Date and Lemon Banana Loaf

Another outing for Mary Berry's Banana Loaf recipe, which is so quick and simple to make. This time I added 100g chopped dried dates and the zest and juice of a lemon. Because of the lemon juice I left the milk out of the recipe.

I only used lemon as a flavouring because I had some lemons to use up, but, in all honesty I think orange would have been a better addition to use. The lemon gave an odd tang to the flavour - not enough to spoil the cake, but just enough to know something wasn't quite right.

Apart from that, the cake was as good as usual - moist, with a well-textured crumb - and it's a cake which keeps well for a few days.

Date and Coffee Loaf

This post should really be called Date and Coffee Loaves, as the recipe makes 2 x 1lb loaves. One loaf was sliced and frozen for future use, the other eaten over the course of a few days.

The recipe comes from Lynn Hill, the founder of the Clandestine Cake Club, who has recently renamed her website Traditional Home Baking. I've been a member of CCC and a follower of Lynn's work for several years, but this is the first time I've made one of her recipes.

The recipe was straightforward to follow, although the instructions regarding the dates are a little confusing. I didn't have Medjool dates so used Deglet Nour dates instead. These were already quite soft and didn't absorb all the coffee when the two were heated together. I added the dates and the residual liquid to the cake mix, but later found out from Lynn that all the liquid should have been absorbed, so I either should have simmered the dates for longer to evaporate excess liquid, or discarded the excess. 

As it didn't spoil the cake (although too much liquid might have done so) it wasn't a problem in this case, but the written instructions might have mentioned that there shouldn't have been any residual liquid after cooking the dates, rather than just say the liquid should be reduced (by how much?).

This cake was delicious; both the dates and the coffee could be tasted and the flavour combination was very good. The loaf was quite light too; I had expected something like a tea loaf in texture but this was more like a sponge cake.

Date and Ginger Flapjacks

Another roll out of an old favourite - flapjacks are really quick to mix and bake so are ideal for occasions when you don't have much time, or just want to make something from store-cupboard ingredients. I think I overdid the ginger here, so the flavour of the dates didn't come through strongly, but their chewiness added to the texture. The recipe is really simple, and can be made in one bowl or saucepan, depending on how you want to melt the butter, syrup and sugar together.

As long as you don't exceed 150g, you can use any combination of dried fruit, nuts or seeds that you have in stock, or know you family likes, adding appropriate spices or other flavouring, such as citrus zest.

For a 20cm (8") square tin, melt together 160g butter, 70g of golden syrup and 100g of light muscovado sugar. I do this in a large bowl in the microwave, but it can also be done in a saucepan on the hob. When all the butter has melted add in 240g porridge oats, 2 teaspoons ground ginger, 1/2 teaspoon of ground cinnamon, 80g of chopped dates and 50g crystallised or glacé ginger,  both chopped quite finely. Mix until well combined then transfer to the baking tin, which should be lined with baking parchment. Press down firmly to give an even layer, then bake at 180C for about 25 minutes, to give a chewy flapjack. If you like a slightly crisper finish, bake for a few minutes longer. Cool in the tin for 5 minutes, then mark into bars or squares, but leave in the tin until completely cold.

Date and Banana Loaf

With a wet afternoon ahead of me, and some over-ripe bananas in the kitchen, I was looking for a recipe which I could make using just my storecupboard ingredients. This recipe for Easy Date and Banana Loaf, on the Waitrose website looked promising, and used my favourite storecupboard sweetener - date syrup - which was an added bonus.

Following the recipe exactly didn't quite work out, as I didn't have Medjool dates or enough butter and SR flour, but my substitutes worked well, producing a well-flavoured moist loaf with a firm but not heavy texture. I used cream cheese in place of the missing amount of butter, light spelt flour and some extra baking powder in place of some of the flour, and basic soft dried dates instead of Medjool dates.

Ingredients
100g butter, softened
75g full fat cream cheese, at room temperature
100g SR flour
100g light spelt flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon ground ginger
1 teaspoon cinnamon
2 eggs
3 tablespoons date syrup (plus extra for drizzling)
2 large ripe bananas, mashed roughly
100g chopped soft dried dates
demerara sugar for topping (optional)

Method
Line a 900g (2lb) loaf tin with baking parchment or a pre-formed liner. Pre-heat oven to 160C.
Put all the ingredients except the bananas, dates and demerara sugar into a large bowl and beat until smooth, then beat in the bananas. Finally, fold in the dates.
Transfer the batter to the loaf tin, level the surface and sprinkle over the demerara sugar, if using.
Bake for about 75 minutes, or until a test probe comes out clean.
Cool in the tin for a few minutes, then transfer to a wire rack and drizzle with a little more date syrup.

