Orange and Almond Cake

You look high and low for recipes when you fall in love with a food. And sometimes it is hard to satisfy your palate with what you make because your hand creations cannot match the great taste that you enjoyed for that food the first time. The Orange and Almond Cake is one such recipe for me. It was a sweet yet refreshing and light dessert. I've been working to perfect this recipe for a long time and I stroke it rich when I landed on the Food Safari show in SBS one day where they presented this exhilarating dessert as a classic Passover confection from the Mediterranean, Morocco and the Middle East.

White Chocolate Panna Cotta

Panna Cotta is a classic Italian dessert which means cooked cream. It is velvety smooth and decadent and has a very close resemblance to the Indian Phirni or the Arabic Mahlabi. While Phirni uses rice flour and Mahlabi uses cornstarch to thicken boiled milk, Panna Cotta uses gelatin to a mixture of boiled milk and cream. And then there are also differences in the flavouring agents used and the way these desserts are served. I am hoping to post recipes for Phirni and Mahlabi very soon; so more later.

The recipe here is a change to the traditional one since it uses white chocolate (source: Woolworth's Australian Good Taste magazine). The original recipe serves Panna Cotta with coffee syrup but here I have used orange marmalade sauce (source: http://www.eatingwell.com/recipes/orange_marmalade_sauce.html). The first time I made this, the sauce turned out more bitter, since the marmalade I bought was more on the bitter side. The next time I tried it with a different brand of marmalade which was more sweet and the sauce turned out better. You can also serve it up with a berry coulis or a berry sauce. The choice is yours.