Lemon-Vanilla Dream Bars

The first recipe I tried from Pure Vanilla, by Shauna Sever, was one of the simplest in the book - Lemon-Vanilla Dream Bars. Shauna describes these as a 'less messy and more portable' version of lemon bars, which are one of the classic American baked treats. This recipe is essentially a white chocolate blondie rippled with lemon curd, and flavoured with both vanilla extract and vanilla bean paste. I used Green and Black's White Chocolate which contains vanilla seeds(caviar), so adding another dimension of vanilla flavouring.

The recipe seemed straightforward, but I had a typical heart-stopping moment that always seems to happen when I work with white chocolate. The first stage of the recipe is to melt white chocolate and butter together over simmering water, and I just couldn't get the two to combine smoothly. In fact I thought the white chocolate had seized completely, and it wasn't until I whisked in the eggs that I realised the mixture was going to come together smoothly.

After that it was plain sailing, although I forgot to fold in the chocolate chunks and had to sprinkle them over the surface of the batter after it had been in the oven a few minutes. Fortunately, the bars seemed none the worse for this!

This recipe is reproduced with permission from the publishers, and I have included the metric weights I used, where appropriate:

Ingredients:
10oz (300g) white chocolate, 50g chopped into chip-sized pieces
6 tablespoons (150g) butter
1/4 cup (50g) granulated sugar (I used caster sugar)
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 large eggs at room temperature
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 teaspoon vanilla bean paste
1 cup (130g) all purpose (plain) flour
1/2 cup (125g) lemon curd

Method
Pre-heat the oven to 350F (180C) and line a 8" (20cm) square tin with baking parchment.
Melt the butter and 250g of the white chocolate together in a large bowl, over a pan of simmering water.
Remove the bowl from the heat and stir in the sugar and salt.
Whisk in the eggs, one at a time, then whisk in both the vanilla extract and bean paste.
Gently fold in the flour, followed by the chopped chocolate, and put the batter into the baking tin.
Dollop the lemon curd onto the batter in 5 or 6 equal portions, and swirl into the batter using a knife and a figure of 8 movement.
Bake for around 25 minutes, until a tester comes out clean.
Cool on a wire rack, then cut into 12 bars when completely cold.

These were really delicious! The batter gave the perfect dense texture of a fudgy blondie, and the lemon curd was partly absorbed by the batter and partly remaining in little pockets that were intensely lemony. This lemon note really contrasted well with the sweet base, but still allowed the vanilla flavours to shine through.

My bars don't look perfect, because of sprinkling the chocolate chunks over the batter instead of folding them in. This caused little hollows to form as the larger chunks sank, although these hollows seemed to happen where lemon curd was left on the surface too.

This recipe is worth repeating just for the blondie base, if I can face the trauma of working with white chocolate again, perhaps with dark chocolate or fudge chips added, and Shauna also suggests replacing the lemon curd with any good quality low-sugar jam with a tart flavour, to ring the changes.

I'm so pleased my first recipe from this book was a success; it gives me confidence to tackle some of the more complicated recipes, and endorses my positive review of the book given from the first reading. Although I received a free copy of this book, I was not required to give a positive review of either the book, or the recipes I tried, in return.

Pure Vanilla - A Book Review

I'm used to getting promotional emails, asking me to take part in competitions, add my blog to other sites, give space to aspiring writers and so on, or offering books or sample ingredients. Most of these are rejected, as I don't want to change the nature of my blog - I write for my own satisfaction, not to gain recognition, make money or further a career (mine or anyone elses!). Occasionally I'm offered a book or a baking ingredient which I think I can use, without compromising that point of view - in the case of books, I always make it clear that I will give an honest opinion, whether it be positive or not so enthusiastic. If I accept a book, I will always try to find a recipe which I can make, so as to get a real feel for how well the book is written and how good the cook is. This is a review of one of the books which has tempted me recently!

'Pure Vanilla - irresitible recipes and essential techniques' by Shauna Sever is about to be published in the UK. Shauna has already published a book called  Marshmallow Madness!, and writes a blog called A Piece of Cake. As well as a wide range of recipes covering everything from breakfast to evening cocktails, this book covers the history and production of vanilla, and looks at the characteristics of vanilla pods grown in various regions around the world.

