Sweet - Supper

Olive Oil Cake with Blood Orange

Delphine Roy — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

One 20 cm round cake
1 hr 10 min total — Serves 10 — Easy

Ingredients

For the cake

200 g caster sugar
3 eggs, at room temperature
200 ml fruity olive oil
150 ml whole milk
2 blood oranges, zest only
60 ml blood orange juice
200 g plain flour
50 g ground almonds
2 tsp baking powder
½ tsp fine salt

To finish

1 blood orange, sliced into thin rounds
2 tbsp demerara sugar

Butter cakes are a performance. There is a temperature the butter has to be at, a stage the creaming has to reach, and a window in which the eggs will go in without splitting. Olive oil cake asks for none of that. The fat is already liquid, so the batter comes together in one bowl with a whisk and cannot really be broken.

What you get in exchange is a cake with a much longer life. Oil stays soft at room temperature where butter sets hard, which is why this is still good on Thursday when a sponge made on Monday is a coaster.

Choosing the oil

This is the whole decision. The oil is not a shortening here, it is the dominant flavour, and it will be more obvious in the finished cake than it is in the bottle. A grassy, peppery Tuscan oil makes a cake with a savoury edge that I like very much. A softer, rounder Spanish or Greek oil makes a gentler one.

What you cannot do is use something anonymous and hope the sugar covers it. It does not.

The two minutes of whisking

Sugar and eggs, whisked until they visibly thicken and lighten. This is the only aeration the cake gets — there is no creamed butter holding air — and skipping it gives you something dense and slightly greasy. Two minutes by hand is enough, and it is worth setting a timer, because it is longer than it feels.

Citrus, and where to put it

Zest goes in the batter, where the oils in it dissolve into the fat and reach every crumb. Juice goes in too, but only one orange’s worth: more and the acid starts fighting the baking powder.

The slices on top are not decoration so much as insurance. They keep the surface from drying while the middle finishes, and the demerara over them turns to a thin, cracking caramel.

Serving it

Plain, with coffee, standing up in the kitchen. Or with a spoonful of thick yogurt and nothing else. If you want something to drink beside it in the evening, it is very good with a small glass of something bitter.

Strawberries with Black Pepper Cream

Delphine Roy — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

4 glasses
10 min total — Serves 4 — Easy

Ingredients

For the strawberries

500 g strawberries, hulled and quartered
2 tbsp caster sugar
1 tbsp balsamic vinegar, or lemon juice
a pinch of flaky salt

For the cream

300 ml double cream, very cold
1 tbsp icing sugar
½ tsp coarsely cracked black pepper, plus more to finish
1 tsp vanilla extract

Two ingredients and a spice, and it is the pudding I make more than any other between May and August. It relies on two pieces of kitchen chemistry that both sound like affectations and are not.

Maceration

Sugar on cut fruit draws water out by osmosis. Within half an hour the strawberries have released a syrup that is more intensely strawberry than the fruit was, because it is the fruit’s own juice with sugar dissolved in it and none of the water diluting it. The fruit itself firms up and concentrates.

The tablespoon of balsamic is doing what the lemon does elsewhere: strawberries at their best are very sweet and quite low in acid, and without something sharp the whole bowl reads as one flat note.

The salt

A pinch, in the fruit, not the cream. Salt suppresses bitterness and raises the perceived sweetness and aroma of fruit — it is the reason salted watermelon and salted mango exist. Leave it out and this is noticeably duller, in a way that is hard to place until you do it both ways side by side.

Black pepper is not a joke

Strawberry and black pepper share several terpenes, and pepper’s own aromatics are floral and slightly resinous before they are hot. Cracked coarse and folded into cream, the effect is not “peppery pudding” — it is a strawberry that seems more like itself, with a warm catch at the back.

Half a teaspoon for 300ml of cream. Coarse, so it turns up as an occasional pop rather than a haze.

Soft peaks

Cream whipped to stiff peaks is structural — for piping, for holding a shape. Here it is a sauce, and it should slump. Stop when the whisk leaves a trail that closes slowly.

Dark Chocolate Tahini Cookies

Delphine Roy — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

16 large cookies
32 min total — Serves 16 — Easy

Ingredients

115 g soft butter
100 g tahini, stirred well from the bottom of the jar
150 g light brown sugar
75 g caster sugar
1 egg
1 egg yolk
1 tsp vanilla extract
250 g plain flour
¾ tsp bicarbonate of soda
1 tsp fine salt
200 g dark chocolate, 70%, chopped into uneven chunks
flaky salt and sesame seeds, to finish

Tahini in a cookie is not a health substitution. It is there because sesame paste is about fifty per cent fat and intensely savoury, and both of those things do something specific to a chocolate cookie: the fat keeps it fudgy, and the savour stops the sugar from being the only thing you taste.

