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!

Nutty energy bites

Another of my vegan, gluten-free, sugar-free, no-bake recipes for energy bars and bites created for the Allroots Yoga Festival. These ones are made with a delicious mixture of almond butter, peanut butter and agave nectar, and chock-full of seeds, nuts, raisins, rolled oats and rice flakes, then rolled in desiccated coconut.

Spiced honey, fruit and nut muffins

Since getting home from Sark I’ve had the most horrible fluey cold.  I think it is proof that too much fresh air and exercise is bad for you – what I need is CAKE to make me feel better!  Feeling pathetic and also fairly exhausted from all the baking I did for the wedding cakes, I want something really easy and quick, and something to nourish my sickliness.  I’m living on mugs of hot lemon and honey for my sore throat.  The answer?  Honey muffins – the quickest and simplest of all baked goods!

Part of the simplicity of muffin making is using American cup measurements for baking – it is a really quick and simple way of rustling up some delicious muffins in no time at all.  Just pour your ingredients into the cup measures, use a hand whisk to lightly beat together the wet ingredients, then add the dry ones, and give it all a quick stir (muffins shouldn’t be over-mixed – the batter is meant to look lumpy.)  Quarter of an hour in the oven is just enough time to clean up and make a cup of tea, ready to enjoy with your delicious hot muffins!

This recipe is based on a honey oat muffin recipe from the White House – you can’t get much more American than that! I added nuts and dried cranberries (any dried fruit would work just as well).  This makes it feel like breakfast (not that I need any excuse to eat cake first thing in the morning) and since there is no sugar or butter in the recipe, I think I can officially call these healthy, and definitely guaranteed to put a smile on the face of someone feeling under the weather!

Rhubarb, rum and walnut pie

This was a quick after-work invention for a pud. In the shop on the way home, I picked up some ready-made pastry for £1, and a few stalks of rhubarb.  Within 20 mins of getting home, this was in the oven, filling the house with delicious smells.  If you wanted to make the pastry from scratch – it is very easy to do – I’ve a recipe for it in the post about my Spiced Apple, Rum and Pecan Pie.

Danish apple cake

I'm not sleeping well at the moment and this morning woke up at 3am, completely unable to get back to sleep. My recipe for insomnia? Baking of course! So I found myself in the wee small hours peeling apples to make a version of a Danish apple cake. Traditionally this would be made with ground almonds, but I didn't have any and couldn't pop to the shop at that time of night (or morning) so used ground walnuts instead. Either works well I think. Again I used some gorgeous jewel-like crimson raisins (I recently used them in my spiced rum, raisin and dark chocolate cookies) but normal raisins or sultanas would work just as well. I'm not sure it's traditional to soak them first either, but I always like raisins so much better when they've been soaked in something so they plump up and become lovely and juicy. My only tip with this would be to make sure you really test it for done-ness before taking it out of the oven - it's easy to underbake it because of the thick layers of fruit on top of the cake batter. Delicious for breakfast any time of the day or night!

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!

Fanouropita – a Greek olive oil and orange cake for the patron saint of lost things

This week, we’re off on holiday to the Greek island of Symi, near Rhodes.  I’ve been reading Tessa Kiros’s lovely book, ‘Food from Many Greek Kitchens’ and I fell in love with the idea of ‘Fanouropita’, a cake traditionally made today, on August 27th, the name day of Saint Fanourios, the patron saint of lost things.

Women in Greek villages, particularly in Rhodes and the neighbouring islands, bring the cake to church, where the priest blesses it with a special ceremony. The congregation asks for the saint’s mother’s sins to be forgiven, and then make a wish to Saint Fanourios for help to find something – good health and happiness, lost items, lost relatives, peace, etc. It is also said to help unmarried women 'find' the name of their future husband. After the Mass, the sweet cakes are cut and everybody shares pieces with each other.

Fanouropita can also be made at other times of the year if someone wishes to ask Saint Fanourios to find something or someone for them, or once you have found something lost you can bake this cake to show Saint Fanourios appreciation for his help. To honour the tradition, you then also need to distribute some pieces of the cake to friends or neighbours.

The cake must be made with seven or nine ingredients, as the power of  7 or 9 is said to have prophetic or magical properties. The ingredients are pure and nutritional Greek ingredients like olive oil and orange juice, all of them suitable for the Orthodox fasting, so there are no dairy products like eggs or butter in the recipe. Although Tessa Kiros’ recipe doesn’t say so, other traditional recipes I’ve looked at say that, in keeping with the tradition of 'finding things', the cake batter should contain nuts and dried fruits, so that as you eat it, your teeth will 'find things' in it.

Here is my version of Fanouropita based on several different traditional recipes. Mine includes sultanas soaked in orange liqueur and a mixture of nuts – I used almonds and walnuts, as they are in keeping with Greek produce.

Banana, yoghurt, honey, oats and walnut muffins

It's my Saturday morning baking session and so I've used up a couple of ripe bananas to make some breakfast muffins.  These fill the house with an amazing smell while they're cooking, and taste delicious!

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!

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! 

Carrot cake

A yummy carrot cake to shake off the January blues...

Coffee and walnut mini-muffins

Orange and walnut cupcakes

Walnut mocha mini muffins

After discovering the joys of my new silicon mini-muffin pan when I made Christmassy mini-muffins, I couldn't wait to make some more!  This time I made double chocolate muffins with walnuts, chunks of dark chocolate and coffee.  I'm taking them to work tomorrow to help us all through an all-day meeting!

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!

Coffee and walnut cake (10 inch square)

I like my coffee cake to have a bit of cocoa in – more of a mocha cake – but also can’t resist walnuts if I can find them.  Using real espresso if you are passing a coffee shop would probably make this even better, but I find that instant coffee mixed with the smallest amount of boiling water you can get away with to create a smooth syrupy mixture works just as well.  There’s also Camp coffee essence (I found it in Asda but nowhere else) which works really well – it’s especially good for the icing and creates a fantastically rich, golden colour when mixed with mascarpone and icing sugar.