Summer berry white chocolate muffins

For Christmas I was given the most amazing present - a shiny red Artisan KitchenAid! Now pride of place in my kitchen, this was my first attempt using it - a batch of delicious muffins to start the evening before heading to a New Year's Eve party.

Chestnut chocolate truffle torte

This is my adaptation of a fantastic Delia Smith recipe which I've done several times before - this time though, I've added some chestnut  purée to make it more Christmassy!  It's the ultimate decadent chocolate dessert, so I'm rounding off Christmas dinner with it (accompanied by my summer fruit terrine and a spiced Christmas panna cotta).

Christmas panna cotta

This is my first attempt at making panna cotta - I've used a recipe by the Hairy Bikers which is so Christmassy I couldn't resist making it for Christmas dinner dessert to go with my summer fruit terrine.

Summer fruit terrine

OK, it's not summertime, but this is such a pretty looking dessert that I'm doing it for Christmas dinner.  It's a Delia Smith recipe, which means it's foolproof!

White chocolate cranberry fudge

I love white chocolate and cranberries together (they make fantastic cookies) - and it makes very good-looking fudge for Christmas!

Chocolate orange fudge

A Terry's Chocolate Orange was always my favourite bit of a Christmas stocking - this is a fudge version for grown-ups!

Coffee liqueur fudge

For Christmas presents this year we're making fudge.  It's a really easy basic recipe that just uses melted chocolate and condensed milk - we've made three flavours, adding liqueurs and different toppings and a different type of chocolate for each.

Apple and elderflower crumble pies

Our fridge was empty this morning, which always makes both me and Lu feel sad!  Languishing on an otherwise empty shelf was a packet of ready-made pastry.  This was a way to make it, and a slightly tired looking bag of granny smith apples, go a long way, and cheer us all up on a wintry day when everyone in our house is feeling under the weather!  The pastry was enough to make 12 large muffin sized pies and 12 mini ones.  A bit of spice, some elderflower cordial and the juice and zest of a clementine helped make them a bit more festive, what with Christmas only days away now.  A mouthful of a mini apple pie like this can't fail to make you smile!

Blueberry citrus scones

These are my adaptation of a traditional scone recipe, using blueberries instead of raisins, a little lemon and orange zest, and a mixture of greek yoghurt and milk instead of buttermilk - the result is beautifully light, fresh and moreish!  Best when split open and buttered while still warm, these are really lovely served with a dollop of greek yoghurt and a drizzle of honey - but you could of course also serve them the traditional way with jam and clotted cream.

Classic Victoria sponge cake

I made this with my nephew James for his 9th birthday today.  It's his favourite cake, so we made a really big one - nine inch cake tins, 4 eggs in each - but of course this can be downsized.  You really cannot beat a slice of this while still slightly warm (... but not too hot or the cream will melt out of it like an avalanche!)  

Cakeapés!

Yesterday was my step-mum Jane's 60th birthday and rather than making one big cake, I decided to make a selection of mini-cakes - cakeapés, if you will! The recipes are all on here separately:

Orange and walnut cupcakes

Lemon and poppyseed cupcakes

Rose and vanilla mini-cupcakes

Blackberry and almond mini-muffins

Raspberry and elderflower mini-muffins

Blueberry and cinnamon muffins

Cranberry and macadamia muffins

Coffee and walnut mini-muffins

Dark chocolate chip mini-muffins

Dark chocolate chip mini-muffins

Coffee and walnut mini-muffins

Cranberry and macadamia muffins

Blueberry and cinnamon muffins

Raspberry and elderflower mini-muffins

Blackberry and almond mini-muffins

Rose and vanilla mini-cupcakes

Lemon and poppyseed cupcakes

Orange and walnut cupcakes

Walnut mocha mini muffins

After discovering the joys of my new silicon mini-muffin pan when I made Christmassy mini-muffins, I couldn't wait to make some more!  This time I made double chocolate muffins with walnuts, chunks of dark chocolate and coffee.  I'm taking them to work tomorrow to help us all through an all-day meeting!

