Blackberry Coconut Macaroon Tart

In London, blackberry season is in full swing. Every week, we save the big tubs we buy litres of Greek yoghurt in for blackberry picking at the weekend. With their handle and lid they make the perfect vessel to bring home plenty of berries. I was never a very good blackberry picker (it was a case of two for me, one for the tub) so now my parents go and I wait for them to return, tubs overflowing with juicy fruit. It feels a treat to be able to go berry picking in the middle of London – they grow wild along the Thames. Once we have had our fill of the berries fresh or blitzed into a compote and served with nectarines and sour cream– it’s time to get baking.I didn’t want anything too heavy – I love a classic pie but at the moment it is just too hot to deal with melting pastry – so I searched through my bookmarks until I found this. I’ve made a few variations of crumble bars in the past because they are such an easy (but still, most importantly, tasty) way to use up fruit or jam but I liked the twist of the macaroon topping on this recipe. And with spelt flour in the base, and a generous layer of fruit sandwiched in the middle – this is basically health food! Somehow even the small slices that I cut are filling enough and the different textures of the crunchy shortbread, juicy fruit and chewy coconut are delicious together. Now, just to think of uses for the two remaining tubs of berries waiting in the fridge… 

Blackberry Coconut Macaroon Tart, adapted from this recipe
Crust: 1 cup spelt flour
1/2 cup shredded coconut
1/2 cup golden caster sugar
pinch of salt
90g unsalted butter, melted

Filling: 1 cup shredded coconut
4 tablespoons light brown sugar
2 large egg whites
250g fresh blackberries, halved if large

1. Preheat oven to 180’C and lightly grease a 13x36 long tart tin, or 9inch round cake tin – a removable base is important.
2. Combine the flour, coconut, sugar and salt in a medium bowl. Stir in the melted butter until evenly distributed. Press the mixture firmly in the bottom of the pan to form a even layer. Bake for 15 minutes or until lightly golden and firm. Remove and set aside to cool for a few minutes while you prepare the filling.
3. Stir together the coconut, sugar and egg whites. Evenly distribute the blackberries across the tart base. Spoon over the macaroon mixture and spread out lightly – it’s nice to still be able to see some berries.
4. Bake for 15-20 minutes until the peaks of the macaroon filling are golden. Remove from the tart tin and cut into slices. Enjoy!

Blueberry & Lemon Bundt Cake

I feel like as it is mid-July I should be blogging about ice cream, barbecues and gluts of summer fruit. But it appears the English weather is yet to get the ‘summer sunshine and warmth’ memo so I made a cake instead. My first bundt cake!I’ve wanted to make a bundt cake for so long so when I finally got my hands on a tin last week I knew it wouldn’t be long until one graced my table. I’m now desperate to make another one at the same time as another batch of these and have a bundt cake party…but that’s a whole other day. I used this lemon drizzle cake recipe from olive magazine and just added a few handfuls of blueberries to the mixture and used some more for decoration. Berries tend to sink to the bottom in cakes, but the beauty of the bundt is that you turn it upside down to serve so it looks like all the fruit stayed perfectly at the top. The heavy pan means it did darken slightly alarmingly on the outside, but it actually cooked really well and the ground almonds and berries keep the cake moist for days… if it lasts that long! Enjoy!

 

Orange & Honey Torte with Mangoes & Passion fruit

I will only have butter on my toast. No jam, no marmalade, no Marmite or Nutella, no honey. I don’t know why, because I like most of these things in every other way (apart from Marmite), but I can’t stand them on toast. Really this just means that I have to get my honey fix in other, far more delicious, ways such as this summery torte… I don’t usually think of honey as a core flavour for a dessert. I’m sure I’ve added it to biscuits, cakes and flapjacks to add a bit of extra sweet and stickiness, but rarely used it as a main attraction. In this dessert blossom honey is combined with orange to make a really light version of a cheesecake – using just yoghurt and cream instead of any cream cheese. In my mind cheesecakes set with gelatine have a bad image of being overly firm and bouncy, but this is a really light set so it stays super creamy. Blanched almonds are added to the biscuit base (I used Nice biscuits because I thought the coconut would complement the other tropical flavours) which is such a simple idea but one I haven’t done before and was delicious – you know I’ll get almonds into anything somehow! My favourite part, however, was the accompanying fruit salad. Passion fruit instantly make me feel transported to a desert island and are without a doubt my favourite fruit. Combined with fresh mango and a sticky, ever so slightly spicy, ginger and lime syrup and I almost didn’t even need the torte. Almost. You can find the recipes here – enjoy!

