“Oh! I am so sorry!” I exclaimed, ready to turn on my heel and go out into the rain rather than face any more embarrassment.

“Ah – so fresh!” he smiled “I was in need of a bit of refreshment.” He eased me out of my coat and escorted me to my table.

He and his brigade continued to serve me as if I were a guest of utmost importance or at least one with impressive spending power (In reality, I am the worst kind of guest in Michelin starred restaurants because I only order 1 bottle of water and 1 glass of wine, I’m not really worth the space I take).It was one of my best multi Michelin starred experiences in London, followed closely by The Square, and Tom Aikens. (A notable albeit surprising service dud was The Fat Duck in Bray).  That was 2005, 7 years ago and I still remember it, although I no longer remember what I ate.  (That’s why, I always keep the menu)

I bring all this up as a way of underlining how memorable human interaction is, can be.  After countless shopping experiences at Galeria where service so bad it borders on comic and should be accompanied by canned laughter I have placed them at the farthest end of the scale from that wet afternoon on Hospital Road. Take the fish counter.  I have had 3 experiences.  First time, they tried to sell me the shriveled up old piece when there was a fresh, plump one right next to it.  Another time, the tail end.  Still another, I asked for two pieces and got one nice portion and another that was almost double in size.  That’s like being given a right shoe in a size 37 and a left shoe in a 38 and when you complain being told to get a grip and just shove some toilet paper in at the toe.  More or less the reaction of the fishwife.  I insisted nonetheless, she grumbled something, probably a hex of some sort as I have been struck down by the most monstrous of colds.Thinking I would be safe if I stayed within the self-service boundary of Galeria, I went to pick up some ground coffee.  My path was impeded by a large woman with a trolley re-stocking the shelves.  ”Excuse me.” I smiled “Would it be alright if I grabbed that coffee?”  ”When I’ve finished.” she replied gruffly.  I stood there, 86, 85, 84…2, 1 until the last tin was on the shelf.  Ok, she moved her trolley out of her way without so much as a nod of acknowledgment in my direction.  Goings on so preposterous, I am physically rooted to the spot with incredulity.

The number of times I’ve asked if they stock something to which the answer is inevitably no, only to find it myself?  Too many to count.What I don’t get is this, there has been money spent on the food hall at Galeria; floor to ceiling shelves, good stock, glossy pamphlets filled with hampers and such, consistent branding.  Why has corporate not had a look at service?  Or thought about installing an information desk with a data base so that goods can be located when someone esquires about them?

I will shop at Galeria, if I am in vicinity but I literally cringe at the thought of interacting with the staff.  As for fish, I will trek out to one of the Frischeparadies which Hilker’s website tells me, only displays fish for 48 hours.  Dry stores or canned goods I prefer Karstadt or even Ullrich (the latter, which sells my beloved Mutti tomatoes for under 1 euro!)

Galeria
Alexanderplatz 9
Berlin
030 247430

If you want the flank steak (skirt steak), and you do want the flank steak, it’s a supplementary €3.  This cut has a lot of chew to it, with visible fibers, which means you order it medium rare otherwise you will be masticating for rather a long time.  To compensate for the jaw work out it packs a lot of flavour.  It’s hard not to eat every last one of those skin on fries (you may ask why one would even contemplate such a thing – welcome to a woman’s mind, it’s all about abstinence, too much of a good thing is very very bad).

That wasn’t my dish by the way, it was my friend’s.  Mine was an aubergine cous cous dish.  When I went to University in Paris, my friend Giulia and I would often lunch at a Moroccan place on Rue de Grenelle.  I pictured a vegetarian tagine of chickpeas and aubergine and a steaming bowl of cous cous like I used to eat there.  The nostalgic water works in my mouth abruptly dried up when I got my order.  A shallow filled eggplant skin, where the flesh had gone off to, I don’t know.  The cous cous filling bland and dry, the handsome broccoli florets unsalted and cold and the accompanying salad a repeat of my appetizer (beetroot and apple with balsamic mustard dressing).  Hope manifested itself in a miniature bowl of sauce.  Something salty perhaps? Or a tangy  yogurt with a breathe of garlic to liven everything up?  Alas, no it was cream (huh?) with cinnamon (whaaaaa….?) and it got left behind.