Rum and raisin mince pies

It's beginning to feel even more like Christmas...  The rum-and-raisin mincemeat was too good to wait until it's even Christmassier to use, so I made some mince pies.  I used the same pastry recipe as the one I used for my recent pecan, rum and chocolate chunk pie - it's so easy I'm not going back to shop-bought pastry!

Christmassy mini-muffins

It's beginning to feel a bit like Christmas...  These mini-muffins are full of Christmas flavours of dark chocolate, dried cranberries, rum-and-raisin mincemeat and cinnamon.  Delicious with coffee (try dunking them!)

White chocolate pomegranate flapjacks

I recently bought a pack of dried pomegranate seeds in an Asian supermarket.  They were quite sharp and crunchy, so rather than using them in cupcakes or cookies, I decided to try using them in flapjacks as an alternative to raisins or nuts.  I soaked them for a while first in some pomegranate juice and sugar to bring out the full flavour and sweeten them as they'd become quite bitter (I'm sure they're really designed to be used in Moroccan tagines and savoury dishes).  I also decided to add some sugar to the butter and syrup mix to compensate for the sharpness of the pomegranate.  They came out really well - the seeds were still quite crunchy, but the whole flapjack had a lovely fruity flavour and a gooey texture from the melted white chocolate.

Mini plum amaretto tarts

This is a really quick invention to use up some plums that needed eating and to brighten up a wintry Tuesday evening after a stressful day at work!  (It's made extra quick by the use of ready made pastry - pre-rolled is even quicker and you don't need to flour a worktop...)  We ate them with friends to celebrate Kirsty's first job as a law graduate, congratulations K!

Pumpkin apricot and orange cake

A proper hallowe'en recipe this one - roasted pumpkin and soaked dried apricots are puréed with clementine juice to form the basis of this cake, drizzled with fresh orange juice when baked and then topped with zesty orange mascarpone icing.  There was loads of roasted pumpkin left over too, so I turned it into a pumpkin soup, and roasted the seeds with salt, pepper, paprika and olive oil to serve instead of croutons.  Happy hallowe'en!

Pecan, rum and chocolate chunk pie

I've made this for a weekend away with old friends from uni.  What better way to spend hallowe'en than eating scrumptious pud made of rum and chocolate!  This is best served warm when the chocolate is slightly melted and deliciously gooey.

Welsh cakes

I made Welsh cakes for the first time ever yesterday, with my niece and nephew Casey and James.  I've always thought they wouldn't work without a proper iron griddle or hot stone, but I tried it in a heavy-based frying pan and it worked fine!  The trick is just to keep it on a medium heat as the Welsh cakes burn on the outsides quite quickly if the pan is too hot.  Now that I've realised how easy this is, I can't wait to try it with other variations - dried cranberries, cherries or apricots, vanilla sugar, ginger, white chocolate chips... Fantastic served warm straight from the pan with a big pot of tea on a chilly winter Sunday.

Citrus rose sorbet

I recently found an enticing looking bottle of rose syrup in the foreign produce section of the supermarket – it’s a beautiful deep pink coloured cordial.  This sorbet recipe was an invention so I that could use it – the syrup is probably too strong for cakes, when a splash of rosewater is better, although I’m sure it could be diluted for that.  If you can only find rosewater, you could make a syrup by gently heating rosewater and about 100g caster sugar in a saucepan and then leaving to cool.  The colour is fantastic though!  The recipe is incredibly easy and would be even easier in an ice cream machine (the frozen disc for mine was unfortunately not in the freezer ready to use when I thought of making this, so I did it the old-fashioned way by stirring it every half hour).  I served this sprinkled with fresh pomegranate seeds.

Apple and almond (eggless) biscotti

I’ve never made biscotti before but decided to try making an eggless version of a traditional almond biscotti recipe for dinner with my vegan friend Ellie.  It was another excuse to use up Lu’s homemade apple sauce (made with lovely Welsh cider).  Delicious with coffee after dinner!