Pear, Almond and Chocolate Loaf

I’ve been meaning to make this cake for so long. But each time I was ready to make it something got in the way. I didn’t have the ingredients, or something prettier or more useful came along instead. Finally, this weekend, with some pears ripening rapidly and a rainy Sunday crying out for cake this loaf finally graced my kitchen. And it was worth the wait!I wish now I hadn’t waited so long to get round to this cake because it is so good! It’s the perfect Sunday afternoon cake – not too big that you’re eating it all week, but not too small that it’s over as soon as it has begun. It has a smattering of melting chocolate to feel like a treat but the generous amount of pear and lack of icing mean it isn’t too rich and you don’t feel too guilty about having a second slice. Also, I made it as a simple afternoon loaf but if you made it in a round tin and served it with crème fraiche it would make a great dessert. It’s such an all rounder! I adapted this a lot from the original recipe, the main difference being that I swapped half the flour for ground almonds and added a dash of almond essence because my love for almonds means I’ll find a way to get them in anything I bake somehow. I also doubled the amount of pear, slicing and arranging one on top as well as just dicing it into the cake to make it extra juicy, and finally I used golden caster sugar instead of ordinary caster sugar for a more caramel rich taste. Overall I was very happy with the result – the cake is diminishing rapidly and I know it won’t be too long before it’s made again. Lesson learnt: it’s not always the fanciest, jazziest bakes that are the nicest. Enjoy!

Pear, Almond and Chocolate Loaf (adapted from Poires au Chocolat here)

Ingredients: 2 small ripe pears
125g unsalted butter
75g golden caster sugar
50g light brown sugar
2 eggs
1tsp almond extract
80g ground almonds
55g plain flour
1 & 1/2 tsp baking powder
pinch of salt
60g dark chocolate, chopped

1. Preheat the oven to 180’C. Line a 20cm loaf tin with a strip of greaseproof paper and butter the sides. 
2. Peel and core both pears. Finely dice one. Quarter and slice the second pear.
3. Cream the butter and sugars together until light and fluffy, then beat in the eggs with 1tbsp of the flour to stop it curdling.
4. Mix together the flour, ground almonds, baking powder and salt. Stir in the diced pear and chocolate to coat in the flour and prevent them sinking in the cake.
5. Add this to the wet mixture and fold until combined. Spoon into the loaf tin and level out. Arrange the sliced pear on top of the cake and bake for 40 minutes – check after 30mins and cover with foil if necessary to stop the top browning too much. Leave to cool on a wire rack.

Pear, Almond and Amaretto Tart

As I mentioned on Twitter the other day, starting cookery school has had an effect on my weekend baking. I often have the kitchen to myself during the weekend so I can potter around, Radio 1 blaring, baking, humming and making a bit of a mess. Last weekend was the first time I had properly cooked at home since starting Leiths and it was strange (in a good way) to be in the kitchen on my own without being assessed, in a dress and jewellery not chefs whites, with a dishwasher not a sink and scourer, and just my hunger levels instead of a service time and waiting teacher dictating my speed. It was definitely enjoyable being relaxed again whilst baking but at the same time I’ll admit I missed some of the camaraderie of my group all cooking and chatting together. Cookery school has, of course, had positive impacts on my baking – I’m more organised (‘mise en place’ is our mantra), probably faster and more efficient in my timing. Those daily time plans are not going to waste! My weekend baking also gave me the chance to practice some of my skills I’ve been learning: starting with pastry.My Mum sent me this Lorraine Pascale recipe a while ago and it sounded right up my street – you know how much I love almond flavoured anything. It also gave me the chance to use my rectangular tart tin which I have had for an embarrassingly long time without using and now that I’ve used it once I know it will become much more of a baking regular for me – the shape, particularly with this tart, make serving really easy and you don’t have to worry about slightly wonky or uneven slices like with a normal circular tart.But more important than shape is taste! Happily, this tart did not disappoint there either. It’s been ages since I’ve used amaretto and I loved the way its warmth enhanced this dish and emphasised the almond flavour. The frangipane stayed really soft with just a slight chew and crackle on the surface. My only slight issue was the pears – the recipe said to use either tinned or fresh and I chose fresh. However, mine were pretty unripe and didn’t really soften during baking so I think I would recommend tinned ones in future, for a reliably softer and slightly sweeter final result. Overall though this tart was still a winner – the only real problem being that the obvious serving option of a pear per slice makes it difficult to sneak a little bit more each time you walk past! You can find the recipe here – enjoy!

Whole Lemon Bars

Something happened to me last week whilst cooking that, in 5 years of blogging, has never happened to me before. We had lots of fresh gooseberries to use up and I love taking advantage of their short season in all the different recipes I gather during the rest of the year. I found a Nigel Slater gooseberry crumble cake recipe that sounded like it would fit the bill perfectly – a simple cut and come again cake that could also be easily transported. I made it, photographed it, took it to my Granny’s and sure enough it went down really well, like most Nigel Slater recipes do. When I was eating it, and then particularly when I was writing up the blog that evening, I started to feel that there was something really familiar about this cake. I checked my archive and sure enough, in July 2011 I had already made and posted it. Today’s post is my 205th, so in all honesty I’m surprised this hasn’t happened before! If you want to read about the cake, you can read my original post here, otherwise today I present all new Whole Lemon Bars!