It was fascinating reading and sent me to the kitchen to discover the origins of my vanilla products. My pods, produced by Ndali, come from Uganda, so have a "sweet, winey, raisinlike fragrance and flavour ..... perfect for rich desserts, especially ones containing chocolate" (so that's OK then!). The organic vanilla bean paste was from an Australian company, so may have been produced in  Papua New Guinea from Tahitian Vanilla. The bottle of vanilla extract, from one of the leading brands, doesn't state the origins of the beans at all.

Reading about how difficult it is to produce a vanilla bean, and how long the subsequent processing takes, makes it easier to understand why vanilla is one of the most expensive spices on the market, second only to saffron.

After the comprehensive introduction to all aspects of vanilla we come to the recipes. They are not all illustrated, which is always a disappointment, but those that are have beautiful photographs by Leigh Beisch.  It can't have been easy to photograph food which is mostly in shades of white, but  Leigh has produced some stunning photographs which make all the dishes look very appetising.

In many of the recipes, Shauna uses more than one form of vanilla to produce layers of flavour which are not in competition with other strong flavours. This will probably surprise most cooks, who tend to use vanilla as a background note to other flavours and not as the main feature. As the author is American, the recipes are written in cup measurements, which can be off putting to UK cooks, although cup measures are widely available. I was interested to see that white chocolate is often used to add a vanilla flavour, as I've often said that this is about the only real use for white chocolate!

Most of the recipes are for sweet dishes, although some savoury uses for vanilla are mentioned, including the vanilla salt you can see in my photographs. I intend to use it to top some salted vanilla chip oatmeal cookies, but it can be used to season meat, vegetables or salads too. It's going to take a week for my vanilla salt (a mix of the seeds(caviar) of half a vanilla pod with half a cup of sea salt) to mature, so I'll be writing a review of that recipe separately!

I was surprised that it was initially quite difficult to actually find recipes which I wanted to make straight away. I wasn't really interested in either breakfast foods (although many could double as desserts), drinks or candies and confections which ruled out three of the six recipe chapters. In the other chapters, covering cakes and pies,  cookies and bars, and custards and creams, some of the recipes seemed  quite complicated, expensive (16 egg whites!) or used ingredients not easily obtained in the UK (marshmallow creme!). Some of the recipes just weren't suitable for the sort of cooking I'm doing at the moment, needing the right occasion to serve them up to a crowd. However, there are enough recipes which I would like to make, when the time is right, to keep me interested in the book, and any cook past the beginnners stage would find some of the more difficult recipes appealing and challenging.

All in all, this is a book which would be a good addition to any cook's library and which challenges our perception that vanilla is synonymous with plain and ordinary!

Lemon Drizzle Cake - Baking Mad part 2

The Baking Mad PR person listed several links to recipes and recipe categories from which I could choose to bake, including the general categories of cakes and muffins. Having tried a muffin recipe which I wasn't entirely happy with, I turned my attention to cakes.

Unfortunately, once I'd excluded everything that someone in the rest of the family wouldn't (or couldn't) eat and those that I didn't have all the ingredients for, there wasn't much left that looked really interesting. I was particularly hoping to find a cake made with oil instead of butter, but eventually picked this Lemon Drizzle Cake - although it used butter it was quite a low proportion compared to standard recipes. I've tried several lemon drizzle cake recipes, but am always willing to try another; to my mind they need to be more interesting than a sponge soaked in lemon syrup, and this cake seemed to fit that brief.

The recipe used 150mls lemon juice in total, but I only got 120mls from the 3 average sized lemons I had available. This didn't worry me - I just reduced the drizzle mixture accordingly - most cakes use far too much for my taste anyway! As I was using 3 lemons, I added the zest of 2 to the cake, rather than the 1 stipulated. These were the only changes I made to the recipe, which was quite straightforward to follow. I haven't made this sort of cake with melted butter before - I was a little worried about adding lemon juice and eggs to hot butter, so let it cool as much as I dared, something which wasn't mentioned in the recipe.

