Having squirrelled a dog-eared copy of the Observer Food Monthly away the other week, last Sunday seemed like an opportune time to try my hand at baking some of Trine Hahnemann’s traditional Danish Christmas biscuits.

Unfortunately I didn’t clock exactly how many biscuits the recipes yielded, so I ended up with a couple hundred; keeping me extremely busy for seven long hours in the kitchen. That was a lot of painful cookie-cutting, needless to say.

I chose to make some pepparkakor (iced pepper cookies); vaniliekage (vanilla cookies), and brunkager (brown cookies.) With the brunkager still chilling in the fridge several days later, and destined for my in-laws’ house over Christmas, I decided to make little parcels of the 300 or so pepparkakor and vaniliekage to give to colleagues and friends.

The lighting in our kitchen is very poor; please excuse the above photo. I tried going for a messy (or “home-made”) icing style for the pepparkakor, with the vaniliekage thankfully being easier to make. A light dusting with edible glitter on some of the pepparkakor finished them off nicely, before they were wrapped in baking paper; tied with string, and attached with small luggage tags to give away.

You may be surprised to hear that the seven packs of biscuits below were less than half of Sunday’s yield! If you do follow any of the recipes, I’d urge you to halve them (at the very least). Unless you don’t mind being chained to the kitchen for seven frickin’ hours…

When in need of something sweet, especially something that takes just 15 minutes to whack together, consider this raspberry coconut slice.

After my Nana passed away, my Grandad became quite the dab hand at baking, with this slice being our favourite. Little did I know that it was so easy to make! Perhaps that’s why he made it pretty much every time we visited…

So, if you want to whip up this simple slice in 15 minutes, using just one bowl; a spoon, and a measuring cup, hit up the recipe down below.

Note: I actually double this recipe to get 16 squares, but if you follow the recipe below, you’ll get eight squares.

Ingredients for the base

3/4 cup plain flour
1/4 cup self-raising flour
2 tablespoons sugar
90g butter
1 egg
1/2 cup raspberry (or any) jam

Ingredients for the topping

1 egg
2 tablespoons sugar
1 and 1/4 cups coconut

For the base, combine all of the dry ingredients together in a bowl, and the rub in the butter with your fingers. Crack one of the eggs into the bowl, and mix it up with a spoon.

Spread it into a greased tray, and then spoon the jam over the top.

Next, whack the coconut, sugar and the egg into the bowl, and stir together until mixed. Spoon it over the jam, so it’s evenly distributed. Put it in the oven at around 180 degrees, and keep an eye on it, pulling it out after 20 minutes or so — or until brown.

Snaffle a square while it’s still piping hot, otherwise leave to cool and cut up into about eights (or 16 squares, if you doubled it.)

Having been handed Violet Cakes’ recipe book for my birthday, my first venture into these strange Amish cake-sandwiches was a complete disaster. I set about trying to make the strawberry ones, but as the shop didn’t have strawbs, I substituted them for blueberries. One big, gooey mess later (I had no idea how much they grew in the oven!) I vowed to stick to cupcakes for the time being.

That was until I tried Violet’s salted caramel whoopies, and my god, if they weren’t the tastiest baking I ever did make! The caramel swiss buttercream was incredibly smooth and subtle; I could’ve eaten the whole bowl if I wasn’t expecting friends ’round for tea.

Ingredients:

300g plain flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
125g unsalted butter
120ml whole milk
200g light brown sugar
2 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Method and buttercream recipe below the jump…

Don’t preheat the oven yet, as there’s some chilling involved first.

You’ll need three bowls of varying sizes for the whoopies. In your middle-sized one, sift the flour, baking powder and salt together, and set this aside. Next, melt butter in with the milk in a small saucepan, careful that it doesn’t boil. Remove from the heat once mixed, and pour this into your smallest bowl.