I really enjoyed making this cake with a whole orange a few months ago, so when I saw these bars I was intrigued how the same technique would work with a much sourer fruit. I ended up making the lemon mixture in my mini food processor as my normal size one had broken, and luckily it just about all fit in, making the whole process really easy. Lemon bars in record time! The base was also super simple as you just press it into the tin, saving any rolling faff. The results were delicious – obviously the whole lemon in the filling meant they tasted (and looked) really vibrant and citrusy without being too sour. The base was also actually really tasty even just on it’s own, I think the vanilla balanced really well with the sharper topping. You can find the recipe here – enjoy!

Blackberry, Lime and Elderflower Cake

It appears lime recipes on this blog are like buses – you wait forever for one and then two come at once. I was really surprised when I was tagging my Lime & Rosewater cake that I’d never blogged anything limey in all 5 years of blogging – especially considering I have made 18 lemon and 16 orange recipes. It was actually a sheer coincidence that I ended up making two limey recipes so close to each other after years of nothing, but the tasty results of both cakes have persuaded me to make sure another 5 years of blogging doesn’t go by before I use it again.In this cake the limes are paired with a whole load of fresh blackberries. The bramble bushes near my house are ripening rapidly now – the fruit can’t be picked fast enough! I remember going blackberrying with my parents when I was younger – spending hours in amongst the huge brambles, perfecting a routine of one berry for the bucket, one for me, one for the bucket, one for me. Now my parents go together to pick the berries all growing by the river or the common – I think its great that even in London there is still fruit growing wildly. My Mum uses the fruit to make jars and jars of blackberry jam for gifts and to last us through the winter, and I take advantage of this wealth of free fresh fruit to bake with. This recipe makes a big tray of cake but it’s not rich (and it is addictive) so you’ll definitely find yourself repeatedly going back for more, and also the drizzle keeps it super moist. I really liked the combination of flavours in this cake – lime and blackberry isn’t something I would have put together but they really work – but I think I would have liked the elderflower to be a bit stronger. It’s only a delicate flavour that got slightly overpowered by lime, so I would up the cordial and reduce the lime juice in the drizzle next time. Also, I think I would stir the blackberries right into the cake mixture rather than place them on top so that they release a bit more juice and flavour into the cake. Overall though I was definitely pleased with this traybake – it was super quick to make and really versatile. I’m going to submit this cake to my first ever Calendar Cakes challenge, hosted by Dolly Bakes and Laura Loves Cakes.The August theme is ‘Summer Lovin’ using seasonal ingredients or summer memories and this cake combines both! Enjoy :)

Blackberry, Lime and Elderflower Drizzle Cake, adapted from Waitrose Kitchen Magazine
Ingredients: 225g self raising flour
75g ground almonds
250g softened butter
250g golden caster sugar
4 eggs
1tsp vanilla extract
1 lime, juiced and zested
2tbsp milk
200g blackberries
Drizzle: 100ml elderflower cordial
6tbsp granulated sugar
zest of 1 lime
juice of 1/2 lime
1. Preheat the oven to 180’C. Line a 22cm x 33cm cake tin.
2. Blitz all the cake ingredients apart from the blackberries in a food processor (or with an electric whisk) until smooth.
3. Tip the cake mixture into the tin and top with the blackberries, pressing in lightly (or stir the blackberries into the cake mixture gently before tipping into the tin). Bake for 30 minutes.
4. Use a cake skewer to poke holes all over the surface of the cake – this will enable the drizzle to properly soak into the cake. Mix together the drizzle ingredients and spoon over the hot cake. Cool in the tin before slicing. Enjoy!