As usual, I had trouble getting the cake to absorb the drizzle mixture, especially as the crust of the cake was quite crisp. I find drizzling only works really well on flat topped cakes, with domed cakes like this the tendency is for everything to run off, however careful and slow you are with the drizzling. Bigger holes might help, but then the appearance of the cake is spoiled! I didn't use all the drizzle I made - I guess, between this and making less, I only used about half the total volume made in the recipe.

This was a great cake - well flavoured and with a lovely texture, thanks to the ground almonds and cornflour. What drizzle I did get onto the cake made a crunchy coating which was intensively lemony, but it hadn't penetrated far into the cake. I often leave off the drizzle on these sort of cakes, as I find it so difficult to get them on, but used it this time because I thought the cake wouldn't be sweet enough without it. However, I needn't have worried - the interior of the cake was nicely balanced between sweetness and a gentle lemon flavour.

I think this is a recipe I'd use again, as it's simple and quick to make, but perhaps making a smaller volume of  more concentrated hot syrup with caster sugar and lemon juice, just to brush on the top. Alternatively the cake could be prettied up with a lemon glacé icing and some strips of lemon zest, as there is peel leftover from the number of lemons needed in the recipe.

There are several other lemon cakes on the site, including this traybake with cream cheese frosting, and a simple recipe search to enable you to get all the examples together to make your choice. This is worth doing, as some cakes aren't in the category you'd expect to find them. For instance, this lemon and poppy seed loaf was in the 'sweet doughs' category, even though it is obviously a cake!

Chocolate Brownie Muffins - Baking Mad

I expect most food bloggers receive promotional emails offering free goodies in return for a mention in a blog post. I've only taken advantage of these twice before - once to receive a charity recipe book, and once for free samples of one of the low sugar/stevia products. I don't like feeling obligated to cook or write about something in particular, which stops me taking up a lot of the offers I get - they just don't fit into my style of cooking or the general theme of the blog. However, the ongoing campaign for Baking Mad caught my eye - bake from a selected bunch of recipes from the Baking Mad site and receive a book by Eric Lanlard.

I'm only peripherally aware of Eric Lanlard, as I don't watch many of the food programmes on TV - we only bought a Freeview box just before the digital changeover, and I still try not to watch TV during the day. My impression of him is of a French patissier whose recipes looked amazing, but far too complicated for the average cook to follow. This certainly isn't true of all the recipes on Baking Mad, but then, they are not all Eric Lanlard recipes; he seems to be associated with the site through the name of his TV series, but the site itself is run by a conglomeration of food companies such as Silver Spoon, Billingtons and Allisons - are all these owned by the same parent company? Yes - they are all under the Silver Spoon umbrella!

The Baking Mad site seems to give extensive coverage of all aspects of baking, with several ways of looking for particular types of recipes - from Cakes and Pastry recipes through Jams and Chutneys, to gluten free baking. There's a section on Kid's Cooking as well as baking tips. There's also a community area, where you can join in discussions on baking. As well as Eric Lanlard recipes, there are others contributed by TV cooks, although the vast majority have no noted contributor, other than 'bakingmad'.

One of the choices on the list provided was for something from the range of muffin recipes on the site. I chose these Chocolate Brownie Muffins because they looked quick and simple to make, and were relatively low in both fat and added sugar. I followed the recipe exactly, only substituting hazelnuts for the pecans in the recipe, so that FB could eat them. The recipe was as simple as it looked, although I couldn't find an explanation of the electric oven temperatures - I had to assume the first was for a conventional oven and the second for a fan assisted oven. There was also the puzzle of the additional ingredient - 50g of dark muscovado sugar  - which wasn't used in the recipe. Perhaps it was an option to increase the sweetness, if preferred. The muffins could certainly have done with the extra sweetness, but I would have liked to read something in the recipe which explained this!

Now, you will know by now that muffins aren't my forté, so it's possible that someone else would get a better product, but I found these a little on the dry side, and although they were light in texture, they didn't rise much. They were also nowhere near as chocolatey as a good muffin should be - the addition of some cocoa to the batter, and some chocolate chips stirred through, would have improved this. The cooking temperature also seemed a little on the high side - the muffins looked a little overdone even on the minimum cooking time!

I certainly can't dismiss the whole site on the basis of one recipe which wasn't a complete success. I'll try another recipe - perhaps one by Eric Lanlard himself - and I will add the site to my list of sites to search when I'm looking for new ideas. I've already wasted spent a lot of time there! From what I've seen, the majority of the recipes are quick and easy to make, and don't need unusual or hard to find ingredients.

