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!

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!

Flourless chocolate, hazelnut, macadamia and cranberry cookies

Another flourless recipe for my sister – this time, rich dark chocolate cookies for Christmas, loaded with hazelnuts, macadamia nuts and dried cranberries.  They are lovely and soft and cakey, more like brownies than biscuits – really good served warm with a scoop of my Christmas Pudding Ice Cream!

I’ve based my recipe on a chocolate and walnut cookie recipe by famous patissier Francois Payard.

OBAMA rocks! cakes

What an amazing US election result last night! To celebrate Obama's second term in office, I decided to make something with ingredients that spelled out OBAMA (a habit I've got into what with my ABC cake (Apple, Blueberry and Cinnamon), BMW bread (Banana, Mango and Walnut), and more recent BANG cake (Banana, Amaretto, Nut and Ginger)...). These started life as cookies but I soon realised that they tasted just like the rock cakes my mum used to make with us on Sunday afternoons as kids. So rather than flattening small scoops of the dough into cookie shapes, I instead dolloped big scoops onto the baking tray and left them to come out as rock cakes. I made one dough but split it into two batches before adding the different OBAMA fruit and nuts. The first batch contained Oats, Blueberries, Apple, Macadamia and Almonds. The second batch contained Oats, Banana, Apricot, Mango and Almonds. The result: OBAMA rocks! [cakes]

Kitchen sink cookies

These cookies are so-called because you can chuck in any mixture of chocolate, nuts and dried fruit you have in your cupboards.  I used a mixture of Galaxy chocolate (milk and cookie crumble), toasted macadamias and pecans, dried cranberries and natural glace cherries.  You could substitute this for anything else - white chocolate, dark chocolate, crystallised ginger, pistachios, peanuts, hazelnuts, dried apricots, pears, peaches, fudge, mini marshmallows... These are lovely chewy, soft cookies and will disappear quickly!

Cranberry and macadamia muffins