White Chocolate & Raspberry Dipped Cookies

You might remember back in May I told you I had been interviewed all about this blog and baking for a podcast on Podium.me. Well, today is the start of a new 3-part podcast series with me over on Podium, called ‘Lucy’s Recipes’ where I bake and chat through a different recipe each week. I am super excited about it, I really enjoyed recording it and it was a really fun new challenge. These white chocolate and raspberry cookies are the first recipe in the series and were a big hit in my house!As well as talking through the recipe for these cookies on this weeks podcast, I also chat about my future plans now that I have finished school. I haven’t mentioned them on here before as I was waiting until everything was confirmed and I had solid plans to announce. But since exams results day was yesterday here in the UK I can finally be sure of exactly what I’m doing for the next four years. At the start of October, I am starting cookery school! I know it will be a massive challenge going from a fairly relaxed Sixth Form schedule at school to an intense year of learning everything there is to know about food but I am so excited! In case you are interested, I will be doing this Leiths Professional Diploma for a year. After that, I will be starting a History degree at Cambridge in October 2014. This blog will of course keep going and I’m hoping to be able to write posts about my time at Leiths and updates on cookery school as well as my normal content, if people would be interested? Now, back to the cookies!This is my fourth white chocolate cookie on my blog and they are always super popular but I wanted to do something slightly different with this version. I adapted a Dorie Greenspan sable recipe, meaning that the cookies are super sandy and buttery. This was the first time I have used freeze dried raspberries and I really liked them – they are super pretty and their burst of intense raspberry flavour helps cut through the richness of the thick layer of white chocolate! At first, I wasn’t sure if these cookies would be too rich but judging by the speed at which the cookie tin emptied I think we managed! You can find the recipe below, and head over to the podcast here to listen to me chat through the recipe and discuss cookery school a bit more. I hope you enjoy!
White Chocolate and Raspberry Dipped Cookies
Ingredients: 225g butter
1/2 cup caster sugar
1/2 cup icing sugar
1/2 tsp salt
2 egg yolks
2 cups plain flour 250g white chocolate, chopped into small chunks freeze dried raspberries
1. Cream the butter and sugars in a stand mixer or with a wooden spoon until really light and fluffy.
2. Add the yolks and salt and mix until combined.
3. Pour in the flour and 100g of the white chocolate and stir until the dough comes together and looks uniform.
4. Shape the dough into a log and wrap in clingfilm and chill for at least 3 hours.
5. Preheat the oven to 180’C. Unwrap your log of cookie dough and slice into 1cm thick cookies. Place on a lined baking tray, leaving 1inch between them.
6. Bake for 15minutes until golden, then let cool.
7. Melt the remaining white chocolate in the microwave (stirring every 30seconds) or in a bowl over a saucepan of simmering water.
8. Dip the cookies halfway into the white chocolate and place on parchment paper. Sprinkle some freeze dried raspberries over the white chocolate and leave to set. Enjoy!

Lime, Yoghurt and Rosewater Cake

This post is an important post for me. It marks my first blog post with my shiny new camera! Well, technically, my Borough Market post did, but hey – this is my first recipe post with it. I have been meaning to buy a proper SLR camera since around my first blogoversary. Four years ago. Despite thinking how much I needed one every. single. time. that I struggled to get a half decent photo with my old camera I just always was too scared to make the investment. What if I stopped blogging? What if I dropped it? What if I lost it? Until this week, on my 5th blogoverary, I finally took the plunge! My old camera that I used, a little hot pink point-and-shoot that is over 7 years old has finally been relegated in favour of a proper Nikon SLR and, as much as I have fond memories of my old camera, I am beyond excited!This cake was also important in another way: it saved the baking day. My Mum looked through my whole list of bookmarked bakes – that’s a selection of 340 cakes, pies, ice creams, muffins, cookies, doughnuts, tarts and more – and found not one that she liked. (Update: she would like to add there were many that she liked, just none that she fancied that day.) Eventually, we found this cake that suited us both. Not too rich for her, summery enough for me. I can always rely on a Rachel Allen recipe to unite us! Luckily it lived up to expectations – the recipe delivered a really moist, flavoursome cake with plenty of lime zing but a touch of sweetness from the rosewater. My notes on this cake would be to take care with the drizzle. When I made it, I added the minimum 1tbsp of rosewater which seemed like a lot and certainly smelt and tasted strong when I tested it, but once it’s competing with the lime in the cake I felt it got a bit lost. Rosewater is always a flavour to be careful with to prevent bakes tasting soapy, but in this cake I think you can definitely add more than you think. The generous dose of drizzle also means the cake keeps really well for a few days – if you can get it to last that long! You can find the recipe here – enjoy!

Mini Lemon Cheesecakes

There are only four of us in my immediate family. My sister is away and my Mum doesn’t eat that many sweet things – so this leaves just me and my Dad to bake for. Whilst we wouldn’t exactly say no to eating layer cakes and batches of muffins and trays of scones, it’s hardly good for us and more often than not the food is no longer its freshest and best before we’ve had a chance to eat it and this waste is super annoying. It also limits my recipe choices: when I had some leftover cream cheese I knew immediately I wanted to make cheesecake but all the recipes I read were way out of my feasibility – calling for 700g of cream cheese, 400g of biscuits, finished bakes serving 12 etc. It was time to go it on my own!I don’t create my own recipes from scratch very often so I used this as a starting point but halved it to make it even smaller. I prefer chilled cheesecakes to baked – they seem to be creamier yet lighter and so much easier. I’ve also written before about how citrus desserts for me need to be rammed with flavour so I wanted this to be really punchy with lemon. These also gave me the chance to finally use my food rings which I got for birthday nearly a year ago now and had never used, and I was really pleased with how they turned out looking very neat! I wasn’t exactly sure how to use these so I just set the cheesecakes straight onto the little plates and then removed the ring at the end which actually worked well as I didn’t have  to risk moving them! Overall I loved the finished cheesecakes – they were the perfect size for a satisfying, slightly decadent individual treat and tasted divine. Mini Lemon Cheesecakes
Makes 3-4 mini cheesecakes

Ingredients: 50g butter

120g digestives

200g cream cheese

1tbsp creme fraiche

50g icing sugar

1 lemon, zest and juice

Method: 1. Heat the butter in the microwave until fully melted. Place the digestives in small plastic bag or bowl and use the end of a rolling pin to bash the biscuits to crumbs. Tip the biscuits into the melted butter and stir until fully combined then press a few teaspoons of crumbs into the base of each food ring.

