Sesame Honey Butter Toast

Dessert inspied by London's Arome Bakery

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Hello, Happy Friday!

I cannot tell you how happy I am that autumn has properly arrived. Outside is cold and crisp, but the sky is blue and bright. It's sweater weather, its cardamom coffee season - it’s my favourite time of the year.

In a couple weeks I will be headed to the US for my American book tour (check out all of the details here), and one of the things I am most excited for, apart from meeting lots of you, of course, is America in the fall. I don’t think anywhere else in the world leans in to the cosiness quite as well as Americans. I will be enjoying many a pumpkin spice latte, taking pictures of leaf-covered streets, enjoying an apple cider doughnut at the market, and generally pretending I live in a Nancy Myers movie. Yes, I love a cliched autumn (I am currently writing this curled up on my sofa, wrapped in a blanket). Well, that's what I would like to be doing. The truth is, the book tour is going to be brutal, with a lot of stops in a very short period of time. I will be spending about as much time travelling to each city as the time I actually spend in the city. It's going to be plane, event, hotel, plane, event, hotel on repeat for 10 days! My one aim is to try and hit up at least one really good bakery in each city, and I’ll be sending out mini postcard newsletters from each stop of the tour.

But back to the here and now. I seem to have been incredibly busy the last couple weeks, and I wanted to make something quick and simple but something that also really packed a punch in terms of flavour but which was also more than the sum of its parts. And then I remembered an idea I jotted down a few weeks ago. My notes app simply read, Sesame honey butter toast. If you haven't been introduced to the incredibly delicious treat that is honey butter toast, let me be the one to tell you about your next favourite thing.

Arome Bakery is without doubt one of the best bakeries in London. Slightly hidden away, on a quiet side street, seconds from the crowds of Covent Garden, the bakery is a dream. I would say the bakery takes French technique and merges it with flavours from different countries in Asia. The resulting dishes are some of the best bites you’ll have in London. The pastry they have become rightly famous for is their honey butter toast. It's incredible, but that's to be expected. The quality on offer at Arome is top-tier, hard to beat, and close to perfect. Honey butter toast starts with a loaf of shokupan, a Japanese white bread loaf. The bread is enriched with butter and made with a very small amount of sugar or honey. As any self-respecting white loaf should be, shokupan is also incredibly soft and fluffy. The bakery slices the bread into thick slices and coats the bread in a paste made from a mixture of brown sugar, honey, butter, and a good pinch of salt. The bread is then baked until the sugar and honey caramelise, and you’re left with an almost crunchy caramel coating and soft bread centre

The simplicity of honey butter toast is arguably part of its charm, but I couldn’t help making a little tweak to make it my own. And as my notes reminded me, that tweak was adding sesame. I wanted to coat the honey toast in a layer of sesame seeds and serve it with a tahini cream and finish with some roasted fruit, plums, because they’re still in season. In my head, this was going to be a knockout dessert and not to brag, but it really is! The sesame seeds do give the toast a slight passing resemblance to prawn toast, but the flavour, not so much.

If you want to make a loaf of shokupan yourself, my recipe can be found in the archive of the newsletter here. Otherwise, you can use a shop-bought loaf. If you can't get hold of that style of bread, you could also use brioche.

Alternative Flavours

Now that we are truly coming into autumn, this would also be brilliant with caramelised apple or pear, which would go so well with the tahini and sesame flavors. Same goes for caramelised orange segments, maybe with a hint of ginger? You could replace the tahini cream with a mascarpone whip and serve it alongside a cherry or raspberry compote for a kind of cheesecake vibe.

My Book

Don't forget my new book Small Batch Cookies is now on sale in the UK, AUS and NZ and for friends in North America, the book is out imminently on Sept 24th! If you’ve already got a copy of the book and are enjoying it, it would really help if you could leave a review for it online. You can review the book at whichever online store you bought the book, but reviews on Amazon (even if you didn't buy your copy there) have a big impact as most copies are sold online these days.