Sticky orange and almond cake

This is just great for winter - a great blast of sunny orange flavour, but rather than coming from a delicious healthy glass of juice, it's mediated through a sugary cake, made amazingly moist and dense with ground almonds. Stodge is a very important mood-lifter in the dark evenings of December.

If you have visitors this Christmas who don't like Christmas pudding or Christmas cake, this is a very good alternative. It's rich, heavy and very luxurious in mouth-feel, and while a spoonful of brandy butter or a slug of cream might feel like overkill, it'd be a pretty handsome variety of overkill. If you do plan on making this for Christmas and want to kick it up a level, add three tablespoons of Cointreau or another orange liqueur to the orange juice you pour over at the end, when the cake comes out of the oven. Do not use Blue Curaçao, for obvious reasons.

You'll need:

250g salted butter, softened
225g caster sugar
4 eggs
50g plain flour
200g ground almonds
1 teaspoon almond essence
Zest and juice of 2 oranges
2 tablespoons icing sugar

Preheat the oven to 180°C (350°F). Grease and line a springform tin.

Cream the butter and sugar together until they are pale and fluffy. (You really do need an electric mixer for this recipe, I'm afraid.) Beat the eggs and add them a tablespoon at a time to the butter and sugar mixture along with a tablespoon of flour, whisking as you go and adding more until the last batch is incorporated.

Fold the ground almonds into the batter and add the juice of 1 orange, the zest from both oranges and the almond essence. Stir the liquid ingredients gently and use a spatula to move the cake mixture into the prepared tin.

Bake for 1 hour, checking halfway through to make sure the cake isn't browning too quickly (if it is, just put a tinfoil hat on it). The cake will leave a toothpick pushed into the centre clean when it's ready. Remove from the heat, sprinkle over the icing sugar and poke little holes all over the top of the cake. Strain the juice from the remaining orange to get rid of any pulpy bits and spoon it evenly all over the surface of the cake. Cool in the tin for 20 minutes, remove to a rack and when completely cool, wrap carefully for a few hours before serving to allow the flavours to meld and the stickiness to reach a lovely peak.

Chocolate banana bread

Bananas, white and milk chocolate chunks, and a sugary, crispy crust. What's not to like? This is a pleasingly easy recipe, and I was very pleased with the reaction when I came up with it the other evening - the entire loaf vanished before I was able to boil the kettle for a pot of tea.

For one disappearing banana miracle loaf, you'll need:

3 ripe bananas
100g white chocolate
100g milk chocolate
180g plain flour
150g soft light brown sugar + 2 tablespoons to sprinkle
40g salted butter (softened)
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda

Preheat the oven to 190°C (375°F). Grease a 9×5 inch loaf tin.

Sift the flour from a height into a large bowl with the bicarbonate of soda and baking powder. In another bowl, use an electric mixer to cream the sugar and butter together until they are pale in colour. Use the back of a fork to mash the bananas, and use the mixer to whip them into the butter and sugar mixture for two minutes.

Wallop the chocolate, still in its packets, with a rolling pin to reduce it to chunks. (This is a lot cheaper than buying dedicated chunks for baking, and the chocolate will probably be of a higher quality too.) Use a spatula to fold the chocolate chunks and contents of the banana bowl into the flour as gently as you can - if you've ever eaten a disappointingly solid banana bread it's almost certainly because the batter has been overhandled. Use the spatula to shuffle the mixture into the loaf tin, sprinkle the top with the extra sugar and bake on a middle shelf of the oven for 45 minutes. Check a skewer comes out clean - if it doesn't, pop a piece of tin foil on top of the tin to stop the top from going too brown and add another 10 minutes to the cooking time. Cool for quarter of an hour in the tin, then move to a rack to finish cooling (or eat immediately, which is what we did, and very nice it was too).

Chilli choc chip cookies

Chillies and chocolate have a lovely affinity; they're a traditional pairing in South America, where the locals really know how to treat their cocoa. I was making up a traditional toll house cookie recipe - actually, it's the traditional toll house cookie recipe, as I'll explain below - yesterday with Dr W (the family that bakes together stays together), and decided to augment the recipe with some fresh Scotch bonnet chillies. Wonderful and potent little balls of fire, they're one of my favourite chillies. If you've not tried them before, be cautious, especially if you find chillies hard to tolerate; these are hot, rocking up at between 100,000 and 350,000 Scoville Units. (The humble jalapeño only rates at between 2,500 and 8,000 Scoville Units, for the sake of comparison.)

Scotch bonnets are closely related to the habanero, but have a very distinct flavour and aroma, fruity and sweet behind all the heat, which I think is just wonderful against chocolate. I've only used one here, chopped very finely and creamed in with the butter so its powerful capsaicin (the stuff that burns your tongue off), which is fat-soluble, can work its way smoothly through the cookie dough. The chocolate chunks are a good milk chocolate - nice and smoothly cooling on your tongue against the chilli heat.

The basic recipe I've used here is the original toll house cookie recipe - I've never found a better. The Toll House was a restaurant in Whitman, Massachusetts, where Ruth Wakefield, one of the owners, was responsible for all the recipes. She came up with this recipe around 1930. Nestle bought the rights to the recipe in 1939 - this ingredients list is from Ruth's original recipe from the 1947 edition of Toll House Tried and True Recipes, where she calls them Toll House Chocolate Crunch Cookies. (As well as adding the chillies, I have left out a cup of chopped pecan nuts from the recipe - if you want to use them, stir them in with the chocolate bits.) Ruth preferred very tiny, crisp cookies, and only used half a teaspoon of batter for each one, with a much shorter spell in the oven. I like them quite a lot bigger for the squashy middle, and suspect you will too - if you want to make teeny cookies, reduce the cooking time.

To make about 20 cookies, you'll need:

1 Scotch bonnet pepper
2¼ cups plain flour
1 teaspoon salt
1 cup unsalted butter, softened
¾ cup granulated sugar
¾ cup firmly-packed light brown sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 large eggs
1 teaspoon baking soda
2 cups plus 2 tablespoons chocolate morsels (I used two bars of Green & Black's cook's milk chocolate, walloped into rough chunks with a rolling pin while still in the wrappers)

Preheat the oven to 190°C (375°F).

Chop the chilli very finely, discarding the seeds if you want to cut the heat down a bit. Sift the flour and salt together in one bowl. In a large mixing bowl, cream the butter and the chilli with an electric mixer (this should take about 2 minutes). Add the sugars gradually, creaming the mixture together until light and fluffy. Beat the vanilla and eggs (one at a time) into the mixture, then the baking soda. Turn the speed of your mixer down to low and add a third of the flour, then gradually add the rest. Stir in the chocolate pieces and drop heaping tablespoons of the mixture onto baking sheets about 2 inches apart to leave space for the cookies to spread.

Bake for between 8 and 10 minutes, until the edges and tops are just turning golden. Allow to cool on the baking sheets for a few minutes so they can firm up a little, then use a spatula to move the cookies to cooling racks (or direct to your mouth).

These are a lovely, crumbly, squashy cookie. They'll keep in an airtight container for about a week.

Ambrose Heath's Anchovy Biscuits

If you've been following me on Twitter, you may have noticed a few references to Edwardian savouries and a writer called Ambrose Heath this week. The savoury used to be a course served at the end of a formal English meal. Salty, umami and often highly spiced, the savoury was packed in by English gentlemen after dessert while they discussed hats and feudalism. A salty nibble was meant to cleanse the palate of whatever gelatinous pudding you'd just eaten so you could happily assault it with a cigar and too much port.

The savoury didn't survive the period of rationing during and after the Second World War (a period which rendered English food completely joyless - it's only started to recover recently). A grave shame, especially for those, like me, who lack a particularly sweet tooth; I'd far sooner eat a bacon sarnie than an ice-cream. Recipes for savouries are, these days, pretty hard to find, but I have several in a pre-war book by Andre Simon, and I couldn't believe my luck when I found a copy of Ambrose Heath's Good Savouries in a second-hand book shop last week.

Ambrose Heath was a prolific food writer: there are more than 70 books to his name. One of the first cookery books I owned was his book on sauces, which, along with his other books, appeals to the systematising, cataloguing part of my soul that lives somewhere on the autistic spectrum. His books are exhaustive and meticulous treatments of their subjects - there are multiple recipes with tiny tweaks for many of the dishes, alternative approaches and ingredient substitutions, and a lovely sense of a rather plump, happy man behind the pen. (And isn't that a gorgeous cover illustration?)