The resulting loaf was moist enough to eat as a cake, although butter spread on this sort of loaf is always an option worth considering. The subtle spicing enhanced the overall flavour of the cake, but it was the dates which stood out as the strongest flavour.

Date and Apricot Cookies

I didn't intend to bake last weekend, but I had an online discussion with friends about whether a weird sounding recipe that we'd all noticed would actually work. The recipe in question was this one, from former GBBO contestant Tamal Ray, in the Guardian Feast magazine. Not only did the recipe sound strange - so much liquid! - the accompanying picture didn't look particularly attractive either - should a baked cookie still look shiny? As I had all the ingredients to hand, including date syrup, one of my favourite sweeteners, I decided to set my doubts aside and give it a go.

The result was a delicious soft cookie, strongly date flavoured, with nuggets of sweet dried fruit. I can't say the recipe was entirely successful, as the cookie dough was too soft to shape initially, and had to be chilled for 90 minutes before I could roll it into balls. And my cookies didn't look much like the picture in the magazine, either, but for my personal taste, that was an improvement.

Because the dough had been chilled I allowed an extra 3 minutes baking, but otherwise followed the recipe exactly (apart from needing to chill the dough, of course). I didn't have medjool dates, but did have some large soft dates to use instead, and I used the zest of two tangerines instead of an orange - but neither of these changes substantially altered the recipe.

The cookies were quite large - if I make them again I think I would make them a little smaller - and very soft, and both the orange and almond flavours were overwhelmed by the date syrup, but I'm still glad I decided to risk the experiment, and that the recipe worked (with just a little adjustment!).

Date and Tahini Brownies

This recipe from Jill Dupleix, for Tahini and Date Brownies, made a fantastic chocolate cake, but I couldn't really relate it to the sort of thing I expect from a brownie recipe - it was far too light! Using puréed dates gave a lovely soft, but rich, texture, as well as cutting down on the amount of refined sugar and fat usually used in a recipe of this size, but did stop the brownies being dense and fudgy.

The amount of tahini in the recipe didn't make much of an impact on the flavour either. It's hard to tell unless I made the same recipe without the tahini, but we certainly didn't bite into a brownie and say 'Oooh! Good sesame flavour there!'

I puréed the dates with a stick blender, which was pretty hard going, as the purée was so thick. A blender attached to a food processor would probably given a smoother purée, but that wasn't possible for me. To those who profess to not like the flavour of dates, I would say, if you get a really smooth purée, you wouldn't even know the dates were there! However, I liked the odd little nubble of date left in my purée, just to remind me what was in the brownie.

If you are worried about the amount of refined sugar your family is eating, you would probably enjoy this recipe. I think it would make a good rich chocolate layer cake too - I'm pretty sure it would fit into 2 x 18cm (7") sandwich tins.

Date Shortbread Squares

 - gluten-free, plus dairy-free option

This is an adaptation of my favourite 'shortbread squares' recipe, which comes from 'On Baking' by Sue Lawrence, to make it gluten-free. Instead of wheat flour and semolina, I used a gluten-free flour, ground rice and added a little xanthan gum. It's the shortbread part of the recipe which is so good - quick to make, as it uses melted butter, and very crisp and light after it's baked. Any type of filling can be used, such as mincemeat or re-hydrated and cooked dried apricots - just make sure it's not too wet; for this version I made the filling from dates flavoured with pomegranate molasses, cinnamon and a little rosewater.

Ingredients

Filling:

225g dates - chopped
3 tablespoons pomegranate molasses
3 tablespoons water
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon rosewater

Shortbread:
255g gluten-free plain flour
85g ground rice
1/2 teaspoon xanthan gum
170g butter (or hard vegetable fat such as Stork*)
85g caster sugar

*see note at end of post

Method
Preheat the oven to 190C (170C fan)

Start by making the filling. Put all the ingredients into a small saucepan and bring to the boil. Cover the pan, turn the heat to low, and simmer for a few minutes until the dates are soft. At this stage you can blend the filling until smooth, but I prefer to just mash the dates with a fork, to make a rough purée. You may also need to add a splash more water to make the purée easy to spread, if all the added liquid has been absorbed during cooking.

