Ultimate gingerbread

Why do weekends go so fast? I know it's a cliche but it is true. This weekend we did nice things: on Saturday we had lunch with my parents and then saw my grandmother, who had baked a lovely walnut cake and made us tea. Yesterday we went shopping and I indulged in the Clarins event at John Lewis (my excuse is that I have poor skin and cheap products often give me a rash. Make of that what you will) and bought some espresso cups that I had been craving. I also baked gingerbread (see below) and we had roast beef for Sunday dinner (which we have in the evening...) which was as delicious as it always is (Don't worry. I didn't take a picture of it. I am sure you all know what a rib of beef looks like) and suddenly I woke up and it was Monday. It seems to have been raining for days here; we haven't had the snow that has plagued other parts of Britain, but we have had interminable rain.

Anyway, onto food. After I wrote the last post mentioning gingerbread, the thought of gingerbread insinuated its way naughtily into my head (isn't it always the way...?) and so I felt obliged to make Jamie's ultimate gingerbread recipe yesterday. It is derived from the fabulous recipe from a shop in Grasmere, a recipe that is around 150 years old and has attracted much publicity - I think this is it here; the owner keeps the recipe a secret, and this is Jamie's attempt to recreate the secret recipe. I have never tasted the original and thus can't comment on the comparison, but I am now feeling the need to make a trip to Grasmere.

This gingerbread has a shortbread base, which, Jamie suggests, you can make yourself from his shortbread recipe or buy. His shortbread recipe is utterly heavenly and I have vowed not to go back to the bought stuff, so I made the shortbread first, but of course Simon saw it come out of the oven and was excited at being given that shortbread again - it is, honestly, delectable. I could see the disappointment in his face when I admitted that the shortbread was simply one ingredient in the gingerbread. I admit I shared his misgivings - the shortbread is just too good to waste if the gingerbread doesn't turn out really well - but I knew that I had to get past that stage and get on with making the gingerbread. A little voice was playing in my head, though, as I turned the shortbread into gingerbread, saying, repeatedly, 'this won't be as good as the shortbread on its own'.

To make the gingerbread, blitz the shortbread with some powdered ginger and caster sugar, setting aside 100g of the mix. Add mixed peel, crystallized ginger, plain flour and baking powder; pulse until well mixed.

Melt a mixture of butter, treacle and golden syrup in a large pan, then add the mix from the food processor and stir until combined. Spoon the mix into a baking tray and smooth it level across the baking tray with a spatula or your fingers; once flat, bake in an oven preheated to 170C for 10 minutes. Remove from the oven and scatter over the reserved shortbread mixture, pressing it down with your fingers or a spatula. Cut into pieces with a sharp knife and then leave to cool before turning out.


The smell of ginger was almost irresistible as the gingerbread cooked and cooled. I was worried about removing it from the tray as initially it seemed a bit bendy, but once it had cooled it was easy to lift out and serve. And I am happy to report that I definitely hadn't wasted the shortbread - this gingerbread is incredibly gingery and has masses of flavour; it is really the ultimate gingerbread, not just one of Jamie's over-statements. It was even better today, which I find is an important criterion in judging recipes because when I bake on Sundays I really want a piece of baked goodness to cheer me up on a wet Monday faced with hungover students and moaning colleagues. As I ate a piece after lunch today, I remembered that Jamie suggests that as well as eating it as a biscuit, you could use it as a cheesecake base... which is now somewhat inevitably making me dream of gingerbread cheesecake. A good way to spend a Monday evening!

