Creating this was a delicious, if sobering, way to ‘explore’ my top bucket-list destination. While I’ve accepted that I likely won’t ever set foot on the Great White Continent, I can still appreciate its beauty from afar - and through the medium of cheese. It doesn’t hurt to dream!

Schnecken are popular in Germany and they translate to mean snails. They are actually sweet buns with a swirled filling. I made Himbeerschnecken which have a raspberry filling, but common other fillings include nuts and poppy seeds.

This is a yeasted dough that gets a quick lamination before filling with blended fresh raspberries, then rolling and cutting into swirls. After baking you add a lemon glaze, and I also added some lemon zest. I also scattered some pearl sugar before baking which gave a wonderful texture.

These were lovely and great with a big cup of coffee for breakfast. It's very much a "trust the process" kind of recipe as the rolling and cutting gets extremely messy, but I highly recommend this recipe.