For the shortbread, mix the gluten-free flour, ground rice and xanthan gum in a bowl.
Warm the butter and sugar together in a small pan, until the sugar has dissolved, then pour onto the flour mixture. Stir well to combine thoroughly - the mixture will form a crumbly dough.
Put 2/3 of the dough into a 20cm (8") square shallow tin, lined with baking parchment, spread evenly and press down firmly.
Spoon over the date filling, spread evenly, leaving a small margin around the edges.
Use your hands to crumble the remaining shortbread mixture evenly over the dates to cover as much as possible, and press down lightly with the palm of your hand.
Bake for 30 minutes until pale golden in colour. Cut into squares (16) while still hot, but leave the squares to cool completely before trying to remove them from the tin, as they are fragile when warm.

My only criticism of these is that the added flavourings were a little too subtle - both the cinnamon and the rosewater could have been increased.

* Dairy-free: I made a second batch of these date shortbread squares which were dairy-free as well as gluten-free, using Stork vegetable fat instead of butter. The shortbread was a little more crumbly than when using butter, for some reason, and they didn't taste as rich, but the recipe was largely successful.

Date, Apple and Walnut Cake

I bought walnuts for my last bake - Nigella's Emergency Brownies - and I know that they don't keep fresh for long, so decided to use them in this cake too. I added a twist to the traditional British autumnal flavours of dates, apples and walnuts by using date syrup in place of some of the sugar and adding a little rosewater too.

Ingredients
100g softened butter
75g caster sugar
3 tablespoons date syrup
*1 teaspoon rosewater
2 large eggs
150g SR flour
50g chopped soft dates
50g chopped walnuts
1 small eating apple, peeled cored and chopped
a sprinkle of demerara sugar for topping (optional)

*or to taste, depending on the strength of the brand you are using

Method
Preheat oven to 180C (fan 160C) and line a small 450g (1lb) loaf tin. I used a loaf tin liner, but baking parchment can be used too.
Put the butter, sugar, syrup, rosewater, eggs and flour into a large bowl and beat together until the mixture is smooth and light. If the batter seems too thick, add a little milk or water to give a dropping consistency.
Stir in the dates, walnuts and apple pieces.
Transfer the batter to the prepared tin, level the surface and sprinkle on the demerara sugar, if using.
Bake for about 60 minutes, until a test probe comes out clean.
Cool in the tin for a few minutes, then transfer to a wire rack to cool completely.

Using the date syrup intensified the date flavour, and deepened the colour of the cake crumb, which I was pleased about. I liked the flavour combination of dates, apples and walnuts with rosewater, but it became a summery cake rather than an autumnal one. Probably fitting, as we seem to be having a bit of an Indian summer at the moment, but for a really seasonal cake a little cinnamon or other spice would have been better than the rosewater.

Apricot, Date and Ginger Flapjack

Flapjacks are often my 'go to' recipe, when I need something quick to mix and bake. In this case it was after an afternoon working in the garden, so that the flapjacks could bake while I was getting dinner ready. Once you have melted the butter and sugars together, it only takes a few more minutes to get the tray into the oven. The other good thing about flapjacks is they are ideal for using up the last remnants of bags of dried fruit, to stop them building up in the store cupboard.

Ingredients
60g dried apricots
40g dried dates
30g crystallised ginger
160g butter
70g golden syrup
100g light muscovado sugar
240g porridge oats

Method
Pre-heat the oven to 180C, and line a 20cm (8") square shallow baking tin with a single piece of baking parchment, folding it into the corners, so that the sides of the tin are lined too.
Chop the dried fruit and ginger into pieces about the size of a sultana.
Melt the butter,  golden syrup and sugar together - I find it easiest to use a mixing bowl in the microwave, but a saucepan on the hob is fine too.
Add the oats, dried fruit and ginger and mix together thoroughly. Tip into the baking tin and spread evenly, pressing down firmly with the back of a spoon.
Bake for 25 minutes until golden. This baking time gives a chewy flapjack; if you like yours crisp, then add a few more minutes.
Cut into squares or fingers while still hot, but cool completely in the tin before removing.