Tea-party fairy cakes

Where are all the tea parties? So many cookbooks have sections devoted to tea parties and when celebrities are interviewed they often extol the virtues of afternoon tea. I never get invited to tea parties. In fact, I think my one and only tea party was when I was a student and an American exchange girl liked the idea of an English afternoon tea, so she invited everyone round for outsized mismatched and chipped student-style mugs of PG Tips, with chewy Sainsburys scones, a Sara Lee chocolate cake and a packet of digestives; we sat around on the floor and on the bed, because she didn't have a table. She called it afternoon tea, but it was just a formalization of normal student behaviour - that is, sitting around drinking endless mugs of tea and eating biscuits (no one should be surprised that we moved seamlessly from tea to gin and tonic, and eventually onto the local pub when the gin bottle ran dry). Hardly afternoon tea as I imagine it, with delicate, crustless cucumber sandwiches, homemade scones with jam and clotted cream, Earl Grey in little china tea cups, and doilies (there has to be doilies. I don't own any doilies, but I do recall biscuits appearing on doilies during my childhood). Anyone out there who wants to invite me to afternoon tea, please feel free - I've been missing out. Although I'm not entirely sure how afternoon tea fits into a busy working schedule...

These musings are not entirely irrelevant to fairy cakes, because Jamie points out that they are great to serve at tea parties. I can't imagine Jamie at a tea party. The photo is incongruous, of a tiered cake stand with cutesy little cupcakes in shades of pink; it doesn't look like the sort of picture you would tend to find in a Jamie cookbook. The icing is not immaculately smooth, though, which it might be in a different kind of book; moreover, the icing has fresh fruit in it, which raises these little cakes up a notch, or at least sets them apart a bit from the standard fairy cakes that everyone can make.

At the risk of sounding like a fairy cake bore, which I am not, all fairy cakes are not the same. Nigella's fairy cakes, which I usually make, contain milk and vanilla extract; Jamie's have lemon instead, and you can taste the lemon in his sponge, which makes a difference (I don't know which I prefer. They're just different). The sponge recipe is the same as for the Victoria sponge
that I made recently, so I won't repeat it; the difference here is simply using bun tins and cooking for a little less time. The icing is the interesting part: mash up some fresh berries (raspberries, strawberries or blackberries) and mix with icing sugar, then drizzle over. Jamie suggests adding crystallized fruit petals for decoration, but I used a heart-shaped bun tin so I thought mine were cutesy enough.


The fresh fruit icing is unsurprisingly delicious, much nicer than plain icing; mine was runny, as you can see, because I wanted a lot of fruit in the icing (Jamie's is runny too). The only problem is that the fresh fruit icing doesn't last long, which means you have to eat them up quickly - in some ways that isn't such a problem since they taste good and are little mouthfuls of sweetness. I only made half the suggested recipe amount, and gave some away immediately...

I like cupcakes, fairy cakes, whatever you want to call them, because I like food in miniature; I prefer cupcakes to muffins. Sometimes in a coffee shop the muffins look obscenely enormous and off-putting, whereas a cupcake slides down easily. I made cupcakes for our wedding last year, because I had to work up until the evening before and didn't want to make a cake because we were having an untraditional wedding and would have had to carry uneaten cake to the next stage of the proceedings; it seemed a bit complicated. I liked the idea of the guests taking a little cake home each. Here are our wedding cakes:


I bought the stand (above) from an Ebay seller to hold the cupcakes for the wedding (it was a small wedding - only 26 of us). It occurs to me that I now have a cupcake stand, so maybe I should host an afternoon tea, and give in to my urge for crustless sandwiches and scones, and fragrant Earl Grey, plus fairy cakes, this time with the fresh fruit icing. Part of me sees afternoon tea as horribly upper class - and not only do I have no desire to be upper class, but also they wouldn't have me even if I did. That said, there is no reason why afternoon tea has to have anything to do with social class. After all, it is a truth universally acknowledged, as Jane Austen might have said but didn't quite, that everyone likes cupcakes.