The result is a cookie that is slightly less sweet and considerably more interesting than the standard, and people usually cannot identify why.

The hour in the fridge

This is the difference between a good cookie and a very good one, and it is worth the wait for two reasons.

The first is spread. Cold fat takes longer to melt, so the dough sets before it flows, and you get a thicker cookie with a chewy middle rather than a thin crisp one.

The second is flavour. Resting lets the flour hydrate fully, and enzymes break some of the starch into simpler sugars. Those sugars brown more readily, which is why chilled dough bakes darker and tastes more caramelised than dough baked immediately. An hour is the minimum; overnight is better and forty-eight hours is the outside edge of useful.

Chopped, not chipped

Chocolate chips are formulated with less cocoa butter and more stabiliser so they hold their shape in the oven. That is exactly the wrong property. A chopped bar gives you shards that dissolve into the crumb, chunks that stay whole, and flat pieces that melt into visible pools — three textures instead of one.

Chop unevenly on purpose.

Underbaked is the target

Pull them when the perimeter is set and the middle still looks wet. There is enough residual heat in the tray to finish the centres, and a cookie baked until the middle looks done in the oven is a cookie that will be dry on the plate.

Roasted Stone Fruit with Honey and Thyme

Delphine Roy — Thu, 28 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

One tray, for four with yogurt or ice cream
33 min total — Serves 4 — Easy

Ingredients

800 g plums, peaches, or apricots, halved and stoned
3 tbsp runny honey
1 tbsp olive oil
4 thyme sprigs
1 strip of lemon peel
2 tbsp water
a pinch of flaky salt
thick yogurt or vanilla ice cream, to serve

Stone fruit sold in the north is picked hard so it survives the journey, and a good proportion of it never gets sweet — it goes from hard to mealy without passing through ripe. That fruit is not a loss, it is just a different recipe.

Heat as a substitute for sun

Ripening on the tree converts starch to sugar and breaks pectin down, which is why a ripe peach is both sweet and soft. Twenty-five minutes at 200C does an approximation of both: water evaporates so the sugar that is there concentrates, and pectin degrades so the flesh collapses.

It will not turn a bad plum into a good one. It will turn a bad plum into a good pudding, which is a better outcome than the fruit bowl was going to manage.

A snug dish

This matters more than it sounds. Fruit spread out in a large tray gives up its juice into a thin layer that evaporates and then burns, and you get dry fruit and a black dish. Packed tightly, the same juice pools deep enough to stay liquid and reduces into a syrup.

Water in the base

Two tablespoons, and this is the one measurement in the recipe that does not scale. Honey on its own in a hot oven will be caramelising before the fruit has released anything, and caramelised honey is bitter. The water buys the fruit five minutes to start giving up liquid of its own.

Thyme, not cinnamon

Cinnamon, star anise, and vanilla all work and all make it taste like a dessert. Thyme keeps it ambiguous — it is just as good spooned over yogurt at breakfast, or alongside cheese, or next to something roasted. Savoury herbs with sweet fruit is one of the most reliable moves there is.

Lemon Posset in Small Glasses

Delphine Roy — Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

6 small glasses, about 100ml each
18 min total — Serves 6 — Easy

Ingredients

600 ml double cream, at least 48% fat
150 g caster sugar
2 lemons, zest only
90 ml lemon juice
a pinch of fine salt
thin shortbread, to serve

A posset is the oldest kind of trick: three ingredients, one pan, and a dessert that sets without eggs, gelatine, or agar. It has been made in England since at least the fifteenth century, and the mechanism was understood a long time after the recipe was.

What is actually happening

Cream is an emulsion of fat droplets in water, stabilised by casein proteins. Casein is stable at neutral pH; drop the pH below about 4.6 — which lemon juice does immediately — and the proteins lose their charge, stop repelling each other, and link into a network that traps the liquid. It is the same reaction that makes yogurt and fresh cheese, arrested at the point where it is a gel rather than a curd.

The boiling is what makes it firm rather than merely thick. Three minutes at a rolling boil drives off enough water to raise the fat and solids concentration to the point where that protein network has something to hold.

Three failures, all avoidable

Not enough fat. Below about 48% there is simply not enough to build structure, and you get lemon cream soup. Read the carton.

Not enough boiling. The most common one. Three minutes at a genuine rolling boil, not a simmer, and time it.

Juice added too hot. Straight into a boiling pan, the proteins denature and clump rather than forming an even network, and the texture goes grainy. A minute off the heat is enough.

Small glasses

Six hundred millilitres of double cream divided six ways is 100ml each, and that is the correct portion. It is one of the richest things in this section and a large bowl of it defeats people halfway down.

Something thin and crisp beside it — shortbread, a tuile, a plain biscuit. The contrast is most of the pleasure.