The real reason I haven’t shared any new recipes lately

My passion for cooking and creating recipes slipped away from me these past few years. I’m sure you’ve noticed!

For fifteen years I wrote about food. Eight cookbooks. Columns. A blog that began at a kitchen bench in Auckland when my (now 18 year old!) daughter was small and I was younger and needed somewhere to write down all the things I was feeling. Food was how I made sense of myself, how I earned a living, how I showed love to everyone ~ both near and far. I knew my way around a recipe the way you know your way around your own home in the dark. Fresh ideas came easily to me. I realise now how much I took that for granted.

And then, I shifted my entrepreneurial energy into clothing and style. I had a wardrobe guide go unexpectedly viral. I had many wonderful styling clients. A brand I loved asked if I’d like to come and help shape their creative direction. And I said yes ~ enthusiastically, gratefully, with both hands on my heart.

Which is wonderful. It is genuinely wonderful.

But somewhere in the middle of all that newness, the kitchen went quiet. Not dramatically. I can’t actually remember a single moment where I stopped creating and having fun in the kitchen. It was just a gradual fading…. the way a song does when you haven’t listened to it in a while and suddenly can’t quite remember how it goes.

I’ve been cooking, of course. The same handful of reliable meals, rotated weekly like a capsule wardrobe that’s become a little too simplified. And every time I thought about sharing something here, I hesitated. What if it wasn’t interesting enough? What if I’d lost the knack? What if fifteen years of instinct had simply... dissolved?

I might be a little dramatic here.

But it is interesting, isn’t it, how quickly the spark dims when you stop feeding it. How confidence is less a permanent quality and more a living thing that needs to be lovingly tended to.

This school holidays, my daughter and I did what we always used to do when she was little and the afternoon stretched out ahead of us: we made something sweet and slightly messy, and it prompted me to share what we made with you here.

We’d been sending each other reels of healthy-ish treats… the kind that involve dates and nut butter and feel virtuous while tasting like dessert, and decided to make our own version from what we had in the pantry. I did make one small trip to the local supermarket for freeze-dried raspberries, because they make everything look more beautiful and I am not above that. But you can absolutely leave them out as they can be rather pricey! The truffles are just as good without them.

Here’s what we ended up with: peanut butter and raspberry cookie dough truffles, coated in dark chocolate. Roughly ten of them, depending on how generously you roll. They keep in the fridge for the week, though ours only lasted a couple of hours (the reality of having a family of six!).

Here’s what you’ll need:

For the filling
1 cup ground almonds
4 tbsp melted coconut oil
4 tbsp peanut butter
2 tsp vanilla extract
A pinch of sea salt
A small handful of freeze-dried raspberries

For the coating
150g dark chocolate
1–2 tbsp freeze-dried raspberries, for crumbling

Add the ground almonds, coconut oil, peanut butter, vanilla, and sea salt to a food processor and blitz until it comes together. Add the raspberries and pulse two or three times. You want them broken down but still present, little flecks of pink through the mixture. Scrape into a bowl and put it in the fridge for ten to fifteen minutes, until it firms to something that feels and smells remarkably like cookie dough.

Roll into balls. Don’t stress about uniformity.

Melt the chocolate slowly over a double boiler, then coat each ball and set them on a tray or dish lined with baking paper. Crumble over a little more raspberry, for colour, for prettiness, because you can. Back into the fridge for fifteen minutes to set.

That’s it. That’s the whole thing! Now you get to enjoy them!

It felt good, making something again. Standing in the kitchen with my daughter, licking peanut butter off a spoon, arguing mildly about whether the truffles needed more salt. (They did. They always do.)

Maybe the spark doesn’t disappear entirely. Maybe it just waits, patient and unhurried, for you to come back to it.

I think I’m coming back to it.

Lovely to have you here, as always. If you make these, I’d genuinely love to know. Drop a comment or reply to this email. And if you have a healthy-ish sweet treat you keep returning to, send it my way. I’m collecting them! Eleanor x