Date and Ginger Chocolate Chip Biscuits

Biscuits aren't one of my favourite things to make; in general there's too much faffing about to make them worth the effort. They might look more decorative but you can usually get the same amount of eating pleasure from a traybake cut into squares or bars, with lots less work for the cook. However, put the name Dan Lepard to a biscuit recipe, and it's one I'll look at twice, and by the second time I'll probably be eagerly searching the storecupboard, to check I've got all the ingredients. It's no coincidence that this is my second biscuit bake this year (see here), and they are both Dan's recipes - previously I hadn't made any biscuits since July last year!

I think it must be the (sometimes unusual) combinations of flavours that Dan uses, and that he tries to maximise the impact of those flavours, which makes his recipes so appealing to me. In this case, I love the combination of dates with chocolate, and ginger with chocolate, as well as dates and ginger, but the only time I've ever used the three ingredients together is in another Dan Lepard recipe - Chocolate Passion Cake, where the dates were used as an egg replacement rather than a flavouring ingredient.

These Date and Ginger Chocolate Chip Biscuits, published on the Good Food, Australia site, were relatively quick and easy to make, as the method is based on melting butter and sugar together, before mixing in the other ingredients. I used cocoa, rather than carob, and dark muscovado sugar but otherwise followed the recipe exactly.

I portioned out the biscuit dough using scales, and got 21 biscuits out of the mix, not the 24 suggested in the recipe. As I was using the fan oven, so that I could put in two trays of biscuits together, I cooked for the minimum time suggested.

These biscuits were as delicious as I expected. Rich in chocolate flavour, with large chunks of fiery ginger which were a delight to chew on. I find dates quite neutral in flavour (which is why they're often used as a sugar replacement these days) but I think that they really enhance the impact of chocolate and they certainly contributed to the chewiness of these biscuits.

This shows how the chocolate melted and tried to escape!

My only slight disappointment with the biscuits was that any chocolate chunks on the outside of the dough ball melted during baking, leaving a lot of melted chocolate on the baking paper, and on top of some of the biscuits. This might be down to my choice of chocolate, but as these biscuits were really only chunks of chocolate, dates, and ginger held together with the minimum amount of dough, it would be difficult to make them without any chocolate chips on the surface. I've not looked into bake-stable chocolate in detail, as I've never really needed it, but my impression is that it's quite expensive - possibly only for perfectionists, which I'm not!


I'm sending these to Choclette's We Should Cocoa link-up for March, over at Tin and Thyme. There is no theme to the link-up, any recipe, using any form of chocolate, is welcome.

Date, Orange and Cardamom Cake

dairy-free

This is a recipe from one of Waitrose's monthly recipe cards  (also online here). I didn't pick it because it was dairy-free, but because I liked the sound of the other ingredients when put together - dates, orange, almonds and cardamom. I just happened to have some dairy-free spread to use up too, which was an added bonus. It's a strange recipe - it uses only bicarbonate of soda as a raising agent and is cooked at a very low temperature; the dates, sugar and orange are all acidic, so I presumed these ingredients would interact enough with the bicarbonate to raise the cake.

I had to use a slightly smaller baking tin, 20cm in diameter rather than 21cm, but the cake still cooked in the time given in the recipe. There was a slight dip in the centre, which spoiled the appearance of the cake a little - no idea why that happened, unless it was using the smaller tin! This time I added the drizzle of orange frosting suggested, just to alleviate the brownness of the cake, but it wasn't really necessary for flavour.

The cake was, surprisingly, as it contained wholemeal spelt flour, very light and moist. Both the orange and cardamom flavours were quite subtle, but I don't think that's always a bad thing - sometimes you just want all the ingredients to blend into something unique which is delicious but unidentifiable. You don't always want to be hit over the head with several, or even just one, big flavour, and that's what happened here. Because of this, and because the cake wasn't too sweet, I think this was a cake where the flavour of the spelt flour was noticeable too.

This is definitely a recipe to put in the 'repeat' file.

Date and Walnut Squares

The recipe for the base and topping layers of these squares is perfect - the top is crisp, the bottom layer holds together well but is still very light, and it's really quick to make as the butter and sugar are melted together before being poured onto the flour mixture.

I've used the recipe before, for these Date and Ginger Squares, but wasn't entirely happy with the filling that time. This time, I used just dates, leaving out the currants, and added finely chopped walnuts instead of ginger. This combination was really tasty, but this is one of those recipes where I can imagine a wide variety of fillings working as well - at this time of year, mincemeat springs to mind, but dried apricots cooked in orange juice, or even a thick apple purée would be worth trying too!