I blame myself really.  (That’s another thing women readily do)  It’s a brasserie and I should have stuck to what brasseries do best instead of going off on some Don Quixoten/esque (?) quest to find a tagine as good as the one I used to eat on Rue de Grenelle when I was 18 and you could have gathered up all my culinary expertise, dumped it into a chickpea skin and still had space to spare. The brasserie in the title is not decorative.  It’s got the bustling and clinking of a Paris brasserie as well as the small footprint and tables that are very close together – too often in Berlin, you get cavernous quiet spaces, with not enough furniture and the balance doesn’t seem right.  Unlike Paris, the staff is young and friendly.  They speak French, German and English all at once.  It is a pleasure to have lunch there.  But I advise you to stick to the classics.

*Dinner is an entirely different menu with different prices and I haven’t tried that yet.

La Bonne Franquette
Chausseestrasse 110
10115 Berlin
T. 030 9440 5363
www.labonnefranquette.de
Lunch from 11:30 to 15:00
1 course = €7 / 2 courses = €10 / 3 courses = 1€3.50 menus include one drink

The food was similarly nostalgic.  The components of the salad that came with my fish were all peeled.  Everything; green peppers, tomatoes (deseeded), cucumbers (deseeded).  The fish had been wrapped in an intricate confetti of potato and fried in butter.  Fried in butter was the theme of the our main courses, it was wafting out every time the kitchen door swung open.    Hrabi’s schnitzel had been similarly bathed in butter, the potato salad came with the superfluous addition of mushrooms.   Dessert was an option between three different kinds of parfait.  I don’t like parfait.  When I was small and we used to visit Bucharest, parfait was all they had, my parents would tell me it was ice cream.  One bite of the dense almost buttery parfait, often with -gag- pieces of orange peel or some other such horror would be enough for me to forgo dessert all together.  I may have outgrown my fear of fat (see Phoebe in Berlin post) but I am standing firm behind my fear of parfait.  I think I was expecting something else, regional food- yes but with an up to date spin. The high street Carmens is on, the interior it’s all like stepping back in time, which is quite an experience in itself. And it was nice to get out of the city, even if it was just for an afternoon.  Considering the wonderful reviews it has received from Qype, Tip the Michelin Guide and so on, I am even willing to come back to try it in the summer, maybe sit at one of those 16 outside tables.  I doubt, however, that I will manage to convince my husband to come a second time around.

Carmens
Bahnhofstraße 9
15732 Eichwalde
T. 030 675 84 23

Caroline and Tobias of the Thyme Supper Club recommended Phoebe in Berlin’s. Their words “It’s something different. She’s a professional chef, not an enthusiastic amateur. She does French food and Chinese. The Chinese is special, not like any Chinese food we’ve ever eaten before.”It wasn’t.

