Tamami Haga, photographed by Andy Andrews.

Tamami Haga is a Japanese Londoner and passionate baker who sells her handmade chocolates and pastries from a stall at Broadway Market in Hackney, East London. She also writes the lovely blog Coco & Me, which I’ve been following for years and years, and mixes her experiences as a stall-keepers with inspiring — and precisely written — recipes. I love her Luxury Brownies in particular. She is currently working on her own cookbook.

Tamami is the mother of two children, and I am very happy to have her as a guest for the Parents Who Cook interview series. Please welcome Tamami!

Can you tell us a few words about your children? Ages, names, temperaments?

My son Issei is nine and my daughter Sakura is four. Issei is a kind, sensitive kid who might tut if there’s rubbish on the pavement and would pick it up, then put it in the bin nearby. He is also very clever.

Sakura is a very funny girl and loves to come up with her own lyrics to famous tunes. She is very skillful with her drawing. And being Japanese, she says “Aww, cu~te!” and “Kawaii~!” rather a lot.

Did having children change the way you cook?

Yes, it’s totally changed! When I was single I couldn’t care less about the “five veggies/fruits a day” stuff. I never bothered with eating breakfast for example. Imagine a twenty-something, going for a pint or three in a pub after work… that was me!

But now, it can’t be “eat anything at anytime,” obviously. I try all the time to notch up square meals for the family. But you know, I don’t find it tiresome or a bore to cook anyway — I keep it interesting for me by trying new ingredients, new skills and new recipes. Just last weekend, I cooked ox cheeks for the first time! I slow-cooked them for two hours and the result was meltingly soft.

The food might turn out wrong at times though, and the children may turn up their noses. But they critique it with me and will always tell me, “Well done mummy for trying.” And with that, I think, “Well, at least I tried” and at least they see that I like a challenge. Hopefully that approach to challenging things and also to keep on trying will rub off on them.

Tamami’s 4-year-old daughter, Sakura (with homemade bear cub doughtnut)

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If pastry chef and baking expert extraordinaire David Lebovitz were to release a Greatest Hits collection, this Fresh Ginger Cake would no doubt make the cut. Come to think of it, he has and it did: the collection is a book called Ready for Dessert: My Best Recipes, and it is a must-own for every baking enthusiast.

I have been friends with David for a good eight years, and I have known about this amazing ginger cake of his for about as long — it is one of his most requested, most celebrated recipes — but for some reason that’s the time it took for me to actually try it myself.

What is it that drives us to make a certain recipe at a certain time? Has anyone ever studied that?

At any given moment, it feels like I have dozens of recipes floating in my brain with a “to try” tag on them — recipes I’ve read about online, or in books and magazines, or ideas I’ve collected during restaurant meals or chef events. Some pop back out in a matter of days, last-in-first-out style, but others linger around for months and often years, bobbing in and out of my consciousness until the urge strikes, presumably when the right alignment of appetite, mood, and ingredient availability is reached.

Is that something you’ve experienced also? Do you let chance and spontaneity rule your cooking and baking projects, or do you have a system?

I’m wondering because, really: all I did was waste eight years of my life depriving myself of this wondrous cake.

It is called Fresh Ginger Cake, which certainly gives you a hint on the main flavor, but in truth it could be called Fresh Ginger and Molasses Cake, as half of the sweetening power is handed over to this tar-like and notoriously tricky ingredient, which can easily execute a coup d’état on your cake if you’re heavy-handed, but helps build complex layers of flavor when used properly.

In fact, David calls for mild molasses, and because there aren’t a million different types of molasses available in France — you usually have a choice of, oh, about one — I was worried mine was too strong. So I took an executive decision and used half molasses, half unrefined cane syrup from Louisiana, the same one I use for gâteau sirop.

And the resulting cake was nothing short of perfect: not too sweet (I did reduce the sugar a little bit) with a hefty ginger kick that warms the back of your throat, and a remarkably fluffy and moist texture. It’s a cake that keeps well, too, so it’s a good one to make for a household of two (I’m not counting the baby, who nibbles on three crumbs): for the next week, sliver after sliver, we kept marvelling at how moist it remained.

