Sticky toffee apple cake

 

Apple cake cooling after baking ^^

I tried another new recipe today: sticky toffee apple cake. It's just a normal cake mixture with 2 coarsely grated apples added to it and folded into the mixture, plus a couple of teaspoons of cinnamon. Then I put slices of apple on top of the mixture after putting it in the cake tin, added a sprinkle of nutmeg and baked it.

The sauce is basically a load of sugar, butter and double cream all heated up together - makes a gorgeous buttery toffee sauce. I made this one a sandwich cake, with toffee sauce and apple slices in the middle, but it would also be lovely in a loaf tin or as a round non-sandwich cake.

It's not dense like sticky toffee pudding; it's actually quite light and spongy if you sift the flour and fold the grated apples in gently. It is very sticky and delicious though :-)

Sushi for lunch

I'm getting into this sushi lark!

It's much easier to do it with the seaweed on the outside of the rolls rather than with the rice on the outside, for obvious reasons! And it looks much neater too.

Autumn

I usually hate this time of year because of the spiders (see Charlie Brooker's column on this subject). However, in allotment terms, it's bloody marvellous! I haven't done a lot of work on it lately, but stuff just keeps growing. Today there were 4 courgettes of harvestable size, plus at least another 5 baby ones which I'll leave to grow a bit more, the first crop of French beans, more never-ending lettuce, and another lush strawberry, which unfortunately the slugs reached before me:

24 mini chocolate cakes in 20 minutes...

Had a sudden evening burst of energy so thought I would put it to good use by making some little cakes in my new silicone cake tray that cost £2.49 from B & M bargains!... here are the results:

Sushi!

Making sushi is fun! California rolls are fiddly but do-able with a bamboo rolling mat. Nice with crabsticks, salmon, avocado and cucumber, served with soy sauce and pickled ginger. Gave the wasabi a miss because it's too spicy for my tastes:

Sushi with fresh tuna steak, raw of course:

Spot the difference

Popped into the allotment yesterday to pick up some courgettes that have sprung out from nowhere and discovered that one strawberry has ripened. Can you spot the difference between these two pics?

60th birthday celebrations

Happy birthday Barbara!

A more sophisticated version of the flowerpot cakes, with sugar roses, rolled icing cut into leaf shapes and a silver sheen cake spray on top to give them a glittery finish, presented in a little basket with leaves from the garden and candles: