Category: Cakes and biscuits

Vegan pumpkin spice cookies

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The kids are out and about, hopefully not terrifying the neighbours too much with their Halloween antics, so I’m home alone – answering the door to a steady flow of creepy (and quite cute) trick or treaters.

I think I got the better deal. It’s a chilly night and has just started to drizzle, while I’m sat here, warm and cosy with a big mug of tea and a couple of these delicious pumpkin spice cookies. My oldest baked them today to take over to her Halloween sleepover. Her friend’s mum is vegan and she was keen to make them dairy-free so everyone could enjoy them. I’m sure they will!

Vegan pumpkin spice cookies

Makes around 15

175g plain flour
1 tsp ground cloves
1 tsp ground cinnamon
1 tsp ground ginger
1 tsp ground nutmeg
1 tsp baking powder
60g vegan spread or margarine
90g demerara sugar
1 tbsp vegetable oil
2 tbsp golden syrup (plus a little more for fixing the icing in place)
250g orange ready to roll icing
coloured writing icing (we used black, green and red)
icing sugar (for dusting)

Sieve the flour into a large bowl and stir in the spices and baking powder.

Add the margarine in small chunks and rub it into the flour mixture with your fingers until it looks like breadcrumbs. Then stir in the demerara sugar.

In another bowk, mix the oil and golden syrup together. Gradually stir this into the rest of the mixture, then use your hands to bring it all together to form a dough. Knead until smooth.

Wrap the dough in cling film and place in the fridge for 15 minutes.

Preheat oven to 170ºC / gas mark 3. Grease and line a couple of baking trays with greaseproof paper.

Flour your surface, and then roll out the dough to about 5mm thick. Use a sharp knife to carefully cut out pumpkin shapes.

Transfer to the lined baking trays and bake for 10 to 12 minutes, or until lightly golden-brown. After a few minutes, transfer to a cooling rack and leave to cool completely before decorating.

Dust your surface and rolling pin with a little icing sugar, and roll out the orange icing until it’s as thin as you can get it. Cut out pumpkin shapes, slightly smaller than the cookies. Fix into place by brushing with a little golden syrup. Draw on your pumpkin faces and little green stalks with the coloured writing icing, and leave to dry for half an hour or so.

Autumn half-term baking with kids

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I’m off work this week to spend the half-term school holidays at home with the kids and – what a surprise – the weather is truly miserable. So yes, we’re resorting to our favourite rainy day activity: baking. We’ve been having fun experimenting with edible decorations from Dr Oetker and have come up with three tasty bakes you might like to try out with your gang the next time rainy day boredom sets in. Continue reading “Autumn half-term baking with kids” →

Our ghastly Halloween showstopper

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Every year I watch the Great British Bake Off and every year I feel inspired to get the kids in the kitchen to join me in creating some crazy, outlandish showstopper-style masterpiece*.

The problem is, and I know I’ve said this before on the blog, but I’m just not a natural-born baker. That’s not to say my bakes don’t taste good. Nine times out of ten they most certainly do. But all too often they just don’t look good. And that’s the whole point of a showstopper, isn’t it? To impress? To wow? So perhaps our attempt this year at a ghoulish bake for Halloween is more a pause-glance-and-nod-approvingly before moving on than a full-blown stop-them-in-their-tracks-in-awe showstopper. The children loved it though, and that’s what’s most important.

*easily interchangeable with ‘monstrosity’, but quite appropriate really for this time of year. Continue reading “Our ghastly Halloween showstopper” →

Oatie cookies with ginger and chocolate

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Who can resist an oatie cookie, especially one that’s crammed with gooey dark chocolate and chewy chunks of crystallised ginger? I know I certainly can’t, and neither can my children. They’re the perfect biscuit for a spot of baking with the kids on a wet Saturday afternoon and an ideal snack for when they get home after school – if there any are left from the weekend that is.
Continue reading “Oatie cookies with ginger and chocolate” →

Sloe syrup drizzle cake with caraway seeds

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sloe syrup drizzle cake with caraway seeds

Instead of bottling a batch of sloe gin this year with my haul of sloe berries from the blackthorn in our garden, I decided to try something different and created sloe syrup using a recipe from Fuss Free Flavours.

