Cranberry, fresh ginger and clementine cake with mulled wine syllabub

I made this cake with a punnet of fresh cranberries intended for cranberry sauce to go with our Christmas turkey, that we forgot to make on the day. It's back to work and school tomorrow so we had a final movie night in front of the fire, and ate it while the cake was still warm. The cranberries are quite tart even when cooked, but balanced perfectly when paired with the sweetened cream of this mulled wine syllabub (made with a syrup from the poaching liquid I'd used for our Christmas poached pears).

Pink grapefruit marmalade

Every year we make Christmas hampers for our family and friends, and include a selection of chutneys and jams. It changes every year (we've often done red onion marmalade, piccalilli, bacon chili jam, and usually some kind of tomato-based chutney) but an absolute annual staple is my pink grapefruit marmalade. I look forward to marmalade making day, usually on a wintery weekend sometime in the run-up to Christmas, when the house gets filled with the delicious aromas of bubbling, sugary citrus. 

Gluten-free granola

My son Mostyn is a big fan of granola but as he is gluten-free, we make our own using gluten-free oats (although they are naturally GF, wheat is often used in the rolling process so you need to make sure you buy oats specifically labelled as gluten-free). You can mix up the recipe as much as you want, varying the choice of nuts, seeds, dried fruit and even the type of oil, sweeteners (I like a mixture of honey, brown sugar and maple syrup, but golden syrup also works really well) and spices (which you could leave out altogether if you so wished).

Buckwheat blinis

Every year at Christmas, we start the day with a posh breakfast of blinis with smoked salmon and cream cheese. These little pancakes are traditionally made with buckwheat, which is gluten free. 

No-churn Christmas pudding ice cream

In my opinion, the best thing about Christmas pudding is turning it into ice cream! This is a really easy way to do that without an ice cream machine or the faff of making your own egg custard (although if you want to do that, here's how I used to do it - before discovering this no-churn method!). The whole point is to be able to whip it up in 5 minutes and forget about it until the next day.

Chocolate brownies (Frankie's vlog)

Today Frankie shows you how to make delicious chocolate brownies. (We made ours with gluten-free flour and baking powder but you can swap these for ordinary wheat flour if you like.)

Christmas Yule Log (kids vlog edition)

I first posted a recipe for a chocolate yule log over a decade ago. Since then it has become an annual staple of our Christmas baking traditions. I've experimented over the years with various tweaks and permutations (one year we made little chocolate pine cones from chocolate icing studded with chocolate cereal crescents - see below).

We've all decided the best version of it is to lean in to the Black Forest theme by including a layer of morello cherries scattered over the cream (which is sweetened with their juice). This year, Frankie made it almost completely by herself - here's how...

The icing on the Christmas cake (kids vlog edition)

After 'feeding' the Christmas cake every week since Stir-Up Sunday, we're finally ready to ice it on Christmas Eve. Here's how we did it...

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!