o frabjous day!

Category: Baking

  • Dense Chocolate Loaf Cake

    This is a Nigella Lawson recipe from How To Be a Domestic Goddess, and I’ve been a little hesitant about trying it, because it looks so moist and sticky, and as Nigella and I have vastly different ovens, I worried about being able to tell if it was cooked. However, a craving for chocolate cake…

  • Chocolate Fudge Cake

    This chocolate cake recipe is my basic, birthday cake recipe that I generally use. It’s simple and easy, and despite using cocoa powder rather than melted chocolate, it really is delicious fudgy. I made a chocolate ganache for the first time to go with it, and while it made the cake very darkly chocolatey, I…

  • Banana and Pecan Bread

    This is adapted from a Doris Brett recipe. Everyone who bakes has their perfect banana bread recipe, but I’m not quite sure that this is mine. It’s delicious, moist and uses plenty of bananas (which is an important element in making banana bread – usually it’s done to use up overripe bananas that have been…

  • Mars Bar Biscuits

    I had a craving for a sweet chocolate biscuit one night, and came up with these. The pieces of Mars Bar make chewy chocolate caramel chunks within the dough. I cooked mine for too long, and they’re more crunchy than I’d like, although the chewiness of the Mars Bars do contrast well with a crunchier…

  • Pear and Honey Muffins

    These are very sweet and sticky muffins, and are quite dense and moist as well. The fresh and almost tart taste of the pear goes beautifully with the warmth of the honey and ginger. They’re adapated from a Diana Linfoot recipe in More Muffin Magic. There’s more than enough mixture for 12 normal muffins –…

  • Cranberry and Chocolate Chip Biscuits

    I haven’t made biscuits for years, but suddenly felt the urge to today. I’m planning on taking my excess baking to work tomorrow, and I thought a few biscuits would go down well. This is a chocolate chip recipe from a generic cookbook called Better Baking, which I’ve altered by adding the cranberries. They’re very…

  • Prune and Chocolate Cake

    This is a delicious, richly spiced and dense cake. It’s a recipe from Doris Brett’s Australian Bread Book, which I think is now out of print, but is a wonderful book full of unusual cakes and breads. This particular cake is not only very easy and quick to make, but also versatile – it can…

  • Brownies

    This is a recipe for utterly divine, dense, rich brownies. It’s a huge recipe, and I haven’t been brave enough to experiment with halving it. I’ve found people quite enjoy being pressed to eat brownies, so I haven’t minded having enormous amounts of them. The original cooking time in Nigella’s recipe (from her book How to…