Victoria sponge cake

I used to really, really hate Victoria sponge cake when it was wheeled out at children's parties; not the sponge part, but the inevitably sickly filling (or so I saw it), which clagged up the plate and the mouth. Victoria sponge cakes couldn't be easier to make, but for some reason many people buy them, and they can taste horribly artificial; the real McCoy makes a huge difference with Victoria sponges, as with almost everything else. I have moved on from my childhood mistrust of all things sweet that weren't chocolate or ice cream and I now predictably enough really like a good sponge cake, in addition to the little buns and muffins that I have always liked. While I was making this cake, I had a sort of flash back to teenage me and thought about how shocked I would have been if someone had told me that years later I would be spending a Sunday afternoon making Victoria sponge cake. I suspect that teenage me wouldn't have liked the 31 year old me all that much, or at least all we would have had in common was books; we wouldn't have had much luck going out for dinner together (though a glass of wine would probably unite us). Whimsy aside, part of me still feels that Victoria sponge is a bit staid; when I first baked cakes they tended to be luscious, glossy chocolatey confections, courtesy of Nigella. I baked with the girl who had the room opposite mine in our university accommodation; we made each other and the rest of our house cakes for birthdays, special occasions and just for fun. Our favourite was the chocolate ganache birthday cake from Nigella's How To Eat, occasionally eclipsed by her chocolate hazelnut cake or her sour cream chocolate cake. There was a girl in the house who got on our nerves and who had the cheek to ask for a cake for her birthday, and because we were polite we made a cake, but because we were secretly mean, we made her a boring sponge with butter icing inside, and I used an evil looking green cake decorating pen to inscribe Happy Birthday on top. She was really, really touched; she didn't at all understand that we were trying to snub her, and she loved her cake, as did the other neighbours, even though it bore little resemblance to our more sophisticated cocoa-laden offerings. That taught us a lesson: not to look down our noses on the humble sponge.

I can't believe I've just admitted to doing things like that, but sadly I have a mean streak.

Anyway, back to Jamie's Victoria sponge, which I made on Sunday before returning to work on Monday. This was my last day of lazing around and - just as Freya used hers to make a superb Sachertorte, I used mine to make a sponge. I have made sponge before, obviously. I made little buns for our wedding cake(s) and decorated them with white icing and white sugar roses; I have made sponge for Eve's pudding, and so on. This is Jamie's recipe though, and for some reason on Sunday, contemplating the end of a lazy holiday, I needed something homely to make; this sprang to mind. The sponge part is standard: 225g butter/ flour/caster sugar, 4 large eggs, plus some lemon zest. I creamed the butter and sugar, beat in the eggs, and folded in the flour and lemon zest, before dividing into 2 sandwich tins and baking for 20 minutes or so until lightly browned and risen. I left the cakes briefly in their tins and then turned them onto a rack to cool. Meanwhile, I warmed raspberry jam in a saucepan and stirred in raspberries (Jamie suggested strawberries, raspberries, blackberries or a mixture; he said he loves strawberries, but out of season strawberries aren't that great in my opinion); I then spread it over the top of one of the two sponges. I whipped double cream with the seeds from a vanilla pod and some sugar, and smeared that over, before topping with the other sponge.



It looks pretty, as Victoria sponges do, and it tasted fresh and lovely - completely different from the cardboard sponge and sickly fake filling of the bought versions. We had a kind of afternoon tea; I made a pot of tea and brought the milk jug into the living room (I don't really do that for just us, usually) and we ate cake and drank tea and I felt very English, all of a sudden. It was surprisingly nice. There is something about sponge, with fruit and sweetened cream, plus jam, that would make anyone feel settled and contented, particularly with a huge pot of tea and a suitably engrossing novel. Teenage Kathryn would have despised this; I now enjoy this sort of thing as a privileged part of our culinary heritage and as a simple, tasty cake that really makes an afternoon special.