Ingredients
250g pack of chopped dates
2 tablespoons honey
3 tablespoons water
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
75g finely chopped walnuts
170g SR flour
170g semolina (I used 50:50 mix of semolina and ground rice, as I didn't have enough semolina)
170g butter
85g caster sugar

Method
Preheat the oven to 190C, and line a 20cm(8") square baking tin with parchment.
Put the dates into a small saucepan with the honey, water and cinnamon. Bring to the boil, cover the pan, then lower the heat and simmer until the liquid is absorbed - 10 minutes at the most, so keep an eye on it! Turn off the heat.

In another small pan, melt the butter and sugar together and stir until the sugar has mostly dissolved. Tip this onto the flour and semolina mix and stir in with a spoon. It will make a crumbly mixture which looks as if it might hold together if you kneaded it, but there's no need to do this!
Put 2/3 of the dough mix into the baking tin, spread evenly and press down firmly.
Spread the date filling on top of the dough base, leaving a very small margin around the edge of the tin.
Crumble the remaining dough over the top, as evenly as possible, and press down lightly with your hand. Don't worry if there are gaps where the filling shows through.
Bake for 25-30 minutes until the top is golden brown. Mark into squares or fingers as soon as the bake is removed from the oven, but leave in the tin until completely cold - they are very fragile while warm.

Chocolate, Date and Walnut Bars

 Looking back over my blog posts I can see that it's been well over six years since I last made these. For me, that's one of the downsides of blogging - if you're usually trying to bake something new to write about, a lot of very good things often fall by the wayside.

These bars fit somewhere between a brownie and a cake; they are dense and chewy, but with a lot of the bulk being provided by dates, rather than butter and sugar, they are not as rich and guilt-inducing as brownies. The recipe comes from 'Wicked Chocolate' by Jane Suthering, and originally used 50:50 orange juice and water to soften the dates, but I couldn't taste the orange in the final cake, so decided it was a waste to use it. There is also a chocolate and yogurt frosting in the recipe (see my original post), but I'm not keen on the extra calories in frostings on things that are perfectly good enough without.

Ingredients

225g stoneless dates (chopped in halves widthways to check for stones - I always find at least one!)
250mls water
170g plain chocolate, around 70%, chopped roughly
115g softened butter
115g light muscovado sugar
2 large eggs
170g SR flour
115g walnuts, coarsely chopped

Method

Pre-heat the oven to 190C/170C fan. Line a 30 x 20cm(12 x 8") baking tin with baking parchment.
Put the dates and water into a small pan and bring to the boil. Simmer gently for 5 minutes to soften the dates, then remove from the heat and add the chocolate. (Note - not all the water is absorbed during the softening process.) Stir until the chocolate has melted.
Cream the butter and sugar together, then beat in the eggs, one at a time, with a tablespoon of the weighed flour.
Fold in the rest of the flour, followed by the chocolate mixture and lastly, the nuts.
Transfer the batter to the baking tin and spread evenly, then bake for around 20 minutes, until risen and firm.
Cool in the tin.
Cut into bars when cold. The original recipe suggests 24 pieces but I cut the cake into 18 bars.

Leaving the dates in quite large pieces means that there are noticeable chunks of them in the bars. If you wanted the bulk of the dates without the texture and flavour, I'd suggest chopping them more finely before cooking them, to make a coarse purée which then 'disappears' into the cake batter, as in a sticky toffee pudding.

As this is the only chocolate recipe I've made this month, I'm sending this to November's We Should Cocoa link-up at Tin and Thyme. Choclette has changed We Should Cocoa recently, so that any recipes including chocolate can be added; there is no longer a theme to follow.

Apple, Date and Ginger Cake

I often fall back on this recipe when what I'd really like is a fruit pie, but either I haven't got time to make pastry, or it just seems too much effort. The fruit filling is infinitely variable, depending on season and availability - this time I used the last of the small eating apples from our own trees, a handful of dates and a couple of tablespoons of ginger preserves. Once the fruit is prepared the dough can be made, and the cake assembled, in about 10 minutes.The only time things get less simple is if the fruit produces a lot of juice when cooked - then it really needs cooking in advance, draining and cooling.

