I love Bakewell Tart in any shape or form. Mr Kipling – tick. Sainsbury’s cherry almond slices – tick. M&S Bakewell – double tick. Anything involving almonds or marzipan is good in my book.

My Bakewell Tart recipe comes from Ceserani & Kinton’s ‘Practical Cookery’. I have the 1979 edition – the year I started at catering college. It is one of my favourite books – the spine has not just cracked, but disappeared completely, the pages held together only with the original glue and quite a lot of different generations of Sellotape – and the pages smell of everything I have cooked over the last 37 years. Continue reading “Bakewell deluxe” →

We are off on yet another jaunt tomorrow, this time to the Lycian site of Cadianda, then a night in Fethiye with dinner at the fish market – more on that later. Obviously, tradition dicates that we will need cake – and plenty of it – and it’s my turn.

In my distant youth, I worked in the kitchens of a women’s hospital in Sydney and we used to pilfer this cake from the refectory to keep us awake when we were unlucky enough to be on the night shift. I had forgotten about it, but rediscovered the recipe in a long-forgotten Australian cooking magazine, which had been residing in my parents’ attic for about a hundred years. Continue reading “Armenian nutmeg cake” →

Once upon a time, in deepest London, I lived with a wicked landlady called Susie. Not really, she was actually a fairy godmother, who rescued me from a disastrous relationship by letting me stay in her spare room. It was so cosy that I refused to move out for several years. Hah! Continue reading “Joyce Pictor’s boiled fruitcake” →