Most of the savouries in this book are based around salty ingredients like ham, bacon, anchovy or bloaters; they're usually spiced vigorously with curry powder or chutney, and are presented sitting on a fried crisp of bread, a puff of pastry or a hollowed roll buttered and baked crisp. This recipe for anchovy biscuits reads as follows:


To make the pastry for the cheese straws, Heath says you'll need:

2oz plain flour
2oz grated parmesan
2oz butter
Yolk of 1 egg
A dash of mustard
Salt and pepper

His recipe will have you rubbing the butter into the flour/parmesan/mustard mixture, binding with the egg yolk and a little water, then baking for ten minutes. I changed the method a little, freezing the butter for 15 minutes and shredding it on the coarse side of the grater into the flour/parmesan mixture (to which I'd added a teaspoon of Madras curry powder), stirring everything together with a knife and binding the resulting mixture with the egg yolk and some ice-cold water mixed with four anchovies pounded in the mortar and pestle. I rested the pastry in the fridge for half an hour before rolling it out very thinly, cutting out 48 rounds with my smallest cookie cutter, and baking at 200°C for 12 minutes until golden. Rub the mixture in if you prefer, but grating in hard butter will give you a puffier, crisper result. I left out salt and pepper - the anchovies and curry powder will provide all the salt and spice you need.

To make the paste to spread on top of the biscuits, I pounded four more anchovy fillets, 1 teaspoon of curry powder (Madras again - Bolsts is my favourite curry powder, but you should use your favourite brand/ferocity), 2 tablespoons of parmesan, 1 tablespoon of chopped capers (in wine vinegar, not salt, which would just be too much with the anchovies), 1 tablespoon of oil from the anchovies and 1 teaspoon of smooth Dijon mustard in the mortar and pestle until smooth. This will give you enough to smear each biscuit with the tip of a knife - look to use a very tiny amount of the topping, which is strong and salty. If you are familiar with Marmite or Vegemite, you need to spread in about the proportions you would spread those on toast. Allow the biscuits to cool before spreading them or they will be too fragile to work with.

Pop the biscuits in an oven heated to 180°C for five minutes. The spread will go slightly puffy. Dress with a little parsley before serving warm. Rather than eating your anchovy biscuits at the end of a meal, I'd suggest you use them as nibbles with drinks - a very dry Fino sherry or a Dirty Martini will work beautifully against them.

Flapjacks

I had an email a couple of weeks ago from a lady from Mornflake oats, asking if I'd like some samples. Now, I was a big fan of Mornflake as a kid, when the sixth-formers at school had a weekly stall in the dining room where they sold us teenies snacks of the very limited sort allowed by our health-fascist teachers. There wasn't much that was very good - nobody really liked licorice twigs, and I would sooner die than ever have to eat a carob bar again. Happily, there was one thing on sale I loved without measure - a muesli made by Mornflake with oat clusters, coconut, and chunks of candied papaya and pineapple. Infinitely better for breakfast than school gruel.

I suspect my waxing lyrical about a childhood affection for Mornflake pressed some buttons, because the next morning three cubic feet of oat products arrived on the doorstep. Since then, I've been happily munching my way through some really fantastic muesli (the Swiss style is creamy and delicious with the traditional Swiss addition of milk powder, the Fig and Apple is gloriously crispy and tastes divine), oatbran flakes (Very Berry, with strawberries, raspberries and cherries were Dr W's favourite) and porridge - microwavable single portions in packets, bags of rolled oats, and fine oatbran sprinkles for smooth porridges or garnishes. My cholesterol level is at an all-time low. Mornflake are a considerably older company than I'd realised; the same family has been milling oats for more than 14 generations, and they've just celebrated their 333rd anniversary, making them the UK's eighth-oldest company. The folks at Mornflake tell me that oats will reduce my appetite, keeping me slim and gorgeous (a recent study from King's College London has identified a hunger-suppressing hormone in oats, which, along with their cholesterol-squelching action appear to be almost sinister in their healthiness). They would also like you to know that a very varied assortment of people, including such luminaries as Tim Henman, Orlando Bloom, David Cameron, Kate Moss and Madonna, have gone on the record as being fans of porridge. I am not sure that this brings anything in particular to your own breakfast experience, but it may be useful for your next pub quiz.

Even after two weeks of artery-cleansing, appetite-suppressing, celebrity-endorsed oaten breakfasts, I still have a goodly portion of Mornflake's oaten bounty left in the breakfast cupboard. Happily, there's something really unhealthy and extremely delicious you can do with an awful lot of oats - make an awful lot of flapjacks.

Flapjacks are fast, easy and will make your house smell deliciously of caramel as they cook. To make 25, you'll need:

275g rolled oats
225g salted butter
225g demerara sugar
2 heaped tablespoons golden syrup

Preheat the oven to 160°C and grease a 30 x 20cm baking tin. Melt the butter, sugar and syrup together in a saucepan over a low heat, and stir the oats into the molten mixture, making sure everything is well blended. Pack the oats into the greased tin, pressing down with the back of a spoon to make sure the mixture is firm and flat on the top.

Bake the flapjacks for 35 minutes, until they are a golden caramel brown. (Overcooking will make your flapjacks hard and dark - 35 minutes will give you crisp edges and a nice squashy middle, but some people prefer a crispier flapjack, so adjust the cooking time to your liking.) Remove from the oven and leave in the tin for ten minutes, then use a spatula to mark the flapjacks into 25 squares. Allow the flapjacks to cool completely before moving them into an airtight tin (or cramming the lot into your face - I'll leave it up to you).

Fruit scones for cream tea

One of my sad, sad weekend hobbies is wandering around National Trust properties, buying a sack of books at the inevitable second-hand bookshop and then visiting the tea-room for a handsome cream tea, with fluffy scones, strawberry jam and plenty of clotted cream to slather on top. If you're in East Anglia, the exquisite Oxburgh Hall, where you'll find a number of embroideries worked by Mary Queen of Scots and Bess of Hardwick, a priest hole you can clamber into and a very fine garden, has a really fabulous tearoom. Ickworth House (English wines, fantastic gardens, wonderful collection of fans) and Wimpole Hall (organic farm, hot-dogs made from the pigs you have just fed pig-nuts to in the barn) also do a very good line in cream teas - but to my mind Oxburgh's intimate tearoom, housed in the hall's old kitchens, complete with antique bread ovens and blue and white crockery displaying pictures of the hall itself, still takes the...cake. All the same, while it's nice to visit Oxburgh once or twice a year (those gardens change gorgeously in character over the seasons), I can't really justify driving an hour just for a cup of tea and a scone more regularly than that. Time to get baking.

I usually choose a pot of Earl Grey to go with my scones. So when, in the absence of a National Trust tearoom, I decided to prepare my own cream tea at home this weekend, I decided to use some very strong Earl Grey to soak the sultanas in before adding them to the dough. With a pot of tea, a jar of good strawberry jam (try Tiptree's Little Scarlet or Duchy Originals Strawberry) and some clotted cream (increasingly available in supermarkets and delis - if you can't find any, use extra-thick double cream rather than whipped cream, which has exactly the wrong texture), you'll find yourself in possession of one of the finest things you can eat in the afternoon.

A quick note on the egg in the dough. I was lucky enough to have a box of bantam eggs a neighbour had given me, and used two - bantam eggs are tiny, very yolky and rich, and two are approximately the same volume as a single large hen's egg. If you can find bantam eggs, I'd recommend using two in this recipe.

To make about 16 scones, you'll need:

225g plain flour
2½ teaspoons baking powder
50g butter
25g caster sugar
1 large egg OR two bantam eggs
Milk (enough to make up 150ml when added to the beaten egg)
100g sultanas
1 large cup strong Earl Grey tea

Start by brewing the tea (make yourself a cup to drink while you're at it) and preheating the oven to 220°C (425°F). When the tea is nice and strong, pour it over the sultanas in a bowl and leave them to plump up for half an hour while you prepare the dough for the scones.

Sieve the flour and baking powder into a bowl, and cut the softened butter into it in little chunks. Rub the butter into the flour mixture until it resembles breadcrumbs. Stir in the sugar.

When the sultanas have had half an hour in the tea, drain them in a seive and add them to the flour mixture. In a measuring jug, beat the egg. Top the beaten egg up with the milk until you have 150ml of liquid, and stir it gradually into the flour mixture (you may not need all of it), mixing all the time with a wooden spoon, until you have a soft dough that holds together but is not sticky. Try not to over-handle the dough so that your scones are light and fluffy. Roll the dough out on a floured surface to a thickness of about 1cm, and cut out rounds with a 5cm circular cutter.

Place the rounds onto greased baking sheets and brush the tops with any remaining milk/egg mixture (if you have none left, plain milk will do). Bake for 10 minutes until golden brown.

These scones are at their very best served as soon as they come out of the oven, split in half, spread with jam and cream. Once cooled, they'll keep for a couple of days in an airtight tin.

