my Magimix

I’ve had my Magimix for years – I bought it, and a whole batch of blades, many years ago, when I was much better off than I am now 🙂 It’s always sat there on the worktop, but I don’t actually use it all that much – veg for soup, whipping up the odd cake when…

orange and lemon cake

Having made the Christmas cake yesterday, I was all set to make some mincemeat. I started by blitzing an orange and a lemon in the food processor, and then pulled opened the baking cupboard to get at all the other ingredients (they’re all kept in a pull out cupboard).  And there, on the top shelf,…

the desiccated orange made a chocolate orange cake

Dear Reader, I have a confession to make. I had to throw out an orange. Oh, the shame. We’re not very good with fruit – we buy it, and then we don’t eat it, so this orange had languished in the bowl for quite a while, and had gone mouldy. It was accompanied by a…

christmas cakes 2013

  Please excuse the chocolate dinosaur cakes. They were an experiment which clearly needs more work. No wonder the bloody creatures are extinct. I actually got round to doing my Christmas cakes reasonably early (for me) this year. And inspired by my friend Jane’s most excellent, if sporadic, food blog, I have done them slightly…

banana and *chocolate* cakes

Neither Pete nor I are especially fond of bananas in their raw form, but I bought some for the GrandToad’s visit a few days ago. He didn’t really want them either, so there were five bananas going brown in the fruit bowl. Not a problem – banana cake! I use a basic recipe refined over…

a chicken pie and a raspberry cake

I’ve written before about everlasting chicken. We don’t throw any of it away, except the bones, and then only when they’ve been boiled up for soup. I sometimes put the last bits of the meat into a pie filling, and bung that in the freezer, and when we had a friend coming for supper the…

cranberry and lemon cake

Like most people, I tend to overbuy at Christmas, and that’s even with cutting back a *lot*. We had a couple of punnets of fresh cranberries lurking in the back of the fridge; well, when I say “fresh”, $deity alone know what they do to them to make them keep for over two months, but…

lime, ginger and coconut cake

We went to Staithes (on the North Yorkshire coast) on Saturday, and had a cup of tea and a slice of this delicious cake (or one very like it). It was so delicious that I came home determined to try and make one, and after a bit of googling and adjustment, here’s what I came…

coconut and banana cake

We found a kilogram of desiccated coconut in the larder box – no idea why we bought such a huge amount, but it must be used up! There were four small, brown bananas in a box in the fridge  – I read somewhere that they will keep for ages like that, so was experimenting; seems…

wholemeal banana cake

I run a community recipe site called Nibblous, and if you Google for banana cake, you’ll find my friend Jaqui’s recipe is the number one hit, which I’m quite pleased about! I’ve long used a similar recipe to that myself for banana cake, but I’ve refined it quite a bit over the years, and I…