It took a couple of months, a flurry of emails and one cancellation for enough people to be interested to make the Chinese themed evening viable. Good things are worth waiting for and the shifting date meant that I didn’t go into overdrive imagining what it must be like. In fact when the email finally came: “Hallo! Happy to see you! Tomorrow night 7:30” it caught me totally off guard, I didn’t even know if my husband was in town to watch Layla.We were asked to leave our boots at the door and invited to help ourselves to a pair of slippers from an overflowing wicker basket (love that, stealing that! I too make people take off their shoes but I don’t provide any slippers).Phoebe is from Taiwan, where she ran a successful French restaurant (Louis XIV) for over 10 years. Her apartment is large, bright and Ikea free with plenty of unfamiliar decorative pieces that give the place an Asian flair. Not Asian like you or I could achieve, trawling the shops around here, more like bits and pieces you might find in a Mandarin Oriental in Taiwan.Phoebe struts decisively in knee-high black boots with waist length hair and an awesome air of authority. I have an odd thought, primal in nature: ‘if we went into battle, I would follow Phoebe’ – which is weird really, because normally I would expect people to follow me into battle. All these thoughts tumble into my consciousness in the hallway, in a matter of seconds.Phoebe has already left us to speak to the journalist that is doing a piece on her supper club for a Norwegian publication. She is showing them ingredients that will feature in tonight’s meal. She speaks quickly, gesturing a lot, often hard to understand. Even though I am speaking to other guests, I catch snippets of what she is saying “this is like lychee, we dry it…this is a special pepper…good for skin, gets rid of water.”I had been expecting a nice Chinese meal but this sounds medicinal, mystical.

When the rest of the guests arrive, we are invited to start with the canapés. Peeled tomatoes in vinegar, to get the appetite going we are told. Deep fried green olives in a Parmesan and wasabi crust. Ricotta and soy panna cotta with a sprinkling of cracked pepper in a pool of vivid grassy olive oil.We are asked to adjourn to the dining room, where the table is laid with a black velvet tablecloth, large white plates set off black ceramic plates, orchid in the center, deep groves radiating outwards. Tucked in on the left the evening’s menu. The table setting and dining room are arresting.The ten of us sit down and are immediately immersed in the menu. There are many ingredients I don’t recognize; rubber bush mushrooms, white wood ear, job’s tears, black sugar.The food starts coming out. Each course is served in a different dish.  There is a build up of flavour complexity and richness as we amble pleasantly through the meal.  The pan-fried mushrooms with silken tofu is a favourite.  The steamed cod in caramelised soy sauce is dreamy, succumbing to large succulent flakes with just the gentlest of prods.  A plate of slow cooked pork belly is put in front of me by Phoebe’s husband, only to be whisked away by Phoebe moments later.

“I give you a better piece, more fat.”  She reappears with another plate, the ratio of meat to fat roughly equal.  ”Fat is best part.” (In my slow evolution- I can hear my friend Giulia giggling as I write this- from pernickity child eater to foodie adult, fat has been a difficult issue.  I would often push away plates of pristine chicken breast schnitzel because they allegedly contained ‘fat’.)  I take a bite, the play of soft fat to flesh is delightful but the whole is topped with a bouncy piece of fat, the texture of a Haribo gummy bear.  There is a moment of hesitation, I admit, until I transcend my Western bias against unfamiliar textures.  Once I do, I quite enjoy it.  And beam happily when Phoebe notes that I alone appreciated my fat.   The best comes next. A dumpling filled with black sesame in a pool of black sugar, stewed fruit (something like a lychee but not, Phoebe tells us) and sweet walnuts.  The combination is foreign but  sensational, the table falls into a quiet reverie, the only sound that of scraping spoons.  And still there is more, a green tea cake with sesame snaps and a special tea.  By that time, midnight has rolled around. I want nothing more than to be horizontal, I am stuffed. The company has been good and I can’t wait to get in front of my computer and tell you all about it!

www.phoebe-berlin.de
Suggested donation €50 with a €3 extra per glass of wine

Exclamation point indeed.

Ask and certain people will tell you.  Berlin isn’t ready for pricey restaurants.  That is why so many places open up only to close.  The market is just not here yet.  Give ‘em cheap and give ‘em lots.

