COOKBOOKS GALORE

As I said in a recent post, plums are one of my favourite fruit. I love making crumbles and tarts with them, but wanted to find something different to try. This recipe is from a Woman's Weekly magazine; it's one of the hundreds of recipes I have to sort out in my cuttings folder! I bought a punnet of plums from the supermarket which were marked as seconds, and they were really hard. Anyway I thought I'd use them in my new recipe, and they turned out soft and juicy. 250g plain flour 170g chopped up butter 1 egg yolk I used my processor to make the pastry, putting in the flour, butter and egg yolk and adding a tbspn of water and blitzing till the pastry started to come together. Roll out and line the flan tin and chill for 30 mins. it's a very short pastry and breaks easily, but is easily patched up. Filling: 1 tspn cinnamon 2 tbspns soft brown sugar 750g plums, stoned and quartered Topping: 1 egg + a yolk 125g creme fraiche 45g soft brown sugar ...

These were mentioned recently on the GBBO, so I thought I'd find out more about them. They're made on the Isle of Anglesey and are a traditional biscuit really, not a cake. They're served sprinkled with sugar and even with cream and jam, like a scone. The bit I liked was that a scallop shell is pressed into the top to give it a shell-like pattern. Nowadays, a lot of the Aberffraw cakes have the pattern put on with a knife. I have a bag of scallop shells, brought back from France so I used a genuine one to make my pattern. The recipe is a 3.2.1  - quite common for biscuits. This means 3 parts flour to 2 parts fat to 1 part sugar. 175g flour 110g butter 55g caster sugar a little milk more caster sugar for sprinkling over Preheat oven 190C/gas5. Grease a baking sheet. I used a processor to make my dough. Put flour and sugar in a bowl and rub in the butter. Bind together with a litle milk to make a soft dough. Roll out and cut out circles. I used a 7cm cutter an...

I love citrus cakes so had to try this one; the recipe was given to me by a church friend whose son is married to a Swedish girl. This is Anneke's family recipe, and she calls it a teabread and serves it as a dessert with some fruit salad. It's lovely as a cake with your afternoon cuppa.  Another easy cake for my repertoire. 150g butter 120g caster sugar 3 eggs greated zest of a lemon 60ml fresh orange juice orange essence [opt] 250g plain flour with 2 tspn baking powder added breadcrumbs to coat the tin topping: 80g icing sugar orange juice - 1-2 tbspn Preheat oven 175C/gas4 Grease a 900g loaf tin and sprinkle with breadcrumbs Beat butter and sugar together till fluffy. Whisk the eggs in one at a time then mix in the rind, juice and flour. Blend together. Pour into the tin and bake for about an hour. Remove from the tin and leave to cool under the upturned tin! Mix the icing sugar with enough juice to make it the consistency you want; make su...