Iced sugar cookies

These little cookies are delicious, easy to make, fun to ice, and will keep for about a week in an airtight tin. What's not to like? Even I, who singularly lack artistic skill, a steady hand or any visual imagination at all, had a total blast making a big batch of these for Dr W's birthday.

You'll be using royal icing and flood icing to colour these in. Piped lines of royal icing make little reservoirs which you will later fill with flood icing - royal icing which has been watered down a very little to make it flow into the shape you've outlined. I like to use squeezy bottles for icing rather than an icing bag (much less messy). Bottles are available at most cookware shops for under £2, and they come with a plastic piping nozzle which is perfect for this job. The amount of icing in the recipe below should be sufficient for filling six bottles in different colours, first for outlining, then, with a little water, for flooding.

It's important to use food colouring that won't dilute and loosen your icing. Gel icings, which come in tiny round pots to be added to your plain icing with a toothpick, are simply brilliant. I got Wilton's set of eight gel colours from good old Amazon, and used a licorice pen (from the Elizabeth David shop in Cambridge) for black detail like eyes and buttons. Eight colours will probably be more than you'll need for any single project, and the pots, although tiny, last for a very long time; you only need the tiniest dot of colouring for a batch of icing. Make sure that you blend the colour with the icing as thoroughly as you can; you don't want any streaky bits.

Sugar cookies
300g plain flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
230g vanilla sugar
230g butter
1 egg
½ teaspoon vanilla extract

Royal icing (see instructions below for flood icing)
1lb powdered sugar
5 tablespoons meringue powder (available at cookware shops and some supermarkets)
2 tablespoons water

Start by baking the cookies. Preheat the oven to 180°C (350°F). Sieve the flour and baking powder together and put to one side. Cream the sugar and the room-temperature butter with an electric whisk. Add the egg and vanilla extract, and continue to whisk until everything is blended together. Gradually add the flour mixture, beating gently until it is all incorporated.

Roll the dough onto a floured board and use cookie cutters to cut out shapes. Lay out on greaseproof paper on baking sheets and bake for about 12 minutes. Leave the cooked cookies on the sheet for a few minutes to cool a little and firm up, then use a spatula to transfer them to a cooling rack.

While the cookies cool, make the icing by beating together the sugar, meringue and water with your electric whisk until the mixture reaches stiff peaks (this can take several minutes). The icing will keep, covered, in the fridge for a week, so you can make and colour it before making the cookies if you fancy. Colour the icing according to the instructions on the gel colouring pack. Divide the icing between squeezy bottles, and get to work piping outlines on all your cookies - make sure there are no gaps in your outlines for the flood icing to dribble out of later.

The piped icing should dry quite quickly, so you can start filling in with flood icing as soon as you're finished outlining. To turn the royal icing you outlined with into flood icing, add water a drop at a time and mix well until you have an icing just loose enough to flow when drizzled onto a flat surface. Squiggle flood icing into each outlined area, and use a toothpick to encourage it into the corners.

You can drop contrasting colours of flood icing into flood icing that is still wet to create certain effects. Make lines of wet icing and drag with a toothpick for a feathered effect; or try dripping a single drop of icing in a contrasting colour into wet icing for neat dots.

Edible sprinkles are a lovely, lily-gilding addition too. To stick them onto the cookies, wait for the icing to dry, then mix a teaspoon of meringue powder with a couple of drops of water, until you have a sticky paste. Use a kids' paintbrush to apply this meringue glue to the area you want to stick sprinkles to, and scatter the sprinkles over while the glue is still wet.

When the icing and sprinkly bits are dry, store the cookies in single layers between sheets of greaseproof paper in an airtight tin.

Hot cross buns

I know - hot cross buns are really cheap at the supermarket, so why would you bother making your own at home?

There's a very easy answer: home-made hot cross buns are unbelievably delicious (unlike the supermarket variety, these are enriched with butter and eggs, and have more in the way of spices and fruit in their dough) - far better than the bought variety. They're cheap, too. And if you're interested in cooking something that will make your house smell divine for an afternoon, hot cross buns are just the ticket.

These sweet, yeasty little buns are a treat for Lent. (Pipe a Darwin fish on yours if you do not subscribe to this religious baking stuff.) According to Elizabeth David, the hot cross bun was a cause of great concern among the Protestant monarchs of England - Catholics were rumoured to bake them using communion wafers, and all that doughy symbolism was immensely threatening. The Tudors actually tried to ban them, but the populace would not be fobbed off with toasted teacakes, and eventually Elizabeth I passed a law allowing bakeries to make them at Easter and Christmas.

To make 12 hot cross buns, you'll need:

Starter
7g (1 sachet) easy-blend yeast
1 teaspoon soft brown sugar
100g strong white flour
200ml blood-hot milk

Dough
350g white bread flour
1 pinch salt
½ nutmeg, grated
2 tsp ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon allspice
Zest of one lemon and one orange
50g salted butter, cut into small pieces
50g light brown soft sugar
90g candied mixed peel
90g sultanas
1 egg

Piping
3 tablespoons plain flour
3 tablespoons caster sugar
Water

Glaze
1 orange
75g caster sugar
100 ml water

Get your yeast going by mixing it with all the starter ingredients in a small bowl, and leave it in a warm place to start working for fifteen minutes while you prepare the rest of the dough for the buns.

Mix the flour for the dough in a large bowl with the spices, pinch of salt and the citrus zests. Rub the butter, cut into small pieces, into the flour and spice mixture as if you are making pastry. When the mixture resembles breadcrumbs, stir through the sugar, peel and sultanas. Check that the yeasty starter mixture has plenty of large bubbles on the surface, and add it and the beaten egg to the dough mixture. Mix well with a wooden spoon, and when everything is amalgamated, start to knead the mixture with your hands.

Knead for ten minutes until you have a soft dough which is no longer sticky, and which stretches easily. (If after five minutes or so of kneading the dough still seems very sticky, add a little more flour - bread doughs will vary enormously in stickiness depending on variables like the humidity outside and the temperature in your kitchen.) Oil a bowl, and put the kneaded dough inside with some oiled cling film or a damp teatowel on top. Leave the dough for about an hour and a half in a warm place until it has risen to double its original size.

Knock the dough down, and make twelve round balls from it. Arrange them evenly in a baking dish, cover again and leave to double in size again in a warm place (between an hour and an hour and a half).

Preheat the oven to 220°C (425°F). When the buns have risen, make a paste for the crosses from flour and caster sugar, adding water until it is stiff and pipable. Using a piping bag or a freezer bag with a hole snipped in the corner, pipe crosses on each bun.

Bake the buns for 15-20 minutes until they are golden. While the buns are baking, take the zest and juice of the orange for the glaze and simmer it with the water and sugar until you have a light syrup. Brush the hot syrup over the hot buns when they come out of the oven.

You can serve these immediately or cool and toast them. Either way, they're glorious with a big slab of butter.

Rhubarb crumble with proper custard

The forced rhubarb is arriving in the shops at the moment. It's a lovely delicate pink when raw, and can tend to lose its colour a bit when cooked, unlike the very red rhubarb from later in the season - but it tastes deliciously of spring and makes a great crumble (or crisp, as the Americans call it). The lovely buttery, crunchy topping is impossible to get wrong, and this is a good recipe to start kids on before they try to make pastry, so they can get used to the rubbing-in method.

The custard below is made in the traditional way with egg yolks, vanilla and milk, but also includes a spoonful of Bird's instant custard. The Bird's, full of cornflour, stabilises the other custard ingredients as well as adding some flavour, so you'll end up with a supremely custardy custard, rich, silky and packed with vanilla. Alfred Bird, a chemist, came up with his custard powder in 1837, because his wife loved custard but was allergic to eggs: a romantic gesture that's still going strong after nearly two centuries. Mrs Bird is no longer with us, so additional yolks are not an insensitive addition.

For this first crumble of the year, I wanted the buttery, clear taste of the crumble topping to shine against the fragrant spring rhubarb, so this is a plain topping with a rhubarb-only filling. If you want to jazz things up a bit, try adding a couple of teaspoons of ground ginger to the topping and two or three tablespoons of crystallised ginger to the filling. To serve six, you'll need:

Crumble
225g plain flour
75g softened, salted butter
75g soft brown sugar
900g trimmed rhubarb
75g caster sugar

Preheat the oven to 180°C (350°F). Slice the rhubarb into one-inch chunks. Place in a saucepan and sprinkle over the caster sugar. Cook gently, covered (you don't need any extra water because there is so much in the rhubarb) for 15 minutes, stirring occasionally, until the rhubarb is cooked but still chunky.

While the rhubarb is simmering, make the topping in a large bowl by rubbing the butter into the flour gently, using your fingertips, until the mixture resembles breadcrumbs. Stir the sugar through the crumble mixture.

Put the rhubarb in a shallow cooking dish (I like my le Creuset tatin dish for this) and sprinkle the topping over. Scatter a few drips of water from the tips of your fingers over the surface - this roughens up the top and makes things even crispier. Bake for 30-40 minutes until the crumble topping is golden brown.

Custard
2 tablespoons Bird's custard powder
1 vanilla pod
1 pint milk
3 egg yolks
2 tablespoons vanilla sugar

Mix the sugar and custard powder in a bowl with a little milk taken from the pint until you have a smooth paste. Bring the rest of the milk to a bare simmer (it should be giggling rather than chuckling) and pour it over the mixture in the bowl. Return the whole lot to the saucepan over a low heat and, whisking hard, add the egg yolks and the seeds from inside the vanilla pod to the mixture. Keep cooking until the custard thickens and serve immediately. (If you need to keep the custard warm for a while before serving, lay a piece of cling film directly on its surface to avoid forming a skin.)

Cheese scones

Cheese scones, English, savoury and light, were one of the first things I learnt how to cook in school home economics lessons. The scones we turned out at school were really pretty awful - there was not enough cheese, and they were full of margarine. But a good cheese scone, properly spiced, made with butter and plenty of strong cheese, can be very different, such that Dr W will eat three, buttered, in one go and then make strange contented sighing sounds for the next couple of hours.

This is (as my home economics teacher doubtless realised, despite her margarine/cheese stinginess problems) a great recipe for kids. It's easy, it introduces them to the rubbing-in method they'll use when they're feeling advanced enough to attempt pastry, and it's hard to mess up. And what child doesn't get a huge kick out of baking something to go in his own lunchbox?

We ate these as part of a sort of high-tea arrangement late on Sunday afternoon. I like them with lots of butter and a little Marmite, which really makes the parmesan and cheddar in the scones sing. When buying the cheese for these scones, make sure your cheddar is a mature, flavourful variety.

To make 8 cheese scones you'll need:

225g self-raising flour
½ teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon powdered mustard
½ teaspoon cayenne pepper
50g softened, salted butter
50g cheddar, grated
25g parmesan, grated
150ml whole milk, plus a little to glaze

Preheat the oven to 230° C (450° F).

Sift the flour, salt, mustard and cayenne into a bowl (hold the sieve up high - you're trying to aerate the mixture as much as you can). Cut the butter into pieces and rub it into the flour mixture with your fingertips until you have a mixture that resembles breadcrumbs. Grate the cheeses and stir them into the flour mixture. Pour all the milk into the bowl with the flour and cheese, and use a knife to bring everything together into a dough.

Roll the dough out on a floured surface until it is 1cm thick, and cut into rounds with a fluted 6.5cm cutter. Arrange on a greased baking sheet and brush the top of each scone with milk. Bake for 8-10 minutes, until the scones have risen and are golden. These are fantastic served straight from the oven. If you want to ring the changes, try adding a tablespoon of Herbes de Provence with the cheeses for a cheese and herb scone - really good served with a slice of sharp cheese.

Chocolate orange fairy cakes

I eat precisely one Terry's Chocolate Orange every year, at Christmas. Here, for non-festive times of year, is the same thing in cake form.

There will be no post here on Monday; it's a Bank Holiday, and I shall be spending the day on a boat.

To make 16 little cakes, you'll need:

Cake
100g soft butter
100g caster sugar
2 eggs
100g self-raising flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
Grated zest of 1 oranges

Icing
75g dark chocolate (I used Hotel Chocolat's amazing 100% cocoa solids bar from the Purist range)
50g butter
75ml double cream
Grated zest of 1 orange

Preheat the oven to 200° C. Beat all the cake ingredients together with an electric whisk until the mixture is pale, light and fluffy. Divide it between 16 paper cake cases and bake for 20-25 minutes until the cakes are pale gold in colour, and a toothpick inserted into the centre of one comes out clean. Set the cakes to cool on a rack while you make the icing.

Melt the butter and chocolate together in a bowl over some boiling water. Stir in the orange zest and a tablespoon of the cold cream, and begin to beat with the electric whisk on medium. Pour in the cream in a thin stream as you beat, and when all the cream is incorporated, continue to beat air into the chocolate until the mixture is pale, spreadable and light.

Spread the icing over the cooled cakes with a knife (or, if you don't hate washing up, pipe it on). These cakes keep well in an airtight container for a few days.

Pouding chomeur - maple syrup sponge pudding

The chocolate puddle pudding I wrote about a few weeks ago went down so well that I felt duty-bound to make another self-saucing dessert for you to try at home. Pouding chomeur (French for poor man's pudding) is a French Canadian dish, dating from an era when poor men could afford maple syrup. Maple syrup has been pretty pricey stuff for as long as I remember, and I suspect that this pudding was named when dinosaurs still roamed the Latin Quarter of Montreal.

You'll be making an easy sponge, and pouring a maple syrup and cream sauce over it before putting it in the oven. The liquid magically swaps places with the sponge while the pudding is cooking, and you'll end up with a lovely moist cake layer on top of a thick, syrupy, mellow and gloriously sweet sauce.

A warning - this is, by design, a very sweet dessert. I recommend cutting through the sweetness by sloshing cream over the warm cake before you eat it, or by having a glass of cold milk by your plate.

To make an amazingly sweet cake from the time of the dinosaurs, you'll need:

Sauce
375 ml maple syrup (I used Grade A syrup, but Grade B will be great here too)
250 ml double cream
1 tablespoon cider vinegar
Pinch of salt

Cake
170 g caster sugar
90 g butter
225 g self-raising flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
180 ml milk
1 egg
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
¼ nutmeg, grated
Zest of 1 lemon

Preheat the oven to 180° C (350° F).

Bring the syrup, cream, vinegar and salt to the boil in a saucepan and immediately remove from the heat. Set aside.

Cream together the butter and sugar with an electric whisk in a large mixing bowl, until the mixture is pale and soft. Add the egg, vanilla extract, lemon zest and nutmeg to the bowl and beat in well with the whisk. Sieve the flour and baking powder in another bowl. Continue to whisk the creamed butter mixture on a medium to high speed, adding the milk and flour a tablespoon at a time until all the milk and flour are used up and the sponge mixture is light and fluffy.

Use a spatula to spread the sponge mixture in the bottom of a 20 cm square cake tin. Pour the sauce gently over the top. Don't worry if it appears to disturb the sponge mixture - magic will happen as soon as you shut the oven door.

Put the cake tin on a middle shelf of the oven and bake for 45-50 minutes (it may take ten minutes or so longer - test the cake with a toothpick in the centre; if it comes out clean, the cake is done). Serve warm with an insulin drip.

Chocolate puddle pudding

This is a rich chocolate pudding, which makes its own sauce when cooked and rises like a chocolate sponge island in a syrupy chocolate sea. Your mother probably made chocolate puddle pudding. I've been asking around, and everybody's mother seems to have had a similar recipe - and what sensible mothers they were, because this is rich and delicious, malevolently chocolatey and so quick and easy that my cats could make it (given opposable thumbs, the ability to read recipes and access to some weighing scales, an oven, bowls and...you get the idea). To serve six, you'll need:

6 tablespoons cocoa powder
150 g self-raising flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
200 g vanilla sugar (or 200g caster sugar and a few drops vanilla essence)
30 g salted butter
75 g dark chocolate (use something with a high proportion of cocoa solids)
150 ml milk
150 g soft brown sugar
500 ml hot water

Preheat the oven to 180° C (350° F).

Measure the flour and vanilla sugar into a large mixing bowl with two tablespoons of the cocoa powder and the baking powder. Melt the butter and chocolate together, and when melted, add them to the bowl with the milk. Stir with a wooden spoon until everything is well blended, and spread the mixture (which should be a thick paste) into the bottom of a baking dish. (I used a 20x30 cm dish.)

Mix the soft brown sugar with the remaining four tablespoons of cocoa, and sprinkle them over the top of the sponge mixture. Pour over the hot water (this should be hot from the kettle but not boiling) and put in the oven for 45 minutes. The sponge pudding will rise through the puddle of chocolate sauce. Serve with vanilla ice cream or a big dollop of cream.

Focaccia with onion and rosemary

My week was brightened no end yesterday when I discovered that Jean-Christophe Novelli was linking to one of the recipes on Gastronomy Domine. I'm cooking a lot of things like the aubergine caviar he mentions at the moment - it must be the weather. To make the most of the short English summer, it's lovely to eat a cold al fresco supper with some good, home-made bread. This explains the bread-making binge I appear to be on at this week. Fresh bread tastes great, it makes the house smell fantastic, and there is something strangely soothing about pummelling the hell out of a wodge of dough as you knead it; not to mention the lovely feeling you get from poking your fingers into a baby-soft, freshly-risen batch to knock it down. Bread dough is deliciously tactile, but I shrink from describing the full puffy, silky, stretchy glory of it in case you all decide I'm some sort of dough pervert.

Focaccia is an Italian bread enriched with plenty of olive oil. The oil in the dough makes it a dream to work with, and although it has a long rising time to help it develop its lovely open texture, all you have to do is knead, then wait for the dough to rise a couple of times. I've flavoured this focaccia with rosemary and chillies stirred into the dough itself, and a caramelised onion topping slathered on top. It's lovely cut into squares and served with some Mediterranean-style cold nibbles like caponata, aubergine caviar, hummus or panzanella, and a bowl of olive oil and balsamic vinegar to dip into.

To make one focaccia you'll need:

Bread
500g strong white bread flour
1 packet instant yeast
275ml tepid water
1 teaspoon salt
4 tablespoons olive oil (plus extra for oiling bowl and dough)
5 tablespoons chopped fresh rosemary
2 teaspoons Italian chilli flakes

Caramelised onion topping
2 large onions
3 tablespoons olive oil
A few sprigs of rosemary to decorate
12 olives
Olive oil to drizzle and salt to sprinkle over

Put 250g of the flour in a large mixing bowl with the yeast, chopped rosemary and chillies, then pour in the tepid water - this should be around blood heat - and the olive oil. Beat with a wooden spoon until the mixture is smooth, then start to stir in the remaining flour, a handful at a time, until you have a soft dough. The dough should not be completely dry - a little stickiness is fine, and should have vanished by the time you have finished kneading because of the magical development of the gluten in the wheat. You may not find you need to add all the flour - the amount you use will depend on the flour you have bought and the humidity and temperature of your kitchen. (I had about 20g left to put back in the bag when I was done.) Knead the dough vigorously for at least ten minutes, until it is very smooth and stretchy. Oil the dough ball and put it inside an oiled mixing bowl, cover with a damp cloth and leave to rise for two hours in a warm place.

The dough should have more than doubled in size. Knock it down to its original size and knead again for five minutes, then spread it out in a baking tin (mine was 25cm x 35cm), making sure the dough is even and pushed well into the edges and corners. Cover with the damp cloth again and let the focaccia rise for 45 minutes, then push the dough flat again and let it rise for a further 45 minutes while you heat the oven to 220° C (425° F) and prepare the onions by sautéing them in the oil over a low heat until they are sweet and golden (about 20 minutes), then putting them aside to cool.

Push 12 olives into the surface of the risen focaccia in a pattern with some rosemary sprigs, and spread the onions gently over the top (don't push too hard when you spread, so the bread does not deflate). Pour over some more olive oil to fill the olive holes, sprinkle with coarse-grained salt and bake for 20-25 minutes until golden on top, then place on a rack to cool.

Beer-leavened rye bread

Why is rye flour so tricky to get your hands on in the UK? I've been craving rye bread ever since we were in Finland, and ended up sending away to Shipton Mill in Gloucestershire, where you'll find some extraordinary speciality flours. How about mucking around with some Swiss dark flour, organic chestnut flour or something called Emmer wholemeal - an ancestor of modern wheat? There are eight white flours alone, including a specialist cake flour, a French white flour especially for baguettes and an Italian variety for ciabatta. Shipton Mill is fantastic for baking nerds.

I ordered a few kilos of flour, including some dark rye. I've not handled rye flour before, so I've started here with a relatively easy recipe (no sourdough starters, which need feeding for days), where the rye flour is supported by some strong white wheat flour. The gluten in rye is more fragile than wheat gluten, so you'll need to treat the bread dough a little more gently than you might with a loaf made entirely from wheat. The beer and brown sugar give the bread a lovely malty quality, and we really enjoyed it with some smoked salmon, capers, diced shallot and crème fraîche. To make two loaves you'll need:

375 ml beer (use something with some bite - I used an English bitter)
125 ml water
5 tablespoons softened butter
1 tablespoon soft brown sugar
1 teaspoon salt
200g dark rye flour
350g-400g strong white bread flour
1 pack instant yeast

Melt the butter and heat the beer and water together until they are lukewarm. They should be around body temperature - test the liquid on the inside of your wrist. Stir two tablespoons of the butter, the sugar and the salt into the beer and water mixture until the sugar and salt are dissolved.

Sift the rye flour and instant yeast into a large bowl, and add the lukewarm liquid to the bowl, beating with a wooden spoon until the mixture is smooth. Add the strong white bread flour to the bowl a handful at a time, stirring all the time, until you have a soft dough. (You may find you do not need as much as 400g of flour to achieve a soft dough; you will probably need somewhere between 350g and 400g.) Make the dough into a ball and leave in the bowl, covered with a damp tea towel, for 15 minutes. This will help the gluten develop.

When the dough has rested for 15 minutes, knead it for five minutes. (This is less kneading than you would require with an all-wheat bread.) The dough should be soft and no longer sticky. Coat the inside of another large bowl with another tablespoon of butter and put the ball of kneaded dough into it, covering the dough ball with a tablespoon of softened butter too. Cover the bowl with the damp tea towel and leave in a warm (not hot) place for two hours to allow the dough to rise.

After two hours, punch the dough down and knead it gently for one minute. Divide the dough into two and form it into two round, flat loaves on baking sheets covered with greaseproof paper. Allow the bread to rise in a warm place again, this time uncovered, for forty minutes, while you heat the oven to 190° C (375° F). When the loaves have risen, drag a serrated knife across the tops to make a pattern.

Bake the loaves for around 45 minutes (start checking them from about 35 minutes in) until they are golden on top and sound hollow when you knock on the bottom. Glaze the loaves with the rest of the butter, melted. This bread is delicious served while it is still warm, but will keep for a few days in the bread crock.

Currant cakes

I love currants. The little dried rabbit-dropping things, I mean, not the tart currants that we grow in England, which are all very well in Cumberland sauce and so on, but lack the sweet seductiveness that you really need for an excellent cake. The currants I am talking about are Zante currants, which are tiny, tiny dried grapes grown absurdly sweet in the Greek sunshine. They're the fruit you'll find in Eccles cakes, and they have a wonderfully sweet and mildly tangy flavour, quite different from other dried vine fruits.

Horrifyingly, especially if you share my tidy British habit of compartmentalising foods, I discovered when living in France that on mainland Europe nobody differentiates between currants, sultanas and raisins. If it's small, dark and wrinkly, it's called a raisin, so if you are in France and want some currants, you're going to have to do a bit of light mime in the grocer if you want to buy proper, tiny Zante currants rather than horrible giant American golden raisins, which are processed with sulphur and taste rubbish. The golden raisin sometimes masquerades as a sultana in the UK too - beware.

I've iced these currant cakes with a really easy buttercream, which is deliciously mellow with the tartness of the dried fruit. To make about 18 cakes, you'll need:

Cakes
100g softened butter
100g caster sugar
100g self-raising flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
2 medium eggs
50g currants

Buttercream
175g softened butter
350g icing sugar
2 tablespoons warm water

Preheat the oven to 200° C (400° F). Lay 18 little paper cake cases in bun tins, and beat all the cake ingredients together in a mixing bowl with an electric whisk for two to three minutes, until the cake mixture is pale, smooth and fluffy. Divide the mixture between the cases (they should each be about half-full).

Bake in the hot oven for between 15 and 20 minutes. Devotees of this blog should be familiar with the Dr Weasel Aural Method of cake testing - when your little cakes come out of the oven, bring an ear close to them and listen carefully. If the cake is making tiny prickling noises, it is not ready: return it to the oven for a couple of minutes. A finished cake is silent. As Emily points out in the comments, a finished cake may not be *entirely* silent. Minimal prickling noises are allowed - do not allow your cakes to carbonise.

Put the cakes in their paper cases on a wire rack to cool. While they are cooling, make the buttercream icing by using your electric whisk to beat the butter, water and icing sugar together until it too is pale, smooth and fluffy. Spread the icing on the cakes when they are cold, and decorate any way you like.

Brandysnaps

I've never met a person who doesn't love brandysnaps. They're a buttery, toffee-crisp, lacy bit of teatime royalty. Fox's, the English biscuit people, started manufacturing these in the 1850s to sell to fairground traders, but they're a much older recipe (the owner of Fox's borrowed a family recipe from his neighbour in Yorkshire), which used to be cooked in the home. You can still buy them in packets - but they're much, much nicer when they're homemade.

