fig leaf and honey ice-cream

and other nice things

there are some very beautiful fig trees growing in the city at the moment. i’ve been spotting their heavy dark green leaves draped over garden walls along the streets near my flat. lambeth palace, just a little further up towards the river, is home to a 465 year old one. kitty travers writes about how london came to have so many in her book la grotta ices.

i’ve wanted to make something with fig leaves for a while now, and what with the last few weeks of hot weather i thought it might be nice to dust off my much loved (but much neglected!) ice-cream maker. the flavour of fig leaf is quite hard to describe. my best attempt is “coconut but herby, a little like basil”. i followed this recipe by david lebowitz which calls for you to toast the leaves in a skillet, watching the leaves crisp and curl up on themselves is very satisfying. we had ours with jarred amarena cherries.

some other nice things i’ve enjoyed this week;

i finished ottessa moshfegh’s lapvona. i loved all of her other books and i loved this one too. true, it is deeply disturbed and revolting at times but i think that might be the point; you’re confronted with just how grotesque the human experience can be at times.

capturing the moment at tate modern. ‘a journey through painting and photography… an open-ended conversation between some of the greatest painters and photographers of the modern era’. well worth seeing if you’re in or visiting london. another exhibition i’ve seen and loved lately (which wasn’t in the last week, or even in london!) was ernest cole’s house of bondage at foam in amsterdam.

lemons, more specifically variegated pink lemons. you can spot them by their eccentrically striped skin and pink flesh. taste-wise they’re like; floral, sherbet and tangy. i used mine to make a lemon tart. i’m working on a lemon and elderflower drizzle cake recipe that i hope to share with you in the coming weeks.