Christmas cake (kids vlog edition!)

It's Stir Up Sunday and the little star bakers have made their first ever vlog! This is a Christmas cake recipe packed with figs, cranberries, pecans and soaked in hot buttered rum and maple syrup...

Almost a decade of baking with kids

It's been a while! My last post was 10 years ago, at the end of 2014, when we'd embarked on an IVF journey and life was just about to change forever! I stopped blogging while I baked up twin babies, who we welcomed to the world in autumn 2015. I didn't stop baking though... just found myself a couple of sous chefs! 

Ricotta, lemon, almond and blueberry cake with blackberry cream

I made this as a gluten-free dessert for a Boxing Day lunch with my mum and sister.  It's so light and seems to get even better after a day or so in the fridge.

Rhubarb and cherry upside down cake

Upside down cake is one of my favourite kinds of cake.  This one is made with fresh rhubarb and glacé cherries that have been soaked in amaretto (although fresh cherries would work nicely).  Perfect for a wintery Sunday evening in front of the fire.

Lavender, honey and sea salt shortbread

This is quite an unusual flavour combination but I think it's delicious.

Stollen

I had a really lovely day on a Christmas baking course at Angela Gray’s Cookery School at Llanerch Vineyard.  I’d never made stollen before but it was really easy and so delicious and Christmassy!  The recipe made one big stollen load but it could be halved for a littler one or made into lots of baby loaves.

Apricot and pistachio flapjacks

These are yummy, moist flapjacks that are really quick to make.

Applesauce cake with cinnamon cream cheese icing

This year we had another lovely autumn weekend away in a big Cornish farmhouse with a bunch of old friends from art college.  I made this cake using up a bowl of homemade applesauce from last weekend’s roast pork Sunday lunch.  It was great as a dessert after a big meal of Lu’s beef brisket chilli, but was still a lovely and moist cake for eating the next day, sitting around in pyjamams in front of a big fire with good company and lots of pots of tea!

Three-tier wedding carrot cake

I made this three-tier carrot cake for the wedding of our friends Becky and Luke. It was a really moist and flavoursome cake, given texture with a mixture of plain and wholemeal flour and ground almonds, chopped pecans and rum-soaked raisins, and spiced with cinnamon, ginger and nutmeg. I topped it with a classic cream cheese icing, and decorated it with a colourful array of fruit to go with the rainbow colour theme of the wedding. 

Vietnamese banana fritters

We’ve recently returned from an amazing holiday in Thailand, Laos and Vietnam.  We ate the most incredible food, did a cookery class in the middle of the jungle beside the Mekong river, and spent a day touring the street food secrets of Hanoi.  Last night, back at home, we cooked some of our favourite recipes from the trip for a meal with our friends.  For dessert, I made these Vietnamese street food favourites, banana fritters.  They are dangerously easy!

Basil-infused berry, fig and clotted cream Eton mess

Last night Lu and I cooked a meal for my Dad and had such a lovely evening with him, eating, drinking,  listening to music and to him telling us brilliant stories from his days as a journalist, and generally putting the world to rights until the wee small hours!  I invented this very quick and easy dessert for pud - a twist on a classic Eton mess by swapping whipped cream for clotted cream, adding some fresh figs to the strawberries and raspberries, and infusing the fruit with fresh basil while it macerated in the fridge.

Butternut squash coffee cupcakes

We had quarter of a butternut squash left over from cooking dinner yesterday, so I turned to one of my favourite cookbooks, Harry Eastwood’s 'Red Velvet and Chocolate Heartache', to see if I could find something to bake with it.  This recipe is adapted from her 'cappuccino cupcakes' recipe which uses sweet potato, but butternut squash worked brilliantly.  The book is full of amazing recipes for baking with vegetables – and these were no exception, like all the recipes I've tried from the book they always turn out perfectly.  Whenever I make any of these vegetable cakes though, I’ve discovered the trick is to not tell people what the secret ingredient is until after they’ve eaten at least a good mouthful of cake – people are often very hesitant about the idea but surprised and amazed when they find out what makes it so moist and unusual. I took these to work to try to liven up a Monday morning team meeting!

Passionfruit almond cake

Sometimes on a Sunday we go to Splott Market, where you can buy industrial quantities of fruit and veg – anything you can think of, it would seem, comes bagged in a large carrier bag and sold for a pound.  This week I couldn’t believe I could buy a whole carrier bag full of passionfruit for only a pound – but realised I’d never eat them all without finding a way of baking quite a lot of them!  I could’ve tried making passionfruit curd, one of my favourite things to eat, but I already have a large stash of it after my friend Kirsty bought far too much when making her sister Issy’s wedding cake recently.  So instead, I made this very simple, wheat-free cake.  This smelled so delicious out of the oven that we didn’t wait for it to cool before eating, and it was amazing as a warm pudding – but also makes a lovely cake once it’s cooled.

(Wim)berry cake

On a recent work trip to North Wales, my colleague Paul told me about spending childhood days picking wild wimberries on the mountains near his home.  He couldn’t believe it when I said I’d never heard of, let alone tasted, a wimberry. He tried to explain that they were like mini blueberries, but was determined to find some and bring them into work.  True to his word, he came in the next week with a small tub and presented me with my first wimberry – delicious, but unfortunately he’d not found a very large crop and the tub he brought in contained only a single, solitary wimberry – not enough to bake with!  For his birthday, I made this cake – unfortunately, I could not find the elusive wimberries to bake with either, so I made do with a combination of blueberries, redcurrants and blackcurrants.  If I ever find enough wimberries, I will bake them in this recipe – but for the time being, I’m still less than convinced that they really exist (perhaps what Paul gave me was just the tiniest blueberry he could find...)

Salted chocolate hazelnut crispy cakes

These are vegan, gluten free chocolate and hazelnut crispy cakes, given an extra special twist with a pinch of pink Himalayan salt.

Nutty energy bites

Another of my vegan, gluten-free, sugar-free, no-bake recipes for energy bars and bites created for the Allroots Yoga Festival. These ones are made with a delicious mixture of almond butter, peanut butter and agave nectar, and chock-full of seeds, nuts, raisins, rolled oats and rice flakes, then rolled in desiccated coconut.

Apricot, pistachio and maple energy bars

A vegan, gluten free, no-bake recipe I invented for my stall at the Allroots Festival.  These are really quick and easy to make, and would be great for breakfast or a mid-morning snack to take to work.

Energy balls!

I spent a lovely weekend helping out at my friends Ellie and Ruadhan's yoga festival, and had a little stall selling vegan, gluten free energy bars and flapjacks. This recipe was the out-and-out winner, selling out in minutes! 

Vegan banana mini muffins

Lovely mouthful-sized muffins!

Deconstructed blackberry and apple crumble

I’m a huge fan of crumble, but have recently discovered a way of making it so quickly, and in small quantities, so I can have an instant crumble for one late at night when I fancy a sneaky sugar kick!  I’ve called it ‘deconstructed’ crumble, which makes it sound very chef-y and pretentious, but really it’s just some delicious oaty, almondy crumbs that can be sprinkled on any fruit you’ve got to hand, which is very quickly stewed (well, warmed through) while the crumble bakes.  Our garden is groaning with blackberries at the moment, so I’ve been eating this quite often with them, but you could use other berries, apples, pears, peaches or whatever combination you fancy.