Blackcurrant pie with a slice cut out and before the pastry lid has been placed on top

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In this lovely sunny weather, the fruit is ripening beautifully! Loganberries to top off my morning muesli, gooseberries plump and ready to be made into jam and deep dark blackcurrants calling out to have something created from them.  Actually, there are so many blackcurrants, I could make more than one thing with them. I’m going to start with a Blackcurrant and Lemon Verbena Pie, as you really can’t go wrong with a pie. Method for making Blackcurrant and Lemon Verbena Pie I slightly altered a recipe in the Guardian, Feast section, which was adapted from The Farmette Cookbook by Imen McDonnell. Handy tip: You needRead More →

Huge Wholemeal Hazelnut Shortbread in oblong tin by Helen Green Photography

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It would seem from looking at Twitter that every day is some sort of special day! And obviously I believe everything I read on Twitter (!) A couple of days ago it was #biscuitday, today it’s #nationalsmileday, so I thought I would combine the two by making some biscuits (actually one huge biscuit!) and eating them, which certainly made me smile. It’s actually a straightforward shortbread recipe, except that in a radical departure from the norm, I used wholemeal flour and I also threw in a few toasted hazelnuts for bit of a nutty crunch. It wasn’t just any wholemeal flour, either, it was freshlyRead More →

2 jars of homemade marmalade with snow in background helen green photography

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With the weather so bitingly cold and snowy, there’s nothing better than warming marmalade on toast (home-made too of course!) or a marmalade sandwich – a la Paddington Bear. I actually didn’t think I would ever say that, because marmalade has never been one of my favourite things, but somehow having made it myself it suddenly seems delicious and I am now trying to put it in everything! So watch out for more recipes involving marmalade! I’ve never made marmalade before, so when I saw that the bitter Seville oranges were in season and reduced, I thought I would give it a go. It reallyRead More →

peach cake with crumble topping

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It’s so nice to cook again! Having not had a kitchen for so long, being able to mooch around in the kitchen cooking unnecessary things feels such a luxury. So, I had thought about doing a healthy January type recipe, but then I quickly recovered and I found some lovely ripe fresh peaches that made me think of Summer, so I decided to make a tasty-sounding peachy cinnamon yeast-based cake that I found in Anne Shooter’s “Sesame & Spice” recipe book. Method for making Peach Cake: I pretty much followed the recipe as given in “Sesame & Spice”, which is available in all good bookshops.Read More →

helen green photography garibaldi biscuits

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I can’t think why I haven’t made these before, I used to love them when I was a child, although we used to call them dead fly biscuits! And they are super easy to make, no difficult processes at all. In case you were wondering, Garibaldi biscuits were named after Giuseppe Garibaldi, the Italian general who fought to unify Italy after he had made a celebrated visit to Britain in 1854. See Bee Wilson’s article for further details. I have to confess I made these a few weeks ago and am catching up, as the house is a building site and baking is very trickyRead More →

helen green photography gooseberry cakes

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In: Sweet

The gooseberries were ripening, turning paler and soft to the touch, so I needed to decide whether to do something with them or just cook them down with a little sugar and water. I mused for, about a minute and then made gooseberry cakes – of course I did, don’t you know me by now! I do love gooseberries, there is something demure and unassuming about them, they’re not pushy or popular like strawberries. They are a pretty green colour, they have their own totally unique flavour and I like their soft little hairs. I know, this might just be me! Method for making SubtleRead More →

helen green blackcurrant ice-cream

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I love this home-made blackcurrant ice-cream, because it is: Delicious Refreshing (especially in this hot weather) Easy to make A million times better than any ice-cream you could ever buy (not scientifically proven but absolutely true) Blackcurrants are in season and our bush has been going bananas! I have already made some yummy blackcurrant jam, so when my second harvest of blackcurrants coincided with the hottest weather for decades I just had to make some blackcurrant ice-cream. This is really easy to make even without an ice-cream maker and it didn’t last long. We’ve now run out of blackcurrants, however the gooseberries are ripening soRead More →

apple crumble cake photo by helen green photography

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In: Sweet

I hadn’t seen my best friend for months, so when she said she would be in the area and would be unexpectedly dropping by, I knew I wanted to make her a cake, as there is nothing that says I am really happy to see you more than a homemade cake. It would have been almost rude not to. It didn’t have to be complicated or involve a lot of elaborate icing, in fact I rarely make those sort of cakes, but needed to be tasty and delicious and have a nice moist centre, so apple crumble cake fitted the bill perfectly. It doesn’t takeRead More →

caramelised apple prune tart

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In: Sweet

I think prunes might be one of those marmite foods where people either love them or hate them, remembering watery prunes and custard for school dinners. Well I love them, especially when allowed to soak in alcohol and become really succulent, like in this tart. I actually prefer prunes to plums, as sometimes, particularly when cooked, the plum skins make them taste rather bitter, whereas with prunes the flavour is concentrated into sweet loveliness. The combination of apples, prunes, a light fresh custard and crumbly pastry is a winning one. I could eat this all day, but I won’t obviously, or I won’t be able toRead More →

game pie

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In: Savoury

It’s British Pie Week #britishpieweek so I wanted to make a pie I had never made before, something a bit more challenging than an apple or gooseberry fruit pie (and anyway, it’s too early in the season for those), so I settled on a game pie. I have always liked pork and game pies and once had a really fabulous one that has stayed in my memory, still warm from the oven, from a butchers in Yorkshire. It was the same day that I bumped into Paul Hollywood, who was there to film a feature on the oldest sweetshop in the world. But that isRead More →