Thursday, May 22, 2014

Fresh Ginger Cake: "Breakfast Lunch Tea-Rose Bakery"

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One of my few remaining cookbooks
 Fresh Ginger Cake

Ginger is an ingredient I came to fairly late in my cooking life. My mother kept a dusty jar of ground ginger in her 1970's spice rack but I never recall her using it. When did I discovered fresh ginger? I can't tell you, although I do remember reading a recipe that had fresh ginger as an ingredient in my very favourite...



"James Barber's Immodest but Honest Good Eating Cookbook." (Solstice Press-1971,1978,1981)
The recipe was called:
"GINGER TEA MAKES FRIENDS"

This cookbook is a gem! It made me appreciate flavours I would never have discovered on my own…like fresh ginger! (and the illustrations and stories are pure 'Barber')  Fast-forward to 2014...

"Breakfast, Lunch, Tea: Rose Bakery" by Rose Carrarini

I picked up this cookbook at Anthropologie in Downtown Seattle for 2 reasons:
Beautiful photography and Rose Bakery is in Paris.
I love cookbooks that you can read like a book(see above-James Barber). I also love a cookbook that has recipes that you can imagine yourself cooking and eating. I was fortunate to have been back to Paris last year (after a 35 year absence) and it was magical. One of the places I wanted to visit was Rose Bakery. My husband dutifully got out the map, and as it was on the way to Sacre Coeur, we set out with plans to have our breakfast there. Despite getting hopelessly lost in the hilly winding streets of Paris, we found it! (46, Rue Des Martyrs) By now, we were STARVING. We chose: a muffin, a slice of cake, yogurt, fruit salad, coffee, and a cookie. (which we took home to eat that night on our tiny patio at our hotel while we watched the 'penthouse cat' across the street visit every flower his or her mistress had planted 5 stories above the busy street.) After almost a week of croissant every morning…this breakfast was a feast! Incredibly, the taste, smell and freshness of the food we ate that summer morning in Paris, at Rose Bakery was an exact match to the cookbook I had purchased on a rainy Saturday afternoon in Seattle.

The Fresh Ginger Cake
The Cake
It's my usual practice to take a recipe and tweak it then blog about my fabulous, ground breaking achievement. This cake needed no tweaking, no improvement. It was as close to as perfect a cake as I know I will ever produce in my kitchen.

THIS CAKE

  • Is Easy to prepare (10 minutes)
  • Requires no special ingredients
  • Requires no special equipment
  • Stays moist for a few days on the counter
  • Is delicious with a smear of good butter
  • Is not overly sweet
You can order "Breakfast, Lunch, Tea" on Amazon, or from Chapters/Indigo. 
OR
If you want the recipe, leave me a comment below and I'll send it to you. Unbelievably, I can't find the exact recipe on line, just some one's 'improved' version


Please leave me a comment-I want to hear from all you Ginger-Loving/James Barber freaks/Paris- Junkies out there…

CathyB

Worth the walk!






1 comment:

  1. great post and a good read! i want to get the cookbook now. do you have a recipe of the ginger cake? cheers tia.

    ReplyDelete