COOKBOOKS GALORE

  This is the second easy rhubarb recipe I made with my sil's rhubarb. It's just a variation on the yoghurt cake all French families seem to make. You use the yoghurt pot as a measure.  1 small pot natural yoghurt - use this pot to measure 3 pots of caster sugar, 3 pots of sr flour, 3/4 pot of sunflower oil,  1/4 pot milk 2 eggs 1 tspn baking powder 1 tspn vanilla extract pinch salt 250g rhubarb cut into chunks Preheat oven 200C/gas6 Grease and base line a 20cm round cake tin. Beat all the ingredients together except the rhubarb, then stir the chunks in. Spoon into the tin and bake for 30 mins till golden. A good moist cake, not too sweet. Love the texture of the rhubarb. A simple cake to have with a cuppa, or as a dessert with some crème fraiche or vanilla ice cream. Am away for a week, so next week's post will be later than usual.

My sil came for the day and brought a bundle of rhubarb. It's one of our favourite things to eat, so I decided to make a couple of easy recipes with it. The first was a simple rhubarb tart with a meringue topping, a change from a pie or a crumble. I used a pack of bought shortcrust pastry, which made it even quicker to make, but of course you can make your own. 1 pack shortcrust pastry 600g rhubarb 2 tbspn granulated sugar 3 egg whites 175g caster sugar pinch salt 1 tspn lemon juice Preheat oven 180C/gas4 Roll out the pastry to fit a 23cm tart tin. Prick the pastry with a fork. . Trim the rhubarb and cut into 3cm chunks, then spread it over the pastry. Sprinkle the tbpsns of sugar over. Bake for about 25mins. While it's cooking, whip the egg whites with the salt into stiff peaks. Gradually add the sugar and the lemon juice and carry on beating. Take the tart out of the oven and top with the meringue, then put it back in the oven for about ...

We've been eating sweet potatoes for some time, but have never tried them in a cake. I wanted to make something different last week to take to OH's family get together, so decided to make a sweet potato cake. There are lots of recipes and ideas on the net, but many, as is usual with American cakes, had so much sugar.  I played around with a few recipes, tweaking this and that, and tried this one out first as muffins. It we didn't like them, the birds could have an early Easter present! They certainly tasted different, but pleasantly different, so decided to make the cake.  Lots of the recipes I looked at had a marshmallow frosting or some other sickly stuff. This one is one I've used many times since being given it by an American neighbour - it's not too sweet, and I love cinnamon! The first thing you need to do is to roast 2-3 medium sweet potatoes in oven 190C/gas5 for 45 mins or so till soft. Cool. You could cook them a couple of days before and keep them in...