Ever since I’d seen the beautiful photograph of raspberry napoléon in Thomas Keller’s The French Laundry Cookbook, I’d always wondered what the contrasting textures would taste like. The only hurdle in my way was the puff pastry.

I’ve always wanted to give puff pastry a go, but never had the courage to do so. I’ve convinced myself that the butter blocks would just melt horribly in the warm weather over here and I’d end up with a thick block of dough with no layers whatsoever.

So, when my parents presented us with store-bought puff pastry they’d carted all the way back from Melbourne (please don’t ask me how they did this without the pastry sheets defrosting on the flight), I knew right away what to do with them.

The resulting dessert was visually pleasing, but I didn’t like the texture of the store-bought pastry. Although the layers were present, I found the pastry a little too dry and flakey. Fortunately, the vanilla flecked pastry cream, which I’d also infused with orange zest, was lovely with the slightly tart raspberries. It looks like I’ll have to try making my own puff pastry!

This was lunch today. Chicken drumsticks marinated overnight in Lee Kum Kee’s chicken marinade and baked in the oven at 180 degrees C for 30 minutes, blanched green vegetables (choi sum or cai xing) and Vietnamese Phó mixed in a sauce consisting of dark soya sauce, sugar and sesame oil.

It was simple but satisfying. If only every meal were this easy to throw together…

I’d bought a 9″ square cake ring and couldn’t wait to put it to use. I was too lazy to bake a cake from scratch, so I put together a dessert that didn’t require baking, but could still fill up a cake ring.

This italian dessert can be put together on a wimp, unless you’re baking the sponge fingers or sponge cake layers instead of using store-bought ladyfinger sponges. All you need is some heavy cream, mascarpone cheese, sugar, Amaretto, expresso and the sponges.

Normally, I would have piled on the mascarpone cream, but my family had complained that the last one I made had too high a cream-to-sponge ratio. This is the waistline-friendlier version with 2/3 the amount of cream. No complaints received this time!