In your largest bowl, beat the brown sugar, eggs and vanilla until it’s all fluffy. Add the middle-sized bowl’s contents (flour, baking powder and salt) and mix. Then, pour in the buttery milk from your smallest bowl, and stir. Put this bowl into the fridge for half an hour.

Violet says this recipe makes 9 large or 24 small whoopies. I’d recommend you go for the small ones, because even they turn out to be quite larger than expected (see my first paragraph, above!) So, get a teaspoon, and drop tiny dollops (making them as highly-built up as possible) onto a greaseproof paper-lined tray. Make sure they’re not too close together, because they will grow larger than you think.

Bake for close to 10 minutes; keeping an eye on them so they don’t go any further than golden brown.

While you’re doing this, you can get started on the caramel swiss buttercream for gluing them together…

Ingredients:

40ml double cream
75 caster sugar, and an extra 50g on the side
2 tablespoons water
175g unsalted butter
1/4 teaspoon salt
2 egg whites
1/4 vanilla extract

In a bain-marie (small saucepan on top of larger saucepan, which is filled with water), mix 75g of caster sugar with the water. Don’t stir much; just keep at a low heat until it’s mixed. Then, rack the heat up higher, and boil it until it goes dark caramel-ish. Quickly turn the heat off before you burn it, and pour in the double cream, whilst whisking frantically. Pour it into a bowl, and let it cool down.

Meanwhile, wash your smallest saucepan and whisk, because you’ll be using that bain-marie again.

In your large-sized bowl (you may need to wash it by now!), mix 50g of the caster sugar with the egg whites, until foamy. Pour it into the smallest saucepan, and put it atop the larger one which should be filled with simmering water, and get that whisk into it until the sugar’s all dissolved, and the consistency is positively frothy.

In a middle bowl, beat the butter and salt together until fluffy. Grab that large bowl again, and pour the sugary egg whites mixture back into it, beating it until fluffy. Ensure it’s cooled down, and then add the butter and salt mixture you’ve just made. Beat together until mixed, and then pour in the butterscotch which you made first.

The next bit is easy. Grab two like-sized whoopies, and smoodge them together with a good slick (and I mean good) of buttercream. Eat with a tea or a glass of prosecco — both of which should be served with a hugely-satisfied smile.

As aforementioned, Sunday was the day o’ three baked goodies, with the rosewater sponge being the best rated by all who ate it.

I followed Feast on Scraps’ recipe, which was really simple. It’s basically an adapted sponge, which rises really well and as Laura wrote, it makes for a bloody big cake. All the more to eat, mmm. Definitely don’t scrimp when pouring the boiled rosewater syrup on before icing it — it makes it more moist, and certainly adds to the flavour.

There was a slight change to mine, however — I actually followed Hummingbird Bakery’s cream cheese icing recipe rather than Laura’s, as I was running low on caster sugar by that stage. Their recipe as follows:

300g icing sugar, sifted
50g unsalted butter, at room temperature
125g cream cheese, cold

I just rinsed a whole lemon of its juice, grated in some rind, and bob was indeed my uncle.

Why a picture of a jug of roses for this post? Well would you believe me when I said the cake disappeared so quickly that I forgot to take a snap of it?

Salmon is one of my favourite fish, and when it’s sold at Sainsbury’s for £6 per two packs, we eat it pretty often too. The best way to cook it is wrapped in a sheet of aluminum foil, with a bit of olive oil drizzled over the top, in the oven for about 15 minutes. Served while still pink in the middle, it’s absolute bliss.

However, I do love pan-frying it with a bit of olive oil, then pouring a generous drizzle of ketjap manis (caramelised-tasting soy sauce from Indonesia – got mine in Brixy market, but it’s quite common, just got to know what the bottle looks like!) and some honey. Fry until still a bit pink and tender inside, and serve. As you can see from the photo, the ketjap manis turns the salmon almost black, and gives it a chicory/caramel taste. Beautiful served with a stir fry.