Pants

Exclamation point.I made a lunch date at 1:30 with a girlfriend.  ”Should I call ahead to make a reservation.” she asked.  ’Who needs a reservation for lunch in Berlin? On Torstrasse? On a Wednesday?  Even for an offshoot of Bandol Sur Mer, bound to be popular.’  That was my thinking at least.  Flawed thinking I soon came to realize, as I huffed and puffed my way up Torstrasse in my two pairs of trousers, 4 shirts, 1 fleece and 1 coat and a cashmere pashmina wrapped around my waist to combat the devastation this arctic weather is wreaking on my lower back (Born in Kuwait people – which by the way – is where you will find me if this cold doesn’t let up.).The place was throbbing with custom.  Screen away the surrounding buildings and 3 Minutes could have been off the Seven Dials in London or in the Latin Quarter in Paris.  Blockbuster cities with a fair number of wealthy inhabitants.  I snagged the only table just in time.I love the inside.  A corner location means two walls of windows ensuring a bright crisp dining room.  There is a similar aesthetic to Bandol but with more space to fill, they’ve graduated from  blackboard walls to a more sophisticated  interior.  A bar area whose ceiling is decorated with caramel coloured wooden beams and square lighting fixtures so retro, it could have all come from some Swiss skiing chalet that was buried under an avalanche of snow 50 years ago.  Another wall is dressed with 4 prints that I covet instantly.  The kitchen is open, a mark of confidence.The lunch menu (11:30 to 18:00) needs to be seen to be believed because in an act of commendable restraint and self-knowledge, it only lists 5 dishes.  Things like coq au vin, white fish with beetroot and potato, veal with potatoes and cauliflower, jerusalem artichoke soup.  You have the option of ordering a small or large portion, allowing you to tailor your starter and main.As I trust their sourcing, I order the veal and I realize I haven’t eaten meat for over a month (€18).  It comes with a small side of brattkartoffeln and a scattering of steamed cauliflower florets.  The veal has lots of flavour but the sides need a little more attention, more of a spin I feel, to justify the price tag – maybe dauphinoise potatoes or a side of cauliflower and cheese (I know, very British but exceedingly good).  My friend’s fish dish (€13) needs no tweaking at all – Bandol makes a mean pan-fried fish, crispy on the outside and succulent on the inside, and 3 Minutes has no trouble keeping up the bar.At some point we both realize that the bread basket has passed us by.  We wonder if we are just being greedy by asking for it when we have finished our large-sized dishes and decide we don’t care.  Good thing too, an olive flute as it should be.  Magically chewy and tangy, the waiter tells us it comes from a French Bakery in Schöneberg (Moulin Rouge 1855).

Dessert is crème brûlée or an uninspiring looking cake, I rarely order the perennial crème brûlée or panna cotta – the city seems to be stuck on these two when there is so much more out there, crème caramel, lemon tart, any tart really.It’s just lunch and I’ve only been the one time, I found the food to be pared down in comparison to Bandol (I am not sure how this changes for dinner and I will do my best to write-up a separate post for that), but their sourcing continues to be top-notch and they young chefs in the kitchen know how to do them justice.

So yes – excited, happy even at this new Torstrasse addition.

3 Minutes Sur Mer!
Torstr. 166 (Bergstr.)
Mitte
T. 030 6730 2052,
Mon-Fri 11.30 to midnight, Sat and Sun 10 to midnight
(Just like Bandol, 3 Minutes Sur Mer have no website so I will direct you to a write-up by Tip magazine Berlin here)

“Really?” I asked “Don’t you just want to go to Brot und Butter?  I had some weird food there last time.”

“Huh.  I had a lentil dish the other day and it was very good.  What did you have?”

“Leg of goose, I think there may have been some chocolate involved in the sauce, red cabbage, spaetzle.  All delicious if ridiculously enormous a portion large enough to feed two – which by the way it ended up doing because Hrabi’s dish of spaetzle with sweet and salty peanut sauce was inedible.  Then for dessert a dry chocolate brownie, corners showing signs of age, with a yummy plum compote of which ironically, there was not enough.”

“Ok, let’s go to Brot und Butter.”

