Strawberry almond cake

I bought a small wooden crate full of beautiful strawberries from the greengrocers the other day, and the shiny red juicy fruit inspired me to whip up this cake - it's incredibly quick to do, but utterly delicious!  The strawberries are pushed into the cake batter with their noses pointing upwards before baking, but when it comes out of the oven they have become completely submerged as the cake has risen, so it's a strawberry surprise when you cut into it.  This has all the flavours of British summer - Eton mess, Victoria sponge, strawberries and cream - and brings a bit of sunshine even to rainy spring days like these.

Salted caramel chocolate tart

I tasted salted caramel tart at a really good Italian restaurant recently, and it was so amazing I had to try and recreate it! This is incredibly indulgent - it uses a lot of butter in every stage - and it looks quite complicated as there are several components (pastry, caramel, chocolate filling, chocolate ganache)... but it's so worth it!

White chocolate florentines

These are really easy biscuits to make and take no time at all - but just be careful to watch them when baking so they don't burn.  I've coated mine in white chocolate but they are lovely with dark or milk chocolate too.

Pear and crystallised ginger cookies

This is the same basic recipe as my peach, pecan and cinnamon cookies, but with dried pear and crystallised ginger.  The mixture makes about 30 cookies so if you like you could divide it in half after stage 4 and make two different batches.

Peach, pecan and cinnamon cookies

We're off to our friend Liz's hen party today and so I've made a couple of different cookie recipes to take along.  This one uses dried peaches that I bought at our local farmer's market recently, which gives them a lovely flavour and nice chewy bits!  Rolled in sugar, the cookies have a lovely twinkly crust.

Mini egg rocky road

I love the excuse of Easter to gorge on chocolate.  This recipe is easy and indulgent - lots of chocolate and colourful goodies (cranberries, mini marshmallows) topped with Cadbury's mini eggs.  These were quickly devoured!