1980s style Black Forest Swiss Roll

When we started German at school, for some reason one of the first things we learnt was 'Schwarzwalderkirschtorte', Black Forest cherry gateau. I think we probably thought that all Germans ate that every day, in the same way that we had a hazy notion that French people lived on croissants for breakfast and then baguette for lunch before snails and frogs' legs for dinner (I didn't - I spent enough time in France to know better - but those language textbooks were really peddling a certain culinary image of the countries whose languages they were teaching - and that image was really quite convincing). To be honest, 80s Black Forest cherry gateau stands as an emblem of all the desserts I used to hate - oozy, creamy, fruit in it, all in all a bit messy, really. I always liked cake and flapjack, but not the oozy icing in a Victoria sponge, or anything squidgy, in terms of dessert; I would never have eaten this dish, in times gone by. I am, however, a reformed character prepared to boldly go where never I went before, and thus I set to making this swiss roll version of a Black Forest cherry cake, cheerfully dismissing any lurking phobias that might have raised their ugly heads in the process.

My cooking began badly - I lost the cocoa powder. Our kitchen is small - large enough for a table and four chairs, but hardly enormous - and I have a lot of kitchen equipment and even more food and baking ingredients. I still haven't found the cocoa powder that I am sure is there (unless the kitchen gremlins got it - they seem to haunt my kitchen) but Simon graciously, or rather a tad grumpily, went off to Tesco and replenished my supply. I then set to whisking together eggs and caster sugar with my little hand held electric whisk. Jamie said that after 2-3 minutes the mixture would have tripled in size and a dripping beater would leave ribbons of eggy foam visible on the surface after 10 seconds. Hmm. Mine had expanded but not to triple its size and drips from the beater disappeared instantly into the mix, after 3 minutes. I continued until mine did what it was supposed to, but it took time. Then I whisked in melted butter and folded in sifted plain flour and cocoa before scooping it onto a swiss roll tin lined with greaseproof paper. I baked for 15 minutes until the sponge sprang back and then removed it from the oven and tin but, keeping it on the greaseproof, put it on a rack to cool.

To make the filling, I heated orange zest and juice with caster sugar in a saucepan until the sugar had dissolved. I added cherries and cooked until softened. (I used cherries in Kirsch, and then used the Kirsch later). I turned off the heat and added 2 'good splashes' of Kirsch from the cherry jar, cooled, then strained through a sieve, reserving cherries and syrup.

To make the chocolate cream, I heated 1/4 of the total amount of double cream until it bubbled then removed from the heat and mixed in Green and Blacks sour cherry chocolate. I whipped the rest of the cream until it formed stuff peaks.

Finally - assembly time! Keeping the cake on the greaseproof paper, I brushed the cake with cherry syrup and then spread it with chocolate cream, then the whipped cream, then the cherries. At this point I had to roll it up but as I tried, the cake stuck scarily to the greaseproof paper and I panicked - I have always used greaseproof from Lakeland, but it had run out and this was from Tesco, which led me to start blaming Tesco for my failing dessert. (I like to blame Tesco. They can cope with a bit of bashing from me, since their profits are phenomenal and they are known for ruthless trading. Heaven forbid a mistake should come from me, when there is Tesco around as a useful scape goat). The sous-chef, however, managed to roll the cake while prising it awkwardly from its greaseproof coating and it worked, to my complete amazement. We wrapped it not in the over-sticky greaseproof but in cling film and stuck it in the fridge to set.

I forgot to trim the ends and scatter chocolate shavings over, or to dust it with icing sugar. I think that was because by then I had more reason to curse Tesco - the butternut squash I bought there yesterday was off when I cut into it, and by then all the shops were closed. The air was turning slowly blue. Anyway I think the roll looks okay despite my failure to dress it up suitably.


This dessert was much harder for me than the chocolate tart, which was actually quite easy once you got past the idea that you were making chocolate pastry. I'd never made a swiss roll before and the rolling part spooked me a bit, not to mention my eggs and sugar taking forever to whisk together properly. That all said, this is really nice - not too claggy, not too heavy, not any of those things I have always associated with Black Forest cherry gateau. In fact, it is quite delicate somehow - and thoroughly delicious.


