Weekend Baking: Olive Oil Almond Cake and Feta Sun-Dried Tomato Focaccia

Extremely moist though the substitution of flaxseed meal made the mini-loaves a bit crumbly and less attractive than the original. Easy and healthyish.

Recipe: Olive Oil Almond Cake from Sassy Radish
Substitutions: flaxseed meal for eggs and omitted zest

Focaccia was a reprise of the earlier King Arthur Flour recipe but with feta and sun-dried tomato. Made the mistake of placing the tomato on top of the dough and it just got burnt and fell off. Third time makes perfect! Love the sun-dried tomato which I ordered online though.

TNT #16: Spanish nougat

This subtley fragrant nougat with shards of almond and wafer was a sale find from World Market. Excellent texture and not overly sweet, allowing the flavour to shine through. The honeycombed edible paper wrapper kept it fresh and dry.

NSW: Day 2

Breakfast: coffee, cheese and potato bread with hard boiled egg, grapefruit
Lunch: Grilled Viet-style chicken thighs with panang curry using my stockpile of cauliflower and edamame.
Dinner: Morningstar spicy black bean burger with cabbage and onions

Snacks: almond pudding from Istanbul, biscotti, fruit, nuts.

Veritas cherry almond & dark chocolate

I was excited to find this local (ie Midwestern) Veritas 54% cacao chocolate bar at the World Market. It is beautifully packaged in its dark vermillion paper box with cut out. The bar itself looks handcut rather than moulded. Unfortunately the taste did not match the packaging. Nothing particularly wrong with it, the almond flakes add a slightly salty taste, and the Michigan cherries are nice, but the chocolate itself is strangely bland. While it claims to be a dark chocolate bar, it has much less cacao flavour than even the Delhaize bars of the same percentage. Perhaps it's the vegetable oil, which is an unusual ingredient for higher-end chocolate bars. Overall the bar itself reminds me of Cadbury's Fruit and Nut bar, though the Veritas bar is less sweet. While my childhood in Singapore and New Zealand make Cadbury rather than Hershey my nostalgia chocolate of choice, my preference now is for something with more flavour, which this definitely did not provide.