2. Combine the cream cheese, crème fraiche, icing sugar and lemon zest and juice all together in a bowl until smooth. Taste and tweak if you like – the exact quantities do not matter too much in this recipe, so feel free to add more sugar for more sweetness or some more lemon for a sharper cheesecake etc.

3. Spoon the cheesecake mixture between the food rings, pressing the mixture down and levelling the top to prevent air bubbles forming. Cover with clingfilm and refrigerate for 3-4 hours until firm.

4. To remove the cheesecake from the ring, I just warmed them slightly with my hands and ran a knife round the edge and then gently pulled the ring up and off. Zest a little more lemon over the top of the cheesecakes if you wish and enjoy! 

Chocolate Orange Cream Cheese Pound Cake

Baking, and food in general, can often be a comfort. That might seem strange at this time of year – fair enough to talk about comfort food in rainy November, but surely now that we’re in May (where has time gone?!) it’s time to be moving on to light, summery, bikini-ready food, right? Well, not necessarily. For starters, London summers take a long while to get going so the weather is only sporadically beginning to warm up here.  Secondly, just because it is summer doesn’t mean life stresses (I’m looking at you, exams!) don’t occur. And thirdly, when is cake ever a bad thing? That was my thinking recently when I had a stash of oranges that needed using up and I was looking for a new way to use them. With a title as good as this – Chocolate (tick) Cream Cheese (tick) Orange (tick) Cake (big tick) – this cake that I’ve had bookmarked forever finally got its day! Pound cake is an American classic but I’d never made it before and I think this was also my first time using cream cheese in a cake. I liked that the recipe made a properly generously sized cake – one that keeps well for a few days and is very much a cut-and-come-again cake. Despite sounding quite rich and indulgent, it really didn’t taste that way (particularly as I used slightly less chocolate than suggested) so it was perfect as a 4pm pick me up. I also liked the firm texture of a pound cake and am looking forward to trying out more – I think they would be the perfect sturdy cake to bake before a weekend away and take away with you. As I mentioned, it was my first time baking with cream cheese and I had mixed feelings about the results in that respect. Whilst you could taste it in the cake batter, the flavour really cooked out in the oven and I guess the cream cheese is really there to provide texture. I was a bit disappointed by this as I love the flavour, but I guess if you wanted you could add indulgence to this cake with a cream cheese icing! You can find the original Joy the Baker recipe here – enjoy!

Blueberry Friands

These friands proved to me the uniting power that cake can have. One of the main perks of having baking as a hobby is getting to share delicious bakes with friends and family and seeing the look on their faces when they try something new, successful and irresistibly tasty! I took these baby blueberry friands to a serious occasion with lots of small talk but these soon got people talking as we discussed their tiny size, the recipe, method and author and I think everyone enjoyed passing these round whilst sneaking a couple at a time off the platter!The recipe made a lot as you can maybe tell from the pictures, but I also made mine pretty tiny in a mini muffin tin – only a couple of centimetres high – so that they were the perfect canape, so clearly if you made them larger or in traditional oval friand moulds the recipe would make a more normal amount. There is sometimes a stage in baking that can be quite therapeutic – for some bakers this might be piping, kneading dough, rolling pastry or stamping out cookies. Today for me it was the process of filling up the mini muffin tins over and over with a little teaspoon of mixture and a couple of blueberries. The cakes take hardly any time to bake because they are so small and are delicious warm straight out the oven but also last nicely for a good few days. They are light, moist (terrible word but true), with bright bursts of flavour from the blueberries and lemon zest. You can find the recipe below – enjoy! Mini Blueberry Friands, adapted from Jill Dupleix’s Totally Simple Food
Makes about 40 mini muffin size, or around 10 normal sized friands or muffins

Ingredients: 180g butter, melted and cooled 
200g icing sugar
60g plain flour, sifted
120g ground almonds
5 large free-range egg whites
zest of 1 lemon
200g blueberries, fresh or frozen
icing sugar for dusting

1. Heat the oven to 200°C / Gas 6. Grease 2 mini muffin tins, or 10 friand moulds, or one muffin tin.
2. Sift the icing sugar and flour into a bowl and mix in the ground almonds. Lightly beat the egg whites with a fork and fold them into the dry ingredients. Add the cooled, melted butter and lemon zest, and mix until all combined.
3. Place a teaspoon of mixture in each mini muffin tin, add two or three bluberries and cover with another teaspoon of mixture.
4. Bake for 8-10minutes until golden brown and springing back to the touch, checking on the edges as these darken quicker than the top of the friands. Three-quarters fill each mould with the mixture and bake on the middle shelf of the oven for 10 minutes.
4. Leave the tins for 5 minutes, then gently unmould onto a wire tray and leave to cool. Dust the friands with icing sugar and store in an airtight container for up to 3 days.