Somehow I don't think I'd win a talent contest with the appearance of my roll - which is more flat than roll-like - but I really don't care about that. I am really proud that we managed to make this work and it tastes really good; it's the sort of thing you actually want to eat. Cherries, chocolate, sponge and booze- as Jamie says, a match made in heaven - even if it does make you feel like you've returned to what Lindsay Bareham and Simon Hopkinson are calling 'the prawn cocktail years'. What was wrong with the prawn cocktail years, anyway?

Fifteen chocolate tart

I might as well own up: I don't have a very sweet tooth. This seems to be something of an oddity in the world of people who like food: food blogs tend to include a lot of elaborate sweet concoctions, the like of which I would probably be unable to reproduce anyway. I would love to be able to surprise people with my culinary and artistic flair but I can barely draw in 2 dimensions, let alone produce three-dimensional works of edible art. I am reassured by Jamie's intro to the desserts chapter, where he suggests to the over-ambitious home cook that it is best to start with understanding the basics and not to be too clever. I think that this is particularly true in desserts because you can go to a shop and buy professional desserts - it's nice to see something a bit homely too, the kind of thing you want to eat as well as gaze at. My problem with desserts is mainly that I like the idea of them and not the reality - I am not keen on meringue (and thus pavlova), pannacotta, cheesecakes full of fruit, sticky toffee pudding, Bakewell tart... the list goes on. It isn't that I don't like them - I just can't really be bothered to eat them, as I explained to my brother yesterday. We are engaged in a friendly battle as to which of us is the pickier eater: his dislikes include various vegetables and offal; mine, apart from raw tomatoes, mainly involve desserts, but in fact it's only raw tomatoes that I actually wouldn't eat (and even then I have done...). Conscious that Simon has eaten scallops and mussels as part of this project, I hereby solemnly declare to try all the desserts in this book - who knows? - maybe it will make me a dessert-lover. (This in itself is a bit worrying - I have enough vices already).

I don't need to make myself eat chocolate though - on the contrary. I have already raved about chocolate and I don't need to repeat myself ad nauseum; suffice it to say that there is always chocolate in the house, always dark, and usually Green and Blacks or Cote d'Or. It is unsurprising that Fifteen chocolate tart attracted me immediately when I opened the book. The problem was a) I didnt have a large enough tin and b) OK, I'll admit it -I was scared of making chocolate pastry. I have made pastry before, but I usually make shortcrust; sweet short crust is somewhat scarier already and as for a chocolatey version... Still, I didn't let the tin size deter me - I just used my smaller tin and didn't use all the pastry and made less filling - and I decided to forget the possibility of disaster and just make the tart, no-fuss.

Pastry: to make the pastry, I mixed unsalted butter, sugar and a pinch of salt, then folded in flour, orange zest (this is optional but I love the choc-orange combo and couldn't resist), eggs and cocoa powder, worked it into a dough, wrapped it in cling film and refrigerated it for an hour. I then rolled it out and lined the tin, leaving it in the freezer for half an hour.

While I blind baked the pastry for 12-15 minutes, I made the filling. I brought milk, cream and sugar to the boil, stirring gently, took the mixture off the heat and added broken-up dark chocolate, whisking till smooth, then 2 eggs, and whisked again. I filled the pastry case and baked for 15 minutes, at which point the filling was still a bit wobbly. I obeyed Jamie's instruction not to overcook it and ignored the wobble - it firmed beautifully as it cooled down.

You can see from the above pic that my tart is a bit rustic-looking (home-made, one might say). That is probably because I didn't line the tin particularly fussily - I could have done, but I was in something of a hurry because I needed to make the tart to use the oven for something else. Anyway here is a piece:

I can hardly begin to describe how good this tart is. The orange really comes through in the chocolate pastry and makes it oddly refreshing as well as chocolatey - the pastry is delicious indeed. The filling is a sort of tart version of ganache and thus is unsurprisingly gorgeous. I would say that this tart is pretty rich; Jamie suggests serving it with creme fraiche but I only had natural yoghurt and it was a magic combination. This is an absolutely divine tart and everyone should try it.