“No, you know what? I need to get out of Mitte, my blog is becoming overly Mittecentric.And so we did which is a good thing because my lunch was great and I realized that I much prefer the restaurant during the day.  At night it’s a little bit too dim and quiet, it makes me think of long winters spent visiting my grandmother who only ever had (still has) one feeble lightbulb in her 10 lightbulb chandelier.  During the day, light bounces off the large white oval table (Ikea, I have the same one) onto the lovely silver and slate wallpaper.  There are more guests adding warmth to the surroundings.  The large (in stature) waiter, who because of his height, can give you quite a fright when he appears, lurch like, out of the shadows is significantly tempered by daylight.I’m not sure if this is a lunch thing or a-year-has-passed-since-you-last-ate-here thing but the food arrived on trays, with the napkin folded into a triangle to one side, cutlery on top.  You keep the tray under your plate as you eat.  I quite liked that detail, it made me think of times (long, long ago) when I used to look forward to what surprises and delights my airplane meal might have in store for me.  Or when I am oh so blissfully alone (can count on my pinky toe how often this happens) because someone else has my child and is taking care that she is eating her white food, my husband (often culinarily challenged) has made other arrangements and I can make my food exactly how I like, place it all neatly on a tray, perch it on my knees and watch something I want to see while eating food that is not only delicious but still hot!  (Ah, the craziness that such trivial details can induce.)The trays, the solitary large waiter, the salty and sweet peanut spaetzle, it’s all a bit oddball.  But then you only have to look at the homepage which shows the chef, blond eyebrows furrowed together about to impale a yellow pepper with a very large knife to get a visual confirmation.  This genial oddness is present in the dishes.  The ingredients are often locally sourced and organic where they can be and sometimes chef-impale-yellow-pepper-with-large-knife does good things with a lot of it.  The grilled polenta with pan-fried mushrooms and cheese was spot on but then “Oh, what’s that? Is that strawberry syrup drizzled on top of it all?”.  My friend’s maultaschen were served in bowl, to accommodate a hot broth that tasted a little of bouillon cube with cold potato salad nestled up against it.  Hot broth with fridge cold potato salad? Odd.

Don’t write the place off though, I rather like it.  It’s experimental not in the modern molecular sense but in the pineapple and ham pizza sense, which can be fun.  The whole eating in a drawing room vibe is thoroughly enjoyable, especially when coupled with the friendly waiter who serves the tray of food and then folds his hands over his belly and gazes at it fondly – as if he has just handed you the best thing in the world.

Essen Fassen
Knesebeckstraße 89
Charlottenburg
T. 030 2243 8118
www.essenfassen.com

So it follows, want to make superlative baked goods?  You need a certain amount of skill (acquired over time) and some expensive kit comes in handy (Hello? Making marshmallows without a stand mixer? Much much harder.).   So when I come across a recipe that is easy and fast to make, I am skeptical to the extreme.  Regardless of my doubts, out comes a fluffy moist cake, not too sweet, enhanced by a spectacular icing that takes the cake from healthy tasting (think oven baked apples) to one of those cakes where you scrape maniacaly at any streaks of icing left on the plate.Frankly, it makes everything feel a little topsy turvy, like finding a €10 note on an empty street, making a show of bending down to pick it up.  Pivoting on your planted feet this way and that, note held up high (as proof that you attempted to look for the person to whom it might belong) before shrugging your shoulders and tucking it into your pocket.  You still feel a little guilty though, don’t you? That this good luck was bestowed on you while some poor sod is looking for his tenner (Unless it’s my husband.  Walk behind him. He loses money every time he reaches into his pocket.  Shall I describe him to you?)It’s criminal how easy this cake is to make.  All you need is a wooden spoon and some bowls.  I’ve made it in small bundt size cakes and halved the recipe so that it makes one flat cake in my sexy aluminum Hugo Braeuer tin (a small selection of which is available at the kitchen shop Kochtail in Mitte).  I’ve gone ahead and typed out the recipe below exactly how I found it, in Good Food magazine.  I’ve never made it with the walnuts, substituting almonds once and leaving it nut free the other time.  Unless you are a nut fanatic, I find they aren’t necessary, the most important thing is the icing.  Without it the cake is moist but doesn’t strike the right sweet note.I usually use a mix of apples, one of which is almost always a Pinova (a happy discovery I made Neumann’s when I first moved to Berlin).