Ingredients
peeled cored and sliced eating apples - about 400g after preparation
50-100g chopped dried dates (or sultanas)
100g ginger preserves
150g butter
150g caster sugar
1 large egg
300g SR flour

Method
Preheat the oven to 180C/160C fan. Prepare a 20cm(8") springform tin - I grease the tin, then line the base with baking parchment.
Mix the fruit and preserves in a small bowl and set aside. (I usually stand the sliced apples in acidulated water for a few minutes during preparation, then drain well before mixing in the dried fruit and preserves.)
Melt the butter, either in the microwave or in a pan on the hob. It doesn't need to be hot - just liquified. Transfer to a large mixing bowl if necessary, then mix in the caster sugar, followed by the egg. When these are mixed to a smooth paste, sift in the flour and stir in thoroughly to make a soft dough - it will be softer than pastry, and still quite sticky.
Put 2/3 of the dough into the base of the springform tin and spread evenly, using fingers.  At the edge of the tin raise the dough to make a small wall about 2cm high - this will help to enclose any fruit juices.

Spread the prepared fruit over the dough.
Break small pieces from the remaining dough and place on top of the fruit, trying to get a fairly even coverage. Flatten the pieces of dough, to get them to join up - they may not completely cover the fruit, but the dough will spread during baking. There's a picture here of a similar cake, during assembly, to illustrate things.
Bake for 50-60 minutes, until the top is golden and the cake feels firm. Cool in the pan before removing the sides.
Dust with icing sugar before serving, if liked.

I seem to have posted a lot of apple recipes this autumn, but my store of home-grown apples is finished now, so this is probably the last apple-y bake for a while!

Date and Ginger Shortbread Squares

After trying many different recipes for layered bars with a filling of jam or softened dried fruit, I think I've at last found the perfect recipe for the dough layers. This recipe for Date and Ginger Squares, from Sue Lawrence's book 'On Baking' uses an easy shortbread dough made from equal parts of SR flour and semolina, which makes a really crisp, but melt-in-the-mouth biscuit. I adapted the recipe slightly by adding a little lemon zest to the filling, and adding the stem ginger in pieces, rather than blending it with the rest of the filling.

Filling - 175g dates, roughly chopped to check there are no stones left in
60g currants
1 tablespoon of ginger syrup from a jar of stem ginger
1 tablespoon honey
1 tablespoon lemon juice
zest of half a lemon
good pinch of ground cinnamon
3 tablespoons water
2 balls of stem ginger, finely chopped

Dough - 175g SR flour
175g semolina
175g butter
85g caster sugar

For the filling, place all the ingredients except the stem ginger into a small pan and simmer together, for about 10 minutes, until all the liquid is absorbed and the dates soft. Purée with a stick blender or in a food processor, then stir in the chopped stem ginger.

For the shortbread dough, melt the butter and sugar together on a gentle heat until the sugar has dissolved, then  tip it over the flour and semolina, and combine well. The mixture will be crumbly, not a smooth dough. Put 2/3 of this mixture into a 8" square shallow baking tin lined with baking parchment, spread evenly and press down firmly.

Spread the filling over the base, leaving a small margin around the edges. Crumble the rest of the  shortbread mixture over the filling, then press down lightly with the palm of your hand. There may still be a few gaps where the filling shows through, but this is fine!

Bake at 190C for 25 minutes, until the shortbread is golden brown. Cut into 16 squares as soon as the  tin comes out of the oven, but cool completely in the tin before trying to move the squares - they will be too fragile while still warm.

Although the biscuit dough for these squares was perfect, and the filling was very tasty, these squares didn't really live up to the name of 'Date and Ginger'. There certainly wasn't enough ginger in the recipe and I'm not sure the currants added anything to the taste experience. Next time I will try several things to increase the ginger flavour - more stem ginger, some ground ginger as well as cinnamon, and more ginger syrup instead of honey. I will also leave out the currants and increase the amount of dates.

I'll also be using the shortbread recipe in other types of bars - it would be interesting to see how the crisp biscuit stands up to using fresh fruit in the filling, which often produces a 'soggy bottom' result.

Date, Banana and Rum Loaf

Gluten-free and dairy-free.

This Date, Banana and Rum Loaf, found on the BBC Good Food website, could be considered a healthy cake, as it has no added fat or sugar. The natural sweetness comes from almost 800g of fresh and dried fruit packed into the loaf, and the only significant fat is that which is contained in the nuts - 100g of pecans.

