Spiced Chocolate Bundt Cake

I last made this cake, from Sainsbury's website at the end of 2014, as a pre-Christmas treat. This time I made it for a birthday tea for myself and my two children, held in the garden to comply with Covid-19 guidelines. Both my son and I have July birthdays, close together, so usually share a cake. The three of us enjoyed the cake, and the warm sunny afternoon - until the flying ants came out! 

As before, I didn't top with the ganache from the recipe, but with Mary Berry's fudgy chocolate frosting. You can see the details here - nothing has changed. The cake was a little crumblier than I remembered, but that might have been because not all of my eggs were large. The flavour was still very good.

Flapjacks with Blueberries and Cranberries

A friend gave me a box of 8 sachets of  'Super Goodness' Porridge, with ingredients designed to boost the immune system. As the freeze-dried fruit was only 10% of the porridge, I'm not sure how much effect it would have (3.5g of fruit in each serving), but I suppose if you ate porridge for breakfast every day you're not going to do any harm, and might gain some benefits! There were some added vitamins too, which never hurts!

However, I don't like porridge, but could see the potential for the mixture to be used for flapjacks. The oats in the porridge were wholegrain rolled oats, not instant oats, so I figured they would work as a direct substitute for plain oats. The only adjustment I made to my usual recipe was to reduce the added sugar to compensate for the sugar already in the porridge mix (16%).

Ingredients

160g butter

70g golden syrup

50g caster sugar

280g Quaker Oats 'Super Goodness' Porridge with Blueberries, Cranberries and Guava.

Method

Preheat oven to 180C/160C fan and line a 20cm square shallow cake tin with baking parchment.

Melt the butter, golden syrup and sugar together  - I do it in the microwave, but a saucepan on the hob is fine too. Don't boil the mixture, just heat enough for the butter to completely melt.

Stir in the porridge mixture and mix thoroughly. 

Transfer the mixture to the baking tin, spread evenly and press down firmly.

Bake for 30 minutes until golden brown. Cool for 5 minutes then mark into bars or squares, but allow to cool completely before removing from the tin.

Despite the fruit content of the porridge being only 10% (and 2% of that was guava powder), there was enough to give the flapjacks a strong fruit flavour. I think being freeze-dried makes the fruit lighter than ordinary dried fruit, so there's more volume of fruit in the 28g in the recipe - it certainly looked a lot!  These flapjacks were a little crisper than those made following my basic recipe, but they were still chewy enough!