Apple Cake adapted from BBC Good Food Magazine

Ingredients:
300g plain flour
1 tsp ground cinnamon
½ tsp bicarbonate of soda
140.0g dark brown soft sugar
50.0g golden caster sugar
250ml sunflower oil
4 eggs
3 unpeeled apples , coarsely grated
100 walnuts , roughly chopped

100g butter , softened
50g dark soft brown sugar
1 Tbs black treacle
200 full fat cream cheese

Method:

1. Heat oven to 150C/130C fan. Line two 20cm cake tins. Put the flour, cinnamon and bicarbonate of soda in a big bowl, then stir in the sugars, making sure there are no lumps of sugar. Add the oil, eggs and apples, and beat everything together. Fold in the walnuts then divide the mixture between the tins and bake for 45 mins or until a skewer comes out clean. Allow to cool for a few mins in the tin then remove and cool completely on a wire rack.

2. For the icing, beat all the ingredients together then chill until the mixture is thick but spreadable. Spread half the icing on top of one cake, sandwich with the other and spread the remaining icing on top

In a sea of spuds and pork, these guys are offering fluffy rice that smells like it’s been toasted with a few generous ladles of stew.  Vegetarian and non-vegetarian options.  Although I always get the vegetarian option.  For about 3 reasons: 500g a week is what is recommended to ward off certain cancers; the rearing of red meat is straining to the planet; I abhor generic meat, it’s tantamount to eating that weird mouldable cheese that comes packed in individual plastic sheets and calling that Keen’s Cheddar Cheese.

It’s no big sacrifice though.  They celebrate legumes and pulses in the Middle East and the vegetable dishes at Sabzi never feel like a compromise.  The other day, I got half a scoop of chickpea with legumes and the other of pulses with kale.  A spoonful of the optional watery yogurt on top.  They always ask “Yogurt”? And you say yes.  It’s a thin yogurt, the kind that keeps its shape when you take a spoonful out and where that recess quickly fills in with milky water.  That’s the right kind of yogurt to use.  (I grew up putting yogurt on top of / next to everything, lasagna, pea stew, eggs – it’s probably the easiest way to spot an Arab; their need for yogurt.)

If you have a look on Qype, you will find one reviewer going on about their chicken with dried fruit and another about the mincemeat with pumpkin so I am fairly confident it’s all good.

I think for €4.50 the lunch at Sabzi is spectacular value.  It get’s extremely busy at lunch, go early or after 13:00 (your selection might be somewhat limited then), get the optional yogurt.

Sabzi
(Only open for lunch, Monday to Friday from 11:30 to 15:00.)
Luisenstr 15, Berlin
Mitte

Both are books that came out of successful shops, which makes a world of difference when talking success rate in your kitchen.  One thing is to have a home economist who had a make over, a spin through a PR machine to emerge glistening from the other side with a collection of recipes she has pawned from her peers, substituting almond essence for vanilla here and cocoa powder there.  Quite another is to have a book full of baked goods based on those that people line up and part with their money for.Yet another distinguishing feature is that Baker and Spice was the brain child of Gail Stephens (penned by Dan Lepard – who everybody worships these days and Richard Wittington) while Rose Bakery that of Rose Carrarini (also one of the co-founders of Villandry in London) both women.  (Massive generalization coming – can one start a sentence with parenthesis? Does anything really go on a blog? Or have I taken it to far this time?) Shops run by women seem to share certain characteristics; food tends to be un-embellished, think of a male peacock with his attention grabbing tail versus the demure female; absence of gilding doesn’t translate into absence of taste, the spartan cheese plate at La Formagerie (Patricia and Danny Michelson) is the best cheese plate you will ever have in the world, anywhere, ever.  Shops conceived by women somehow feel like the equivalent of someone who uses a Dove soap bar to wash their face and Nivea cream as a moisturizer, producing shiny naturally rouged cheeks with a few life lines thrown in for good measure; practical, real, genuine, dependable, good.

