a flurry of figs

In the weekend I was the lucky recipient of a bowl of figs, thanks to a friend of Mum's that has a tree and doesn't care for them. (There were many more - this is the remainder that was turned into jam). The bowl is my newest addition to my Tony Sly collection of beautiful things to put food in and on.

Roasted figs with fig leaf syrup. We ate these with gingerbread waffles and poached pears for breakfast (more about that later). The fig leaf syrup comes from the Dunsandel Store. It has a flavour that is hard to describe. It is lovely, not too sweet and less cloying than maple syrup or honey.

Fig and lemon jam - inspired by the new book Pick, Preserve, Serve by Chris Fortune. A good little book with nice ideas for contemporary preserves...the lemon in this is delicious, it really lifts the flavour. I cut the figs into wedges so they stayed nice and chunky. I think it will be perfect in a crostata with some sliced apples.

Pizza with caramelised red onion, blue cheese, fig and walnut. Self explanatory.

figs and honey

This weeks TWD recipe is Polenta and Ricotta cake, a mediterranean style cake with figs and honey, chosen by Caitlin of Engineer Baker . I love polenta, so was interested to try a cake recipe using it. I used Rata honey, a NZ bush honey which has quite a strong flavour. I halved the recipe and still filled (to the brim) a medium sized tart tin, so the whole recipe must make an enormous tart.

I did find the cake was a little sweet, I wish I had read other TWD comments earlier about cutting down the sugar. However served with greek yoghurt it was better.

The recipe specifies putting little dots of butter on top of the cake mix before baking. I was skeptical about this but did it anyway, and it resulted in funny little square patches on top of the cake which looked really odd - so I dusted it with icing sugar to try and improve things!


The inside of the cake is lovely and moist with quite a dense crumb (although is is not heavy to eat). Dried figs of the fat, moist kind are essential for this cake. This is a nice, if plain cake, it would be good served as a lighter dessert, maybe with some poached figs or stonefruit.