o frabjous day!

Category: Baking

  • Spiced Up Ginger Cookies

    Part One of my great Christmas Baking Extravaganza – these gorgeous chewy little ginger cookies. This recipe is from Baking Sheet, and they turned out really well (I made a couple of small substitutions). They were gorgeous five minutes out of the oven – a crisp crunch of sugar on the outside, warm chewy ginger…

  • Carrot and Raisin Muffins

    These delicious, lightly sweet muffins are perfect for breakfast or morning tea, have a million variations to be experimented with, and are delicious on their own, or spread with butter, depending on your taste for decadence. Another recipe from the excellent Diana Linfoot’s Muffin Magic. 3 eggs 1/2 cup sugar or honey 1/2 vegetable oil…

  • Quadruple Chocolate Loaf Cake

    This is another wonderful Nigella Lawson chocolate cake recipe – this one’s from the “Chocolate Cake Hall of Fame” chapter in Feast. It’s a dense, yet surprisingly light, loaf cake – not too light, however, and it goes wonderfully with cream. It’s a sweet chocolate cake, and you could make it sweeter by using milk,…

  • Strawberry Cupcakes

    Calling these “Strawberry Cupcakes” is a little misleading – they’re actually a plain butter cake, with strawberry flavoured icing. Much tastier than the lemon version below, and much prettier as well. (Soon I’m going to try and make a cupcake that looks more sophisticated, but I’m rather attached to the childish versions at the moment.)…

  • Lemon Cupcakes

    This wasn’t the most attractive or successful cupcake experiment. Not only did I go completely overboard with the icing (doesn’t it remind you of those little crabs at the beach that leave behind swirls of sand?), but the cake itself wasn’t enormously appetising – I grated the lemon rind too roughly, so that each cake…

  • Chocolate Cupcakes

    I’d never made cupcakes before, but I love the concept of little decorated cakes. Aren’t these cute? Next time I’m going to go for a slightly more adult colour – a deep red, or purple. I got the inspiration for this recipe from this, but changed the recipe to cater to the ingredients I had…

  • White Chocolate and Walnut Cookies

    I based these on this recipe, but due to stinginess I used walnuts instead of macadamias. I’m not a big fan of white chocolate, but I had bought a packet of white chocolate chips in the supermarket a few weeks ago, for reasons known only to some obscure part of my brain. So cookies were…

  • Gateau Lawrence

    This flourless chocolate cake is from a recipe book by Joanne Harris called French Kitchen, which helpfully includes an entire chapter on chocolate, including the chilli hot chocolate referred to in Chocolat. It’s extremely dense and heavy, a sticky feast of a cake, and as you can see from the above picture, very soft. The…

  • Chocolate Guinness Cake

    This is a Nigella Lawson recipe, from Feast. I was a bit hesitant about it – I don’t like beer, and I think Guinness is quite revolting. And beer and chocolate just sounds wrong. But the boyfriend often has Guinness in the fridge, so I stole one to try this cake. (It was the last…

  • Coffee, Date and Chocolate Muffins (SHF #11)

    My first attempt at Sugar High Friday. This month’s theme was coffee, and as I don’t use a lot of coffee in baking, I had to do a bit of searching to find this recipe. It’s a Diana Linfoot recipe, as usual with muffins, and is from More Muffin Magic. She writes, “These muffins have…