Rhubarb and Ginger Crumble....

....... made with the first rhubarb of the year from my garden!!

I'm not a keen gardener, but if I am going to put in some effort, I like some reward, and what could be more satisfying than growing some of your own fruit, vegetables and herbs? It's so good to see the first rhubarb leaves pushing up through the soil and uncurling, and it's amazing how fast they grow. I can't tell how much we will be able to harvest this year, but we didn't get the cold winter that rhubarb needs to be really fruitfull. However, after this we have gooseberries, strawberries and apples to look forward to.

And once you've picked the first rhubarb, there's little to beat using it in a simple crumble. I added a little ginger to this one, in the form of 3 lumps of preserved ginger, roughly chopped, and two tablespoons of syrup from the jar, mixed into the rhubarb, along with 2 tablespoons of Light at Heart brown 'sugar' - a lower calorie sugar substitute. I didn't weigh the rhubarb - I just picked enough to fill my baking dish to about 3/4 full. I guess there was around 500g - rhubarb is usually sold in 400g packs.

I also used Light at Heart in the crumble mix. I've tried it before in baking, and wasn't happy with it's performance in cakes, where volume is important, but it's ideal in this sort of baking, where just the sweetening power is important. Light at Heart is a mix of sugar and stevia, blended so that exactly half the usual amount will give the same amount of sweetness. Half the amount of sugar means half the calories, of course!

For the crumble mix, I used 100g each of butter, SR flour and rolled oats, and 50g of brown Light at Heart. The butter was roughly rubbed into the other ingredients, leaving quite a few lumpy bits. This was then sprinkled over the fruit, pressed down lightly and baked at 190C for 45 minutes. Eat while still quite warm, although you can reheat in a low oven. I reheat leftover portions of fruit crumble in the microwave, but it's nowhere near as good as one that is freshly baked!

I received free samples of Light at Heart from Tate and Lyle at the end of last year, but wouldn't have carried on using it if I wasn't  pleased with it's performance. The only thing I don't like is the price - it's more than four times the cost of sugar! I don't think I'm likely to carry on with it once the free samples are used up!

Pineapple and Blackberry Crumble

This crumble was inspired by one of the dishes made in the third heat of the Celebrity Sport Relief Bake Off Challenge, shown on TV last week. TV presenter Anita Rani, who went on to be the overall winner, made a Pineapple and Blackberry Crumble with the coconut added to the crumble topping. No recipe was given for this, but it wasn't difficult to figure out a recipe which at least featured the same flavours in the dish. Anita added (I think) cinnamon and vanilla to her pineapple, and flamed it with rum while it was cooking. She then mixed in raw blackberries before adding the topping.

As usual, with this sort of thing, my recipe is a bit 'thrown together' as I don't weigh the fruit. I know that if I half-fill my large Pyrex dish with fruit and top it with a crumble mix made from 80-100g of each ingredient, I'm going to get 4-6 portions depending on appetite. I also took the opportunity to use more of the Light at Heart sugar/stevia mix that I've been given to try. The added stevia reduces the calories by half as you only need to use half as much sugar as usual.

So, this is roughly what I did!

Peeled, cored and chopped 2/3 of a standard sized supermarket pineapple into chunks.
Thawed a roughly equal volume of blackberries.
Melted about 40g unsalted butter in a frying pan and added the pineapple. As it started to cook I added 1 tablepoon of brown Light at Heart (or 2 tablespoons light muscovado sugar), a half teaspoon cinnamon and a teaspoon vanilla extract. I then poured on two tablespoons of rum which I mixed in and then flamed. I then turned up the heat and reduced the pan juices to a sticky caramel. The fruit was then cooled.
For the crumble mix, I rubbed 80g unsalted butter into 80g plain flour, 80g whole rolled oats and 40g white Light at Heart (use 80g regular white sugar). I then stirred in 20g desiccated coconut. I think it's important not to make the mixture too fine - leaving a few lumps of butter and some clumps of crumble adds to the texture.
The cooled pineapple was mixed with the blackberries, and 1 tablespoon of cornflour, to thicken any juices. The fruit was put into a deep casserole dish with a 1litre capacity, and the crumble mix was sprinkle evenly on top and pressed down lightly.
The crumble was baked until the top was golden brown and the fruit bubbling. I usually do this at 180C for about 45 minutes, but I started at a much higher temperature with this dish because I was cooking something else in the oven too. It had the first 10 minutes at 220C which didn't seem to do it any harm. It then finished off at 180C, with about 25 minutes cooking overall.

