It’s Jam Time!

It’s that time of the year again! I love finding fruit in the hedgerows and turning it into jams or freezing it for fruit crumbles and tarts in the depths of winter. The last couple of weeks have been filled with picking, freezing and then jamming a huge crop of wild plums of all different […]

Madeira cakes in all sizes!

I have had a request for a scaled up version of my madeira cake recipe for a wedding cake. The texture of madeira cake is firm enough to cope with ornate icing which makes it a good choice for wedding cakes. However, you do have to remember that it does not keep like a fruit […]

Dairy Free Biscuits

I am currently playing around with an unbaked cheesecake recipe and to this end I have been investigating the availability of dairy free biscuits for the base. While I like baking biscuits very much, I find I’m much less enthusiastic if I know I’m baking them simply in order to crush them up for crumbs. […]

Fast and Fabulous Fruit Loaf

This is a fabulously fruity and amazingly easy fruit loaf. It’s a great recipe to make with children. I made this with mine when they were not much more than 18 months old. Once they can stand on a chair, they can help to choose the proportions of the dried fruit and put handfuls onto […]

Traditional Easter Simnel Cake

This is our favourite recipe for a traditional Simnel Cake. It’s based on Nigella Lawson’s recipe with tweaks to make it work dairy free. The marzipan balls on top are great fun for the children to make. There are supposed to be eleven (for the disciples of Christ minus Judas, of course) but, when you […]

Sticky Fingers

To make these treats you will need a heavy-bottomed saucepan and a shallow baking tray. A swiss roll tin would do fine, but remember that you are going to be cutting the fingers up in the tin, so don’t use a precious, non-stick tin. Alternatively, you can line the tin with foil and just […]

Mince Tart

Like a mince pie, but better!

This makes a great party offering: it looks fantastic and isn’t hard to do! Much more impressive than mince pies for the end of a dinner party, less effort and very Christmassy with a little twist of originality. Enjoy!

You will need an 11″ / 28cm loose […]

Custard

“Achieving dairy-free custard which will pass muster in comparison with the real thing is possible. It’s taken me about four years of tweaking to get the recipe right, but now I have something which even sceptical non-dairy-free relations have to admit tastes very much like proper custard. ”

That’s what I said about four years […]