in a new bundt tin!  It's been a long time since I posted. I haven't been baking much, and what I did bake was nothing new - I seemed to need ease and reliability rather than experimentation. Perhaps that's a sign of the times; the unfamiliar is too worrying! I hadn't even done any festive baking in the run-up to Christmas; my daughter has embraced making mince pies as her contribution to Christmas feasting and it's sometimes easier to buy small amounts of treat-type food when you're on your own, and watching your weight - a packet of stollen bites or mince pies can be spread out ..read more

Faced with over-ripe bananas, yet again, but wanting to try something different, I came across this recipe from Matt Tebbutt and BBC's Saturday Kitchen. It adds coffee and (optional) chopped chocolate to banana bread  - of course I added the chocolate! This was a straightforward recipe to follow, and didn't give me any problems. This made a pleasant enough loaf cake, but didn't convince me that any of the added flavours - chocolate, coffee and nutmeg - actually improved the basic premise of banana bread, which is that you want it to taste mostly of bananas.  I've just noticed that ..read more

For some long forgotten reason, I have buckwheat flakes in my store of baking ingredients and they need using soon. They look like rolled oats, so I wondered if they would make good flapjacks. I was relying on them having the same sort of absorbency as rolled oats, but in case they hadn't, I decided to use them 50:50 with oats for the first trial, and take a tip from Lynn Hill at Traditional Home Baking, and add 50g of plain flour to my usual recipe. This makes the flapjacks softer and less sticky, so if absorbency was a problem, extra flour would help. In case the flapjacks didn't work well ..read more

I returned to another old favourite for my son's 40th birthday cake. Both he and I have birthdays in the first half of July, so in truth, it was a shared cake, and he expressed no preference as to what I baked. The recipe originally came from Alice Medrich,  but over the years I've made a few tweaks. Most importantly I've reduced the size of the cake to fit the only bundt tin I have and converted the American cup measurements to metric weights and volumes. I've also replaced the pepper in the recipe with cayenne pepper, and added the finely grated zest of an orange. The cake is mad ..read more

Another outing for Mary Berry's Banana Loaf recipe, which is so quick and simple to make. This time I added 100g chopped dried dates and the zest and juice of a lemon. Because of the lemon juice I left the milk out of the recipe. I only used lemon as a flavouring because I had some lemons to use up, but, in all honesty I think orange would have been a better addition to use. The lemon gave an odd tang to the flavour - not enough to spoil the cake, but just enough to know something wasn't quite right. Apart from that, the cake was as good as usual - moist, with a well-textured crumb - and it's ..read more

I'm not sure what to think about Helen Goh's Anzac cake (from the Australian Good Food site), which is inspired by the ingredients of the traditional ANZAC biscuit. It's a lovely close-textured, moist cake, but without the topping, the flavour really wasn't anything special. The coconut milk used in the cake batter wasn't enough on it's own to give a really strong coconut flavour. The problem was, the topping didn't work well for me! In fact, most of it ended up on the floor of the oven as it ran off the cake. The flavour was fine - a sort of caramelised coconut macaroon - but as well as ..read more

My second Easter bake, for my son, who would rather eat chocolate than dried fruit, was a variation on this recipe from The Baking Explorer. At the end stage of making the batter, I stirred in 150g of chopped plain (70%) chocolate. In order to share the cake with him, I decided to bake it in two 1lb loaf tins, and guesstimated that this would reduce the cooking time by 15 minutes, which turned out to be correct! As I would be wrapping the cake to take it to him, adding a buttercream topping didn't seem a good idea, so I just dribbled some more melted chocolate over the cooled cakes. As ..read more

I can't say that I haven't eaten anything sweet for the last 10 weeks, but less activity during winter lockdown, coupled with a bit of over-eating around the New Year has meant I've been struggling with my weight again. It's easier not to bake and buy the occasional treat than to have home-made cakes and other goodies tempting me all the time. However, Easter is a time of celebration, and even though the cold weather meant I wouldn't be meeting my children, I still felt we all deserved a treat. I delivered cake and Easter Eggs to them both, and put most of what I kept for myself into the freez ..read more

Just before Christmas, I bought a jar of Christmas Cranberry Curd; just after Christmas I bought another - 'reduced to clear' so that the supermarket could get rid of unsold Christmas stock. I didn't have a clear idea of what to do with them at the time, but the idea of using some in a Bakewell tart type of thing slowly took shape. So, in my first baking session since Christmas, that's what I made. I didn't have enough ground almonds, but I did have ground hazelnuts which needed using. I thought the hazelnut flavour might be better with cranberry, as it's much stronger than the flavour of alm ..read more

For some reason, I have made this Panforte, for Christmas, at three year intervals - 2014, 2017 and again this year. Perhaps it's going to be a tradition! Panforte is a particularly suitable Christmas treat this year, when, if we are meeting friends and family at all, it's on a very restricted schedule with regards to both numbers and time. It keeps for weeks after making, so however few of you there are to eat it, you'll get through it without any waste.  This year, this panforte will almost be all mine! Apart from a brief visit from both my children on Christmas Day for an exchange o ..read more