COOKBOOKS GALORE

I'm never too sure about veg in cakes. I quite like carrot cake, but didn't like the parsnip one my friend made, and courgettes, well I haven't really used them. So I was surprised to find that they were an ingredient in a delicious cake someone brought for a social evening recently. I asked for the recipe and this is it! For the cake: 2 large eggs, 80ml runny honey,100g soft brown sugar, 120ml veg oil, 2 tspn vanilla extract, 100g vanilla yoghurt, 1 tspn bicarb, 1 tspn baking powder, 260g plain flour, 2 small courgettes, grated, 100g milk chocolate [chopped roughly] Ganache: 50g milk chocolate, broken into pieces and 50ml double cream Preheat oven 160C/gas3                        Thoroughly grease and flour a large bundt tin  - make sure you do the corners. Put the tin on a baking tray. Whisk the eggs, honey, sugar, oil, vanilla and yoghurt together. Squeeze any excess water out of the courgettes and add to the b...

Having a BBQ tonight with friends so have made a cheesecake for dessert. Have made it many times and we love it because it's chocolate, but also has a hint of coffee in it.  It's an American recipe which I've changed from cups, so there are some odd sounding amounts! I use ordinary digestive biscuits with cocoa powder to get the chocolate base, as I find this works better than using chocolate biscuits; I think it gives a better chocolate taste. You need a 23cm springform tin.  Preheat oven 160C/gas3 Put 125g digestive biscuits in a processor and blitz till crumbs. Add 60g butter and 1 tbspn cocoa and blitz again till the mixture clumps together. Press this into the cake tin and put in the fridge. Whisk 140g caster sugar and 1 tbspn of expresso powder [or a good instant powder] together in a little bowl. Melt 350g dark chocolate [or a mixture of dark and milk] over simmering water or in the microwave. Keep this fluid but not hot. On a low speed on a mixer or a ha...

This isn't a sophisticated chocolate cake; this is for lovers of milk chocolate and peanut butter. My grandsons were coming for tea, so I made the basic cake and they helped me ice it - or at least one of them did, the other 2 got bored! It's a WI recipe that my mil gave me - I've been sorting out my recipe folders and came across some great recipes I must try, and this was one of them. My grandsons love peanut butter, so to have it in a cake AND in the icing, was great. It's almost an all in one mixture, as nearly everything goes in the bowl and you beat it together. Then you add the chocolate drops and some milk. Preheat oven 180C/gas4 and grease and line a 28x18cm tin . You put 115g of crunchy peanut butter, 115g of soft margarine or butter, 175g of soft brown sugar, 3 eggs and 1 tspn of vanilla extract in a bowl. Sieve together 175g of sr flour and 11/2 tspns of baking powder and add to the bowl. Beat with an electric hand mixer for about 2 mins, making sure yo...