Apple, cranberry and walnut flapjacks

Lu recently made apple sauce for a roast pork Sunday lunch (about 6 cooking apples peeled cored and sliced, about 500ml cider and a little sugar and salt to taste).  There was loads left over so I came up with this flapjack recipe to use up some of the rest.

Apple and pomegranate Tarte Tatin

This is one of my favourite desserts and one of the easiest – I quite often make it as a mid-week pudding for after dinner on a hard day when I’m too tired and hungry for proper baking but need a cake fix!  This version adds pomegranate and cinnamon to the classic recipe.

Nectarine Earl Grey bread

For the opening of my friend Ellie’s yoga studio, I made these as a variation on the peach and pecan bread and the peach tea muffins I’ve made previously.  It’s a dairy free recipe so is great for Ellie and her vegan clients!

Fig, orange and lavender cake

This is a variation on the upside down cake recipe I’ve used many times now, this time though using some beautiful fresh figs that caught my eye in the greengrocers one Saturday morning.  Instead of the almond essence I usually use to flavour this yoghurty cake, I added grated orange zest and dried lavender flowers for a delicate flavouring, and made it in a deeper, narrower cake tin.  It took longer to cook and was more like a pudding than a cake – I took the leftovers to work the next day for a team meeting and it was quite a hit!

Lemon and lavender swede cake

This is from Harry Eastwood’s Red Velvet Chocolate Heartache, a wonderful book of cake recipes made using vegetables (think carrot cake, then beetroot, then take a big leap of faith and try sweet potato, swede and potato!).  I promise you cannot taste the swede in it – but I found it was best not to tell people it was in there until after they’d tucked into it and said how good it was; the look on their faces of such confusion that they were enjoying a cake made of swede was brilliant!  My first attempt at this was a huge success (the original recipe uses wheat free rice flour but I’ve substituted it for plain flour), although I have to confess that I made it again recently but tried using mini loaf cases – this did not work very well at all and it went a bit soggy and collapsed slightly.  Stick to a loaf tin in future...

Strawberry and hazelnut bread

It's a charity bake sale in work tomorrow, so I thought I'd use a couple of punnets of strawberries that were sitting in our fridge to try out my new fascination with fruity mini loaves (see my recent experiments with mango bread and peach bread).  I doubled the quantities of those recipes, so this makes 2 normal loaf cakes or 13 mini loaves.  Hazelnuts seemed like a nice combination with strawberries, but I think this would be lovely with pecans or macadamia nuts too.  The strawberry jam glaze made them look deliciously shiny and tempting. These are really sweet!

Flourless clementine, pistachio and rosewater cake

This is based on a Nigella Lawson recipe for a clementine cake using the whole fruit (skin, pith and all) and no flour, but also takes inspiration from a lovely Nigel Slater recipe from his book The Kitchen Diaries, adding pistachios and rosewater to the flavours.

I made it as a birthday cake for my mum, as I was looking for an interesting wheat-free cake idea for my two gluten-free sisters to enjoy with all of us – I’m not a big fan of wheat-free flour so I wanted a flourless recipe.  Mostly flourless cakes are chocolate ones (my favourite is this black forest gateau recipe) but Mum's not a chocolate fan.  This cake suits all those complicated things - wheat free, flourless, non-chocolate - but delicious and quite grown up!  Served with iced mint tea, happy birthday Mum! 

Peach and pecan bread

This is a peach version of my mango bread, with almond essence, pecan nuts and some chunks of diced peach.  I made it as a large loaf but it would be lovely in little loaf cases.  Delicious!

Lime muffins with kiwi, pomegranate and strawberry jam filling

I'm still using up the last of the sweet salsas from the Mexican dessert the other night - this recipe uses the microwave to make a quick and easy jam out of diced kiwi fruit, strawberries and pomegranate.  It takes a while to cool down so you need to make it at least an hour before the muffins to give the jam time to cool.  And make sure you use a really big bowl in the microwave as the jam bubbles up really high!