I first made this pie a few months after getting back from San Francisco with Jim, Laura and Ricky. We had our first (of many, I hope!) San Francisco reunion at Laura’s, where we had the pie with other SF-themed food: clam chowder, prawn sandwiches, lots and lots of prosecco…

The second time was on the weekend when Gemma, Darika, Kate and Libby came over for the Twilight movie night. I forgot to take a photo before we munched on it (well, everyone except Darika, who had to run for her train), so what you see above is the crumbled remains the next day, sans whipped cream.

So, due to popular demand (Kate), here’s the Hummingbird Bakery recipe…

Recipe

Filling
- 8 egg yolks
- 2 397-gram tins of condensed milk
- freshly squeezed juice and grated zest of 5 limes (I can never be bothered grating zest, lest I finish with Madonna arms, so I use the juice of 6 limes instead. And use a sneaky dribble of green food colouring – which the recipe says not to use as the zest will provide the colour.)
- 450ml whipped cream

Crust
- 500 grams digestive biscuits
- 200 grams unsalted butter, melted

Preheat the oven to 170 degrees

For the crust
Roughly break up the digestive biscuits and put them in a food processor (I do about four lots). Process until finely ground. Put the crumbs in a large mixing bowl, and pour the melted butter in, and stir. Press the mixture into the base and neatly up the side of the prepared pie dish, using a tablespoon to flatten and compress.

Bake in the preheated oven for 20 minutes, until deep golden and firm. Set aside to cool completely.

Turn the oven down to 150 degrees.

Put the egg yolks, condensed milk and lime juice in a mixing bowl, and mix with a whisk until everything’s smooth. It’ll thicken as you go.

Pour into the cold pie crust and bake in the oven for 20 – 30 minutes. Pull it out when it’s firm to the touch, and not at all wobbly. Leave to cool completely, and put in the fridge for at least an hour (I make it the previous day).

Serve with whipped cream on top.

- If you’re wondering what to do with the leftover eight egg whites, try this white cake recipe. I made it the day after the pie got eaten, using the whites I’d refrigerated, and it was delicious. Light and fluffy, with a slightly sticky and caramelised top. Didn’t even add icing. The recipe calls for just six egg whites, but I increased the whole recipe by a third so I could use all eight whites.

My Mum rarely made macaroni cheese when I was younger, I guess because it was so similar to salmon mornay and she felt I should get all the iron I could possibly consume after returning from school one day when I was 13, claiming I was a vegetarian. When I was about 14 or 15, and Mum had presumably had an early shift that day (she’s a nurse) I attempted to make macaroni cheese to take to school for lunch.

Sitting under our usual tree on the front lawn of the school, I pulled out my tupperware container and started eating my improvised mac ‘n cheese. My friends were curious why I was eating pasta with grated cheese on top – I explained it was macaroni cheese, that I’d made myself. They all hooted with laughter and said it may have the two title foods – macaroni pasta and cheese – but that it was nowhere like what their Mums made them.

Here’s my homage to that summery Australian lunchtime.

Recipe – inspired by Laura Silver’s.

- enough pasta for however many you’re serving to (my local Sains had sold out of macaroni, so I used fusilli instead. I’m no shape racist)
- handful of button mushrooms
- handful of chopped broccoli and cauliflower
- tablespoon or two of plain flour
- scoop of butter
- two cups of milk
- whatever strong cheese you’ve got. I used stilton and boursin in mine
- breadcrumbs
- milk powder (not essential, but I always use it with breadcrumbs for an extra-crusty top)

Cook the pasta in a saucepan. Make a bechamel sauce my frying the butter in a saucepan, then sprinkling in the flour. Mix quickly, then pour in the milk slowly while still pouring. Crumble in the varying cheeses – I used about 300g in total. Boil the mushrooms, broccoli and cauliflower – or whatever veggies you’re using, if any.

Drain the pasta and veggies when cooked, then put in the oven-proof dish. Pour the bechamel sauce over, and mix well. Grate breadcrumbs and sprinkle milk powder lightly. Cook for 20mins or so, until brown on top.