There's no brandy in the recipe - from what I can make out, brandysnaps never contained any at any point in their history. Some modern recipes will suggest that the cream you serve them with should have a couple of tablespoons of brandy whipped into it, but after some experimentation I've decided that this is overkill (and inauthentic overkill at that). The gentle spicing of the brandysnap can be overwhelmed by a strong-tasting filling, so I have used a simple Chantilly (which is just cream whipped with sugar and vanilla) alongside them. These fragile little gingery curls are delicious with cream and soft fruit as a dessert, but they're also near-perfect eaten completely unadorned, alongside a cup of good coffee.

To make about 20 brandysnaps, you'll need:

75 g caster (superfine) sugar
125 g golden syrup
125 g salted butter
90 g plain flour
1½ teaspoons ground ginger
Zest of one lemon

Start by measuring out the sugar in your measuring bowl, and spread it carefully over the bottom of the bowl. Then measure out the golden syrup into the same bowl, on top of the sugar. This will stop the golden syrup from sticking to your bowl, and will ensure that you don't lose any because it's adhering. Tip the sugar and syrup straight out into a small saucepan, add the butter to the pan and cook them all together over a low flame, stirring with a wooden spoon, until the butter is melted and you have a smooth paste. Don't allow the mixture to boil. When it is smooth, remove the pan from the heat and tip in the flour, ginger and lemon zest. Stir vigorously until you have what looks like a smooth, thin batter.

Set the pan aside for about 30 minutes, until the mixture is cool, and heat the oven to 190° C (375° F). Grease a baking tin thoroughly.

You're going to be cooking the brandysnaps four at a time -the mixture spreads out so four just about fill a baking tin, and you will have to curl them while they are still warm - handling more than four at a time is very difficult because they harden quickly, and if you cook more than one tray at a time, by the time you get to your fifth it is likely to have set solid.

Place four heaped teaspoons of the mixture, about four inches apart, on the greased baking tin and put in the oven for ten minutes, until the brandysnaps are bubbly and lacy. Remove the tin from the oven and allow the brandysnaps to cool for about a minute, until they are stiff enough to manoeuvre. Use a spatula to release each flexible brandysnap from the tin, and wrap them around the handle of a wooden spoon to create the tube shape. Cool on a wire rack. (If you want brandysnap baskets rather than curls, drape them over an upturned ramekin rather than wrapping them round a spoon.)

Repeat the process for the rest of the mixture.

I served my brandysnaps with Chantilly (150 ml whipping cream whisked into stiff peaks with 2 teaspoons of vanilla sugar, or 2 teaspoons of caster sugar and a few drops of vanilla essence) and blueberries. You can pipe the cream into the little tubes or serve it alongside them, but don't fill them more than about half an hour before serving, or the brandysnaps will lose their crispness. Surprisingly, brandysnaps freeze very well once cooked, maintaining their crunch.

Pineapple upside-down cake

Two cake recipes in a week! This is blog democracy in action - many of you have asked for more dessert recipes, so in response, I have been baking like a demon.

This is a handsome cake. The caramel and fruit layer on a pineapple upside-down cake looks positively jewel-like, and tastes glorious, soaking into the cake to add a rich moistness to an already toothsome sponge. If, like me, you significantly lack cake-decorating skills, you'll like this recipe, which produces a foolproof but rather beautiful piece of baking. If you can get pineapple tinned in syrup rather than juice, use that for an extra kick of gloss and sweetness; however, if all that's available near you is the kind in juice, that will work perfectly well. (It's what I used here.)

To make one pineapple upside-down cake, you'll need:

50g salted butter
50g soft brown sugar
1 can pineapple rings (in syrup if possible)
Glacé cherries
3 tablespoons milk
175 g softened unsalted butter
175 g caster (superfine) sugar
3 large eggs
175 g self-raising flour
1½ teaspoons baking powder
Vanilla essence

Preheat the oven to 180° C (350° F).

Begin by greasing and lining a 25cm round cake tin with greaseproof paper. Don't use a springform tin - there is caramel in the pineapple layer which will dribble out of a tin with a loose bottom when heated.

Prepare the caramel by melting the salted butter, a couple of drops of vanilla essence and the soft brown sugar together in a small pan and boiling hard for five minutes. (Watch out here - the caramel will be very hot.) Pour the caramel into the bottom of the lined tin, and tip the tin carefully to make sure that it covers the base well.

Arrange the pineapple rings in a tight pattern on the bottom of the tin (see pictures), and put a glacé cherry in the middle of each one. Set the tin aside while you prepare the cake batter.

Put the milk, unsalted butter, sugar, flour, eggs and baking powder in a large bowl and beat with an electric mixer for two minutes, until the batter is pale and stiff. Spread the batter out over the pineapple pieces with a spatula and bake the cake for 50 minutes, until a skewer pushed into the centre of the cake comes out clean.

Allow the cake to cool for about ten minutes in its tin, until it is cool enough to handle (this sponge can be quite fragile when very hot), then place a plate over the top of the cake tin, hold it there firmly and turn the whole assembly upside down, so the cake slips out, upside-down, onto the plate. Slide the cake off the plate onto a cooling rack until it is completely cold.

Carrot cake

Carrot cake is often referred to by the squeamish, afraid of disturbing their guests by mentioning root vegetables, as passion cake. I've never been quite sure why, since the carrot (and, in my version, a mushed up banana) is a real star here; it's what goes to make the cake so sweet, dense and deliciously moist. This is an easy recipe of the 'bung everything in a bowl and stir' variety, and it's pretty foolproof, rising evenly and maintaining that lovely moist texture throughout. This cake keeps well for about five days in an airtight tin.

Cream cheese icing is a particular favourite of mine. You'll see some recipes where other flavourings are added to the cream cheese and sugar (orange zest is a common one, and some add crushed nuts), but I find the cool icing much better when it's plain, allowing the warm spices in the cake to come to the fore. (This cake is especially heavy on the nutmeg, which is fantastic with that banana.) For one cake, you'll need:

Cake
160ml melted butter
175g light brown sugar
3 eggs, beaten
½ teaspoon ground cinnamon
½ a nutmeg, grated
150g carrots, grated
1 banana, mashed
50g chopped pecan nuts
250g plain flour
1 tablespoon baking powder

Icing
160g cream cheese
80g icing sugar

Preheat the oven to 180°C (350°F). Grease and line a 20cm diameter springform cake tin.

Put all the cake ingredients in a mixing bowl and beat well. Put the mixture in the greased, lined cake tin, and bake for 45 minutes (at which point the cake should be golden - a skewer inserted in the middle should emerge clean). Cool the cake completely on a wire rack.

When the cake is cool, beat the cream cheese and icing sugar together with an electric whisk until it becomes fluffy. Spread over the cake, slice and munch.

Parmesan, tomato and onion bread

When I was a little girl, there was a bakery in our town which made a cheese and onion bread. It was never quite right - the cheese was too mild, there wasn't enough onion, and it needed very salty butter. All the same, I used to really look forward to eating it, preferably sliced with plenty of cheese and tomatoes layered on top, then baked in the Aga by my Dad.

This week, I decided to try to make my own cheesy, oniony bread, this time with my Dad's tomatoes baked into it. I used lots of parmesan, a nice big onion and some flavourful sun-dried tomatoes (along with a little of their oil). The results were great - no extra cheese, tomatoes or toasting required. To make one loaf, you'll need:

210 ml tepid water
1 level teaspoon caster sugar
1 packet easy-blend yeast
350g strong white flour
1 teaspoon fine salt
100g finely grated parmesan
1 ½ teaspoons dried oregano
1 minced clove garlic
1 large onion, sliced finely
5 sun-dried tomatoes in oil, chopped small
1 ½ tablespoons of the tomato oil
½ tablespoon fleur de sel or other coarse salt to sprinkle
Extra parmesan to sprinkle

Mix all the ingredients (except the tepid water and the salt and parmesan to sprinkle on at the end) in a large, warm bowl. Pour in the tepid water and mix well with a wooden spoon until the dough comes together. Transfer to a floured board and knead hard for ten minutes, until the dough is stretchy, glossy and no longer sticky. The onion pieces will snap as you knead, but don't worry about them.

When the dough is kneaded, put it back in the bowl and cover with some oiled cling film. Leave in a warm (not hot) place for about 40 minutes, until it has doubled in size. (The dough will take a couple of hours to rise at room temperature if you don't have a warm place to keep it.)

Take the dough from the bowl and knock it back down to its original size, kneading again for five minutes. If you want a traditional loaf shape, put it in a loaf tin. I decided to make a low, flattish bread in order to make the most of the lovely crust with its sweet caramelised onions poking through, so I shaped the dough on a non-stick baking sheet.