This was a really good combination of flavours - the pineapple, cinnamon, vanilla and hint of rum gave a tropical flavour, and fantastic smell, when added to the coconut in the topping. I'm not sure I'd have recognised the blackberries in a blind tasting but they added another taste dimension and a lovely colour to the dish. Coconut in the crumble topping is definitely an innovation I'll be using again with suitable fruit! Using the Light at Heart sugar in this context was fine too - I didn't notice anything different in the volume, taste or texture of the crumble mix.

Orange Layer Cake

I used the two cakes I made yesterday to make this Orange Layer Cake. 

As it seemed the flatter of the two, I used the cake made with Light at Heart as the bottom layer. It was a little lopsided so I attempted to level the bottom by shaving off a little of the cake. I then sandwiched the cakes with half a jar of orange curd, and made a glacé icing with icing sugar, two heaped teaspoons of orange curd and a few drops of water. The result was a very well flavoured cake, but it threw up a couple of questions:

1) Why can't I level off cakes properly? This was still lopsided and I was contemplating pushing in cocktail sticks to stop the top layer sliding off!

2) Why didn't I know that orange curd isn't suitable for a cake filling? I'm sure I've seen recipes which fill cakes with fruit curd, but as soon as I set the top layer in place, it just pushed the lemon curd out at the sides.

This cake wouldn't win any prizes for appearance, but it was very tasty, and as yet another adaptation of this Annie Bell recipe, it convinced me that this is a really useful recipe.

Baking with Light at Heart

I think we all know that it's difficult to reconcile a love of cakes, pastries, cookies and chocolate with healthy eating and even more difficult for some of us to keep a steady weight, let alone lose weight while eating these regularly. There are things we can do to make baked goods a little healthier - reduce saturated fat, use wholemeal flour, add fresh fruit and vegetables, and so on, but these tweaks don't really address the issue of calorie intake.

Now Tate and Lyle have introduced a new product called Light at Heart which may be able to help - it's a mix of sugar and stevia. Stevia is a plant extract which is so sweet that even though only only 1% is added to ordinary sugar, it makes it so sweet that only half as much is needed, thus cutting the calories contributed by sugar by half too. It is available in brown and white varieties, and Tate and Lyle claim it can be used in baking, as well as a substitute for sugar in things like drinks and on cereals. I think it's ingenious of Tate and Lyle to adjust the use of stevia so that exactly half the usual amount of sugar is needed - easy to remember!

When I was offered free samples of Light at Heart, I was only too happy to try them, even though it's not the sort of product I would usually consider buying. However, I had doubts that it would be suitable for every baking situation, as much of the success of a cake depends on the amount of sugar used. Sugar contributes to moistness, texture and volume when used in cakes, as well as sweetness, and I've read that you can only reduce the sugar by 20-25% before these are affected. Cutting it by 50% seemed a big step to take!

Left-hand cake baked with Light at Heart

I decided the best way of comparing the use of sugar and Light at Heart was to do a side by side bake of two cakes, where the only difference was whether sugar or Light at Heart was used. I picked an oil-based sponge recipe which is simple and quick to mix. This enabled the cakes to be mixed side by side in just a few minutes. Each was then baked in a 10 x 5" rectangle - two halves of a 10" square tin.

There were no other factors affecting the cakes apart from the use of either sugar or Light at Heart.

Each cake was made by whisking 120ml sunflower oil, 2 eggs, 70ml semi-skimmed milk, the zest of half an orange and 1 teaspoon of orange extract together with either 180g caster sugar or 90g Light at Heart, until well amalgamated. Then 180g plain flour and 1 rounded teaspoon baking powder was sifted in and whisked just enough to give a smooth mixture with no flour showing. The cakes were baked at 190C for 30 minutes, when a test probe came out clean.

