I have not baked for ages it seems, been rather busy of late. So here is rather a feeble post from me but a delicious one I think. I love dates and pecans in cakes so what better than to combine them, especially in a banana loaf recipe. This one is based on the chocolate, walnut and banana loaf in my WI book, I replaced the chocolate and walnuts with dates and pecans. It’s a lovey moist cake, especially with the dates, – it didn’t last long.

115g butter
175g caster sugar
2 large bananas, mashed
2 eggs
80g plain flour
80g wholemeal flour
1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
1 tsp ground cinnamon
% tablespoons boiling water
115g walnut/ pecan pieces, chopped
175g milk choc chips or equivalent chopped dates. I think I used slightly less than 175g so it wasn’t too dense.

Beat the butter and sugar together until light and creamy, beat in the bananas and the then the eggs (don’t worry if it looks a bit curdled). Fold in the flours, bicarb and cinnamon. Stir in the boiling water, this will produce a soft mixture.
Gently fold in the nuts and dates or whatever you’re using.
Spoon into a greased and lined 2lb loaf tin and smooth the top.
Bake at 160 degrees/ 180 for a fan oven for about 1-1 1/2 hours until dark and golden and well risen.
Leave in the tin for 10 minutes before turning out on to rack to cool.

Make this vast – 30cm – chocolate cake for Jan’s birthday party, which I helped do the catering for along with Dom and Fran.

Traditionally, large-scale cakes for events tend to be fruit cakes, as they’re solid and hold their structure well. However, fruit cakes are dull, nay yucky. Thankfully, I’ve discovered this recipe, which is a variation on an original from The Moosewood Cookbook and works really well as an alternative. The original recipe is for a “Cardamon coffee cake”; I’ve already posted my metric conversion of that recipe, over here when I used it for a wedding cake that.

For Jan’s do though, as we also did a Madeira cake which Fran did a fancy icing job on, the second cake had to be something different – chocolate!

So here’s my chocolate variation recipe. This quantity will suit a cake tin 23-25cm wide.

Cake batter:
450g soft butter
400g light brown sugar
4 eggs
2 t vanilla essence
450ml sour cream
400g plain flour
50g cocoa powder
2 t baking powder
2 1/2 t baking soda
1/2 t salt

Nut mix
25g light brown sugar
1 t cinnamon
30g chopped walnuts
30g chopped dark chocolate

Ganache
250g dark choc (min 60% cocoa solids), chopped
250ml double cream

Preheat the oven to 150C. Grease and line the tin.

Make the nut mix by simply combining the sugar, cinnamon, walnuts and chocolate then set aside.

Make the sponge by creaming together the butter and sugar until light and creamy. Beat in the eggs, one at a time, then the vanilla.

Sift together all the dry ingredients (flour, cocoa, raising agents), then add this to the creamed mixture a bit at a time, alternating with additions of the sour cream. Fold in gently – don’t beat or over-mix. Start and end with the flour mix.

Put half of the sponge mix into the prepared tin, then sprinkle over the nut mix. Dollop the other half on top.

Bake for for one and a half hours. If your oven is cooler, it’ll take longer. Test with by inserting a skewer. Leave to cool in the tin, then turn out and cool completely.

For Jan’s cake, once cooled, I brushed it with warmed and strained apricot jam, then covered it with ganache. To make the ganache, simply heat the cream until it’s starting to simmer then pour it over the chocolate and whisk. Keep whisking until well combined. Cool until it’s nicely thickened. You might want to do this in the fridge – but don’t leave too long, or it’ll get too stiff to spread on the cake.

For the 30cm cake, I did 4x quantities, and it had to bake for an awful long time…

These are from the rather gorgeous Rose Bakery cookbook Breakfast Lunch Tea, which our friend Jude gave us as a present (not using the royal we there – we as in me and Fran, the wife, as it was our wedding anniversary).

Founded by Rose Carrarini, who co-founded Villandry in London, the bakery/cafe looks like a great place; I’d love to visit one of these days. It’s basically doing something that Fran’s talked about for years – selling English teashop type goodies (and beyond) to the French, who apparently love that kind of thing.

The main emphasis seems to be on wholesome, simple snacks and “little meals” – granola to soup, by way of tartlets, mini-pizzas, cookies and scones. In fact, the sort of thing I’d love to sell in a cafe-bakery if I ever owned one!

This is the second recipe I tried. And rather delicious it is too.

Scones. I love scones, but mostly I just make plain ones. These, however, include that irresistible ingredient – maple syrup.

They are v tasty, with the maple a fairly subtle factor. Mostly, they’re defined by being very short and crumbly. Too short and crumbly arguably, as they fall to bits a bit too easily while cooking. But definitely a recipe to return to.

Here’s the recipe, to make 12 scones, using a 50mm round cutter.

Preheat the oven to 200C (or 180 if you have a hot fan oven).