I served it to my mother-in-law, who had come to babysit Milan while we went to the movies for the first time in forever — I haven’t been so excited about going to the cinema since age twelve — and although she needs no bait to come and watch her grandson, she was so enthusiastic about it I hope we can do this again — the cake and the movie — very soon.

PS: I have just updated my links section if you want to take a look! And for the French speakers among you, I have done the same with the links section on the French version of Chocolate & Zucchini.

PPS: We went to see The Place Beyond The Pines and L.O.V.E.D. it. Did you?

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For this new installment of our Draw Me A Fridge series (read about it here), Alexia spoke with Luisa Weiss.

Luisa Weiss blogs at The Wednesday Chef and is the author of the best-selling food memoir My Berlin Kitchen, which was published last September by Viking. She’s half American, half Italian and was born in Berlin. She moved back to her birth city three years ago, after spending a decade in New York. She now lives in Berlin with her husband Max and their 10-month-old son Hugo.

What are your fridge/freezer/pantry staples?

Fridge: Dijon mustard, a wedge of Parmesan, ketchup, at least two jars of jam at any given time, maple syrup, yogurt (whole milk for my son, lowfat for me), brown sugar (to stay moist!), unsalted butter, a tube of tomato paste, eggs (dinner’s always possible with eggs in the house), Sicilian colatura [a salted anchovy sauce] leftover from recipe testing my book, a jar of Better Than Bouillon stock base and a box of baking soda (for odor control).

Freezer: Ages ago, I read that you should keep spices in the freezer; ever since then, my freezer has been so cluttered with all those little pots and jars that it drives my husband crazy. There’s also always a box of frozen whole-leaf spinach, a bag of frozen peas and several Parmesan rinds wrapped in tinfoil in there.

Pantry: Pasta, lots of different rice varieties (I’m obsessed with my rice cooker), grains, flours, baking ingredients, canned fish, dry beans, dried fruit, nuts, lots of bottles of vinegar, coconut milk, soy sauce and canned tomatoes.

Do you do the grocery shopping for your house yourself? How often? Do you usually buy from the farmers’ market, shops?

I go grocery shopping almost every single day. I go to the farmer’s market for fruit, vegetables and farm eggs once or twice a week, but the rest of the time, I head to the stores in my neighborhood. It gives me an excuse to go outside with Hugo and since we live on the 4th floor without an elevator, I can’t do bulk shopping anyway. I get what I need that day and then I huff and puff my way up the stairs with the baby and the shopping bag. I go to Aldi for dried nuts and fruit, to the organic bakery for bread, and the Turkish grocer for fresh herbs and olives.

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We seem to be having one of those stubborn springs that refuses to, well, spring. And after a particularly dreary winter with a record dearth of sunny days, the grower from whom I get most of my vegetables told me he’s about a month and a half late with the spring crop.

So, despite what the calendar says — and despite my hunger for fresh peas — I am choosing to respect the realities of the current season, and to celebrate the tail end of the winter produce.

And the winter vegetable I’ve really rediscovered of late is the Savoy cabbage — chou frisé in French.

I like cruciferous vegetables of all stripes and colors, but this one had always been my cabbage of least proficiency. I love it in my mother’s stuffed cabbage, and in the farci poitevin I’ve revisited in The French Market Cookbook, but I lacked ideas beyond those.

But then kale happened: it was suddenly easier to find on Paris markets, so I played around with it a lot — cue the mega-list of 50 things to do with kale — and naturally that gave me ideas for its close, if less fashionable, cousin the Savoy cabbage.

As it turns out, the roasting method that gave the world kale chips has a transformative effect on Savoy cabbage, too. In just a few chops of the chef knife and fifteen minutes in a hot oven, the slightly daunting head becomes a heap of lightly browned, tender at the spine but crisp-edged ribbons that I can eat by the bowlful — and happily have.

Add a touch of lemon juice, a scoop of steamed rice and a scatter of almonds, and I am content to wait for spring a little while longer. Just a little.

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