It’s wonderful stuff and extremely versatile. Delicious poured over ice cream or pancakes, it is also perfect as a mixer for cocktails or adding to sparkling wine or champagne, while my daughters like it as a cordial mixed with fizzy water or lemonade.

And it also works a treat in baking, as in this variation on a lemon drizzle cake. I took a recipe for buttermilk loaf cake from the brilliant What To Bake And How To Bake It by Jane Hornby, added a few caraway seeds (I can’t get enough of these in cakes at the moment) and liberally doused the cake, while still warm from the oven, in the sweet, sticky sloe syrup. The end result is simply gorgeous and very, very moreish. Continue reading “Sloe syrup drizzle cake with caraway seeds” →

Jessie’s chocolate orange chess cake

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chess cake5

My oldest daughter has a thing for making the teeny-tiniest models out of Plasticine. She loves to create tiny food items, like burgers and cakes, and she recently made miniatures of the Blue Peter characters in order to try and win herself another BP badge.

blue peter

For her current homework assignment, Jessie decided to bring two of her favourite activities, model-making and baking, together in the form of this ambitious chocolate chess cake, inspired by the Great British Bake Off and now Junior Bake Off.

New Horizons is the theme of her homework project and over the course of a month, she has to  try her hand at a number of new things and write them up as a special report. As well as this monumental show-stopper of a bake, she’s also tried her hand at SLR photography, stop motion videos and is having a squash lesson from her dad at the weekend.

To be totally honest, I wasn’t entirely sure she’d make this baking experiment work. Why not start with flapjacks or a fridge cake? But work it most certainly did. Not only did it look suitably impressive, it was also extremely delicious too. Continue reading “Jessie’s chocolate orange chess cake” →

Baking with kids: iced butter biscuits

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ao bake Collage

As my children grow older, so we grow more adventurous in the kitchen. From pizzas and pasta to carrot cake and chilli con carne, my kids are taking on more and more ambitious projects in the kitchen. But one thing we come back to time and time again, is this easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy recipe for good old iced butter biscuits.
Continue reading “Baking with kids: iced butter biscuits” →

Chocolate cheesecake with blackberry cream

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Chocolate Cheesecake Collage

I feel obliged to issue a public health warning before I go any further with this post. This dessert is not for the faint-hearted and certainly not for anyone on a calorie-controlled diet. It’s extremely rich and something of a colossal beast, easily serving 12 to 14 people, so only make this if you’ve got the man, woman and child-power to tackle it, and be sure not to feed them too much beforehand. Continue reading “Chocolate cheesecake with blackberry cream” →

Strawberry ice cream sundaes with rosemary shortbread

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Strawberry ice cream sundae with rosemary shortbread4

I didn’t realise strawberries with rosemary was a particularly classic combination but on consulting the oracle that is Google I see cooks all over the world are pairing them. This is the first time I’ve tried them together and I think they make a brilliant partnership, especially in this spectacularly simple ice cream sundae.

And with rosemary biscotti being a bit of a winner on last week’s Great British Bake Off, I think rosemary biscuits could turn out to be rather trendy. Not that I keep up with cooking trends in the slightest. I’m always a tad late to the party on that score. I only tried matcha for the first time a couple of months ago, while coconut oil made its first appearance in my cooking just the other day.

But back to those sundaes…

I made the rosemary shortbread to accompany the Rich Clotted Cream ice cream we brought home with us from our recent visit to the marvellous Marshfield Farm. My kids demanded sundaes and as I’m the biggest sucker around for ice cream piled high in a tall glass, who was I to refuse? Strawberries were the obvious choice to go with clotted cream and shortbread seemed the obvious choice for strawberries. And then the rosemary outside the back door called to me, and this sundae was born. Continue reading “Strawberry ice cream sundaes with rosemary shortbread” →