I love baking when it’s Autumn. The range of great ingredients which offer so much flavour are abundant and very comforting. They make great cakes and desserts.
Picking blackberries must be one of the most endearing memories we have and they are readily available within a short distance for most of us. Coming home with stained fingertips from eating as many as you pick is a lovely memory.
These muffins are so quick to put together and have a delicious crunchy topping.
These scones are just perfect, fresh from the oven, warm and maybe spread with a little butter or chutney. Seriously very comforting food! The recipes comes together quickly and they are definitely worth making for a perfect mid morning or afternoon treat.
A very simple and delicious tea time cake full of apples and spices to give it warmth. Using both dark and light brown sugar gives the cake texture a rich, almost caramel flavour. You can opt to add in sultanas but equally, adding in dried cranberries would give a great contrast. I topped the cake with walnuts and after enjoying a slice, I think it would benefit greatly from adding some into the mix.
This cake is very moist and needs delicate handling once it’s baked. I would recommend you leave it sit for a good 20/25 minutes before removing it from the tin to a wire rack.
I’m very partial to a traybake recipe. They are always quick and easy to make, simple to transport and feed a good few people so lots of boxes ticked right there.
This lovely traybake is on the lines of the nostalgic Pineapple Upside Down Cake where the fruit is at the bottom of the tin and ends up on top when you invert it after baking. Using a selection of mixed berries instead gives this cake such a burst of colour and it’s all natural! There’s white chocolate both in the cake batter and drizzled over the top which works nicely to offset the slight sharpness of the fruit.
Traditionally we make our scones with buttermilk or regular milk but this recipe uses Greek Yoghurt instead. I was sceptical of course. I thought it would be way too dry and not be able to work into a dough but it worked! The scones were really good.
You can use a caramel drizzle on these if you want to dress them up and they are equally delicious on their own or with a dusting of icing sugar.
After running a poll on what ice cream flavour to make over on the cozebakes Facebook page, the winner by quite a big margin was Mango Ice Cream.
I make this a little differently than the other ice cream recipes on here as you could chop up fresh mango and mix it in but there’s a chance you would be eating frozen pieces of mango with ice on them after the freezing process and that wouldn’t be very nice! The solution I felt was to pulp the mango in my food processer and mix this in to get the flavour throughout.
These are your classic oatmeal raisin cookie – crispy around the edges and soft and chewy in the middle – basically heavenly perfect!
Oats don’t contain gluten but they would regularly be contaminated with gluten in their processing or storing stages so it’s important to use certified gluten free oats in the recipe.
I love this recipe for it’s simplicity. Just a bowl and a good spoon are needed. In order to prevent them spreading, I pop them in the fridge for 15-30 minutes before baking.
As much as I love a sweet scone, my heart probably lies firmly in the Brown Scone box. I really love a hearty brown scone. I love that I can decide to go with butter, or jam but if I feel like it, I can top with some cheese or whatever may take my fancy that day.
Unfortunately trying to find a gluten free brown scone has been almost impossible and I did try one but it was like eating grain from the miller (without the help of finer processes)!
So one day while I was making some gluten free brown bread, I thought …. this might work so I gave it a go and success! I know I’m going on a bit about it but honestly, I feel I came up with this idea and practically created a gluten free brown scone!
Most of my other ice cream recipes use condensed milk and they are all really good. As peaches are in season, I tried a recipe with fresh peaches and using the same method. I had no complaints, everyone loved it but I wasn’t happy. I felt the condensed milk was the primary flavour instead of the peaches so I set about trying to work around this.
I’m happy to report that the second test worked out much closer to what I wanted to achieve 🙂
I’ve tried making scones using fresh strawberries before but ended up with squashed strawberries and a pinkish coloured dough so haven’t gone back to revisit that recipe until now …. I got a punnet of really sweet and delicious Irish strawberries and really wanted to make strawberry scones so off I set to do a little research.
As with a lot of my baking, I also wanted to make a Gluten Free version too so I’ve included both below so everyone can enjoy these amazing scones.
They veer slightly away from ingredients a lot of us would traditionally use for making scones but the result was a really rich and creamy scone with chunks of strawberries throughout so I’m putting this recipe down as a success!
I’m such a fan of almond flavours which of course lead into bakewell. Any version of a Bakewell is a winner with me. I absolutely love the flavours but I do understand that sometimes, you don’t want to make the different elements needed for a traditional Bakewell Tart so thanks to Lakeland UK, these gorgeous little Bakewell Squares are a very simple yet delicious way to get that hit.
I adapted this shortbread recipe from another one which had chocolate and raspberries. Sounds pretty good and I definitely might try it later but I wanted to try something I had seen on Pinterest and couldn’t wait!
So I decided to try and bake with edible flowers and the lavender that grows in my garden. I used a shortbread recipe but I think a plain, vanilla biscuit recipe would probably also work. The reason I chose the shortbread is because it comes out of the oven really soft which allows you to VERY gently press in the flowers and then return to the oven for the last 5 minutes of baking.
As I was using violas and also the lavender from the garden, I decided to add lemon flavour to the shortbread also as I felt they would work well together.
