La Recette du Jour

At last, a good use for the bread machine! I was really pleased with the results of this recipe, and it's very easy and quick to do.

This can be made with either lemon or orange juice, with equally good results. Very quick to do in a food processor.

Want to make a cake and don't have any eggs? Here's the answer! Very easy to make, and delicious. You can serve it spread with butter, but it's just fine on its own.

A wartime recipe, hence lack of eggs. The original was made with lard, but these days we can use butter.

Classic French delicacy -- best eaten while still slightly warm.

The French equivalent of gingerbread or parkin. Nice on its own, with goat's cheese and honey, or as an ingredient of tiramisu

You can vary the basic recipe by adding chopped candied orange peel, crystallized ginger, or even chocolate chips.

This is my favourite way of using up surplus egg whites. They are time-consuming and fiddly to do, but they keep for ages in an airtight tin, and are a way of filling up a rainy Sunday afternoon. They make an elegant accompaniment for ice cream, but they go well with other fruity/creamy desserts too. You can also make little baskets by forming them in cups, or small tart tins, and fill with fruit. This quantity makes about 20-25.

This recipe makes about 8 soft, slightly sweet brioche-like rolls, which are nice for breakfast or afternoon tea. You can easily make and prove the dough in a bread machine.

I haven't made biscuits for years, but today I wanted to make some simple, buttery sultana biscuits, and to my surprise a trawl through the most likely suspects on my bookshelf (Delia, Jane Grigson, Katie Stewart, Georgina Horley) came up blank. I ended up googling, and even that took a while. But eventually I hit lucky, and less than half an hour later I was able to sample the result. Very nice, albeit a bit crumbly; I might add a spot of milk next time, as the dough was very short. I added sultanas, but see suggestions at the end of the recipe for alternative flavourings. This recipe makes about a dozen.

Credit: from tafn.org.uk, but the site was down when I visited so I used Google's cache.

From Good Housekeeping; a lot of work, but worth it for a special occasion, and you can make the cake ahead and freeze it. I think you could use lime instead of orange; I love the combination of lime and white chocolate.

This makes a very large cake -- at least a dozen servings. Reduce by half for a 15-cm tin; baking time will be the same.

I'm always looking for ways of using up home-made yoghurt so it doesn't linger in the fridge too long. This cake is a well-known one in France, especially as something that's easy for children to make (no weighing involved). You measure everything in a yoghurt pot; unfortunately the recipe didn't specify what size a yoghurt pot is, and since I make my own I didn't have any to hand. However, I decided it was about 100 ml, used a small jar of that capacity, and the recipe came out OK.

Perfect for an apricot tart ... or any other sort of fruit tart. Bake blind, add a layer of crème patissière if you want, and then top with fruit of your choice, arranged in a nice pattern and glazed with redcurrant jelly or sieved apricot jam.

A traditional Scottish dish; I love them slathered with plenty of butter and honey, but you could eat them with bacon and egg for breakfast too.

The latest lesson of the food photography course I've been following along with is up. As it happens I'd been reading C'est Moi Qui l'ai Fait, and noticed a recipe for cake au citron très citron, version mini. Well, I love lemons, I still had a naked one in the fridge from the limoncello, and they sounded like a good photo opportunity, so off I went.

They are very easy to make and turned out beautifully: light and moist (if not very lemony in my case through a shortage of zest; I had another small lemon but it didn't produce much zest).

Ideas for variations: lemon icing, or maybe a blob of lemon curd in the middle (I didn't have any, or I would have tried this to make up for the lack of zest).

Pascale's pink silicone mould is prettier than mine, but I was still quite pleased with the photos, as I just did them quickly.

I needed a quick cake to take to choir practice, made with ingredients to hand. This fitted the bill, and there wasn't a crumb left over. No time for photos! The base is a bit like a crumble mix; pack it down well so that it holds together.

Credit: I think it originally came from World Wide Recipes. Unfortunately the measurements are in cups, and in my haste I didn't do the conversions to metric weights as I normally do. But at least the equivalents in ml are given so if you have a measuring jug it is relatively painless.

