Apple, pistachio and persimmon cake

A delicious, moreish, warm and cosy pudding of a cake this - made to use some apples from our friends Emma and Geraint's garden that I brought home after a lovely supper with them yesterday. 

Banana courgette blondies

I was so impressed with the chocolate courgette brownies I'd made, I decided to try making 'blondies' - brownies without chocolate, this time with banana instead. Again, you'd have no idea that these contained any courgette, and because they are free from eggs or butter they are suitable for vegans. You could almost say these are healthy cakes!

Spiced toffee apple cake

Continuing my recent bonfire night baking theme, this is an adapted version of a BBC Good Food recipe for spiced toffee apple cake. The cake is made from a base of date purée, then before baking is topped with rows of sliced red apples. Once it comes out of the oven, you sprinkle it with icing sugar and then drizzle a toffee sauce over the top.  Serve cut into squares like brownies!

Raspberry crumble cake bars

As usual, I came home tired from work but with a sweet tooth and wanted something really quick and easy to rustle up for pudding.  We had a couple of small punnets of raspberries in the fridge and two eggs, and this was the result.  I even used American style measuring cups as I'm getting to see how amazingly simple they are - just scoop up the right amount of flour or sugar without thinking about scales!  Unfortunately, my tiredness meant I used only 4oz butter (what the Americans call 1 'stick') when the recipe I was using actually called for '1 cup', which is 8oz.  It seemed to turn out perfectly though, so I think I can therefore call this a healthy dessert as it has 50% less butter!

Rhubarb and strawberry upside-down slices

It was the most beautiful sunny weekend and we went for a lovely picnic on the cliffs of Southerndown, before clambering down the cliffs to the beach below for a paddle in the sea with Doug the Pug. On the way we stopped at our favourite deli to pick up some picnic supplies, and I bought a couple of slices of the most delicious rhubarb and cherry cake. It was so good I had to figure out how to make it - I couldn't find any cherries in the local greengrocers so I used some lovely ripe strawberries instead. The cake batter is really just my usual upside-down cake recipe, but this time in a rectangular brownie tin. These are sweet, sunny and perfect for seaside picnics!

White chocolate pomegranate flapjacks

I recently bought a pack of dried pomegranate seeds in an Asian supermarket.  They were quite sharp and crunchy, so rather than using them in cupcakes or cookies, I decided to try using them in flapjacks as an alternative to raisins or nuts.  I soaked them for a while first in some pomegranate juice and sugar to bring out the full flavour and sweeten them as they'd become quite bitter (I'm sure they're really designed to be used in Moroccan tagines and savoury dishes).  I also decided to add some sugar to the butter and syrup mix to compensate for the sharpness of the pomegranate.  They came out really well - the seeds were still quite crunchy, but the whole flapjack had a lovely fruity flavour and a gooey texture from the melted white chocolate.

Apple, cranberry and walnut flapjacks

Lu recently made apple sauce for a roast pork Sunday lunch (about 6 cooking apples peeled cored and sliced, about 500ml cider and a little sugar and salt to taste).  There was loads left over so I came up with this flapjack recipe to use up some of the rest.

Beetroot chocolate brownies

This is my adaptation of a cross between a Harry Eastwood and a Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall recipe, with added decadence through the inclusion of chunks of chocolate, a mix of demerara and caster sugar, lots of cocoa.  If you want them even more chocolatey, increase the amount of melted chocolate - but I think this is a nice amount to maintain the earthiness of the beetroot, which makes them lovely and moist.  The trick with this one is not to use grated raw beetroot but to dice and microwave the veg and blitz it into a purple puree.  I've also separated the eggs so you get lots of air into the mix at the end by adding the beaten egg whites at the last minute.  Altogether, this recipe takes quite a long time to make and you need to be prepared for the amount of washing up required afterwards - but the end results are amazingly well worth it!

For a party to welcome home our friends James, Kate and their new baby Nia, I chopped them into inch squares and piped on a blob of cream whipped with cocoa powder and icing sugar, and added a raspberry to the top of each one.  Pretty!