Grapefruit and molasses loaf cake

  

Yep, I’m really failing at this healthy eating malarkey.  I bought a load of lovely red grapefruit with all the best of intentions of eating a healthy breakfast every day before work, rather than skipping it completely and then needing a chocolate fix mid-morning. Sigh!  The grapefruit have been sitting uneaten as I dash past them every day, until today I decided to rescue them from their decidedly sad plight and… turn them into cake of course!  I have to say though, once you’ve tasted this you’ll wonder why you’d ever eat grapefruit any other way. Rich yet clean, tangy yet elegant, everyone who has tasted this has fallen in love with it.  Sorry healthy eating, cake wins again!

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!

Cranberry and clementine loaf cake

This is the second of the cakes I've made today for a charity fundraising cake sale tomorrow, along with an elderflower, lemon and poppyseed loaf cake and a sloe gin, hazelnut and fig layer cake. I'm really pleased with how this looks, drizzled with a glossy red cranberry glaze that reminds me of toffee-apples, and decorated with white chocolate stars. It'd be a lovely alternative to Christmas cake I think.

Elderflower, lemon and poppyseed cake

Today I've been making cakes to sell at a charity fundraising bake sale organised by Mags, who was a teacher at our school and became something of a surrogate mum to Lu when she was a teenager. She was diagnosed with cancer a few years ago and has been doing incredible fundraising ever since. The first of my contributions is this elderflower, lemon and poppyseed loaf cake with an elderflower icing.

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 bread with brown butter frosting and caramelised pistachios

The smell of roasting bananas is almost as good as great banana bread itself - rich and sweet and caramel - and adds a depth of flavour to my favourite banana bread recipe. I also added a frosting, made with browned butter which also has a similarly caramelised, nutty flavour. I topped it with some caramelised pistachios and took it for dinner with our friends Emma and Geraint, along with some homemade ice cream made with the remaining roasted bananas, coconut milk and honey.  

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!

Banana, honey, yoghurt and hazelnut bread

As usual when I make banana bread, it's to use up very ripe bananas which I've secretly been not eating for days so I've got just this excuse! Today I've added toasted hazelnuts, natural yoghurt and a mixture of honey and brown sugar, but for a plain banana bread recipe my old faithful one is here.

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.

Carrot and ginger cake with orange ginger drizzle

Today is the funeral of my dear friend and first love, Will.  After the service we're all gathering for tea and cake, and so this is one of my contributions - a comforting carrot and fresh ginger loaf cake with a lovely orange and gingery drizzle. 

Rhubarb, ginger and walnut bread

I went to stay with my mum this week and visited her new allotment.  It's a lovely place and made me jealous of her green fingers.  One day I'd love to have a proper fruit and veg patch in our garden, but I've never been able to keep plants alive for very long - and when we planted flowers last summer Doug the Pug took great pleasure in biting the flower heads off every single one within minutes of us finishing planting them!  Anyway, I came home armed with a bag of fresh rhubarb pulled from her allotment, and this was the result - a lovely moist rhubarb, ginger and walnut loaf cake, made with stewed rhubarb and glazed and iced with its juices.  Delicious!

Pecan, apple and cinnamon bread

Lots of American cookbooks I own talk about 'breakfast' muffins, bars and quick-breads.  I love the idea of cake being an acceptable, normal option for breakfast - rather than a guilty pleasure I sneakily enjoy when no-one's looking!  The thread running through most of these 'breakfast' recipes is the addition of porridge oats, apples, nuts - the sorts of things a healthy person might turn into muesli, but that a cake addict like me would far prefer to turn into cake!  So inspired by this idea, this morning I woke up wanting a baking fix (yesterday's cherry scones really did vanish like the joke suggests) and decided to alter my apple, carrot, ginger and walnut bread to create this recipe.  What better way to start your day?

Raspberry, almond and sour cream bread

OK, I have a confession to make. When this came out of the oven, the smell was so good I actually stood over the cake for several minutes just breathing in the delicious aroma of raspberry and almond. It made me chuckle at myself for being so weird... but then I just had to have another sniff! And the taste... it beats the smell.  This is SO good. Try it. You won't be disappointed.

Apple, carrot, ginger and walnut bread (with optional cranberries and crumble topping!)

It's a work colleague, Tim's, last day tomorrow and the office has made him a hamper as a leaving present as he's a bit of a foodie. I was asked to make a cake for the hamper that would be a bit 'unusual' so came up with this - a version of carrot cake but with fresh ginger, grated apple and walnut. Unfortunately I have to give it wrapped up whole, so won't get a chance to taste it - but it looks and smells so good I'll definitely be making this again!
                                                                                                                                                                  

Ahem... I am officially a greedy guts.  I was so disappointed not to have tried tasting this, that the next day I came home from work and made another one! Never able to resist 'tweaking' a recipe, this time I added a crumble topping... and some cranberries. (Told you I can't resist). I've amended the recipe with these 'optional' extras (but I recommend them - it was amazing cake!!)

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! 

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!

Peach and pecan bread

This is a peach version of my mango bread, with almond essence, pecan nuts and some chunks of diced peach.  I made it as a large loaf but it would be lovely in little loaf cases.  Delicious!

Mango bread

After our sweet taco dessert for Mexican night yesterday, we had quite a lot of puréed mango leftover.  I'd recently bought some really cute mini loaf cases that I've been desperate for an excuse to use - and this was the perfect opportunity: mango bread!  I didn't have any eggs (and was too hungover to stagger to the shop to buy some!) so this is an eggless recipe - I used walnut oil instead, but I think any flavourless/ vegetable oil would do.  (I'd also almost run out of self-raising flour, so this has a mix of both that an plain, plus bicarb as well as baking powder - if you've got the right things and no hangover, use all one kind of flour and the right type of powder to go with it!)  They came out beautifully - perfect for a cup of tea at the end of a hungover Sunday afternoon.