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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...