Rum and browned butter mince pinwheels

We had friends to stay this weekend so I made some pastries for Saturday afternoon tea and Sunday morning coffee. I still had a jar of mincemeat left over from Christmas and decided to spruce it up with some spiced rum and browned butter.

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).

Applesauce cake with cinnamon cream cheese icing

This year we had another lovely autumn weekend away in a big Cornish farmhouse with a bunch of old friends from art college.  I made this cake using up a bowl of homemade applesauce from last weekend’s roast pork Sunday lunch.  It was great as a dessert after a big meal of Lu’s beef brisket chilli, but was still a lovely and moist cake for eating the next day, sitting around in pyjamams in front of a big fire with good company and lots of pots of tea!

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. 

Banana, date and rum loaf cake - wheat-free, sugar-free and fat-free!

Our new year's resolution is to try to get healthy. We've started going to the gym (I know, I can hardly believe it myself) and watching the calorie counter on the cycling machines tell you that you've sweated for 10 minutes and only burned about five crisps is slightly soul-destroying, not least as it's made me feel guilty about eating cake.  One of the greatest pleasures in life!  So I have to find a way to make guilt-free cakes. This is my first attempt - it is a fat-free, sugar-free and wheat-free cake - and amazingly, it still tastes delicious!  Made with puréed dates, dried apricots and mashed banana, it's lovely and sweet without the need to add any extra sugar.  Instead of flour it uses a bit of cornmeal (or you could try polenta) to bind it together, and is full of pecans, dried cranberries and sultanas, and finished off with a good glug of dark rum (we all need a little naughtiness...).  As good as any fruit cake, and no guilt attached!

Pomegranate, macadamia and banana bread

Macadamias are just about my favourite kind of nuts - as creamy as white chocolate yet deliciously nutty. A perfect accompaniment to banana bread to use up the black bananas, ripe-as-you-like in our fruit bowl, which were sitting alongside two pomegranates that were beginning to look tired and a little wrinkly. I felt like they were calling out to me to bake them into something wonderful - and this was the result!

Maple, pecan and cranberry granola

I've been using lots of maple syrup and cranberries recently, inspired by their autumnal flavours to make comfort food as we head towards Christmas. This granola recipe was such a winner I had to include it on the blog - the combination of maple syrup with dried cranberries and ground pecan nuts, tossed together with a little honey, oats and golden linseeds makes a brilliant wintery breakfast, but is also great to have in a jar in the kitchen to eat by the handful as you're passing!

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!

Spiced pumpkin cake with salted caramel cream cheese frosting and coconut cream dark chocolate ganache

I've been wanting to try this cake for ages now and have even had a tin of pumpkin purée and a tin of caramel sitting in the pantry waiting for their chance to be whipped up into a cake layered with chocolate ganache.  But for a cake like this with lots of ingredients and layers and two different icings, I need a special occasion as a good excuse to make it. When we were invited to a barbecue for a friend's birthday today I knew this was the perfect opportunity to have a go at it. 

The cake itself was utterly delicious - delicately spiced and moist like a really good carrot cake, which of course always goes perfectly with cream cheese frosting, but this time, cranked up a gear by adding caramel and sea salt to the frosting. I also made use of my recent discovery of dividing a chilled can of coconut milk, using the liquid as a milk substitute in the cake batter for added flavour, then melting the solidified cream with dark chocolate to make the most amazing ganache you've ever tasted. To maximise the amount of ganache and frosting, I sliced each cake in two, so that when the cake was cut, it revealed stripes of four layers of orange pumpkin, caramel cream and rich dark chocolate. 

However, I hadn't quite thought how suitable a cake with so much frosting would be to make - and transport - in the middle of a heatwave! Determined not to be deterred (honestly, I've been dreaming about this cake!) I devised an ingenious travel solution - a big, clear plastic box with a layer of bags of ice which I wedged around the trunk of the cake stand, acting as both a cool box and a way of keeping it wobble-free. It worked - and will from now on be my default way of transporting cakes!

Chocolate ginger cake with pomegranate and raspberries

Today I was invited to make the cakes for an 80th birthday party for one of my fellow board members at Butetown History and Arts Centre, held at the gallery. It was a fantastic turnout of  so many of Paddy and Gaynor's family and friends, politicians, academics, artists, and a privilege to contribute some cakes to a day full of amazing stories and reminiscences. This cake was an enormous chocolate and ginger cake, layered with whipped dark chocolate cream and fresh raspberries and topped with shiny chocolate ganache, pomegranate berries and edible gold dragees. It was nerve racking to transport but arrived in one piece, and went down a storm. Happy birthday, Paddy, who looked as dapper today as the Great Gatsby!

