Torta Caprese (chocolate hazelnut cake)

I have been a fan of Sophie Grigson's recipes since I stole ("borrowed") a copy of Feasts for a Fiver from my mum when I was a postgrad student (rationalised as my need was greater since I had less money...). 

So when I came across Organic in one of those cheap bookshop so snapped it up. It has a cloudless chocolate cake in it which is dense with ground nuts and small bits of chocolate, the Torta Caprese. I've made it a few times, but not in a few years, but a recent restaurant meal that offered a chocolate hazelnut torte reminded me of it. I made a couple of changes to the recipe - I used ground hazelnuts rather than almonds because I'm rather fond of hazelnuts and I used half dark (70%) and half milk (30%) chocolate ( both Lindt) - I often do this in recipes to avoid it being over rich.

You whisk egg yolks with sugar and vanilla, then fold in cooled melted butter, ground nuts and finely chopped chocolate (which the recipe recommends you do in a food processor). Then you fold in whisked egg whites and bake. 

The cake is good served with Creme Fraiche or Greek yoghurt or just alone.it's rich, damp (because of the nuts) and has a great chocolate hazelnut flavour, so hopefully I'll be making it more often in future! 

Dulce de leche cake

Another post, another lemon cake. This is one I haven't made in years, but one that was well worth remembering because it's tasty. I had a jar of dulce de leche in the cupboard that I needed to use before it's best before date, so I googled to find this half remembered recipe. 

It's a slightly unusual cake. You hear butter, water, lemon juice and golden syrup together and then add lemon zest. You let this cool and then add it to flour and sugar with an egg and mix together and pour into the tin. Finally you heat some dulce de leche until it loosens and then pour it over the cake in thin stripes. 

The resulting cake is lovely and light and nice with Greek yoghurt, although I've never tried it with the apricots and dulce de leche laced yoghurt. 

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/foodanddrink/recipes/3304378/The-recipes.html

Drenched Lemon and Ginger Cake

I have a small repertoire of great lemon cakes: the lemon curd cake I've written about before, Nigella's lemon and almond cake, Baker & Spice's lemon sponge with lemon icing. All nice, all different. Then there's this lemon and ginger cake which is a lovely twist on a lemon drizzle cake.

It is a recipe by Tamasin Day Lewis. There's a cake with light muscavado sugar, lemon zest and chopped stem ginger. Then you make a syrup from ginger syrup, Demerara sugar and lemon juice. You put holes over the cake and slowly pour over the syrup and let it soak in. This particular cake is lovely, but sensational warm - do try it. I like it with Creme

Fraiche.  Admittedly it isn't a good looking cake, but it tastes amazing. 

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/foodanddrink/recipes/3299086/Part-one-good-tempered-food.html

My favourite banana bread

I think I've been making this banana bread since I was a teenager and it's the banana bread I measure all others by. To be honest, they usually don't measure up. They're nice, but just not this recipe. 

This banana bread is relatively low in sugar (2 oz / 56g in the whole thing) and the same in butter. Although the recipe does suggest you serve it with butter! Particularly if, like me, you'd struggle to let it cool before cutting in... 

The recipe is from Mary Norwak's Bread and Breadmaking, the book that first taught me to bake bread as a teenager and which I shamelessly took with me when I left home, reasoning that I made more bread than my mum (sorry, Mum!). 

This banana bread is pretty easy. Mix flour raising agents and sugar together than add mashed ripe bananas, eggs and melted butter and mix, before putting into a 2lb loaf tin (the recipe says 1lb but that results in an overflowing tin in my experience) and baking. Then it's just a matter of waiting until you can tuck in.