Sprinkle the bread with the salt and extra cheese, and leave to rise again, covered, for 40 minutes in a warm place. Meanwhile, heat the oven to 230° C (450° F).

When the dough has risen, place a large baking tray full of water at the bottom of the oven, and the tray with the bread on a rack in the middle of the oven. Bake the loaf for between 30 and 40 minutes. It will be ready when it sounds hollow when you tap the bottom. Serve with plenty of butter.

Green chilli cornbread

You don't see cornbread recipes often in the UK. This is a traditional American accompaniment, made from ground maize or cornmeal (if you are making this in England look for fine polenta in the supermarket), and uses baking powder rather than yeast for leavening. It has a fine scent and flavour, a deliciously crisp shell and a soft, fragrant crumb.

Cornbread is often made in a cast-iron skillet in America. I like to use muffin pans to make individual servings. It's extremely good with barbecued food - try it with pulled pork or sticky chicken.

At a Gospel Sunday service and brunch at the House of Blues (churchgoing comes with fried chicken as standard in Las Vegas) earlier this year, I found some fantastic little cornbread muffins, far tastier than other cornbread I'd tried. I asked the staff how they were made, and was told that the secret to the texture was the addition of canned, creamed sweetcorn to the batter. The cornbread was also studded with fresh jalapeño peppers. I've recreated them here, and I'm proud to report that they're pretty much exactly right.

To make twelve individual cornbread muffins, you'll need:

3 tablespoons butter
2 cups white cornmeal (polenta)
2 tablespoons soft brown sugar
1 cup milk
½ cup buttermilk
1 egg
1 teaspoon baking powder
½ teaspoon bicarbonate of soda (baking soda)
1 can creamed corn
4 green chillies (jalapeños if available), chopped finely

Turn the oven up to 220° C (425° F) and preheat the muffin pans with the butter dotted in the base of each. While the pans are heating, mix the cornmeal, sugar, milk, buttermilk, egg, baking powder and bicarb thoroughly in a large bowl.

Stir the creamed corn and chillis through the mixture. Pour an equal amount into each muffin tin, and bake in the hot oven for 20 minutes or until golden brown. A skewer inserted into the middle of one of the muffins should come out clean.

The muffins are delicious split and spread with some butter and a little honey (even better if you whisk the butter and honey together before spreading, for some reason). You can also use them to accompany savoury dishes. The muffins will keep well, maintaining their crisp surface, in an airtight box for a few days.

Peanut cookie drops with fleur de sel

The tiny sprinkle of fleur de sel on each of these little honey peanut cookies brings out the lovely peanut flavour without getting in the way of their honeyed sweetness. The finished biscuit is soft and a little puffy, and goes very well with a cup of coffee at the end of a meal.

There's no flour in these, just the peanut butter, so these are great if you've got guests who can't eat wheat. These cookies use honey instead of sugar, and are also good with a little extra honey drizzled over the top at the end if you don't like the idea of the fleur de sel.

Fleur de sel is a hand-harvested salt made from the very top layer of evaporated salt, collected before it sinks to the bottom of the salt pan. Its name comes from the shape of the salt crystal - fleur de sel comes in beautiful, frilly little crystals a bit like a large snowflake. You can also buy Portuguese flor de sal, which is just the same, but less expensive. I've heard suggestions that it's meant to taste saltier than normal table salt, but that's not my experience with it. I do, however, think it has a very fine taste and a lovely texture, and it looks great on the finished plate. At the moment we use a small pot (from our break in Hyeres last summer) as table salt, and there's a large bag from Portugal in my salt pig which I use for cooking.

To make about 60 peanut cookie drops you'll need:

350g (1 ½ cups) peanut butter
250g (¾ cup) runny honey
2 egg whites
Fleur de sel to sprinkle

Preheat the oven to 180° C. Beat together the peanut butter and honey with the egg whites (I used an electric whisk, but elbow grease will do the job too) until everything is smooth. The oils from the peanut butter may make the mixture glossy as you beat - don't worry if they do.

Place teaspoonsful of the mixture onto non-stick baking trays, a couple of inches apart. Bake for ten minutes until golden and a little puffy. Sprinkle over a very little fleur de sel (or drizzle with honey for a different take on things).

These little biscuits will keep in airtight containers for a few days.

Chocolate brownies

I've had a couple of emails asking for a brownies recipe to accompany the blondies I posted here a few weeks ago. Your wish, dear reader, is my command.

These brownies are very easy to make. They're squodgy, squishy, chocolatey and have that lovely caramel-nut flavour that only toasted pecans can give. It's very easy to adapt this recipe - if you want to try toasted hazelnuts instead of the pecans, or to add some chocolate chips, you have my blessing.

For families who fight over the slices of brownie which have come from the edge of the tin (the pieces with a crisp, chewy edge and a wonderful gradation of softness into the middle), there's a solution to your problems: the Edge Brownie Pan. This baking tin is designed like paths in a maze, and ensures that every slice of brownie you bake has at least two edges. (The cook deserves the pieces with three.) I really must buy one of these.

Use a chocolate which has as high a percentage of cocoa solids as you can find. To make a large tray (mine measures 10 x 14 inches, just right for making enough brownies for a party), you'll need:

1 pat salted butter (8 oz, or 110 g)
4 oz (100g) plain dark chocolate, high in cocoa solids
4 eggs
1 lb (450g) caster sugar
4 oz (100g) plain flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon vanilla essence
Pinch of salt
6 oz (150g) toasted pecan nuts

You can toast the nuts yourself in a dry frying pan over a medium flame. Watch carefully to make sure the nuts do not burn - they can turn from nicely toasted to bitter and burned in moments.

Preheat the oven to 180° C (350°F).

Melt the butter and chocolate together. You can use the microwave or a bowl suspended over some boiling water (a bain marie).

While the butter and chocolate are melting, beat the eggs, salt and sugar together with the vanilla essence, and line a baking tin with greaseproof paper. Stir the chocolate mixture into the egg mixture and sieve the flour into the bowl. Stir until everything is well blended.

Turn out the brownie mix into the lined tin, and sprinkle the pecans over the raw batter. (I prefer to add the pecans to the mix when it's in the tray rather than adding them in the bowl, as it means you'll get a more even distribution.) Bake in the oven for about 30 minutes, until the mixture starts to come away from the sides and the top has a dry, crackling look to it. It will still be soft in the centre.

While the brownies are still hot from the oven, divide into squares. After about ten minutes they will have firmed up enough to transfer to racks to cool.

Dr Weasel's lemon raspberry cake

Dr Weasel, my fine and upstanding husband, has an uncontrollable urge to bake about once a year. This year's annual cake orgy has just taken place - he made several for a shared birthday party at work, where twenty ageing computer programmers played competitive Dance Dance Revolution in the office and ate cake at each other.

There were cupcakes, a couple of chocolate cakes, trays of brownies and this lemon raspberry confection. This particular cake was going to be a nice short semolina sponge, sliced across and glued together with jam and whipped cream. Unfortunately, it didn't really rise enough in the middle to be sliced in two across the bottom successfully, but Dr Weasel, undaunted, raided the fridge and made one of the best quick cake toppings I've tried. He successfully disguised any sag in the middle, created something quite delicious, and ended up with something nearly as popular as my brownies. I am shocked. Has he been having lessons while I've not been looking?

This cake will work just as well if your semolina sponge rises better than Dr Weasel's did (I think his egg whites were not whipped sufficiently - it still tasted brilliant, though). You'll need:

4 oz (100 g) caster sugar
2 oz (50 g) fine semolina
½ oz (15 g) ground almonds
3 separated eggs
Juice and zest of a lemon
5 fl oz (150 ml) whipping cream
5 tablespoons lemon curd
Fresh raspberries to cover (about a punnet)

Preheat the oven to 180° C. Grease and line a round cake tin.

Whisk the egg yolks and sugar together with an electric whisk until they are pale and frothy. Add the lemon juice and keep whisking until the mixture thickens. Fold in the lemon zest, semolina and almonds.

Clean the blades of the whisk very carefully to remove any trace of egg yolk. In a different bowl, whisk the whites of the eggs until they form soft peaks. Fold the beaten whites into the semolina and yolks mixture, turn into your lined cake tin and bake for about 30 minutes until golden (and, hopefully, risen).

When cool enough to handle, turn the cake out onto a wire rack and cool completely. Meanwhile, whisk the cream until it is stiff, fold in the lemon curd and use a palate knife to spread the thick lemon cream over the top of the cake. Stud the surface with raspberries and serve in slices.

