COOKBOOKS GALORE

Recently it was Bramley Apple week, so I decided to make an apple cake, and found this WI recipe amongst my mil's collection, but to be honest, for me, it doesn't really live up to its name. It needs a stronger toffee flavour, but I liked the idea of enhancing the apple flavour by using Calvados. We love apple cakes, and I have lots of recipes, but this is the first toffee apple cake I've tried. I had a look online and there are lots of different ideas  - I liked   this one  from Rosie Bakes It blog, but there seems to be a bit too much topping for me and she adds dates, just as I did for my Sticky Toffee cake, and I didn't want to use dates - I want the toffee flavour to come from something else. Another idea was to put some Carnation Caramel in the cake mixture -  this recipe  uses it, one from the Good to Know site. 225g self-raising flour 150g soft butter 150g soft dark brown sugar 50g  mixed nuts, chopped 1 large Bramley cooking apple, peeled,...

Last weekend we went to stay with our daughter and visited Bluewater shopping centre. There's a great John Lewis store there, and I love browsing in their kitchenware. A few weeks ago, Phil, from the great  As Strong As Soup     blog, posted a 'financier' recipe and I hunted everywhere for my financier tin to make some, but couldn't find it, so when I saw a mini loaf one in John Lewis, I bought it. I don't think it's exactly the same size as a financier tin? We were given a gift pack of several bars of Lindt chocolate, one of them being their Intense Orange bar, so back home I decided to make some little chocolate loaves with orange in my new tin. They're not financiers as they have no almonds in them, but they're good anyway. The original recipe made 6, so I doubled it up. To add to the chocolate flavour I made a chocolate ganache, and found some orange and lemon jelly slices in the baking cupboard and used the orange ones to decorate the top. Prehe...

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...

I wanted to make something special for my friend's birthday. She's a great fan of chocolate cakes, so I decided to combine another of her loves, meringue, with a chocolate cake. I looked through my cookery books and online for ideas, and there were plenty of them. Too many were very complicated and had lots of layers. I wanted a much simpler cake, but with a twist. So I decided on  a sandwich cake with a meringue layer on top and in the middle, and there's also some lime curd in the middle to give the cake an extra bit of zing. I bought a jar of this curd from a farmer's market recently, and don't know what to do with it! It's not a very green colour, so really it doesn't look very different from a lemon curd. The flavour seems to me to be a bit sharper. For the cake  - beat 115g of butter with 115g of caster sugar till nice and fluffy. Add 3 egg yolks one at a time,  then add 100g sr flour which has been mixed with 55g cocoa powder. Pour in 50ml of milk a...

These day, I only make puddings when we have friends or family for a meal - they seem to expect it! I wanted to make something tasty, but not stodgy.  Hunting through my cookery books, I found one I'd bought a few years ago from the famous 'Pudding Club' in 'Three Ways House' in Chipping Camden. If you've nor heard of this club, it was founded in 1985 to save our great British puddings. At the time, puddings were looked on with horror - much too fattening. So the club meets, eat their main course and then 7 different puddings are brought out and devoured. At the end of the evening, they vote for the best one. Looking through the book, many of the pudds are very filling ,but I found one that was marked as 'healthy', and it does contain fruit, nuts and honey and very little fat. I suppose with the latest bad press for sugar, 120g would be classed as a lot, so perhaps it wouldn't be classed as 'healthy'! Many of the puddings are steamed, but...

My husband loves biscuits, so as it was pouring with rain and I felt like baking something, I decided to make some for him. What to make? I had half a tin of Carnation caramel in the fridge left over from a cake recipe my daughter tried, so thought I'd use some of this - not much, as it's so sweet. I like a biscuit with a crunchy outside but a soft centre, so decided to use oats and some plain chocolate to get the sort of biscuit I wanted. A couple of tablespoons of caramel would give it extra flavour, and add to the softish centre. I found plenty of oat biscuit recipes on the net, but couldn't find just what I wanted, so I used a basic oat recipe and added my own tweaks to it. I made 15 chocolate oaties from this recipe. Preheat oven 180C/gas4 100g butter, 100g soft brown sugar and 2 tbspns of Carnation caramel - spoon these into a pan and melt gently till all the sugar and butter have dissolved. 100g sr flour, 100g oats and 1/2 tspn of bicarbonate of soda - put t...

This is one of those cake that uses up the leftover Christmas bits and pieces. I had some cranberries, half a bag of pecans and some pears that needed using up. It's based on a recipe I picked up from one of the supermarkets - Sainsbury's I think. It has quite a thick topping, but it's delicious. It does take a bit of effort to make, but I think it's worth it. Pears and cranberries are 2 of our 5 a day! It's an upside down cake, so you need a heavy bottomed pan about 26cms, as it has to go on the hob and in the oven. I used a Le Creuset saute pan, which worked well. Preheat oven 180C/gas4 Make the topping - melt 75g butter and sugar in the pan over a low heat. Peel and core 900g of pears [about 6] and cut them into about 1cm slices then put them in the pan on top of the butter and sugar. Cook over a gentle heat till the pears are just soft; turn the heat up to caramelize them. Sprinkle 140g of cranberries and 75g of pecans over the mixture and gently mi...