Chilli hot chocolate muffins with whipped chocolate coconut cream frosting

I'm still feeling a little under the weather and decided to try spicing up some chocolate chip muffins with a kick of chilli powder, ginger and cinnamon. We'd run out of milk so instead I experimented by using the liquid from a chilled tin of coconut milk - then I whipped the solidified cream with melted chocolate to make an amazing chocolate fudge frosting!

Rhubarb and ginger marmalade turnovers

On the way home from work this evening I popped into a supermarket and spotted some shiny pink rhubarb in the reduced section for 25p!  It was too good to walk past but I was too tired to do anything too complicated, so I also grabbed a pack of ready-made puff pastry and when I got home made these turnovers – just adding a little of my mum’s home-made ginger marmalade and a little freshly grated root ginger.  We ate them with some shop-bought custard for the most simple and scrumptious after work pud!

Coffee, maple and ginger cake with maple-caramelised pecans

Today I went to visit my very pregnant friend Lucy for a cuppa and a catch up.  Her favourite cake is coffee cake, so I made this coffee cake with a twist - the flavour is intensified with fresh ginger and maple syrup, so it tastes like a gingerbread latte!  I iced it with a coffee and maple buttercream and decorated it with pecan nuts caramelised in a pan of bubbling maple syrup.

The sponge cake base is loosely based on Dan Lepard's recipe for coffee and ginger cake, but I forgot to add oil - it turned out fine though, I think because I added maple syrup and didn't include ground pistachios.  I also made it more moist by making a coffee syrup which I poured over the hot cake skewered with holes and left it to cool in the tin (inspired by Delia Smith's Austrian coffee and walnut cake, but I also added maple syrup and a little ground ginger).  Rather than Dan Lepard's lemon-cream cheese frosting or Delia's coffee mascarpone frosting, I opted for a simple buttercream flavoured with maple syrup and espresso.

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!

Cranberry, clementine and ginger Welsh cakes

I've started working part-time and I have to say I'm absolutely loving it!  Today has been a beautiful sunny day, just beginning to melt the snow we've had this week. After a lovely walk around Cosmeston lakes with our dog, I came home and rustled up another batch of Welsh cakes (they are proving to be very addictive - to make and eat!).  This time, I soaked dried cranberries in a pan with a little clementine juice, so the fruit plumps up (inspired by the juicy blueberry Welsh cake fritters I made the other day, but wanting to make them quickly out of what was in the house).  I added ginger instead of cinnamon, which went very well with a pot of fragrantly spiced chai tea.

Nutty ginger beer cookies

We're off to Cornwall this weekend to stay in a country house with some old friends. I decided to make some ginger nut biscuits (these contain ground almonds, walnuts and are each topped with a whole pecan) but in a moment of madness/ inspiration I added a good glug of Crabbie's alcoholic ginger beer. It worked brilliantly, adding to the light, soft texture and adding extra oomph to the gingeriness, along with chopped crystallised ginger.

BANG cake (banana, amaretto, nut and ginger)

It's fast approaching that lovely time of year when pumpkins and sparklers come out. In honour of this, I've called this a 'BANG' cake, as it's made from banana, amaretto, nuts and ginger. The cake contains ground walnuts and ground ginger, and is topped with a kind of crumble made from blitzed pecans and crystallised ginger. I'm serving this tonight for my friend Ali who is cooking me supper!

Pear, oat and chocolate gingerbread muffins

Last night we had dinner at our friend Debbie's house and I made my flourless chocolate amaretto pear cake. I had a couple of pears left over so this morning decided to include them in another chocolatey recipe - this time adding some cocoa to a basic gingerbread muffin recipe, and replacing half the flour for oats.

Ginger and milk chocolate chunk cookies

This recipe is a mixture of the ginger biscuits I made a couple of days ago and my dark chocolate ginger cookies – this time adding chunks of milk chocolate and a little drinking chocolate rather than dark cocoa powder. These are a delicious combination of warm and spicy ginger with gooey, oozing milk chocolate. They disappear fast!

Ginger biscuits

It's my mum's birthday today and we're giving her a very cute ginger kitten. I decided to bring her a batch of ginger biscuits, her favourites. Happy birthday mum!