260g plain flour
80g wholemeal flour
35g rolled oats
1 teaspoon baking powder (”very heaped” Carrarini writes)
1 teaspoon caster sugar (ditto)
1/2 teaspoon salt
160g unsalted butter, diced up
4 tablespoons maple syrup
4 tablespoons milk

Sift together the flours, add the salt and oats, and mix.
Crumb in the butter.
Mix the maple syrup and milk in a separate bowl or jug, then pour that into the dry ingredients and mix with fork (I like to use those old, bone-handled palette knives)
Bring together to a moist but not sticky dough, adding a little more milk or flour accordingly.
Do not over-knead the dough.
Roll out to about 30mm thick, stamp out scones, place on greased baking sheet, brush with beaten egg.
Bake for 20 minutes.

“Serve warm” apparently. I had mine with plenty of butter and homemade apple and blackberry jam and they were yum.

Feel a strong bond with this cookbook already. (It helps that it’s a nice object too; only quibble is the presence of a few too many pics of cute kids when they could be showing us more pics of, you know, the results of the actual recipes.)

For some reason when I bake muffins with the fan on they sometimes grow noses. These are particularly nosy ones. They didn’t all turn out like this thank goodness, but I’m tempted to stick a couple of eyes on them and some whiskers perhaps.

I made this recipe up, just played around with the basic muffin ingredients. They don’t contain any sugar or butter, just oil and eggs, and lots of banana.

300g sf flour
1 tsp baking powder
2 1/2 very ripe bananas, mashed
2 eggs
4 tbps sunflower oil
200ml milk
3 tbsp honey and lemon (something I bought by mistake instead of just honey)90g chopped dates
40 raisins (for Ivy’s benefit, might just stick to dates next time)

Mash the bananas. Mix together the flour, bp, dates and raisins, make a well and add the eggs, milk and oil, mix well. Add the bananas and honey.
Bake for about 20 minutes at 180, with the fan for noses or at a higher temperature without the fan for regular muffins.

I’ve been a bit off the boil, so to speak, with cake baking. I did however make these chocolate pots on Saturday night for some friends – they are pretty delicious and dead simple.  They are very mousse-like without the use of horrible gelatine, so I’d call them a mousse rather than a chocolate pot, which implies that they are dense and dark. It’s the first recipe I’ve made from Chocolate Box, a book that came with a chocolate hamper from Marks and Spencer (a welcome Christmas present).

Ingredients
225g/8oz plain chocolate (I used Co-op’s own fair trade, which is very good)
4 eggs, separated
6 tbsp caster sugar
4 tbsp dark rum
4 tbsp double cream

Method (makes 6)
Melt the chocolate in a bowl over simmering water and leave to cool slightly.
Whisk the egg yolks with the caster sugar until very pale and fluffy (I didn’t get mine to go ‘fluffy’ – i think that’s the wrong description?)
Drizzle in the melted chocolate and fold together with the rum and cream.
Whisk the egg whites until soft peaks form and fold into the chocolate mix in two batches. Divide between 6 individual dishes (I used my lovely ivy-leaf cups and saucers and you can see) and refrigerate for at least 2 hours.

They suggest decorating with whipped cream and chocolate shapes but I just plonked a few raspberries on top which went beautifully with the chocolate.

I’ve had a block of tamarind pulp hanging around in the fridge, from some curry or other a while back, so this seemed a perfect opportunity to use some of it up. It’s another delicious Dan Lepard recipe, from the Guardian Weekend. Here’s the recipe.

Thing is, pulp ain’t paste – it’s still got the stones in it, so I increased the quantities, then laboriously picked up the stones. In the Dan Lepard forums here, they discuss paste and he links the brand he used, which is concentrated.

This is a cake made by melting the butter, and beating everything together – yet it’s surprisingly light. It’s delicious. Mine probably wasn’t not tamarind-y enough, but it’s given a lovely extra tang by the icing – made with lemon juice and freshly-ground cardamon (one of my fave spices for sweets). Oh, and my icing was made with Billington’s Natural Golden Icing unrefined cane sugar, hence it’s brown-ish colour, which I think quite suited the wholesome style of cake.

Another Dan Lepard recipe from the Guardian. Find it here.

These are very handsome, tasty cookies. Not the usual massive monsters I make. Dan L says “place round, teaspoon-sized balls” on the baking sheets, but I just got teaspoon fulls and rolled them between my palms to the size of a small walnut in an effort to achieve some sort of regularity of size.

The dominant flavour here is from muscovado sugar and black treacle (or molasses – TBH, I’m not sure I could tell the two apart if I ate a spoonful of each in a blind test), along with a slight saltiness from the peanuts. The recipe also includes some lemon zest, which Dan L says “brightens the flavour on first bite”, but I find it also stays on the palette pleasantly.

I’m not sure about the inclusion of a tablespoon of cocoa though. He says it helps “to push the aftertaste towards chocolate”, but is it really necessary? The flavours of unrefined sugar and peanut are quite dominant,  and cocoa is arguably overcomplicating it. Plus, if I want my cookies to taste of chocolate, I’ll make chocolate cookies. But hey, that’s just me. Oh, and I knocked back the sugar a bit too.

