Only Recipes, by Alessandra Zecchini ©

The original recipes comes from my book Sweet As... ,  my own recipe which doesn't require steam baking in the oven and includes nectarine slices. Plum slices and cherries were also added here, and the result was delicious!  In Italy we also call this  crema bruciata , but  crème brûlée  is most commonly used now as it sounds sophisticated :-). To make the crème you will need one egg yolk for each 100ml of cream and 1 tbsp of sugar, for this recipes I used 5 egg yolks (thus 500ml cream and 5 tbsp of sugar) and I filled 8 ramekins, plus I had a little left to fill three miniature ones. Of course if you don't put any fruit on the bottom you will need more crème. It is up to you how much fruit you put in, generally I just line the bottom of the ramekins with 4-5 think slices, this time I think I overdid it (thus the leftover crème) sicne stone fruit season is not long in NZ, and I wanted to use more fruit than crème! Don't use watery fruit and remo...

The Florence Fennel seeds from NewWorld Supermarket's Little Gardener have grown into big long fennels, not the round fat fennels unfortunately. So I decided to pick them before they became too tall and create something with them. I washed them, removed the leaves and cooked them with a tbs of butter and a little light vegetable stock until they were tender, and then I added another tbs of butter I blended them into a cream which I used to dress pasta with. It was delicious! I have a couple more fennels in the garden and this will be their destiny too!  PS: The leaves are just for decoration Photos and Recipes by Alessandra Zecchini  ©