Tag: Cake

  • Moist Carrot Cake with Maple Cream Cheese Frosting

    Moist Carrot Cake with Maple Cream Cheese Frosting

    Unlike many bakers, I didn’t grow up baking at my grandmother’s knee. In fact, my most regular activity in my granny’s kitchen was drying the dishes (can you even qualify that as a skill? – ‘oh her baking is delicious’ ‘you haven’t seen anything, just watch her dry up’). My granny was of the generation…

  • Hummingbird Cake with Cream Cheese Frosting

    Hummingbird Cake with Cream Cheese Frosting

    Everyone has a repertoire. Even if cooking simply isn’t your thing or you pay a private chef to cook for you, everyone has a practiced dish up their sleeve. Whether it’s a spaghetti Bolognese, the Sunday roast, or a secret family recipe, it’s the dish you return to like a well-worn pair of slippers. Its comfort…

  • The baker’s return

    The baker’s return

    When I last wrote I waxed lyrical like a lovesick teenager about my one true love: baking, and how deprived I am without a cookie jar of homemade treats to hand. I can now say, dear reader, that, without being lude, that craving has at last been fulfilled. My return to the family home for…

  • Chocolate Rocky Road & Salted Caramel Filled Chocolate Cupcakes

    Chocolate Rocky Road & Salted Caramel Filled Chocolate Cupcakes

    It was Calum’s birthday (or as he liked to remind me, his ‘special day’). Presents, cards, birthday activities were incidental; my focus was, of course, his cake. Last year I made a large Victoria sponge with white fondant icing, bursting with jam and cream, and neatly decorated with Smarties. We polished off a couple of…

  • Bread and cake

    Bread and cake

    I love these kind of days. The great bowl of sky is bright peacock blue and clear all the way across from one sky scrapper to the other. Only thin white streaks scud across as planes drift soundlessly from one destination to another. It is warm, not uncanny for this time of year but maybe…

  • Sticky plum meringue cake

    Sticky plum meringue cake

    I’m noticing a recurring theme with my blog posts. A majority focus on the sweet side of life, and what could be more sweet than sugar? Ah, how blessed you are you sweet granules which transform many a dish into something magnificent. Let’s see what you can do with this sticky plum meringue cake. Last…

  • And now for cake: the best chocolate cake

    And now for cake: the best chocolate cake

    Every now and then I wonder who tried things first and the circumstances they did it in. What made so-and-so think it would be a good idea to mix together flour, eggs, sugar and butter, put it in the oven and hey presto, ‘Look at this, it’s sweet and fluffy and looks like the sponge…