Mango bread

After our sweet taco dessert for Mexican night yesterday, we had quite a lot of puréed mango leftover.  I'd recently bought some really cute mini loaf cases that I've been desperate for an excuse to use - and this was the perfect opportunity: mango bread!  I didn't have any eggs (and was too hungover to stagger to the shop to buy some!) so this is an eggless recipe - I used walnut oil instead, but I think any flavourless/ vegetable oil would do.  (I'd also almost run out of self-raising flour, so this has a mix of both that an plain, plus bicarb as well as baking powder - if you've got the right things and no hangover, use all one kind of flour and the right type of powder to go with it!)  They came out beautifully - perfect for a cup of tea at the end of a hungover Sunday afternoon.

Brandy snap tacos and sweet salsas

We had a mexican-themed party last night with the girls - nachos to start, chilli and sweet potato wedges for the main course, followed by an inspired dessert, an idea that Lu dreamt up: taco-shaped brandy snaps and sweet salsas!

• 'Salsa' was made with diced strawberries and red plums, lemon juice and sugar.
• 'Guacamole' was made from diced kiwi fruit, pomegranate seeds, lime juice and sugar.
• 'Cheese dip' was made from pureed mango, peach and a little sugar.
• 'Sour cream' was a mojito-style syllabub of lime juice, brown sugar and rum, whipped with double cream and mixed with fresh mint leaves.
• 'Chilli' was made with crumbled chocolate cake, ground almonds, purple jelly beans, mushroom-shaped sweets and cherry jelly sweets chopped up to look like red and green peppers.

And the 'taco shells' were brandy snaps - the first time I'd ever made (or tasted) them.  They were really good, and dead easy!

Pear and raspberry crumble pots

These are a really quick and simple pud and take just a few mins to prepare, then can be baked in the oven while you eat dinner.  Delicious! 

The ultimate crispy cakes

If you think you can't beat cornflake cakes, try these - add honeycomb, raisins and chopped nuts to a mix of dark and milk chocolate, along with cornflakes, for a (slightly more) grown-up version of a childhood favourite! 

Pear and Apple Tarte Fine

This is my version of a tarte fine aux pommes.  I made this recently after my dad gave me a bag of apples from his garden - fruit from the apple trees he planted when my little sister and I were born.  It's really quick to make and could be adapted for pretty much any fruit you've got lying around - nectarines and blueberries is a nice combination.  I like it served cold the next day, when you can eat it like a sweet version of left-over pizza - great to find in the fridge in the morning and take to work for elevenses!

Pomegranate and white chocolate cupcakes

These little cupcakes are fruity and sweet, with pomegranate berries adding a lovely juicy crunch.  The icing is quite sweet, so you could try them without any icing and just a light sprinkle of icing sugar or a glaze made with low-sugar jam and a few pomegranate berries to decorate.

Doug the Pug was desperate to get his paws on them!

Plum upside-down cake

This was a new take on several upside-down cakes I've made.  They are a lovely way to use left-over fruit that you find beginning to wilt in your fridge or fruit bowl, including rhubarb or blueberries - and a greengage and blackberry one I made recently using this recipe was especially good.  The one pictured here I made using red and yellow plums, the red ones so shiny and bright they looked almost like juicy ripe tomatoes.  I've added yoghurt as it worked so well in the redcurrant and white chocolate muffins I made recently - it keeps the cake beautifully moist, and makes the texture more like a decadent pudding than a mere sponge cake.

Beetroot chocolate brownies

This is my adaptation of a cross between a Harry Eastwood and a Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall recipe, with added decadence through the inclusion of chunks of chocolate, a mix of demerara and caster sugar, lots of cocoa.  If you want them even more chocolatey, increase the amount of melted chocolate - but I think this is a nice amount to maintain the earthiness of the beetroot, which makes them lovely and moist.  The trick with this one is not to use grated raw beetroot but to dice and microwave the veg and blitz it into a purple puree.  I've also separated the eggs so you get lots of air into the mix at the end by adding the beaten egg whites at the last minute.  Altogether, this recipe takes quite a long time to make and you need to be prepared for the amount of washing up required afterwards - but the end results are amazingly well worth it!

