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Raspberry Seed Biscuit Cakes
I’ve called them biscuit cakes because they’re a hybrid between the two. A crunchy biscuity outside, with a soft cake-like inside. But whatever their name the gardeners mate and I have decided they are the best biscuits we’ve ever tasted! We grow our own autumn fruiting raspberries, the variety is called ‘Polka’ and they are very productive. In fact once they start fruiting, we can hardly keep up with the picking, eating and preserving of them. These biscuits came about because we hate wasting food, especially when we’ve gone to the trouble of growing it! I was making a raspberry cheesecake, so I’d briefly stewed up a pan of raspberries…
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Spiced Cucumber Cake
If you grow your own cucumbers, there comes a point during the growing season when your plant produces more fruits than you can eat. This is the moment to preserve them for the coming months and there is no better way than turning them into cake, slicing it and freezing it. You can never have too much cake! Those of you that follow the garden’s process will know by now that the gardeners mate and I make quite a lot of low sugar fruit and vegetable cake that we eat with yogurt for breakfast. Cake made with vegetables, especially with nuts added for protein, make a great and nutritious start…
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Garden Diary – Grateful for good health & a tidy greenhouse
Last week marked the twelve month anniversary of a rather nasty fall I had, involving me cracking my vertebra. I felt extremely lucky at the time that no long term damage had been done and a year on I still feel grateful. Without good health, nothing that people think of as important actually matters, but sadly most of the time we take it for granted. The ‘under gardener’ got his promotion this time last year, up from ‘garden apprentice’ with having to take on many more gardening jobs than he’d done before. Some of which he’d not actually been allowed to do before! Lol. Anyway he’s now having a steady…
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Garden Diary – All the B’s, Bees, Butterflies & Blueberry cake
I’m pleased to report even more bees & hoverflies this week, in fact more flying insects of all kinds including butterflies. I’m so happy in my summer garden with buzzing wings all around me. The blueberry bush has cranked up production this week and once it gets going there’s no stopping it! I’ve made two lots of cakes including one evening after work. All a bit tiring but worth it at the weekend when we have it for breakfast. After a really slow start the garden has finally caught up with itself this week with much more colour from the flowers and yummy things to eat around each corner. Happy…
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Pear & Raspberry Cake – Gluten Free
We grow two most delicious desert pears ‘Louise Bonne of Jersey’ and ‘Beth’. Unfortunately, with pears, they all ripen within a short period of time, usually around a fortnight, so a cake beckons. We are lucky enough to have a long south facing boundary in the garden, where we built a wall. The fruit trees grow along the wall. A Plum and Cherry are grown as fans and a Fig as an espalier. The Apples and Pear trees are grown as cordons. This means a single stem planted at a 45-degree angle. We get more than enough fruit off them grown this way, with the big benefit of not having…
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Cherry and Courgette Cake
As the cherries on our cherry tree tend to ripen within a short space of time, we bake with them. Turning them into the best Cherry Bakewell you’ve ever tasted, or today a Cherry and Courgette cake. If you grow your own courgettes, you will know that once the plant starts producing fruits, you can hardly keep up! Over the years we’ve come up with no end of uses for them, both raw and cooked. In recent years we have been making cakes with them, as they coincide with our soft fruit harvests. They add bulk, fibre and extra vitamins to our cakes. Rather than eating these delicious confectionaries the…