A rather pleasing carrot cake with lime mascarpone icing

The title of this recipe is a bit odd. 'A rather pleasing carrot cake' sounds more like Delia than Jamie to me! Nonetheless the accompanying picture whets the tastebuds even if the name doesn't (and let's face it - Delia probably does make a mean carrot cake). I have never made carrot cake before, it being yet another of the banned foods in the Picky Years; I admit that since I began to bake (shamefully only in 2001), I have focused mainly on chocolate cakes. In my defence I should say that I don't have a particularly sweet tooth, but I absolutely love dark chocolate. Recently a lovely woman called Lotta sent me some chilli chocolate from Finland; I think it was the nicest chocolate I have ever had. I love all dark chocolate, really, and some milk; I am not so keen on white chocolate unless it comes with frozen berries, and my idea of heaven is a square of 70% cocoa dark chocolate after a lovely dinner. I am digressing, though - I was intending just to justify my poor baking repertoire, not to start lusting after a square of chocolate (not the whole bar. The kinds of chocolate I like only work in moderation). Anyway, carrot cake always sounded a bit too stodgy for me - and frequently was. I hate stodgy cakes; they remind me of school dinners (and I still have nightmares over school dinners), and carrot cake always has that potential.

I had faith in Jamie though, not to provide a recipe for a Carrot Brick, and I have had my eye on this cake for weeks, but circumstances have militated against my making it. I intended to make it for visitors last week but cheesecake always seemed safer. Yesterday, though, liberated from my usual Sunday roast slavery by the easy beef stew, I came home from shopping and set to making the carrot cake. The process was easy - cream butter and soft brown sugar, beat in 5 egg yolks and zest and juice of one orange, before stirring in self raising flour and baking powder, ground almonds, chopped walnuts, cloves, nutmeg and cinnamon, and grated carrots. I used a packet of ready-ground almonds but chopped my own walnuts, just because this seemed practical. I whisked 5 egg whites with a pinch of salt until stiff and folded them into the cake mix; the cake was cooked for about 50 minutes until golden and risen. Here I nearly goofed: my tin was a 23 cm round tin, as opposed to the 22cm square tin suggested; I am a cake-tin ignoramus, but suspect that my tin was of smaller capacity than the proposed tin. My cake, despite my over-excitable convection oven, was not ready in 50 minutes; the cake skewer remained sticky until 65 minutes or so, which of course made me neurotic (it doesn't take much..).

I am happy to report that despite the unexpected delay, the cake came out moist, not burnt. After an hour of cooling, I iced it with the requisite mixture of mascarpone, full-fat cream cheese, icing sugar and zest and juice of two limes.

The cake was delicious - quite dense; possibly too dense for some, but I liked it a lot and it certainly isn't stodgy. I absolutely adored the icing though - lime mascarpone; utterly delicious and moreish. I would call this cake 'a rather pleasing carrot cake with FANTASTIC lime mascarpone icing', because that icing is to die for (I write as one who doesn't like icing sugar much...) ; I could eat it straight off the cake with a spoon. I admit to being a bit obsessed with limes (I always squeeze more lime juice into Thai curries than recommended...) but even so - lime icing; wicked! I am already wondering how it would work on other cakes... Thankfully, this cake makes enough for leftovers several times over; even so, I have to stop myself from doing a Nigella (remember the cringe-inducing yet compelling final scene of all the episodes of Nigella Bites?) and sneaking downstairs at night to lick off the icing.