For a party to welcome home our friends James, Kate and their new baby Nia, I chopped them into inch squares and piped on a blob of cream whipped with cocoa powder and icing sugar, and added a raspberry to the top of each one.  Pretty!

Camomile and lemon cupcakes

This is my second attempt using tea for cakes, this time with camomile.  I infused milk with camomile tea bags for a couple of hours before I started (and added the contents of one bag to the cake mix) - and it worked really well.  It's a gentle flavour, but has a lovely gingery, honeyish taste, and it works beautifully with the lemony, camomile icing.  These were SO moreish!

Peach tea and biscotti muffins

These are my first experiment making cakes with tea.  I've tried infusing the butter with tea bags, but the flavour is quite subtle - next time I'll try using loose leaf tea and straining it.  I'm thinking about camomile and lemon cupcakes...  The Amaretti and almonds take over the tea in this, but they were pretty delicious and beautifully moist.  Happy birthday Jon!  

Apple, cranberry and cinnamon crumble muffins

Some wrinkled-looking apples languishing in my fruit bowl were the excuse to invent these.  I’ve used the same yoghurt muffin mix from my redcurrant and white chocolate muffins and added a crumbly topping like that used for my apple and blackberry crumble.  The smell of cinnamon fills the house as these are baking – yummy!

Coffee and walnut cake (10 inch square)

I like my coffee cake to have a bit of cocoa in – more of a mocha cake – but also can’t resist walnuts if I can find them.  Using real espresso if you are passing a coffee shop would probably make this even better, but I find that instant coffee mixed with the smallest amount of boiling water you can get away with to create a smooth syrupy mixture works just as well.  There’s also Camp coffee essence (I found it in Asda but nowhere else) which works really well – it’s especially good for the icing and creates a fantastically rich, golden colour when mixed with mascarpone and icing sugar.

Best banana bread

Banana bread is the first thing I remember baking all by myself as a kid.  I had a brilliant recipe in a children's cookery book from the 70s full of lovely illustrations.  Sadly the book has got lost in the mists of time but this recipe is the closest I've come to recreating the banana bread of my childhood which I remember being so proud of - and so excited to eat!

Amaretti baked peaches

Simple but unbeatably delicious!

Rum and raspberry black forest gateau

Based on the classic Delia recipe, this is my version using a creme fraiche chocolate ganache instead of whipped cream, dark rum instead of Kirsch, and raspberries instead of morello cherries.  We love this so much we had a three tier, triple layer version for our wedding cake, covered with summer fruits (thanks to our lovely friend K)!

Apple and blackberry crumble

A classic recipe with a flap-jacky twist - this is the best crumble topping I've experimented with and so had to be preserved!

Passion fruit, lime and ginger cheesecake

Always a winner - but remember to make it the night before so that it's properly set...

Honeycomb and white chocolate cheesecake

This is incredibly good but unbelievably rich - best to make it in small ramekins rather than one big cheesecake

Dark chocolate and ginger cookies

These are brilliant for dunking or on their own - the kind of cookie that deserves to be made BIG!

Cranberry and white chocolate cookies

These are delicious dunked, and probably worth making two batches at once as they disappear so quickly

Redcurrant and white chocolate muffins

I made these recently for my friend Kirsty's 30th birthday - 15 muffins with two pink and white candles in each (so no room for the extra redcurrants on the top).  The recipe actually makes 18 (so we had the excuse to test 3 before the birthday party).  I've made these with icing using the juice of the redcurrants to colour it pink, but I think they are nicest just with the glaze of redcurrant jelly and dusted with icing sugar, making them glisten temptingly!