I cracked two eggs whilst making another batch of Lavender Cupcakes the other day so I had to make soemthing else as well (of course I did). These jammy buns are from a nice little book my sister sent me Best-kept Secrets of the Women’s Institute: Cakes and Biscuits (only their cakes and biscuits apparently) by Jill Brand. This recipe looked nice and simple but I didn’t put nearly enough jam in them, and I used plum as I didn’t have any rasberry. They are very scone-like and great with a cup of tea, they need to be eaten fresh or in a couple of days – so hard.

225g SF flour
pinch of salt
80g margarine (I used butter)
80g caster sugar
2 eggs
Jam of some description

Rub the fat into the flour and salt until it resembles breadcrumbs, stir in the sugar. Make a well in the centre and add the eggs, mix well to form a stiff dough – (the dough was not stiff at all for me at this point so I added more flour.) Turn the dough onto a floured surface and form into a roll, divide int 10 pieces and roll each one into a ball.
Place on  a greased baking tray and make a hole in each one (making sure not to go all the way through ) and fill with a little jam – more than I did – a big teaspoon I’d say. Close the whole and spinkle with sugar, although if you left the whole open and flattened them a bit they’d be a lot like jammy dodgers. Bake at 180 for 15-20 minutes or until golden brown. Leave to cool a little on the tray before turning out onto a wire rack.

The other cake in the photo is the carrot cake version of the beetroot cake I made recently but with dates instead of raisins. This recipe is very moist and light but it does crumble a little in the middle when you cut it – rather annoying.

Such a silly name. They originate from the Pennsylvania Amish, apparently, and one theory suggests they name comes from the utterance made by a hard-working farmer when he found one in his packed lunch. Or something.

Anyway, supposedly they’re trendy. Like cupcakes. Or trendier than cupcakes. There’s a whole feature about their rise to fame here in the New York Times, from March 2009 (a feature that may well disappear behind a paywall in the near future).

Well, they’ve made that transition to Britain now too. Briefly, a whoopie pie consists of two soft layers that are half-way between a cookie and a sponge cake, sandwiched with a sweet filling. I first tried one from the Hummingbird Bakery, and in truth the cookie/cake bit was a bit dry and hard, so when you bit it, it just squished all the filling out, making it a bit of a challenge to eat with any decorum.

These ones I made were a chocolate variety from a recipe from The Times, which also ran this story (that may likewise be disappearing behind a paywall soon). The recipe was a bit vague and some of the quantities were iffy, so here it is slightly revised.

115g unsalted butter, softened
200g soft light brown sugar
1 egg
1 t vanilla essence
225ml buttermilk (or yogurt/milk blend)
60g cocoa powder
5g bicarbonate of soda
190g plain flour

Filling:
200g cream cheese (Philadelphia or similar)
75g butter
150g sifted icing sugar
1 t vanilla essence

Preheat the oven to 200C and line three baking trays with greaseproof paper. Give the paper a quick wipe with butter.

Cream the butter and sugar together, then beat in the egg. You can do this with an electric hand-blender.

Add the vanilla essence to the buttermilk. If you can’t get buttermilk, blend a few tablespoons of yogurt with (whole) milk.

Sift the cocoa powder, bicarbonate of soda and flour into another bowl.

Add half the flour in to the creamed butter mix, and blend. Then add half the buttermilk (or yogurt/milk). Add the rest of the flour and mix. Then the rest of the buttermilk, and mix under it’s all well-combined.

Put 6 desert spoonfuls onto each baking sheet, well-spaced as they spread a bit.

Bake for 10-12 minutes, then remove, allow to cool for a few minutes on the trays, then transfer to a rack and leave until totally cool.

Make the filling by creaming together the softened butter and icing sugar, then blending in the cream cheese and vanilla. You can do this with an electric hand blender, but don’t over-mix.

Sandwich the cookie/cakes generously with the filling.

Some people can still be a little put-off by vegetable-based cakes, but carrot cake is pretty commonplace, and beetroot goes decidedly well with with dark chocolate, so I thought it was about time to play around with parsnip.

Parsnip is a very sweet, aromatic root veg anyway, so I think it needed something to complement that. Maple syrup seemed ideal. Found this recipe, which is nice and simple – as long as you don’t grate your fingertips…

You add the filling at the last minute – it’s just mascarpone, with a few tablespoons of maple syrup stirred in. The result is slight dense, very moist, lovely and maple-y, with the slight crunch of the pecans, and a faintly parsnip aroma. Though it’s one of those cakes that, if you didn’t tell people it contained parsnips, they probably wouldn’t guess immediately.

EDIT: I finished this up yesterday, and in retrospect, it’s a bit too “parsnippy” for my liking. The parsnip is just such a pungently aromatic veg, it’s slightly too strong. I might try this same recipe with carrot, as it tends to be milder and less stridently flavourful in cakes.