Bloomin' easy vanilla cheesecake

Everyone likes cheesecake - don't they? The assumption that cheesecake enjoys pretty universal popularity led me to decide to make this for our visitors the other night to follow the lamb, bread and salad. I liked the simplicity of the recipe - lots of cheesecakes now are gimmicky, which is not to say they aren't good, but after a rustic Italian-esque lamb dinner I really wanted the equivalent sort of pudding - tasty, pleasing but not too difficult to produce. There is nothing worse than a host who has prepared something ridiculously over-elaborate, sort of Heston Blumenthal-esque, totally out of synch with the context of a kitchen supper, and hovers anxiously while the guests feel pressurized into fulsome and exaggerated praise. As someone who over-invests in cooking, I need to beware of placing that kind of burden on my guests - luckily, Jamie's food seems to be perfect for the kinds of social occasion I like best.

The cheesecake, then, is a simple vanilla cheesecake, with a digestive-biscuit base and a topping made from full fat cream cheese, eggs, vanilla, orange and lemon zest, sugar, and cornflour. The base is cooked briefly and cooled; when the topping is added, the cake is baked for 45 minutes or so until golden brown and set. I made the cake some hours before we were going to eat it and kept it in our porch, which isn't insulated and is like a hot-house in the summer and almost fridge-cold in autumn, before becoming more like a freezer in winter - yes, I know, we need to sort that out, but it's one of those things that you say you will do and then forget about. Anyway, before we ate the cake, I made the cherry compote that Jamie suggests to go with it: that is, simmered cherries and sugar with an optional splash of port or whisky (I sloshed some whisky in). When the compote had cooled I served the cake and a generous dollop of compote. Unfortunately, after a fair amount of champagne and red wine, I forgot about taking a photograph (actually I also find it odd to imagine taking pictures of food while guests are there. It must make me look completely batty and I am honestly not) and had to take a photo of the remaining cake the following day.

Mmm. The picture doesn't really do it justice; it was delicious. You could really taste the vanilla and there were strong hints of lemon and orange. This cake is dangerous because it seems really light and more-ish; it is incredibly easy to eat and has a lovely flavour. So, I should add, did the cherry compote, which is a fantastic accompaniment... but as someone who had a sneaky second slice yesterday, I should say that this cake works well on its own too. Mmm.

Jamie's Nan's lemon drizzle cake

A confession: I have never made lemon drizzle cake before. I am not sure why. Partly it is that until recently I baked quite seldom and saved my baking days for Nigella's chocolate cakes and brownies. Most of my baking, in fact, has come about after reading Nigella. Anyway, seeing a picture of Jamie's nan's lemon drizzle cake inspired me, not least because the recipe is entitled 'My nan's lemon drizzle cake'. I have a particular affection for grandmother-cakes, probably because my grandmother, now 91, has always made cakes for us. I went to see her yesterday and again she had made a cake - a walnut cake, this time. I had taken her some plum and vanilla cake, so we swapped. Nana's cakes are usually orange, walnut or more seldom chocolate. They are light, airy, tea-time cakes that go down a treat with a cup of tea. Nana's oven is so old and unpredictable that I don't know how she has such a successful record of cake-baking (her legendary Yorkshire puddings are even more surprising). But as far as I know, she simply doesn't have failures. I wondered if Jamie's nan is similar and that made me want to try her cake.

So: I creamed sugar and butter, beat in 4 eggs, and added ground almonds, poppy seeds, and self-raising flour. I baked the mixture until a cake skewer came out clean.

Then I poured over a lemon syrup made of lemon juice and caster sugar, before leaving it to cool. Once cool, I mixed icing sugar with lemon juice and zest and effectively poured it over the middle of the cake so it would drizzle down the sides.

By the time the cake had cooked and cooled and the icing had set I was dying to try it. And it is a perfect Sunday afternoon cake, worthy of grandmothers everywhere - and the rest of us too. It is incredibly light and lemony, with a real zing.

