A chocolate cake, covered in marshmallows, chocolate ganache and toasted nuts. This isn’t overly rich or sickly.

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Need an excuse to buy whiskey and a new pie tin? Look no further. This uses the same pastry as my apple-cranberry pies and goes well with the pecan filling. They’ll keep for a couple of days in the fridge, or two months in the freezer.

If you don’t have small tart tins, you can make one large one in a 23cm tin and bake it for 40 minutes.

After a traumatic last batch of rock cakes I was reluctant to try again. The last batch didn’t rise, probably due to the wrong yeast. These took most of the afternoon (between prooving/shaping) but were worth it.

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You can never have too much lemon. I was torn between either drizzling this with lemon icing or serving it with lemon curd. The lemon curd worked really well.

Carrot cake is my kryptonite, I lived off it for an 8 month period while I was in Uni. These cupcakes are filled with nuts and cocoa powder gives them an interesting taste.

With Valentine’s Day fast approaching, I needed something which I could either decorate as a heart or shaped like a heart. Cookies tend to end up as splats after baking, but these held their shape well.

I’m still not sure exactly what makes Oreos taste like… Oreo, but these were easy to make and tasted good. The recipe called for a filling made with vegetable shortening, but I used buttercream instead.

These were made for a Harry Potter themed gift exchange. I don’t know what colour eggs a phoenix actually lays, but mini-eggs seem like a good approximation. They’re a twist on standard easter nests.

Two baking related XMas gifts I couldn’t wait to try were a new mixer and a a tub of chocolate popping candy. It’s not really something which you can ‘bake into’ a cake, but in the frosting for these chocolate courgette cupcakes it’s fairly explosive.

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This was a great alternative to Christmas Pudding. Not the easiest thing to hide a £1 coin in though.

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