Blondies

UK readers might not be familiar with blondies, one of my favourite American baking recipes. Imagine a giant, tray-baked, chocolate-chip cookie, or a squashy brownie made from a sweet cookie dough instead of the regular chocolate dough. This is an easy, quick recipe, and it'll make you a heap of blondies big enough to feed everyone in the house several times over.

I don't buy chocolate chips or chunks for baking; instead, I use a really good bar of chocolate (Green and Black's is excellent for cooking) and chop it up with a large knife. It only takes a couple of minutes, and doing it this way means you'll be able to use a much higher quality chocolate in your baking than you can usually find in ready-chipped chunks.

To make 30 squares, you'll need:

2 cups plain flour
1 heaped teaspoon baking powder
1 cup melted butter
2 cups soft light brown sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 teaspoon almond extract
2 eggs
1 cup pecan nuts
A 150g bar of good dark chocolate, chopped into chunks with a large knife

Preheat the oven to 180° C (350° F).

Melt the butter and use a fork to mix it well with the sugar and almond and vanilla extracts, then beat in the eggs with the fork. Add the sieved flour and baking powder, blend well with the fork, then stir in the nuts and chocolate. Spread the mixture evenly into a non-stick baking dish to a depth of about a centimetre, and bake for 30 minutes, until the blondies are coming away from the sides of the dish. They will be crisp at the edges and soft in the middle.

Feel free to experiment a bit with these - use milk chocolate, a different kind of nut, more chocolate, dried fruits and whatever you feel like.

Slice into thirty pieces and serve as soon as the blondies are cool. These keep well in an airtight box, although my guess is that you'll have eaten them all before you get a chance to test how well they keep.

Curry puffs

I'm having a bit of a Malaysian food binge at the moment, and the beef curry puff is about as Malaysian as you can get. These little pasties are made from a mouth-meltingly short, flaky pastry, and are filled with a rich beef, onion and potato curry.

There are as many variations on the curry puff as there are cooks. Some prefer a shortcrust pastry, some like a chicken or vegetable filling - I've also seen sardine in Malaysia. Some are so fiercely spiced you need to cool your tongue between bites, some so subtle that they come across...well...a bit Cornish pasty. This recipe is just gorgeous - serve some curry puffs next time you have some friends round and just watch how fast they vanish. Try to use beef dripping to fry the filling if you can find it; it gives the curry puffs a delicious beefy depth. (Use vegetable oil if you can't find any.)

To make about 30 you'll need:

Filling
Beef dripping to fry
12 oz onions, diced
12 oz waxy potato, cut into 1cm cubes
1 teaspoon ginger, diced very fine
5 cloves garlic, diced very fine
8 shallots, sliced thinly
1 lb minced beef
4 tablespoons Madras curry powder
1 can coconut milk
Juice of 1 lemon
2 tablespoons caster sugar
3 teaspoons salt

Pastry
1 lb flour
4 oz butter
8 oz lard
1 egg, and another to glaze
2 tablespoons sugar
Juice of ½ a lemon
6 fl oz water

Start by cooking the filling. Stir fry the onions in a tablespoon of beef dripping until they are soft and translucent. Remove them to a bowl and set aside. Add another tablespoon of dripping to the pan and fry the potato cubes in the same wok with a pinch of salt until they begin to take on a little colour, then pour over 4 fl oz of water and put the lid on, reducing the heat to a simmer. Cook for between five and ten minutes, until the potatoes are cooked through. Put them in the bowl with the onions.

In the same wok, stir fry the ginger, garlic and shallots in a little more dripping. When the spices are giving off their scent, add the beef and stir-fry for five minutes until well mixed. Add the curry powder and continue to stir-fry until all the beef is coloured. Add the onion and potato, stir thoroughly, then add the coconut milk, sugar, salt and lemon juice.

Reduce the heat to a low simmer, and reduce the mixture until it's thick and glistening. Taste, adding more lemon juice and salt if you think it needs it. Cool and refrigerate. (This is important - you'll find the puffs much easier to fill if the curry is cold. A warm filling will be slightly runny.)
You can make the pastry and fill the puffs on the same day you prepare the filling, but the filling is one of these things that really improves by being kept in the fridge for a day - the flavours deepen and meld.

To make the pastry, mix the egg, sugar, salt, water and lemon in a measuring jug and refrigerate until it's nice and cold. Sieve the flour into a bowl, and rub in the butter until the mixture looks like breadcrumbs. Cut the lard into little cubes (about the same size as you cut the potato) and blend it well with the flour/butter mixture. Add the contents of the measuring jug and bring everything together gently with your hands. Rest the pastry in the fridge, wrapped in clingfilm, for an hour.

Slice the pastry in two and roll out half into a thin rectangle. Fold the rectangle into three (as if you were folding an A4 sheet to fit in an envelope) and roll it out again. Repeat the folding and rolling four times. Cut out rounds about ½ cm thick with a large fluted pastry cutter and repeat the process with the other piece of pastry. (If you've scraps left over, just roll them out and use the cutter on them.)

Beat an egg and put it in a cup where you can reach it easily as you work.

Put a tablespoon of filling in the middle of each pastry circle, and wipe some beaten egg around half the edge. Press each edge together to seal and crimp the curry puff. Arrange the puffs on a baking tray and brush each with the beaten egg to glaze.

Bake at 230° C for the first 10 minutes, then reduce the heat to 200° for 20 minutes. Cool (if you can bear to - ours usually go straight from the oven into slobbering mouths) on a cake rack.

Pepper-hot apple cake

The apples are falling off my trees as fast as I can core, peel, slice and bag them for freezing. At this time of year, when you've apples galore, try recipes like this which are extremely generous with the fruit; a cake crammed with them will be darkly moist and juicy.

Freshly ground black pepper and a tiny pinch of cayenne lift the cinnamon in this cake and somehow make the apples taste all the more applesome. I've made a cream cheese icing for no other reason that that it's my favourite. If you want to try something different, try a buttercream icing with two teaspoons of ground cinnamon worked through it instead.

You'll need:

Cake
4 large cooking apples, peeled, cored and diced into ½-inch squares
2 eggs
4 oz softened butter
4 fl oz (8 tablespoons) milk
1 lb castor sugar
½ teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons bicarbonate of soda
2 teaspoons cinnamon
6 twists of the pepper grinder
1 pinch cayenne pepper
1 lb flour

Icing
8 oz cream cheese
10 oz icing sugar

Place all the cake ingredients except the apples in a large bowl, and mix thoroughly using a hand blender or a wooden spoon and elbow grease. When the ingredients are well blended, add the apple chunks to the bowl and combine with the other ingredients. Pour everything into a greased springform tin, and bake at 180° C for an hour. After an hour, test with a skewer (if the skewer comes out sticky, the cake is not finished). When the cake is cooked, set aside to cool.

Blend the cream cheese and icing sugar and spread over the surface of the cake when it has cooled. This cake is especially nice in the afternoon with a big cup of tea.

Butterfly cakes

These little buttercream-filled fairy cakes were Mr Weasel's favourite when he was a kid. He's the baker in the house, and on getting home today he ran for the handmixer, claiming an attack of cake nostalgia.

He claims that being a computer scientist has given him an unparalleled skill for following instructions, and says this is why he's so very good at baking. I think he was visited by a buxom, greasy-fingered fairy-godmother with cake crumbs in her hair, a wooden spoon for a wand and golden syrup down her apron when he was in his cradle, but who am I to say?

The cake batter which makes the body of these is the same batter we used for the pink cakes at last week's party. You'll need:

Cake mixture
100g soft butter
100g caster sugar
2 eggs
100g self-raising flour
1 teaspoon baking powder

Beat the lot together with a handwhisk until pale and airy, divide between 18 cake cases and bake at 200°c for around 20 minutes, until golden. Use the Mr Weasel Aural Method to work out whether your cakes are done - listen to them when they come out of the oven (get close, but don't burn your ear). If the cakes are hissing and popping, they're not done. Put them back in for a few minutes and try again.

When the cakes are ready, remove them to a metal rack to cool.

While the little cakes are cooling, make a buttercream icing. You'll need:

Buttercream icing
175g soft butter (use butter you've left out for a while, not the stuff with added vegetable oil in tubs)
350g icing sugar
A few drops vanilla essence

Chop the butter into little pieces, and place in a bowl with the icing sugar and two teaspoons of water. Beat the butter and icing sugar together with an electric whisk until well mixed and pale in colour. That's it: piece of cake. (Hur hur.)

When the cakes are cool (important, this coolness; a warm cake may be crumbly, but a cool one will slice readily), slice off the top and cut it in half. Put a teaspoon of the icing on the cut cake surface, and put the half-slices of lid back on to look like little wings. Open mouth, insert cake and reminisce about children's parties.