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!