A lot of words to say that the recipes from Baker and Spice always work, you won’t find a recipe for Crack Pie in here but then tell me, who wants to wait 15 hours for a pie? (I did have a look through Momofuku Milk Bar cookbook but it left me a little cold, like Heston Blumenthal’s books.)This little lemon number will introduce a little zest into the otherwise dreary drizzly days that seem to engulf us.  I like to bake it in individual bundt pans because I find loaf cakes look a boring and take longer to bake.  Individual cakes have the benefit that if I am taking them round to a friend, then I can indulge in one or two cakes myself with them none the wiser.

Lemon Cake adapted from Baking with Passion from Baker & Spice
Makes 1 small loaf pan (500g) or 3.5 mini bundt tins (mine have a volume of 200ml)

Ingredients:
105g plain flour (original recipe calls for 115g self-raising flour which doesn’t exist in Germany)
3 (level) teaspoons baking powder
2 eggs, room temperature
115g caster sugar
65ml full fat yogurt, room temperature (original recipe calls for double cream which gives it a softer crumb but I like the tartness from the yogurt)
grated zest of 1 lemon
1 Tablespoon of lemon juice
45g unsalted butter, melted and cooled
butter and flour for the tin

Icing (double the original recipe because it’s yummy!)
60g icing sugar
2 teaspoons lemon juice (-ish don’t pour the lot in because you might not need it and then you have to top up with icing sugar)

Method:
1. Preheat the oven to 170°C.  Lightly grease a 500g loaf tin with melted butter.  Cut a rectangle of non-stick baking parchment to cover the bottom of the tin.  Put the paper in place and butter it, then dust the paper and side of the tin with a little flour.  Tap it out.
2. Sift together the flour and baking powder. Lightly beat the eggs with the sugar until just combined. Beat the yogurt (or cream if using) into the eggs for a minute, then add the lemon zest and juice. Fold in the flour until lightly combined, then gently and carefully fold in the melted butter. (Your doing this with a spatula right? I don’t want to hear the whir of electric beaters, that will make this cake into a brick).
3. Pour the mixture into the loaf tin. Set the tin in the middle of the oven and bake for 45 minutes or until a skewer inserted in the centre of the cake comes out clean. Leave to cool in the tin for 10 minutes, then run a knife between the cake and the sides of the tin. Cool on a wire rack.
4. To make the icing, sift the icing sugar into a small bowl. Slowly add two-thirds of the lemon juice, stirring until combined. Add more lemon juice to make a thin icing, be care not to thin it too much – the icing will thin further when left for 2-3 minutes.
5. Brush the icing over the top of the cake, letting it drip a little down the sides.

The food seems to be made by a couple of women in the large kitchen behind the store.  With my middle eastern background, women making food seems so intrinsic as opposed to Europe where finding a woman in a kitchen is like finding a four leaf clover (Not that they work in kitchens there mind you, it’s just that they cook for so many people, they might as well be)Guess what else? Auf die hand will open in the new airport.  Can you imagine what sophistication? A new airport (finally, finally, finally – please put some escalators or elevators in!) where you can get some decent (but milky) coffee and a couple of sandwiches or salads for your long haul Air Berlin flights (where I found out on my last trip to Miami, you have to pay €3 for headsets so that you can watch the movie playing on the TV hanging from the ceiling every 5 rows or so – that’s right! Isn’t that positively medieval? If medieval times had long haul flights.)

Auf die hand
Luisenstrasse 45
Mitte 10117
www.aufdiehand.com
Monday to Friday 8 to 18
Saturday 11 to 14