Cupcakes

This is another recipe from the Hummingbird Bakery Cookbook. The brownies were great, but these chocolate and hazelnut cupcakes are marriage material. They’re also a doddle to make: even the fiddly bit turned out to not be fiddly.
You will need:
100g plain flour
20g cocoa powder
140g caster sugar
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
pinch of salt
40g butter, at room [...]

Brownies on a winter’s day

For my last birthday, the one where I became I-don’t-always-remember-how-old, Lauren gave me The Hummingbird Bakery recipe book. Suzy came to tea last night and so I thought it was about time I delved into the fattening pages of the book and made brownies for our dessert. As they’re somewhat too squodgy to put in [...]

Ballet and afternoon tea

My Christmas present from Suzy this year was a very posh one: a ticket to The Nutcracker at the Royal Opera House and afternoon tea at The Milestone Hotel.
We took a packed train to Charing Cross, meeting up along the way with some of Suzy’s work colleagues who would be joining us. Suzy spotted an [...]

Happy to help

When you come to pay for your wares at our local branch of WHSmith – a stationery and book shop – the queue to the tills is lead carefully through a steep-sided valley of half-price Terry’s chocolate oranges.
Oh-ho, Mr and Mrs Marketing Department, I saw what you did there with your impulse buy chocolate [...]

Yesterday’s birthday cake

It’s what’s for breakfast.
I had a good day yesterday, pottering about, spending all afternoon making chocolate brownies, talking to friends, listening to music, being serenaded in person and on the phone and having curry at a restaurant with my family. So, this is 28.

Tomato sauce

We had a pile of tomatoes to deal with and as a variety of parts of them had gone a bit blight-manky, we decided to make tomato sauce from them. We threw them into boiling water and then cold to get their skins off. I burned my knuckle twice on the metal bowl that held [...]

Cucumber cake

The cucumbers in my patch are growing faster than I can eat them, so when I saw a recipe for courgette cake in The Week, I thought I’d give it a go with cucumber instead. Thus Nigel Slater’s courgette cake became my cucumber cake. The result is very tasty – light, but still full of [...]