Apples from my boy.

My son is at Newcastle Uni studying music and last weekend we helped him to move into his student flat. It has a bright red front door and a garden with an apple tree at the end. Once drumkits and guitars and saxaphones and banjo's had been loaded and unloaded, my lovely wonderful fabulous boy picked apples for me from his tree and today, when it felt like Autumn was knocking, I baked a very yum honey and apple cake. My husband has eaten most of it!

My fabulous boy (snapped on my iphone)

Recipe

100g caster sugar

3 eggs

70g of honey

80g softened butter

300g self raising flour

1 tsp cinnamon

3 apples, peeled, cored and chopped into small pieces

2 tbsp demerara sugar

Pre heat the oven to 180 degrees and butter then flour a 20cm round loose sided cake tin

Beat together the caster sugar, eggs and honey until pale and fluffy.

Beat in the butter

Add the flour, a little at a time, along with the cinnamon and the apples. Fold in gently so as not to beat out the air you've beaten in.

Sprinkle with demerara sugar and bake for 55 minuts. Test with a skewer - if it comes out clean, it's ready.

Remove from the tin. Cool.

Serve with a drizzle of honey and ice-cream.

When life throws you lemons...

Last week was a bit busy and in the spirit of organisation I bough fifty lemons to serve with various shellfish dishes, to add to home-made mayonnaise and to make posset with. Somewhere along the way, I lost them. All fifty of them. I bought more and carried on.

Of course, the first thing I found as soon as I got home after a week on the West coast was the original fifty lemons and so today has been a bit of a 'doing different things with lemons' marathon. So far I've made lemon shortbread, sorbet, lemonade (which we have already drunk) and lemon and cardamom cake.

I love the combination of cardamom with lemon. And I love the preparation of this cake - bashing the cardamon pods; separating the husks from the seeds and getting a hit of that beautiful Eastern aroma; adding the lemon juice and zest - which instantly sharpens the air. And then the cooked crunch of the sugar topping. This is the kind of baking that requires a little bit of love early on. The result? Yumminess.

Recipe

12 cardamom pods

125g butter, softened

125g castor sugar

3 eggs

200g plain flour

11/2 tsp baking powder

1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda

50g polenta

3 tbsp thick greek yoghourt

3 lemons - zest and juice

1 tbsp chopped lemon balm

Demorara or granulated sugar for topping.  (My son used to call this granny related sugar and I still want to spell it that way!)

Grease a loaf tin and line the bottom with parchment paper

Bash the cardamom pods until the husks split, remove the seeds and crush in a pestle and mortar.

Cream the butter and sugar, add a little of the flour and alternately beat in eggs and flour, baking powder and bicarbonate of soda.

Using a large metal spoon, fold in the polenta, the Greek yoghourt, the lemon juice and zest and the chopped lemon balm.

Pile the mixture into the lined loaf tin, creating a hollow at the centre. Bake for 30 mins and then sprinkle with the sugar. Put back in the oven and bake for an additional 10 - 15 minutes -  a skewer should come out clean.

Allow to cool slightly, turn out. Eat whilst still warm ideally with an extra dollop of Greek yoghourt, or maybe some lemon curd. I defy you not to eat another slice.

There's a wedding coming up

I've just spent half an hour outside shelling pistachio's. It's one of these tasks that I put off because life's too short and all that. But actually, sitting in the sun watching the tide come in and actually having the time, in the run up to a busy wedding weekend, to do this is quite nice. 

photography by carole fitzgerald of Lazy Sunday

photography by Carole Fitzgerald of Lazy Sunday

A few years ago I visited a friend's finca in Catalunya. They grow olives and almonds and a few of us descended during nut knocking season to thwack the almonds from their branches onto large white sheets which had been spread around the base of individual trees. When the sheets were full, and the trees empty and weightless again, we pulled the corners together handkerchief style and between us lugged our almond harvest back to the finca. For the next couple of hours, as the sun warmed the terrace, we separated the nuts from the leaves and the twigs that had also fallen from the trees. We chatted and drank iced water and thought about lunch and siesta. We did the same again the next day and the next and the next, until the trees were relieved of their winter baggage.

On leaving a few days later, we were each given a bag full of nuts to take home, along with local olive oil which we had watched being decanted from a huge barrell on the neighbouring finca, and a couple of bottles of red wine that we had each selected from the local vineyard. When the very kind man at check - in charged me £70 excess baggage I was so relaxed and chilled that I didn't even catch my breath. Telling my husband, a few weeks later, about this (I wasn't feeling quite so relaxed and chilled when I thought about this some more on the flight home and didn't share this additional cost for a while) he casually enquired why we hadn't shelled the almonds before we left. Obvious really.

I was remembering all of this as I shelled my pistachio's. A friend had brought them back from Turkey for me, as I use them endlessly in baking particularly. I love the colour; the greenness when they're ground; the flashes of deep aubergine. They make everything look so pretty. And they taste sweet nutty, as opposed to walnutty bitter nutty.

Today they're getting chopped up for pistachio shortbread. I'm preparing the baking for a high tea wedding lunch at the weekend, and as my oven is full with meringues at the moment, it seems like a good chance to just sit. And shell.

lavender button shortbread - a midsummer treat