Lavender, honey and sea salt shortbread

This is quite an unusual flavour combination but I think it's delicious.

Gooseberry, apple and lavender crumble

It's gooseberry season, one of my favourite fruits which only seem to appear in grocers for but a few weeks a year. As soon as I laid eyes on some, I couldn't resist filling a bag full of them and bringing them home to make into a lovely stewed crumble filling. Usually I would add a splash of elderflower cordial to this, but I don't have any in the house today so instead decided to add a little lavender to the crumble topping, to give it a different flavour but still one reminiscent of flowering hedgerows on warm sunny walks in the countryside.

Lemon and lavender drizzle cake

Along with my carrot and ginger cake with orange ginger drizzle, I've made another drizzle cake for Will's funeral today - a lemon and lavender drizzle.  This recipe only uses egg yolks, and I used the leftover egg whites to make a batch of blackberry almond friands.

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...