Commonly associated with savoury dishes, spices can add a warmth and complexity to your sweet desserts – a tasty way to use up the last of your summer produce.
In sweet cookery, spice can provide a delicate fragrance, hard to put your finger on but one that gives backbone to a dish. It can balance tartness and tone down things that are overly sweet.
Flavours can be enhanced by a thoughtful addition from the spice cupboard, making chocolate more chocolaty and fruit taste more of itself. Added not in shouts but in whispers, an intrigue of spice deepens allure.
You can’t enjoy spices in isolation, they need foods to bounce off, so cooking with them is an art of creating relationships. Like any successful marriage, when paired with the right ingredients they will bring out the best in each other.
Floral and fruity spices combine well with buttery fats. Warming spices like ginger and clove play off treacly brown sugar. Anise sweetens, lemony coriander seed brightens and herbaceous notes