I happened across a food blog event called Taste and Create in which food bloggers are paired up and cook something from each other's blogs. It sounded like fun, so I signed up. I was a teeny bit alarmed when I saw who I'd been paired with: Megan is obviously a baker who specialises in fancy cakes, which are not my forte at all. I was worried I wouldn't find anything I thought myself capable of cooking, but luckily I quickly found ricotta pound cake, which looked like the sort of cake I make to take to choir practice and doesn't involve fondant icing. I briefly toyed with the chocolate cupcakes, but they involved piping bags and I just didn't see myself with a piping bag; I think I've probably used one about once in my entire life, and that was for making Duchesse potatoes.

Next challenge: the American cup measures. Gah! I hate these! How do you measure a cup of butter?? Off to Google, and I found this handy calculator, instantly bookmarked.

So off to the kitchen with the scales and a measuring jug. Now I have to confess that even after I'd done the conversions I fiddled with the recipe. 340 grams of sugar to 170 g of flour?? Pound cakes normally have equal weights of egg, butter, sugar and flour, and I'm sure most Americans have a sweeter tooth than I do, so I reduced the sugar to "only" 200 g. This might have something to do with the fact that my cake took even longer than Megan's to cook, and was very moist -- er, soggy even. But it had a lovely crisp, caramelised outside which contrasted nicely with the golden yellow interior. It's a "pudding" sort of cake; it would be nice with some soft fruit such as raspberries or blueberries, or even as the basis of a trifle.

So I'm not disappointed with my choice. Maybe I should put more sugar in next time though. The quantities below are what I actually used after my measuring/weighing/converting session; if you want the real recipe, I recommend visiting Megan's blog!

... or goodbye bread machine. There's been a growing buzz about this book on the web and I finally managed to get a copy last week. I've made one batch of dough so far and while the results are not perfect yet, they are startlingly good for such a low-effort method. They are certainly far better than any bread machine bread I've tasted.

Basically you make a large batch of rather sloppy dough using unbleached plain flour (not bread flour), and store it in a bucket in the fridge (no kneading; just mix it all together). When you want some bread, pull off a lump, shape it, and let it rest at room temperature for an hour, before putting it in the oven. Half an hour later, fresh crusty bread!

You can keep the dough for up to two weeks; my first batch lasted five days, and the last loaf I made with it had a pleasant sourdough flavour and improved texture compared to the first one.

One of those things that seem so obvious you hardly need a recipe. But it's handy to have one for reference. This is from Taste & Create partner Ginny's blog, and even though I now have some cup measures I've converted it to metric weights because, well, how do you measure a cup of butter?

Scones aren't as easy as you might think. The key is to mix/handle the dough as little as possible. Don't roll it out; as soon as it holds together, tip it onto a floured work surface and pat it out with your hands. Not too thin; it should be about 2 cm thick. Then cut into triangles or squares with a sharp knife. They might not look as elegant as round ones made with a cutter, but they will be lighter. Sprinkle a little flour on top before putting in the oven. If you have any buttermilk or even milk that's gone sour in the fridge, your scones will be even lighter.

You have to eat them the day they are made, preferably when they are still just warm. Ginny likes hers with honey, but being British I consider that you can only eat them spread with home-made strawberry jam, with a generous dollop of clotted cream on top. Or crème fraîche if you can't get clotted cream. And a cup of tea of course!

I wouldn't say I was exactly an expert at cupcakes, but I found I enjoyed making these, so thank you Ivy, my Taste & Create partner this month. Some of Ivy's cupcake creations are amazing; as a rank beginner in the field, I decided to be relatively unambitious, and went for the carrot cakes with mascarpone frosting -- largely because I like carrot cake, and they involved apricot jam -- I have lots of that.

I made the candied carrots a couple of days before, and left them on a windowsill by an open window for 24 hours before storing them. They look great and are easy to make.

As usual I battled with the American cup measurements; my cakes came out a bit moist yet again, and I wasn't sure whether it was bad measuring or the fact that I baked them in muffin tins as I don't have any cupcake cases. Ivy didn't mention an oven temperature, so I guessed at 180 and baked them for 25 minutes. Anyway, even if they were a bit soggy in the middle, they tasted fab -- I loved the subtle combination of maple syrup and orange, and the mascarpone frosting really is yummy. Read on for my metric version of the recipe.