Rhubarb and Vodka Jellies

I’ve been trying to expand my baking this year. After a while, the constant rotation of cakes and cookies can leave me stuck for inspiration and I’ve enjoyed trying new things this year, such as the tablet and pannacotta. Jelly is really reverting back to proper childhood or nursery food – I have memories of traffic light jellies with different fruit suspended in the layers – but I think the addition of vodka in today’s jelly brings it up to adult level! However, I still lack the patience required waiting for jelly to set…This jelly took a long time to set, and for a while I was afraid that I’d be serving vodka cocktails with dinner. However, eventually they did and my friends were super excited when I told them  what was coming up! Forced rhubarb gives this jelly such a pretty pink colour and the addition of the cointreau adds another layer of flavour, reflecting the classic combination of orange and rhubarb.
The vodka only adds a slight kick (2tbsp are in the 3 jellies I made) and if you didn’t want it you could easily substitute it for something else, even just water. I hadn’t poached rhubarb before this – always roasted – and I thought it might lose some of its flavour but the sugar syrup that forms the base of the jelly really absorbs the rhubarb flavour and colour well. I really enjoyed the final result, it had a good smooth texture, refreshing taste and I liked the look of the poached rhubarb suspended in the jelly. You can find the recipe here – I halved it and still managed to make 3 decent sized jellies. Enjoy!

White Chocolate Pannacotta with Roasted Rhubarb

I love rhubarb, and I’ve noticed that I often seem to pair it with similar flavours. The early season forced rhubarb has such a shocking pink colour and distinctive tart taste that I serve it with creamy, white and almost blander flavours to let the rhubarb shine. One of my favourite dishes I’ve ever blogged was this Rhubarb Tart from Mother’s Day last year and with its rich cream cheese filling it is a prime example of my way with rhubarb. Similarly with the rhubarb custard tart where the baked vanilla filling contrasted nicely with the bold rhubarb. So when I had a lot of rhubarb that needed using up I made one unusual recipe I have to blog in the coming weeks, but used the rest in roasted rhubarb with white chocolate panna cotta. Well, who am I to break with such good flavour combinations?This time I opted to make my creamy background flavour a little bit more interesting and created a white chocolate pannacotta instead of just vanilla. I liked the result – it definitely felt rich and indulgent and had a really nice smooth texture despite the quite large amount gelatine. It also lasted for a week in the fridge so it was nice to have it always ready as a quick treat! White chocolate is a tricky flavour to make truly shine and I think in this case it would be more an issue of noticing if it wasn’t there rather than directly being able to pinpoint that the sweetness coming from chocolate. On their own the pannacottas were possibly a little bit too decadent, and I think they need an accompaniment to keep them interesting – another roasted fruit such as plums or fresh raspberries I’m sure would work well too. However I loved the rhubarb and found it the perfect thing to go alongside the pannacotta and delicious to eat just on its own as well. Enjoy!

White Chocolate Pannacotta with Roasted Rhubarb
Serves 5

Pannacotta: 500ml/18fl oz double cream
150ml/5½fl oz milk
100g/3½oz white chocolate, broken into pieces
25g/1oz sugar
4 Dr. Oetker gelatine sheets, soaked for 5-10 minutes in warm water, then squeezed dry

Roasted Rhubarb: 250g rhubarb, cut into even pieces
1 orange, zest and juice
5tbsp golden caster sugar

1. Heat the cream and milk in a saucepan over a medium heat until simmering.

2. Reduce the heat to low and stir in the white chocolate and sugar until the ingredients have melted and the mixture is well combined.

3. Remove the pan from the heat and add the gelatine leaves. Stir until the gelatine leaves have melted then set the mixture aside until it has completely cooled.

4. Pour the pannacotta mixture into ramekins, then chill in the fridge for five hours, or until set firm.

5. Meanwhile, tip the rhubarb into a tin so that they are in a single but snug layer (I used a 22cm square tin). Add the zest and juice of the orange and the sugar. Stir together to coat the rhubarb, then cover with foil and roast at 180’C for 15mins until tender but still holding its shape.

6. To serve, dip the ramekin bases and sides in warm water to loosen the pannacotta from the moulds. Turn out one pannacotta into the centre of each of plate and serve the rhubarb alongside.

