Citrus almond cinnamon cake with Chantilly cream, berries and pistachios

This weekend we cooked a huge brunch for a lovely gathering of 15 of our friends and five of their kids, including three very beautiful babies!  I made this whopping great cake which Matilda, pictured here, could barely wait to dive into. The cake itself was flavoured with orange and lemon zest, cinnamon, vanilla and ground almonds, then topped with apricot jam, Chantilly cream, raspberries, blackberries and pistachios.  You can see it was massive and for a smaller number of people you could halve the ingredients and make a one layered cake (and still it would be deep enough to slice it in half to sandwich with jam and cream).

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!

Blackberry and almond buttermilk scones

A lovely sunny Sunday morning baking session today, listening to good music and making some simple free-form scones.  The buttermilk in these makes the batter quite moist (hence deciding to dollop the mixture onto the baking trays rather than roll out and cut with a pastry cutter) and the fresh blackberries give them a fantastic juicy sweetness that means you don’t need to serve them with jam (unless you’re a sugar fiend like me and just can’t resist) – just stick to lashings of clotted cream!  (The healthy eating is clearly going great guns…)

Raspberry, elderflower and amaretti crumble (wheat-free)

My sister Lizzie came over for dinner this evening after work and I made this as a quick wheat-free pudding. I was pleased that it was also a dairy-free and sugar-free dessert as we’re all trying to be healthy, but then quickly realised that there was plenty of sugar in the amaretti biscuits and elderflower cordial (and in fact the porridge oats were golden syrup-flavoured).  On that realisation, I decided to hang it all and served it with gorgeous salted caramel ice cream – there’s always tomorrow to try being healthy…

Passionfruit, lime and pistachio layer cake

Our friend Jon’s flatmate Shivaji is moving home to India this week and cooked us a fantastic Indian meal to say goodbye.  I contributed this cake to the feast – made with pistachios and passionfruit pulp in the cake batter, then iced with a mascarpone mixed with passionfruit curd, an amazing find from a recent farmer’s market.  You can buy the curd online or make your own from scratch – Nigella Lawson has a nice recipe on her website.  

Raspberry chocolate brownies

Erin’s chocolate brownie recipe I made recently was so good it’s all I think I ever want to bake again!  We had a girls night at our house this weekend so it was a great excuse to make them a second time – this time instead of white chocolate chips, I added a layer of frozen raspberries in the middle, and a chocolate fudge icing. Totally divine!

Erin’s salted dark choc brownies with white choc chips

This is a very special recipe.  Our friend Roz emigrated to Australia last year (you might remember I made her some pretty delicious peach melba cupcakes before she went) and when she arrived to start a new life and lots of adventures on the other side of the world, she became fantastic friends with a young woman called Erin. Just before Roz came home to see her family and friends this Christmas, Erin tragically passed away.  Roz kindly shared Erin's famous brownie recipe with me, and it was a privilege to make them yesterday, the day after Erin's birthday.  These are incredible brownies - wildy decadent, fabulously chocolatey, can't-fail-to-make-you-grin, heart-warmingly good! As I baked, and as we ate them, we were thinking of Roz and all Erin's friends and family. I hope that you enjoy them as much.  

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!

Banana, blueberry and cranberry muffins

A lovely recipe to use up blackening bananas, these combine the background taste of banana bread with classic blueberry muffins, and some fresh cranberries for little explosions of tartness.  

Pear and blackberry sponge flan with elderflower, gin and tonic jelly

For Christmas, my mum gave me a sponge flan tin. This was my first go at testing it, and the results were lovely – really light, airy cake which I topped with fresh pear and blackberries and a jelly made with elderflower cordial, gin and tonic water.  You could use any fruit or jelly combination you like though.