6th February 2026

I have been trying to do final recipe testing for our cardamom blog. The brownie is really lovely - the cardamom gives the chocolate a little back-note, you can’t identify the cardamom but it does give a beautiful flavour.

From recipe success to recipe failure - the cardamom panettone pudding.  Whilst the pudding itself was nice, the clue is in the name and the 20 cardamom pods (up from 10 last time) still gave little to no taste.  Is it my pods? Have they lost their potency or does the recipe just not work? The milk had a lovely cardamom smell so I am not sure why you can’t taste it. I am going to need to remake it with either new pods or more and see how it goes. It is always disappointing when recipes don’t work out.

On another note, it would be mums birthday today so we had a little spiced espresso martini to cheers her.  We also got a new brandy, the first English brandy. It is very nice but the bottle is not, the stopper is really difficult to get out, not what you want on a Friday ha ha.