Mini Lemon Drizzle Cakes

I think it’s amazing the amount of random kitchen equipment you can get nowadays, Lakeland catalogues in particular are brilliant to introducing you to all sorts of things you never realised you needed – it has 15 different tin openers, a 3-in-1 avocado tool, banana holders and much, much more. It can get pretty dangerous for the bank balance! I’m pretty restrained though, my least used pieces of kitchen equipment are probably the deep fat fryer I’m slightly scared of (for both calorie and fire issues!) or the slightly fiddly doughnut maker, which I should really use more. Another underused piece is a tin from Williams-Sonoma that makes very pretty mini flower-shaped cakes, which I have avoided due to its intricacy and obvious issue of getting the delicate cakes out whole!  When Dr. Oetker offered to send me something to try, I was intrigued to try the Cake Spray. I’d seen it on TV cookery programmes, mainly Lorraine Pascale or American shows, but never tried using it myself. I wasn’t really sure what the benefits of it would be over simple butter or baking paper, but I was intrigued and wanted to to give it a go. I thought the intricacy of all the shapes would be the perfect way to put the spray to the test, as well as get some delicious cakes!
I’m pleased to say, as you can probably tell from the photos, the spray worked perfectly! The cakes slipped out super easily and it was easy to use as well, less faff then I think butter would be for a tin like this with lots of nooks and crannies. I  thought the cakes had quite crispy edges on them, but as I rarely use this tin this could be caused by the weighty and dark metal. I was pleased (and relieved!) with the results and I will continue to use the spray for more fiddly bakes, when I don’t want to use liners for appearance reasons or when I’m out of butter or paper. Now – onto the cake!
I wanted to do a lemon drizzle cake as I thought the bright flavour would suit the cute flower shapes nicely. I found it surprisingly difficult to find a recipe that suited what I wanted with plenty of lemon flavour and a simple lemon syrup instead of crunchy coating or glace icing topping, so I adapted a couple of different sources to make my own! The cakes had a strong lemon zing, the syrup kept them moist and their diminutive size made it very easy to eat several in one go…. Enjoy!

Mini Lemon Drizzle Cakes, adapted from The Big Book of 365 Cakes and Cookies by Hannah Miles

Makes around 40mini cakes (sounds like loads but remember they’re tiny!) or one 20cm/8in large cake

225g softened butter
225g caster sugar
4 large eggs, beaten
225g self raising flour
2tbsps milk
3 lemons, juiced and zested
2tbsps icing sugar

1. Preheat the oven to 180’C/350’F. Spray your mini muffin tins or a 20cm springform cake tin.
2. Beat the butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Add the eggs gradually, beating well after each addition. Add the flour, lemon zest and juice of 1 lemon and fold into the mixture.
3. Fill the mini tins 3/4 fill and bake for 10 minutes, until golden and springing back. If doing one large cake, bake for 25-30 minutes. Turn the cakes out onto a wire rack.
4. Heat the icing sugar and remaining lemon juice in a small saucepan until the sugar has dissolved, then boil for 1 minute to create a syrup. Spoon over the cakes whilst still hot, repeating until all the syrup is used up.

Raspberry, Oat and Almond Bake

I’d describe this time of year as ‘muddled’. It’s definitely still winter, but there’s the occasional sign that Spring will soon come. Mock exams are here, whilst the real things are still a few months off yet feel just round the corner. I’ve applied to uni, but have to wait till August for the grades. I’ll finish school forever in June, but it feels scarily close. It's a weird limbo time of year and I think this bake suits that perfectly. It’s got the oats for a flapjack, texture of a crumble and jammy fruit yet somehow manages to be none of these things!I should have predicted this from its vague ‘bake’ title and lack of photo, but the ingredients list sounded to good to miss out on: marzipan, lots of berries, cinnamon, flaked almonds, a dash of honey – all good flavours combined into one tin. The results were hard to explain. Clearly, these flavours combined into something delicious that was impossible to stop eating and vanished in one weekend.The sweet marzipan cutting through the sharp berries, the almonds adding crunch, the oats a bit of sustenance. The problem was that it was impossible to know how to serve it as it was so crumbly! It was hard to cut proper slices of, yet still a bit more solid than granola. It was like a fruit crumble that was super heavy on the topping! I think it would make a delicious luxury brunch item, served unapologetically messily in bowls, perhaps with yoghurt? Don’t let its confusing nature put you off, the results are absolutely gorgeous and make up for whatever it lacks in appearance! You can find the recipe here – enjoy!

Orange Highlanders

Recently I’ve got into a baking routine of doing all my baking at the weekend – one bigger, main recipe such as a showy cake or elegant tart, and then one recipe for happy snacking during the week. Muffins, flapjacks, tablet – something to fill the 4pm sugar dip. More often than not, this recipe is some sort of biscuit.A simple recipe I can make when I’m not completely awake on a Saturday morning and that will be out the oven by the time my sister wakes up. Bright citrus flavours are perfect for February and for a trusty cookie recipe I turn to my Granny’s old WI Book of Biscuits, which led me to these Orange Highlanders. I was confused about the name but essentially these biscuits are an orange version of these so the link must be due to shortbreads origins in the Scottish Highlands. I loved the crunchy demerara coating and the crumbly, buttery shortbread centre – they definitely didn’t last the whole week!Orange Highlanders, adapted from WI Book of Biscuits
Makes about 20 small shortbreads
100g butter
50g icing sugar
75g plain flour
75g self raising flour
zest of 2 oranges
25g demerara sugar
1. Preheat the oven to 180’C/350’F. Cream the butter, orange zest and icing sugar until light and fluffy. Sift the flours together and fold in to make a dough.
2. Shape the mixture into a sausage. Sprinkle the demerara sugar over a piece of cling-film and roll the dough in the sugar, pressing it to make sure it sticks. Wrap in the cling-film and chill for 1hour.
3. Cut the dough into slices (5mm-1cm thick), place on baking sheets and bake for 8-10 minutes. Remove to a wire rack and leave to cool. Enjoy!

