I always like to have a box of frozen raspberries in the freezer. They keep pretty well and sure, when they’re going into cake they’ll be mushed up a bit anyway.

For the rasberry drizzle cake, I gave the rasberries a quick stewing, to both defrost and collapse them, and to collect a tasty syrup for drizzling on top. To be honest, I hadn’t quite decided what sort of cake I would make before I began stewing them, but when I couldn’t find the recipe I wanted in my email archive, I went with adapting the lemon drizzle cake.

Serving suggestion: cake, and some tasty coffee

• A box of frozen rasberries (mine was about 3/4 full)
• 2 tablespoons of water
• 3 teaspoons of vanilla sugar (or regular sugar)
• 125g butter (softened, leave it out for a few hours at room temperature)
• 175g caster sugar
• 2 large eggs (beaten in a mug)
• 175g self-raising flour (sifted)

Put the rasberries, water and vanilla sugar in a pot. Put on a medium heat and stir it occassionally until all the rasberries are defrosted. Mush them a small bit to get some extra juice out, but not so much you end up with all mushed rasberries. Strain the rasberries through a sieve and set them aside, returning the syrupy juice to the pot. Heat the pot, swirling from time to time, until it has reduced about three times to a thicker syrup and set aside.

The reduced raspberries and their syrupy guts.

Preheat the oven to 180°C. Grease and line a cake tin (I used my 16cm square one). Cream together the butter and sugar. Add a little egg, mix well, then a tablespoon of flour and mix that in. Repeat until the egg and flour is gone. This gives a nice smooth cake batter. You could do all this in a food processor if you own one of course.

Mix the rasberries into the cake batter. I mixed it into all the batter, but if you divide the batter you can get a nice marbled cake. Pour into the cake tin, and bake for 25-30 mins (put a knife in, if it comes out clean, it’s done).

Turn out onto a wire rack, remove the baking paper and flip it over. Poke loads of holes in the top of it with a cocktail stick or skewer. Pour over your reserved syrup from earlier. It’ll probably look like a blood (jam) bath as the red syrup doesnt blend in as well as the lemon syrup. That’s ok though, you can always dust it with icing sugar just before you present it to the happy eaters.

If you happen to have a lemon to hand, I think the juice might be a good tangy addition to the rasberry syrup. Rasberries are tart enough, and the sugar added above isnt enough to neutralise this, but extra tart flavour is always welcome in a drizzle cake.

Most of the rest of the tray, little do they know their fate…

I have been quiet of late haven’t I. We just moved house (gone is the gas hob and fan oven, and it’s back to conventional oven and electric hob) and we’re still unpacking two weeks later. On top of which I caught that marvellous virus that’s doing the rounds. I also got a new camera not so long ago (you may have noticed the browniecheesecake picture was better than the ones I took with my phone camera). So to try out the new kitchen and my camera, I have documented my beans on toast method.

Our new back garden and kitchen window sill. The agave is still doing well, and the houseleek went to flower so the mother plant is about to die off to leave room for the chicks.

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It took me a while to realise I liked cinnamon. I think I must have been in my late teens when it hit me that this stuff is AMAZING. A wonderful warm flavour that goes great with apples, or better yet, some sugar and butter and little else.

Action shot of the icing going on the cinnamon rolls

These delicious rolls of joy were made from a recipe by Smörgåsblog. You should have a good look around that site, there’s some very delicious treats to be found.

The cinnamon snail recipe can be found here.

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As you may know, I’m a crocheter at heart.  Since I learned to crochet, I essentially gave up knitting and can’t go back.  However, I’ve taken to machine knitting as a way to still knit without the fiddly hassle….

I was recently given a Bond Classic knitting machine and have been making squares and handbags on it.  I got it into my head that I’d like to make a teddy bear, but struggled to find patterns online, so I came up with one.  As both sides of the bear need to be the same, I have actually documented this pattern and will reproduce it below for future reference.

There are a few modifications that could be made, like making the body shorter and a bit narrower.  The ears are a particular puzzle. They could be made separately but I’m lazy like that.  The head was the original pattern for the body, but I figured it was a bit small given the size of the legs I had made!

Boxer sitting pretty on the laptop. His nose was broken in a boxing match…

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