Tres Leches Cake with Blackberries & Coconut - Happy Birthday Kitchen Boudoir!

The Kitchen Boudoir turns one this week, after a year of 'dishing, intimately.' With the recipes on this blog, neighbours have been won-over, friendships have been cemented, landlords have been bribed, and much fun has been had. As a result of what happened with butter, sugar, eggs, flour, milk and cream this year, buttons were often unbuttoned for reasons more amorous than overindulgent.

You can read all about how this blog came to be on my inspiration page here. Today, however, I want to celebrate what this blog has come to be over this past first year: a virtual space to make real connections, and a truly wonderful (not to mention delicious) creative outlet. To celebrate - creatively and calorically, I made a Tres Leches birthday cake: a threesome of milks mingling atop a bed of almond-flour sponge cake, filled out with billowy whipped cream, plump, juicy blackberries and fragrant toasted coconut.

'French Laundry' Apple Cake & Vanilla Cream Sauce

The dining room was quiet except for the staccato duet of fork on plate. My friend T. held up his well-scraped plate and broke the silence: "This is what 'I want more' looks like."

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That evening's plate-scraping was due to this simple-but-soulful apple cake; the recipe borrowed and improvised from my prized copy of Thomas Keller's The French Laundry Cookbook. The recipe originates from Sally Schmitt, who owned and ran the kitchen at The French Laundry restaurant before chef Thomas Keller bought it in 1994 and brought it to its current re-known. The recipe pays homage to their relationship, which still continues to this day: Chef Keller gets his apples for The French Laundry from The Philo Apple Farm, where Sally and her husband, Don, have retired.

Vanilla Bean Latte Layer Cake

A homemade mocha torte introduced me to my first taste of coffee when I was still too young to drink it. Coffee and I continued our illicit affair in stolen bites of any dessert it graced - until we both felt we were ready and old enough to 'get serious'. With a lot of milk and sugar as a protective measure, I drank my first latte and never looked back. I still have a weakness for coffee-flavoured desserts and this triple-layer cake truly satisfies the craving: it takes all the flavours of a vanilla bean latte and translates them directly into dessert. Three, in this case, is not a crowd, but a definite crowd-pleaser: this cake, with its rich and flavourful three layers, made at least 20 people remember their 'first time'.

Apple Flognarde

A flognarde by any other name would taste as sweet: a kissing cousin to the better-known clafoutis (which is made with cherries), this custardy-pancake dessert lets seasonal fruit shine atop a bed of pillowy batter. Flognarde comes from the Occitan words fleunhe and flaunhard, which mean 'soft' and 'downy', respectively. This apple flognarde certainly lives up to that sensual description: it has the body of a cake, the soft, inner creaminess of a custard or flan and a puffiness that holds the fruit of your choice like a sweet duvet. I chose to use apples for the fruit in this flognarde, who, nestled one atop the other, got downright delicious under the custardy covers. 

Almond Tart with Homemade Vanilla Mascarpone and Fresh Strawberries

Lately I've been keen to channel my inner milkmaid, for which my kitchen (and my curves) are well equipped. Having truly enjoyed the experience of making fresh ricotta, I decided to try making homemade mascarpone cheese. Mascarpone is the naughtier, creamier cousin to ricotta. Where ricotta is the cheese you'd introduce to your parents, mascarpone is the cheese you'd cheat on ricotta with. It's a rich, smooth, spreadable cheese with a light flavour that is best known for its longstanding affair with the beloved Italian dessert - tiramisu. As much as I enjoy anything creamy and coffee-flavoured, I wanted to prepare something fresh to accompany this season's local strawberries. I decided to introduce yet another tart to my imaginary patisserie. This tart has an almond crust, filled with the creamy combination of fresh homemade mascarpone, cream cheese and sour cream, speckled with flecks of vanilla bean and lemon zest. The tart is topped with macerated strawberries, which taste best au naturel with just the finest sprinkling of sugar to get their juices flowing.

Individual Pineapple Upside-Down Cakes with Coconut Whipped Cream

Should you bring these individual pineapple upside-down cakes to the office potluck, Mr. Draper may want to see you in his office and ask you huskily to close the door. In the spirit of Mad Men's return and inspired by a post by my blogging friend Jen from Juanita's Cocina, I've reinterpreted this retro dessert table staple into a single-serving mini-cake that has the ability to unfasten garters and deliciously fill out pencil skirts with its caramelized bottom. Paired with a  mound of coconut whipped cream, these little cakes are comfortingly dense and undeniably seductive.