Orange Lightning Cake

There seems to be a permanent trend and desire for super fast cooking. Jamie Oliver went from his 30 minute meals to just 15 minutes and magazines sell editions by emphasizing the fast and simple nature of recipes that are perfect for after work. Often, however, these recipes are hardly recipes at all, using pre cooked, chopped and garnished ingredients to get something tasty on the table fast. This cake is the best of both worlds: fits the speedy bill – hence it’s name – yet you end up with something delicious and all natural.I’ve seen lots of recipes for all-in-one whole orange cakes that involve boiling oranges for hours until soft and then whizzing to a smooth cake mixture. Today’s unusual cake goes one step further – simply quartering a whole, raw, unpeeled orange, taking out any pips and whizzing until smooth in a food processor followed by the rest of the ingredients. It feels quite strange, and a little bit wrong, but it works out so well! Whizzing up the fresh orange means the mixture and cooking cake smell amazing and the final cake has a great sunshiney orange colour.The little chunks of orange peel add a nice texture to the cake – just like candied peel but without all the added sugar! All in all I was a real fan of this cake – it’s one of those that you just keep cutting tiny slivers of until you realise rather a large proportion of the cake has now gone… You can find the recipe here (I left out the walnuts, keeping the delightfully soft and squidgy texture of the cake) – enjoy!

Spiced Apple Buns

These buns are the recipe I mentioned I was forced to put on hold due to the combination of a lack of ingredients + heavy snow = me not going outside. Normally I’d have just forgotten about the recipe and moved on to one of the many other tempting bakes in my cookbooks or recipe files, but something made me keep thinking about these. Then I was looking back through my archives and noticed that in January 2011 I posted these Stollen Swirls and in January 2010 I made Glazed Fruit Rolls – I clearly have a thing for yeasted rolls in January! It must be a combination of wanting to start the new year by challenging myself in baking including doing more work with yeast, and the more simple desire of something warm, doughy and carby to eat in the cold! Either way it was a clear sign and as soon as the pesky snow melted I was out making sure my cupboards were prepared for these.The recipe was an interesting twist from standard Cinnamon Rolls and I thought the combination of tart apple and super sweet marzipan alongside the rich bread dough would go down a treat. I was not proved wrong! When I was layering up the fillings onto my rolled out dough there seemed to be a heck of a lot of apple, marzipan and sultanas if I was planning to roll these up neatly. I decided just to add one large apple instead of two and whilst the buns were definitely quite full I think they would have benefited from the extra apple for more tartness as the apple chunks reduced in the oven quite drastically. Note to self: stick to the recipe! Having said that, I added a simple glace icing which I think added a good extra element.These are nicest warm out the oven, but even after a couple of days a few seconds in the microwave will easily restore them to this goodness. You can find the recipe here – enjoy!

Pear and Almond Cake

It’s always difficult to start again in the New Year. Not just resuming work, the gym and everything else that's been totally ignored whilst we happily vegetate on sofas for 2 festive weeks - but cooking too (especially when your camera cable goes walkabout). We've grown accustomed to nibbling on cold leftovers and Quality Street or grazing on bits and pieces from the fridge. As a result the idea of whipping up a huge cake or batch of yet more cookies seems bizarre. The food magazines are full of healthy living, salads and superfoods… yet its snowing outside and you’re craving something carby. Especially when in my house there's still an untouched Pannetone, 2 Christmas puddings and a hunk of Christmas cake left to eat. The relaxed seasonal eating style has been reflected in my cooking recently - some irresistible yet super simple cheddar and chorizo straws, dulce de leche shortbread sandwiches for relatives and these ridiculously moreish cheese crackers. All good food that makes for excellent snacking, but a tad out of place on the blog in January.

I think this cake is a happy medium. It’s simple, isn’t too rich and contains fruit to be mildly healthy if you have strict New Year’s resolutions still going strong and is really comforting in snowy weather. This cake slightly unnerved me whilst in the oven as it properly filled the tin right up to the top, but as the pears sunk into the mixture it just about stayed constrained. The recipe can be found here, it comes from the trusty Good Housekeeping magazines – after sorting through 3 years of GH magazines the recipes are now all neatly in one big tempting lever arch file so expect more recipes from there soon! Including my first attempt at candy making with a batch of tablet – pretty much pure sugar and therefore unsurprisingly delicious and addictive…Coming soon!