Only Recipes, by Alessandra Zecchini ©

I have already explained how to make  Rose Turkish Delight (Lokum)  at home, it is pretty and pink, but I must confess that my favourite Lokum of all is hazelnut, so today I will show you this variations, and a few more. To start follow the recipe  here . Rose Turkish Delight While the cornflour and sugar syrup are cooking shell and toast a couple of handfuls of hazelnuts. It is better to use fresh hazelnuts and toast them just before making Lokum, for a full hazelnut flavour. Years ago I also had a hazelnut essence which was great, but I cannot find it here, I think that one of the best places to buy it would be in Piedmont, in Italy. Anyway, even without hazelnut essence you can get the best out of hazelnuts if you toast them and use them within a few days. When they are still hot from the oven put them in a clean tea towel and shake and rub them well so as to discard the peel. If some peel stays on don't worry, it is edible, just not as...

Wash and boil the red beetroots until you can easily pierce them with a knife. Let them cool down and then peel them (keep the peels aside to colour the eggs later on). Cut them into cubes, then add one big tbsp of mayonnaise and a little wasabi (to taste). Stir. Boil the eggs, peel and colour using the beetroot peels. You can either rub the peels directly onto the eggs, or place them in a bowl of water and immerse the eggs in it for 30 minutes. Serve with the beetroot wasabi mayo salad. Photos and Recipes by Alessandra Zecchini  ©

  I found a Vegan frozen sweet short pastry in the supermarket, and I wanted to try it. Actually, I like making short pastry, but making Vegan short pastry is not that easy (for me) so I was really curious. Because the pastry is already rolled it was easy to cut it with a cookie cutter, and I opted for hearts. Up to here everything was fine, but then the pastry shrunk in the oven! My pretty fat hearts became long quirky hearts! Did this ever happen to you? My solution: transform the hearts into pretty-quirky-modern-art hearts with some glossy icing. I did the borders white first, and then I coloured some icing with saffron powder for yellow (this also gave the biscuits a lovely saffron aroma and flavour), cocoa for chocolate, and then I added a drop of red food colouring to the yellow saffron icing for a geranium orange/red. The colour reminded me of lipstick and nail polish, but I liked it! The kids took the biscuits to the Surf Life Saving Club and they were a...

It is raining in Auckland today, but the bush looks happy and green, and the water tank is filling nicely (yes, we drink rain water!). It is also the last day of school for my daughter, holiday mood in the air, Xmas trees alight. The boy is already home, with a friend who is staying for a sleep over. They are playing with lego: domestic bliss for me! Yesterday I posted about making your own marzipan, and today I'll show you my little fruit. For the marzipan recipe click here , and for the colours I used some spirulina powder dissolved in hot water, and some juice from berries. Shape the fruit with your fingers, you can either colour the marzipan before, or you can paint it later using a small brush, or opt for a combination of the two for a stronger colour. For the stalks I used the smallest cloves that I could find, but this is because I made some miniature fruit! I like miniatures, in a past life I am sure that I belonged to a Jane Austen world where ladies painted miniatures a...

This is another recipe from my book Sweet As , and something that I love to make for Xmas. I would like to say that for marzipan you should get the best almonds around, natural, but here in New Zealand the almonds taste different from the ones in Italy. They are imported, not sure where from most of the time, but they are not top grade almonds. Still, with a few tips, you can make your marzipan taste great even with 'regular' almonds! Buy them natural, not blanched, you need to blanche then yourself or the result will be too dry. To blanch them you need to put them in boiling water for a couple of minutes, and then add cold water and take the skin off, one by one. For this recipe you will need: 200 g almonds 100 g icing sugar 5 apricot kernels. As I was saying before, the almond here have little taste, so I like to collect the stones from apricot and get the almonds out. They are a real pain to crack! In the photo above you can see apricot stones and kernels. The apricot kernel...