Blueberry Welsh cake fritters

It's been snowing for the last couple of days and today I decided we needed some hot cakes to warm us up after a nice walk in the snow.  I spotted a great big punnet of blueberries in the grocer's when I popped out to buy vegetables to make soup later, and thought I'd see how they worked in a Welsh Cake batter.  These are far more loaded with fruit than Welsh cakes are, which is why I've called them blueberry fritters - but they were absolutely delicious hot out of the pan, and good later once they'd cooled as we sat in front of the fire watching a movie.  Perfect fuel for a snow day!

Giant chocolate button cookies

Our friends Emma and Geraint and their two little ones have just moved back to our home town.  It's so nice to have them round the corner!  We popped in today to welcome them to their new home and I made them a batch of these cookies as a house-warming present. The recipe is based on a Millie's Cookies recipe on the BBC Good Food website, and I used some brilliant giant chocolate buttons, but it would be just as good with ordinary chocolate chips or chunks of your favourite bar.

Spiced berry maple betty

Tonight I cooked dinner for our friends Cath and Gregg – a lovely recipe for thyme-roasted belly of pork from Diana Henry’s amazing book, Food from Plenty.  I served it with yellow, orange and purple heritage carrots, purple sprouting broccoli, balsamic roasted red onions, and celeriac, mustard and parsley mash. Not bad, even if I say so myself!  Anyway, in browsing through Diana Henry’s book, my attention was grabbed by her recipe for blackberry, apple and maple brown betty.  She describes it as “a great, down-home American dessert that’s even easier to make than crumble.”  Anything described as “down-home” sounds good to me!

This is my adaptation of that recipe, but I used mixed frozen berries instead of apple and fresh blackberries.  Apart from that, and the addition of a little cinnamon, I’d followed her recipe exactly when I made this, which included so much sugar (mixed with the cake crumbs, and also mixed with the fruit before maple syrup is poured over them) that it was unbelievably sweet.  So here I’ve written the recipe without any extra sugar, as I’m sure it’s completely unnecessary.  Apart from that, it’s amazing – it feels a bit wrong to use cake instead of a crumble mixture, but wow it’s delicious – it’s so moist and soaks up lots of the fruit, so it’s a bit like a hot SummerPudding (which is my all-time favourite dessert)!

Pistachio, lemon and cranberry biscuits

I had some pastry offcuts left over when I made my lemon, pistachio and passion fruit tart for New Year’s Eve.  It seemed too much of a waste to throw such delicious pastry away, so instead I used a mini star-shaped cookie cutter to make lots of tiny biscuits, which I pressed dried cranberries into and sprinkled with sugar.  They were so delicious, I think they’d be lovely to make again on their own, so here is the recipe.

Lemon, pistachio and passion fruit tart

This year, Lu and I decided to stay in for New Year’s Eve.  I’m sure it’s a sign we’re getting old, but it was absolutely lovely to be at home, just the two of us, after all the hectic socialising over Christmas!  So we cooked a lovely meal for each other: Lu made Thai crab cakes to start, and for a main course we had sea bass with goose fat-roasted potatoes and I made an Asian mango salad to go with it.  This was the dessert – loosely based on a classic Tarte au Citron, I added toasted, ground pistachios to the filling and made a lemon and pistachio sweet pastry.  The whole thing was topped with lemon-infused whipped cream, passion fruit and ground caramelised pistachios.  This was a real show stopper of a dessert – and a very decadent breakfast on New Year’s Day before a walk in the sunshine to blow away the cobwebs! 

Mulled wine poached pear flourless upside down cake

I always want to make something special for a Christmas dessert, but it needs to be light enough for people to want to eat after they’ve filled themselves up on Christmas dinner.  This year, I think I came up with my best one yet – a ground almond cake which is flourless for my gluten-intolerant sister, made into an upside down cake when poured over a base of pears poached in mulled wine.  The mulled wine flavours give it a lovely Christmassy taste, and the cake is so light and moist it was perfect after a big dinner.  It went beautifully with my Christmas Pudding ice cream.  As you can see from the picture, half of it disappeared so quickly that I didn't even have a chance to photograph it before it got demolished - always a sign of a winning cake!

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.

Christmas Pudding Ice Cream

I’ve had this recipe for years now and make it every Christmas.  I’ve no idea where it came from originally as I've just got a scribbled recipe on a piece of paper, but over the years I’ve adapted it, replacing the double cream in the original recipe for brandy flavoured cream of the sort that supermarkets start selling at Christmas time.  It’s so much nicer than plain old Christmas cake, and adds a lovely festive taste to pretty much any cake or dessert that you fancy making at this time of year.

Torta Gianduia - chocolate and hazelnut torte

Torta Gianduia is a speciality of the Piedmont region of Italy.  It’s a flourless cake, just made with ground hazelnuts, dark chocolate, butter, sugar and eggs – so was a great choice for a meal we cooked for my dad and step mum to celebrate their birthdays (they were born on the same day, two years apart) with my sister who is gluten-intolerant.  It’s rich but incredibly light and moist – definitely more of a torte than a cake.  I tarted it up with some homemade truffles on top, just made from Nutella and a splash of amaretto, rolled in cocoa powder.

  

Cranberry apple crumble

I went to stay with my mum for a few days this week, and we had a lovely time making Christmas cards on her new printing press. When I arrived I popped into her local grocer to buy some flowers, and couldn't resist a punnet of shiny, glowing red cranberries. I turned them into a crumble with apples, cinnamon and an oat and almond topping. This turned out to be wonderful for breakfast!