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Office baking today; halva, tahini and smoked salt caramel shortbread (aka Middle Eastern millionaire’s shortbread) and chocolate and browned butter chunk cookies (with nearly three quarters of a kilo of Valrhona Manjari 64% chocolate, aka the good stuff.)

Shy kids get no toffee.

Are you flirting with me? The apocryphal story goes: a Persian woman was madly in love with a prince. To have him fall in love with her, she baked him a cake, filled with sweet cardamom, pistachios and rose petals. The cake was said to have magical love powers. Etc, and so on and so forth.

Persian Love Cake, with ginger, cinnamon and cardamom caramel mud cake, black pepper syrup, freeze-dried raspberries, toasted pistachios, rosewater and orgeat mascarpone buttercream, crushed pomegranate meringue, dried rose petals, and gold-leafed figs.

Dorie Greenspan’s slow-roasted pineapple, caramelised until it’s almost translucent and candied in rum, apricot jam, habanero peach jelly, fresh orange juice, star anise, all spice berries and soft Vietnamese cinnamon.

Probably the most rustic-looking thing I’ve ever made, but I’m sure they taste OK; fig, Armagnac and pistachio frangipane tartlets. And a rhubarb version, for the fig-haters. Or a fig version, for the rhubarb-haters.

Well, the unexamined life is not worth living!

I specifically searched out a brand with no shrimp paste - Maesri. Ingredients: Fresh Chilli, Garlic, Fingerroot, Shallot, Lemongrass, Salt, Sweet Basil, Kaffir Lime, Sugar, Spices, Galangal.

I am mega stressed lately, so I do things like get out of bed and bake at 3am to try to chillax - this is a three layer devil’s food chocolate cake, glazed in ginger syrup, filled with dark chocolate ganache into which I’d steeped 8 Kaffir lime leaves and 4 Thai birdseye chillies, coated the cake in Italian meringue buttercream spiked with a tablespoonful of Thai green curry paste (gasp!), and garnished with pistachios candied with white pepper and smoked salt, and Thai rose petals. Strange flavour cake; strangely compelling.

On holiday in an oyster-growing region, so....the biggest oyster I’ve ever had - twice the size of my hand - the red is Tabasco. And then three dozen Sydney Rock oysters. YES, BY MYSELF.

Thats' the Sydney Harbour Bridge; if I turned the camera a little to the right, you'd have a splendid view of the Sydney Opera House.

Things I've made lately; Strawberry mascarpone meringue trifle; which involved four layers of chewy coconut meringue, six punnets of fresh strawberries, an entire bag of freeze-dried strawberries, 1.5kg of mascarpone, 15 eggs, an entire jar of vanilla bean paste, a whole lotta sugar, and a trifle dish. Office morning teas; I rule em. Vanilla eclairs, also for office people: Concrete cake, which is just layers of vanilla butter cake and French raspberry buttercream. I gifted it to my friend, look how happy she is!

I've been trying to enrol there and can't get anyone to respond at all - please let me know if you succeed!

I'm very big in government. Literally.

I'm so dedicated to office baking, I keep my own marble cake stand here!

How’s that for a Monday morning office cake; layers of pistachio dacquoise/meringue, white chocolate mousse, yuzu curd, and thick, fudgy pistachio ganache. Decorated with pistachio and smoked salt praline, cornflowers, and gold leaf. And because last week a whole bunch of office punters complained that they missed out on cake...I made two of them.

Finger injury notwithstanding, another stellar office baking effort, if I do say so myself; sponge cake, into which a crunchy, pillowy layer of meringue is directly baked, then filled with 8-yolk lemon curd, whipped cream, and another sponge meringue cake layer.

Saturday morning trip to Sydney Fish Market = epic sashimi/ kaisen don. Tuna, tuna belly, scallops and uni.

And round 2; vanilla bean cupcakes, with fresh pear baked into the mix, the centers cored out and filled with pear caramel, feuilletine and pistachio praline, topped with that roasted and reduced pear buttercream, and decorated with a candied pear wafer. But the impressive part of all that is that even despite losing a significant portion of my fingertip to the mandoline when slicing the pears and bleeding non stop for five hours and eventually requiring proper medical attention, I still managed to get my eyeliner on more or less straight the next day, bloodied stump notwithstanding. This is my bandaged mandoline stump. Is a serious mandoline injury the sign of a TRUE eGulleter?

More experiments in flavour layering; a cake involving 28 pears. Spiced pear layer cake, filled with pear curd and a caramel made out of reduced pear juice (the juice I squeezed out of the pears I shredded for the cake layers), cream and butter, and frosted with roasted pear and mascarpone buttercream. And then I poached pears in pear nectar and swirled that through the buttercream, and decorated the frosted cake with candied pear wafers (dipped paper-thin slices of whole pear in sugar and dehydrated until they’re toffee). And also pistachio praline in the filling (no pears in that.) Office people were very happy.

I always have a lot of left over egg shells from all my baking, so I've started experimenting with things I can turn them into; first, I painted their insides dusty rose pink and amethyst, and gold/copper leafed their outsides. I figure I can use them as some kind of cake decoration. And part 2 of said experiments; cutting a small hole in the bottom of an egg, draining the yolk and white and washing it out, letting it dry completely for a few days; piping the shell full with liquid praline, sealing the hole, letting it set and painting the egg gold. Ergo, sum; gilded praline hard-boiled eggs.

Made a similar version of this not long ago, but improved the flavours this time; Monday office cake; a three layer pistachio and Cara Cara orange dacquoise, filled with blackberry curd, crystallised pistachios, freeze-dried pineapple and almond mascarpone meringue cream, topped with dehydrated pineapple flowers brushed in yuzu syrup.

Made a similar version of this not long ago, but improved the flavours this time; Monday office cake; a three layer pistachio and Cara Cara orange dacquoise, filled with blackberry curd, crystallised pistachios, freeze-dried pineapple and almond mascarpone meringue cream, topped with dehydrated pineapple flowers brushed in yuzu syrup.

Frosted pistachio experiments, for a cake I'm making for work tomorrow. All flavours involve first crystallizing the roasted pistachios in melted sugar and water, but the flavours I've made today include: * Cardamom, white pepper and fleur de sel * Freeze-dried apricot powder and Murray River soft pink salt flakes * Orange blossom water, star anise, sea salt and a dash of espelette pepper * Sichuan pepper, freeze-dried strawberry powder and crushed black salt * Melted down pralines de roses from Lyon, almond kernel extract and fleur de sel * Kaffir lime leaf, lemongrass, ground dried Kashmiri chilli and crystallised, dried fish sauce granules for the salt (that I made myself by drying fish sauce in the sun and waiting for the neighbours to complain about the smell) And my personal favourite - cinnamon, ginger, cubeb pepper and smoked salt.

Totally doable and delicious with oxtail too, @JohnT. In Korean, that's called gori jjim.