When I think of spring and Easter, I think of Easter eggs(of course!), roasted lamb, asparagus and petits pois, daffodils, blossoms, new born animals playing on green prairies with yellow dandelions. A beautiful time of year.  For this Easter, we will enjoy some oeufs cocotte, salads, some oven roasted rosemary lamb  and we will probably finish our day with a mini Nantais cake. Made to stand for 2 days, its flavour just gets better and better. It can also be baked as one big cake, but a change is always good, so I made it into individual mini cakes.

(recipe from PATISSIER, le Petit Larousse)

La recette.

1. Preheat the oven to 180°C (gas 6, 356°F).
2. Grease a cake tin(20cm diameter), or mini cake molds of your choice.
3. Beat together 125g soft butter, 125 g castor sugar and 100g ground almonds until creamy.
4. Add 3 eggs, one at a time. Beat until well mixed.
5. Add 40g flour, 2 TBSP of apricot jam and 50ml of rum. Mix until the mixture is light and fluffy
6. Pour the mixture into the greased cake tin of the mini tin. Bake in oven for 40 -50 minutes for the large cake tin, or 30-40 minutes for the mini cakes. If the surface gets too dark, cover with a sheet of tin foil or brown paper. Test with a skewer which need to be dry when pulled out.
7. Prepare the icing: Mix together 50ml rum with 100g icing sugar. Pour over the cakes and serve.

Serve 6 people

Pincée de fleur de sel:

• Bake the cake about 2 days for a more flavourful cake.
• Replace the rum with lemon juice of 1 lemon if you don’t want alcohol.
• Replace the rum in the icing sugar with a few drops of lemon juice.

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Spring impressions

The garden is far from finished – I walk around with a knee brace after hurting it with a fall, the days are filled with rain the ground is soaked…so working is not very apparent. At least the bulbs planted in fall have no problems showing off their splendour. So.. to accompany this Easter posting, here are some images from the garden beginning April.

..Bienvenue dans mon jardin à Pacques..

..Early morning light..

..A bed of daffodils, tulips and muscaris..

..No need to encourage the chickens to go play outside!..

..Two chicks, only 3 days old..

..daffodils waiting to flower..

..A mix of daffodils, fancy pansies, borage and the last of the Hellebores flowering..

..Have a lovely Easter time..

Ronelle