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.
Friday 26 December 2014
Saturday 13 December 2014
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.
Saturday 6 December 2014
Sunday 9 November 2014
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.
Saturday 25 October 2014
Saturday 18 October 2014
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!
Thursday 25 September 2014
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.
Sunday 21 September 2014
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!
Saturday 20 September 2014
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.
Sunday 14 September 2014
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!
Wednesday 13 August 2014
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.
Tuesday 12 August 2014
(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...)
Saturday 9 August 2014
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!
Monday 4 August 2014
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.
Monday 30 June 2014
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.
Saturday 28 June 2014
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!
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