Notes about Recipes in this book

• Four-spice ginger cookies

  • hillsboroks on January 16, 2017

    I can't stop eating these cookies! The flavors are intense but oh so good. They don't have a lot of flour and the recipe calls for melted and cooled butter so chilling the full two hours is a must. The cookies spread quite a bit so do not try to crowd them on the cookie sheet. The final cookie is quite thin but still chewy. I substituted 1/8 teas. ground white pepper for the cracked white peppercorns.

• Crunchy top peach cobbler

  • sck on October 04, 2017

    Perfect cobbler! Nothing unusual about it but it's a hit. We've made it several times now.

• Floral-kissed kumquat preserves

  • urmami on February 22, 2017

    This preserve is amazing!! Such a brilliant melding of flavors, and pretty easy to boot. I used about 3/4 the sugar called for since the kumquat peels I was working with were sweeter than usual and I ended up using this between layers in a birthday/housewarming cake. It definitely didn't "gel" quite as much and I wouldn't store it out of the fridge for long this way, but the texture was still fine and I think it allowed the tartness of the kumquats to come through a bit more. Malika Ameen is a genius and I'm honestly thinking about starting a food blog JUST so I can give this apparently overlooked book the love it deserves.

• Roasted grape focaccia

  • sck on October 04, 2017

    Yummy but not quite sure when/where to serve it. More like a danish than a savory bread. We mostly enjoyed it cold for breakfast as leftovers.

• Honey lacquered nuts

  • tmjellicoe on August 04, 2025

    These nuts are well flavoured. They have been a pain to make though. The first time I used oiled parchment to cook the mixture on as per instructions, they were difficult to peel off the paper once cooled. So, the next time I thought it would be easier to just cook them on a greased sheet pan. It was worse. They shellacked to the bottom and I had to chip away at removing them, while fending the dog off from eating bits that went flying. One may be to remove the mixture from the pan as soon as you salt them, before they cool. I’ll try next time once before crossing this one off the list.

• Winter citrus galette

  • urmami on February 22, 2017

    I'm not saying this recipe is brilliant and inspired and utter February perfection, but I AM saying it won the work bake-off in a landslide, against some thirty-odd very skilled competitors. I'd really like to keep this title and continue to be lauded as a pastry/flavor genius so...no one should ever make this. Move along.

• Gingerbread cream and pear ribbon bread

  • hillsboroks on October 02, 2024

    Never I have worked so hard on a recipe only to have it fail so spectacularly. Each element took a fair amount of time to make and turned out well but combining the gingerbread cream with the bread dough just didn’t work when it came to baking. There was simply too much cream and it made cutting the final dough into the pieces extremely difficult and then it oozed out of the pan throughout the baking time carrying pieces of the dough with it. The end result was some edible pieces of bread on top of a pudding like base that included gooey bread dough. Plus I had to clean a messy oven! We ate a few bites of the bread off the top and dumped the rest. It wasn’t a nice sliceable bread and it wasn’t a good bread pudding either.

• Perfect pumpkin pancakes

  • okmosa on August 26, 2023

    Pretty near perfect pumpkin pancakes. I always seem to want pumpkin pancakes to taste more like pumpkin, maybe if I start using a stronger tasting squash? This recipe was just a little bit too moist, but that does tend to happen with pumpkin pancakes. I liked how the recipe loosened up the pumpkin purée with some buttermilk before folding in.