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!

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! 

Vegan banana mini muffins

Lovely mouthful-sized muffins!

Raspberry, elderflower and amaretti crumble (wheat-free)

My sister Lizzie came over for dinner this evening after work and I made this as a quick wheat-free pudding. I was pleased that it was also a dairy-free and sugar-free dessert as we’re all trying to be healthy, but then quickly realised that there was plenty of sugar in the amaretti biscuits and elderflower cordial (and in fact the porridge oats were golden syrup-flavoured).  On that realisation, I decided to hang it all and served it with gorgeous salted caramel ice cream – there’s always tomorrow to try being healthy…

Vegan chocolate macadamia cake with blackberries

This evening we cooked dinner for six, including a friend who is vegan.  I decided to turn my chocolate courgette brownies recipe into something a bit more sophisticated - made with macadamia nuts instead of walnuts, a little coffee essence and baked it in a round cake tin.  I topped it with a mound of fresh blackberries, dusted with cocoa. Telling people once they've eaten the cake that it contains courgettes is great fun to watch - especially our friend Jon who refuses to eat vegetables. No-one would be able to guess, but their inclusion means this is really moist and magic!

Fig and clementine gingerbread

Lu and I have spent all week feeling very sorry for ourselves with a horrible virus. This is medicinal baking - unbelievably easy to make (it's all just blitzed in a food processor) so minimal effort for an achey body, and proper comfort food to eat - best served warm with a generous dollop of custard!  It's an adaptation of my sticky ginger loaf cake, but I used dried figs as we didn't have any dates in the pantry, and added clementine zest and juice and made a clementine icing to drizzle over the top. (It also happens to be vegan - no eggs or butter, all the stickiness comes from the figs, clementine juice and lovely liquoricy black treacle.) A big warm hug of a cake!

Roasted banana ice cream

This is a three ingredient recipe - just coconut milk, honey and bananas, roasted in their skins to bring out their flavour.  It also means it's suitable for vegans as it contains no eggs or milk.  I made it to accompany my roasted banana bread with brown butter frosting and caramelised pistachios.   

Chocolate courgette brownies

These might sound weird but they taste absolutely amazing. You'd never know there was a load of grated vegetable in them, but you will wonder how they are so gorgeously moist! TThey also don't contain any eggs or butter, so are suitable for vegans. I used yellow courgettes fresh from my mum's allotment, which of course made these extra special.  I took them to Plymouth for a weekend away with the girls. I think they are the best brownies I've ever made - deliciously rich, gooey, chocolatey, and a perfect light and fluffy texture. Try them!

Amazing yellow courgettes from Mum's allotment

Vegan lemon and camomile drizzle cake

My friends Ellie and Ruadhan are getting married in June on the tiny island of Sark, and I’m honoured that they’ve asked me to make their wedding cake!  Ellie is vegan so I wanted to make sure that at least one tier is a vegan cake.  I tested this recipe when I went for a picnic and walk in the Forest of Dean with Ellie and Ru this weekend.  You’d never know it was vegan!  But it definitely needs the drizzle – without it I think it might be a little too dry.

Sticky ginger loaf cake

This is a vegan recipe – no eggs, butter or milk – instead it’s full of treacle, sunflower oil, dark muscovado sugar, dates and crystallised ginger, producing a rich, sticky, heavenly cake. It takes only a few minutes to make as everything is blended together in one go in a food processor. Another great wintery recipe to enjoy in front of the fire with a movie on a snowy day!

Fanouropita – a Greek olive oil and orange cake for the patron saint of lost things

This week, we’re off on holiday to the Greek island of Symi, near Rhodes.  I’ve been reading Tessa Kiros’s lovely book, ‘Food from Many Greek Kitchens’ and I fell in love with the idea of ‘Fanouropita’, a cake traditionally made today, on August 27th, the name day of Saint Fanourios, the patron saint of lost things.

Women in Greek villages, particularly in Rhodes and the neighbouring islands, bring the cake to church, where the priest blesses it with a special ceremony. The congregation asks for the saint’s mother’s sins to be forgiven, and then make a wish to Saint Fanourios for help to find something – good health and happiness, lost items, lost relatives, peace, etc. It is also said to help unmarried women 'find' the name of their future husband. After the Mass, the sweet cakes are cut and everybody shares pieces with each other.

Fanouropita can also be made at other times of the year if someone wishes to ask Saint Fanourios to find something or someone for them, or once you have found something lost you can bake this cake to show Saint Fanourios appreciation for his help. To honour the tradition, you then also need to distribute some pieces of the cake to friends or neighbours.

The cake must be made with seven or nine ingredients, as the power of  7 or 9 is said to have prophetic or magical properties. The ingredients are pure and nutritional Greek ingredients like olive oil and orange juice, all of them suitable for the Orthodox fasting, so there are no dairy products like eggs or butter in the recipe. Although Tessa Kiros’ recipe doesn’t say so, other traditional recipes I’ve looked at say that, in keeping with the tradition of 'finding things', the cake batter should contain nuts and dried fruits, so that as you eat it, your teeth will 'find things' in it.

Here is my version of Fanouropita based on several different traditional recipes. Mine includes sultanas soaked in orange liqueur and a mixture of nuts – I used almonds and walnuts, as they are in keeping with Greek produce.

BMW (Banana Mango Walnut) Bread

Normally if I make a vegan recipe it's a deliberate attempt to provide cake to vegan friends. This one was a happy coincidence that looking for a recipe to use up some very ripe bananas and mangoes I came across a recipe from Joy the Baker which was dairy-free - and turned out to be so good I'll definitely be using it again regardless of who I'm baking for! Normally I'd also take a photo of a whole cake - but this was so delicious I didn't have a chance to get my camera out before half of it had been scoffed! 

Peach, strawberry, blueberry & pecan cake

Tonight we're going for a pot luck dinner at my vegan friend Ellie and Ru's new house.  I wanted to make a vegan cake and decided to make a round cake version of my peach and pecan bread - this time with tinned peaches, which worked just as well.  We'd got a small punnet of blueberries and some strawberries in the kitchen so I added them to the mixture, and made a cinnamon icing drizzle using the tinned peach juice, lemon and apple juice.  A lovely, dairy-free way to warm a new home (and it made ours smell wonderful too)!

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!

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!

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!