I was a little worried about making the cake, as some of the comments on the Good Food website said the cake was quite crumbly, but I needn't have worried. I followed the basic cake recipe closely and made a dense, very moist fruit cake, which even survived being dropped (in it's cake box); quite frankly I was amazed that just the puréed fruit, 100g of fine cornmeal and 2 egg whites made a batter that actually held everything together! In a slight departure from the recipe, I added 1/2 teaspoon of xanthan gum, as it's easy to get hold of now, although it wasn't when this recipe first appeared in 2008; I don't know if it made any difference but it couldn't have done any harm!

One other thing I did, not mentioned in the recipe, was to cut each date in half, cross-ways, before cooking them. I found two stones while doing this, so it's well worth the extra time spent, as unnoticed stones could damage food processor blades.  When I drained the cooked dates I didn't get enough liquid, so I added water to get to the 100mls needed for the recipe. I varied the topping, as I don't really like banana chips - I used the remaining pecans, chopped coarsely, and 4 crushed brown sugar cubes (optional if you don't want to add sugar).

I really enjoyed this cake, but I would leave the sugar off the topping next time. It only added a crunch when the cake was fresh, and quickly dissolved in the moisture from the cake. Unlike a lot of other recipes that rely on the natural sweetness of the ingredients, rather than adding any additional sugar, this cake did taste sweet enough. This is definitely a recipe I'll be using again!

One small criticism - sultanas and raisins are very similar in looks and taste; the cake might have been more attractive and even tastier if a different mix of dried fruit was used. Cranberries, cherries, chopped apricots and/or golden raisins could be used to replace some of the 400g of raisins and sultanas used in the loaf.

Date and Tahini Slice

The randomly chosen letter for this month's AlphaBakes is T, although it's not that random, as we are nearing the end of the alphabet again, and T was one of only two letters left on this run-through. It's another strange letter when it comes to ingredients, as initial thoughts are that T must be easy, but then you look through recipe books to find that there aren't that many baking ingredients, or recipe names, beginning with T. Some of my books didn't have anything at all listed under T in the index, and others only had 'Triple....' or 'Toasted....' or similar descriptive words. Treacle cropped up quite a lot too, but I wasn't in the mood for anything too dark and sticky.

In the end, I decided to use Tahini, but it took me ages to find something that I really wanted to make, once I'd made that decision. I looked at cakes, cookies and flapjacks before I remembered that good old Australian word - slice - and came across this recipe, which seemed to use a good mix of  fruit and spices. It looked fairly healthy too - no added fat - until I read the nutritional information on the jar of tahini, and realised that sesame seeds contain nearly 60% fat, so using 185mls of tahini adds about 100g of fat to the recipe!

It's a simple recipe to follow, especially as metric weights are give alongside the cup measurements, but my cake batter was more like a cookie dough. I'm not sure whether this is down to different brands of ingredients being used, as well as desiccated coconut instead of shredded, or a fault in the recipe. I added a couple of tablespoons of milk, but it didn't make things much better. I gave the slice an extra 5 minutes baking time, to colour the coconut slightly, and be sure it was cooked through - a test at 20 minutes still looked a little damp.

The slice was pleasant to eat, and the flavours of dates, coconut and sesame seeds blended together well, but the amount of ground ginger used was hardly noticeable! The slice was more like a cookie in texture, but that made it a bit too dry for it's depth. Unfortunately, this wasn't something I'll be rushing to make again, although it might have worked better as a bar cookie, cooked in a larger baking tin, or even chilled and rolled into balls of dough to make conventional cookies.

AlphaBakes is co-hosted by Ros, at The More Than Occasional Baker and Caroline at Caroline Makes, who is this month's host. The basic idea is to use the chosen letter as the first letter of a major ingredient or part of the name of the dish which is made eg T is for Tiger Bread, or in my case, T is for Tahini. Full rules can be found here.

Festive Fruit Pie

Most of the Christmas leftovers have been dealt with by now. The last slice of ham, a few chunks of turkey and half a dozen chestnuts, together with a few mushrooms, in a mustard-y cream and white wine sauce, made a very tasty pie. What hasn't been eaten has been packed into the freezer, hopefully to make pies and curries over the next few weeks, and not just forgotten about. However, I am also determined not to leave too many half-used jars and packets of seasonal ingredients lurking about, as by springtime I'm past the point of wanting to eat things like mincepies and cranberry sauce.

