Mmm … Canada

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It’s that time of the month again, Sugar High Friday time and this month the challenge has been set by the event owner.

OK so what’s the challenge involve for June?  Well it has to be something sugar high inducing and has to involve a typically Canadian product or recipe. To quote the Domestic Goddess herself:

Let’s get together as many bloggers as we can to share their favourite Canadian confection, indulgence, dessert, sweet…anything really! As long as says Canada to you and you can get some sort of Sugar High from it, we want to know about it.

As a girl from the UK who has never travelled to Canada I’m not overly knowledgeable in this area of the worlds cuisine, I don’t think I even own a Canadian recipe book, which is shocking considering how many books grace my kitchen (and the rest of the house if I’m going to be honest).  So what to cook?

I love, no make that adore, maple syrup but it’s quite tricky to find the ‘pure’ variety here in my location. Luckily for me a great forum friend of mine Steph (who is Canadian) sent me a lovely large bottle of this amber nectar as part of a swap arranged last Christmas.

Maple syrup is apparently a pretty straightforward product to make yourself, oh if only I had a few maple trees in my garden, sigh, I’ll just have to stick to the health-food store and generous friends won’t I.

I use maple syrup in so many ways, in fact if I listed them all I think I’d overspill an A4 piece of paper So a few examples, drizzled over a chicken before roasting to give the most glorious crispy sweet skin, in spicy marinades for meat/fish/vegetables as the sweetness offsets the heat so well, in my now becoming famous side dish of carrots & peas which are simmered in butter and maple syrup with some herbs occasionally, drizzled over pancakes (so good especially when served with crisp rashers too), on french toast, oh I could go on and on and on; but maple syrup comes alive for me when it’s in cake frosting.

So for the challenge it just had to be a maple syrup based cake then didn’t it really, and the one that springs to mind has already been blogged about here, so I won’t bore you all by recounting it again. Trust me here, this cake is guaranteed to give a sugar high of the best kind, so please do give it a go.

Nestled in amongst that wonderful swap parcel from Steph was a small bottle of Inniskillin Vidal Ice Wine, a fruity, slightly floral wine with an almost vanillery edge.

The perfect thing to drink with a nice slice of this cake as a naughty night time treat

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Filed under Cakes & Cookies, Challenges, Chat, My Recipes, Sugar High Fridays, Vegetarian