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.

Blackberry nectarine galette

A very quick pudding to use some of the deliciously juicy, plump blackberries from our garden, this uses ready-made puff pastry so is ridiculously quick to assemble after a long day at work.

Pistachio chocolate truffle-cookies

A lovely couple called Rhian and James commissioned me to make them a chocolate and pistachio wedding cake just like the one I’d made for my friend Sarah.  James also confessed that he is a complete addict when it comes to cookies, and so I made them a great big batch of chocolate and pistachio cookies to go with the cake.  I’d planned to use my trusty recipe for this, but having finally used up the mountains of ingredients in my kitchen for the cake, I mistakenly assumed that all the chocolate that was left was for the cookies – forgetting entirely that I still had to make a large amount of chocolate ganache for the cake. It seemed like an awful lot of chocolate as I stirred it into the cookie dough, and so when I re-checked my cookie recipe, I realised that I had actually used three times the amount of chocolate.  Rather than starting again straight away (which would’ve meant going shopping for more ingredients) I decided to bake the cookie dough I’d made and see if it worked – after all, what harm does extra chocolate do anything?  It was a mistake that paid off – these are without doubt, the best cookies I have ever made.  There is so much chocolate that they are almost held together by it – they become more like chocolate truffles with some cookie dough in – but they are unbelievably good.  The bride and groom emailed me after the wedding to say what a huge hit they had been and that they’d struggled to get James away from them.  Sometimes mistakes are the best form of invention!

Clotted cream tiramisu

Lu loves tiramisu and always orders it when we go to Italian restaurants, but I realised recently that for some reason I’ve never made it!  For her birthday, I decided to give it a try, but unfortunately couldn’t find any mascarpone at the shops.  Instead, I made it with clotted cream – and Lu says this was the best tiramisu she’s ever tasted, so for now on this will be how I always make it!

Flourless citrus almond cake with orange blossom cream, griddled peaches, honeycomb and heather flowers

A birthday cake for my little sister Lizzie who is turning 30!  The cake is flourless, made with ground almonds instead, and flavoured with lemon, orange and grapefruit zest.  It's topped with an orange blossom whipped cream, peaches and plums scorched on a griddle pan, toasted almonds and heather flowers, and home-made honeycomb.

Citrus almond cinnamon cake with Chantilly cream, berries and pistachios

This weekend we cooked a huge brunch for a lovely gathering of 15 of our friends and five of their kids, including three very beautiful babies!  I made this whopping great cake which Matilda, pictured here, could barely wait to dive into. The cake itself was flavoured with orange and lemon zest, cinnamon, vanilla and ground almonds, then topped with apricot jam, Chantilly cream, raspberries, blackberries and pistachios.  You can see it was massive and for a smaller number of people you could halve the ingredients and make a one layered cake (and still it would be deep enough to slice it in half to sandwich with jam and cream).

Grapefruit and molasses loaf cake

  

Yep, I’m really failing at this healthy eating malarkey.  I bought a load of lovely red grapefruit with all the best of intentions of eating a healthy breakfast every day before work, rather than skipping it completely and then needing a chocolate fix mid-morning. Sigh!  The grapefruit have been sitting uneaten as I dash past them every day, until today I decided to rescue them from their decidedly sad plight and… turn them into cake of course!  I have to say though, once you’ve tasted this you’ll wonder why you’d ever eat grapefruit any other way. Rich yet clean, tangy yet elegant, everyone who has tasted this has fallen in love with it.  Sorry healthy eating, cake wins again!

Blackberry and almond buttermilk scones

A lovely sunny Sunday morning baking session today, listening to good music and making some simple free-form scones.  The buttermilk in these makes the batter quite moist (hence deciding to dollop the mixture onto the baking trays rather than roll out and cut with a pastry cutter) and the fresh blackberries give them a fantastic juicy sweetness that means you don’t need to serve them with jam (unless you’re a sugar fiend like me and just can’t resist) – just stick to lashings of clotted cream!  (The healthy eating is clearly going great guns…)

Raspberry, elderflower and amaretti crumble (wheat-free)

My sister Lizzie came over for dinner this evening after work and I made this as a quick wheat-free pudding. I was pleased that it was also a dairy-free and sugar-free dessert as we’re all trying to be healthy, but then quickly realised that there was plenty of sugar in the amaretti biscuits and elderflower cordial (and in fact the porridge oats were golden syrup-flavoured).  On that realisation, I decided to hang it all and served it with gorgeous salted caramel ice cream – there’s always tomorrow to try being healthy…

Passionfruit, lime and pistachio layer cake

Our friend Jon’s flatmate Shivaji is moving home to India this week and cooked us a fantastic Indian meal to say goodbye.  I contributed this cake to the feast – made with pistachios and passionfruit pulp in the cake batter, then iced with a mascarpone mixed with passionfruit curd, an amazing find from a recent farmer’s market.  You can buy the curd online or make your own from scratch – Nigella Lawson has a nice recipe on her website.  

Raspberry chocolate brownies

Erin’s chocolate brownie recipe I made recently was so good it’s all I think I ever want to bake again!  We had a girls night at our house this weekend so it was a great excuse to make them a second time – this time instead of white chocolate chips, I added a layer of frozen raspberries in the middle, and a chocolate fudge icing. Totally divine!

Erin’s salted dark choc brownies with white choc chips

This is a very special recipe.  Our friend Roz emigrated to Australia last year (you might remember I made her some pretty delicious peach melba cupcakes before she went) and when she arrived to start a new life and lots of adventures on the other side of the world, she became fantastic friends with a young woman called Erin. Just before Roz came home to see her family and friends this Christmas, Erin tragically passed away.  Roz kindly shared Erin's famous brownie recipe with me, and it was a privilege to make them yesterday, the day after Erin's birthday.  These are incredible brownies - wildy decadent, fabulously chocolatey, can't-fail-to-make-you-grin, heart-warmingly good! As I baked, and as we ate them, we were thinking of Roz and all Erin's friends and family. I hope that you enjoy them as much.  

Banana, date and rum loaf cake - wheat-free, sugar-free and fat-free!

Our new year's resolution is to try to get healthy. We've started going to the gym (I know, I can hardly believe it myself) and watching the calorie counter on the cycling machines tell you that you've sweated for 10 minutes and only burned about five crisps is slightly soul-destroying, not least as it's made me feel guilty about eating cake.  One of the greatest pleasures in life!  So I have to find a way to make guilt-free cakes. This is my first attempt - it is a fat-free, sugar-free and wheat-free cake - and amazingly, it still tastes delicious!  Made with puréed dates, dried apricots and mashed banana, it's lovely and sweet without the need to add any extra sugar.  Instead of flour it uses a bit of cornmeal (or you could try polenta) to bind it together, and is full of pecans, dried cranberries and sultanas, and finished off with a good glug of dark rum (we all need a little naughtiness...).  As good as any fruit cake, and no guilt attached!

Banana, blueberry and cranberry muffins

A lovely recipe to use up blackening bananas, these combine the background taste of banana bread with classic blueberry muffins, and some fresh cranberries for little explosions of tartness.  

Pear and blackberry sponge flan with elderflower, gin and tonic jelly

For Christmas, my mum gave me a sponge flan tin. This was my first go at testing it, and the results were lovely – really light, airy cake which I topped with fresh pear and blackberries and a jelly made with elderflower cordial, gin and tonic water.  You could use any fruit or jelly combination you like though.