Chocolate truffle cookies

Since Christmas we've had a small box of milk chocolate truffles in the cupboard and miraculously they've not been eaten. This has to be a record in my house, as I normally can't resist scoffing all the chocolate in sight, on sight! I decided to roughly chop them up and turn them into cookies - a good way to make them go a long way, and producing the most decadent chocolatey cookies ever. Unlike the box of chocolates, these definitely won't last long in our house!

Sticky ginger loaf cake

This is a vegan recipe – no eggs, butter or milk – instead it’s full of treacle, sunflower oil, dark muscovado sugar, dates and crystallised ginger, producing a rich, sticky, heavenly cake. It takes only a few minutes to make as everything is blended together in one go in a food processor. Another great wintery recipe to enjoy in front of the fire with a movie on a snowy day!

Snow ice cream

It's sad to think that all the snow will be gone in a day or two. Desperate to make the most of it before it does, I went searching on the internet for things to do. I've heard of snow dyeing, where you add coloured dyes to buckets of snow on top of fabric, and wondered if there were similar things to do that were edible. Then I found this recipe - instant ice cream made from fresh snow!  So I rushed into the garden with a couple of mixing bowls and scooped up the top layer of snow from the several inches worth covering our garden table.  Just add a little icing sugar, milk and vanilla and hey presto! Magic snow ice cream!

Cranberry, clementine and ginger Welsh cakes

I've started working part-time and I have to say I'm absolutely loving it!  Today has been a beautiful sunny day, just beginning to melt the snow we've had this week. After a lovely walk around Cosmeston lakes with our dog, I came home and rustled up another batch of Welsh cakes (they are proving to be very addictive - to make and eat!).  This time, I soaked dried cranberries in a pan with a little clementine juice, so the fruit plumps up (inspired by the juicy blueberry Welsh cake fritters I made the other day, but wanting to make them quickly out of what was in the house).  I added ginger instead of cinnamon, which went very well with a pot of fragrantly spiced chai tea.

Ciabatta

I love Ciabatta bread, sliced into chunky strips and dipped in balsamic and olive oil. Until now, I’ve never tried making my own as I’ve always been put off by recipes that insist you need to make a ‘sponge’ dough the night before. I’m afraid I like instant gratification when it comes to cooking! But today I’ve had a go at a recipe for ‘quick easy ciabatta’ that I spotted on the Pease Pudding blog - that's the kind of recipe that gets my attention.  It seems peculiar when you’re making it because the dough just looks like runny pancake batter rather than normal bread dough, but it’s ok, it really is meant to! The kneading required (which had also always put me off bread-making, until I got a food mixer with a dough hook – told you I don’t like slogging when baking!) is not hard work at all and is actually pretty fun: you just stretch parts of the dough high up in the air and then slap it back down, which pushes pockets of air into the dough. It still looks pretty flat and runny when it goes into the oven, but it comes out beautifully airy. I'll definitely be making this again!

Blueberry Welsh cake fritters

It's been snowing for the last couple of days and today I decided we needed some hot cakes to warm us up after a nice walk in the snow.  I spotted a great big punnet of blueberries in the grocer's when I popped out to buy vegetables to make soup later, and thought I'd see how they worked in a Welsh Cake batter.  These are far more loaded with fruit than Welsh cakes are, which is why I've called them blueberry fritters - but they were absolutely delicious hot out of the pan, and good later once they'd cooled as we sat in front of the fire watching a movie.  Perfect fuel for a snow day!

Giant chocolate button cookies

Our friends Emma and Geraint and their two little ones have just moved back to our home town.  It's so nice to have them round the corner!  We popped in today to welcome them to their new home and I made them a batch of these cookies as a house-warming present. The recipe is based on a Millie's Cookies recipe on the BBC Good Food website, and I used some brilliant giant chocolate buttons, but it would be just as good with ordinary chocolate chips or chunks of your favourite bar.

Spiced berry maple betty

Tonight I cooked dinner for our friends Cath and Gregg – a lovely recipe for thyme-roasted belly of pork from Diana Henry’s amazing book, Food from Plenty.  I served it with yellow, orange and purple heritage carrots, purple sprouting broccoli, balsamic roasted red onions, and celeriac, mustard and parsley mash. Not bad, even if I say so myself!  Anyway, in browsing through Diana Henry’s book, my attention was grabbed by her recipe for blackberry, apple and maple brown betty.  She describes it as “a great, down-home American dessert that’s even easier to make than crumble.”  Anything described as “down-home” sounds good to me!

This is my adaptation of that recipe, but I used mixed frozen berries instead of apple and fresh blackberries.  Apart from that, and the addition of a little cinnamon, I’d followed her recipe exactly when I made this, which included so much sugar (mixed with the cake crumbs, and also mixed with the fruit before maple syrup is poured over them) that it was unbelievably sweet.  So here I’ve written the recipe without any extra sugar, as I’m sure it’s completely unnecessary.  Apart from that, it’s amazing – it feels a bit wrong to use cake instead of a crumble mixture, but wow it’s delicious – it’s so moist and soaks up lots of the fruit, so it’s a bit like a hot SummerPudding (which is my all-time favourite dessert)!