It was only after I'd made the cake and re-read Jamie's blurb that I realized that this recipe didn't come from his nan - it was the cake he used to make for his nan and her whist-drive team. So where I had imagined this recipe being passed down through the generations, in fact it is Jamie's own. Which makes me wonder: didn't Jamie's nan bake? Every term that my brother and I went off to university in a car packed full of books and clothes and CD players, Nana made us a cake, and I don't know what my brother did with his, but I always cut mine open and shared it with my neighbours with a cup of tea while we caught up on the gossip - and before we started on the wine. I'm not sure I'll ever bake like Nana, but I am certainly trying.

Fifteen Brownies!

The title of this recipe makes me think of fifteen little girls clad in unfetching brown dresses and bobble hats, with their untrendy brown purses clipped to a belt that hoiked the dress up from definitively sad to borderline acceptable. Well that was how I looked when I was a Brownie, a million years ago (or so it seems). Now they get to wear trousers and sweatshirts, and they probably don't have to do a House Orderly badge that involved becoming a household slave for a week (or getting your mum to cheat when she signed off what you had done) or a Hostess badge that involved making cups of tea and rounds of toast. I was a terrible Brownie. I was not even vaguely house-orderly; I didn't drink tea, and I'm not sure I even knew how it was made. I couldn't cook to save my life and I didn't care - I was a pre-teen career woman, or else a book worm, but one thing I certainly was not was interested in cooking, much less baking. I would rather have had a McVities half-coated milk chocolate digestive than a home-cooked brownie and while my grandmother baked in the kitchen, and my brother (not interested in cooking either, but desperate to please) followed her slavishly, I was probably elsewhere, reading.

Anyway. Somewhere along the line I changed, although I am not sure why or how. And now I love cooking, and I find baking more therapeutic than cooking, although I cook more than I bake because it is more suiting to our life-style. One favourite of mine is Nigella's snowflake brownies, from Feast, which have white chocolate in them. They are truly divine. So I was interested to see if Jamie's could rival Nigella's. They aren't that different. Eggs, flour, butter, sugar, cocoa, chocolate - all brownie staples. Nigella puts white chocolate buttons in hers; Jamie suggests dried fruit and nuts in his. I went for macadamia nuts and dried cranberries, partly because they came in a handy sized mixed pack and partly because his alternatives -pecans and walnuts - I have put in other brownies, but I haven't previously tried with macadamias. I should note that in his live webcast to the world last week, Jamie tried to pretend that the inclusion of nuts and fruit in his brownies makes them healthy/healthier. Hmm. Nice one Jamie, but I'm not sure the government expect us to get our five a day through chocolate brownies, however many cranberries they might contain. In any case, Jamie doesn't need to bill these brownies as healthy because they are delicious - tasty is as good as healthy anyday. And today they did serve a noble healthy-ish purpose- they revived me with a blast of cocoa and sugar after a tedious morning at work. Which has to be a good thing.

Best ever shortbread

Jamie says this is the best ever shortbread. I have a confession to make. I can bake cakes, puddings, pastry, bread. For some reason, though, I am not very good at making shortbread. I've tried a few recipes. First I butchered one of Delia's - probably because I couldn't find the requisite semolina flour. Then I ruined a batch of Bill Granger's - in my defence, I still think his had too much butter in. I did manage to make shortbread a couple of times, but it was never quite right and I never knew why. Hmm.

Anyway I made this shortbread on Sunday night, in the ten minute gap between washing up and Jane Eyre on television, while my husband ranted away in the background about mad people baking at night and messing up the kitchen. And it was easy as can be - so easy that even shortbread-challenged me managed to make it and still watch Jane Eyre save Rochester from burning to death in his bed. I didn't have the required square cake tin (I can feel Lakeland calling me) so I made it in a round springform tin. It worked - crumbly, buttery, really and truly the best shortbread I've tasted, never mind made. I took pieces in for colleagues, who raved about it too. So this shortbread could become a habit.