Allow me a slight digression here - have you noticed that cream cheese is sold in 280g packs now, and not 300g? Luckily I was using a modern cheesecake recipe which took account of that, but many of my older recipes use multiples of 300g, so leftovers are inevitable, even if buying smaller packs, which are proportionally more expensive, to make up the weight.

Even so, as a result of scaling down a cream cheese frosting recipe, I was left with around half a pack of cream cheese and happened to read this recipe at Belleau Kitchen for a delicious sounding pastry using cream cheese, orange zest and ground almonds. It seemed perfect for the 'leftovers' fruit pie that I had decided to make. I made a slight adaptation to the recipe - I reduced the sugar to 50g and used icing sugar (which I think is incorporated more easily into pastry), and also used the zest of a small orange instead of a clementine, but otherwise I followed Dom's recipe, which originates from Dan Lepard's 'Short and Sweet'.

I used 2/3 of the pastry to line a deep pie dish, and the remainder to make a lattice for the top. I assembled the lattice on a sheet of baking parchment, and chilled it, along with the pie case, for about 20 minutes, before putting the pie together for baking.

For the filling I mixed together:
200g of mincemeat
roughly 125g of a good quality cranberry sauce (over 50% fruit)
two eating apples, peeled and cored and cut into small dice
80g of ready-to-eat dried dates, snipped into small pieces
1 teaspoon of ground rice to absorb excess fruit juices

I put the filling into the unbaked pie case, and placed the pre-made lattice on top. The excess pastry around the top of the pie case was folded over the edges of the lattice to seal the base and lattice together. The top was brushed with beaten egg white and sprinkled with caster sugar and the pie was baked at 180C for about 40 minutes until golden brown.

Both elements of this pie were very good! The pastry was very short and crumbly, but very easy to work with, and probably would have been even more delicious with a blander pie filling. The orange zest could be tasted in the pastry when eaten alone, but it was overwhelmed by the spices and other flavours in the mincemeat mixture. The pie filling still tasted predominantly of mincemeat but the addition of tart cranberries and apples cut through the usual sweetness and added a greater depth of flavour. The overall spice level of the mincemeat was reduced too, allowing the combination of dried and fresh fruits to dominate. Altogether, a successful experiment - the pastry is wonderful (thanks Dom!) it's worth buying cream cheese specially for it, and the filling mixture reduced my stock of opened jars while tasting much better than such a haphazard mixture might have done!

Sticky Date Cake with Ginger and Lemon

Christmas arrived a little early for me, as the theme for this week's local Clandestine Cake Club meeting was 'European Christmas Markets', with the remit to be inspired by the scents and flavours of Christmas across Europe.

In a way, the CCC is a little limiting when it comes to Christmas - no pies, tarts, or biscuits means a lot of Central and Northern European specialities, such as Lebkuchen, gingerbread biscuits and our own mincepies can't be included. A lot of traditional Christmas baking all across Europe seems to feature yeast dough too, something which is not my forté.

Despite the restrictions there was a great range of cakes to try -  chocolate cakes included Sachertorte, Black Forest Gateau, mint, orange and coffee, then there were two gingerbread cakes, a cranberry and orange drizzle cake, and my personal favourite - a mincemeat and marzipan bundt cake.

The meeting was held in one of our local tea rooms, so as well as the flavours of Christmas in the cakes we had the perfumes from the teas chosen too - London Fog (vanilla and Earl Grey) was popular, and cherry and chocolate tea went down well too. I can't remember the name of the tea recommended to me, but it was robust and spicy, and stood up well to the rich flavours in the cakes.

I took this cake, called a Squidgy Lemon-Ginger Cake on the BBC Good Food site, which I've made for Christmas before. Despite containing no dry fruits or ground spices, the ingredients magically blend to give just the right seasonal flavour and perfume. The cake is moist with finely chopped dried dates, which are soaked before use, and apple and is flavoured with dark muscovado sugar, fresh ginger and lemon, as well as the natural caramelly flavour of the dates.

I decorated the cake with a glacé icing coloured pale green with sparkly food colour, tiny white snowflakes from a bought packet and some larger snowflakes cut from rolled fondant icing. I don't know what possessed me to chose green icing - I had green or gold glitter available and thought green the better option for some reason!