Left-hand cake baked with Light at Heart

It was obvious as soon as the cakes were baked that there was a significant difference between the two. The cake using Light at Heart didn't rise as much and was paler, with a speckled unevenly coloured surface. When the cold cakes were cut, there didn't seem much visible difference between the two, apart from the volume, but the cake made with Light at Heart seemed a little drier when eaten. The speckling was due to the Light at Heart having larger crystals than caster sugar - it was more like granulated sugar, which I don't usually use in baking.

These differences aren't great, and if you really want to reduce calorie intake and still eat cakes, then you might be able to overlook them and be happy with cakes baked with Light at Heart. I'm not sure you'll be able to overlook the price difference though - Light at Heart costs around £2.50 for 500g which makes it about 4 times more expensive than sugar.

Left-hand cake baked with Light at Heart

I'm going to try Light at Heart in other baking situations, where I think it might be more succesful. The issue of volume and texture isn't as important in things like pastry and crumble toppings, where sugar is used mainly for it's sweetness. I'm hoping that using Light in Heart in cookies will be successful too. However, I don't think I'll be using Light at Heart in cakes where lightness, moistness and volume are important.

The Little Book of Treats - Part 2

As part of the review of 'The Little Book of Treats', available exclusively from M&S Cafés and sold to raise funds for Macmillan Cancer Support, as part of The World's Biggest Coffee Morning,  I decided to try a couple of recipes straight away. I was a little constrained by what was already in the store cupboard, and by the fact that I'd already made a batch of our favourite low-fat brownies, for the weekend, so didn't want another chocolate bake.

My first choice was Fabulous Flapjacks, a recipe which contained a little less fat and sugar than I usually use. This used add-ins which I often use in my flapjacks - dried apricots, dried cranberries and pumpkin seeds - but added orange zest and juice and some mixed spice.

The flavours worked really well together but I found the flapjacks a little too crisp for my taste, although this could be due to the 5 minutes extra baking I gave them before I got a golden colour on top. The mixture didn't really hold together well either - the downside of trying to reduce the fat and sugar, I think - so the flapjacks crumbled when eaten. I used a tangerine instead of the orange stipulated, so may have been a little short of enough orange juice, which might have contributed to the crumbliness.

This is one of my quibbles with this particular recipe - the imprecise nature of the measurements and instruction! "Add orange juice to taste" said the recipe - well how am I to know how much it needs, and whether it's a vital part of holding the ingredients together, or just a flavour addition? An instruction which makes sense to the recipe owner, who may have developed the recipe over several years of changes, may not mean much to anyone else trying the recipe, without the experience with it. I'd also much rather have weights of syrups, rather than tablespoons. It's also difficult to measure dried apricots in tablespoons! OK, they need chopping, but if I chop them first and then measure out 3 tablespoons, then I may chop too many and end up with waste. In the end I decide two apricots would fill a tablespoon, so chopped 7 of them (one for luck!).

The recipe - melt 125g butter in a pan, adding 60g unrefined demerara sugar (I used light muscovado) 1 tablepoon of golden syrup and 1 1/2 tablepoons of honey. Stir in 250g porridge oats, 3 tablespoons chopped dried apricots, 3 tablespoons dried cranberries, 2 tablespoons pumpkin seeds, 1 teaspoon of mixed spice, 1 teaspoon salt (I left this out as I used salted butter) and the zest of an orange. Finally stir in the juice of the orange, to taste. Spoon the mixture into a shallow base-lined 20 x 18cm tin (I used a 20cm square tin, lined with baking parchment), press down firmly and bake at 180C for 20 minutes or until golden on top. Leave to cool in the tin for 5 minutes, then turn out and cut into squares. (I marked the flapjack into squares while still warm, then cooled in the tin, as I usually do!)

The second recipe I chose was Butterscotch Apple Meringue, a dessert of apples cooked in a butterscotch sauce and topped with meringue before baking. This was pleasant enough to eat, but lacked any textural contrast. It would have been more than twice as good in a crisp pastry case! We ate it still slightly warm from the oven, but I thought it was better the next day, after a night in the fridge, when the apple flavour was more pronounced.

The recipe - Preheat the oven to 150C. Cook 450g (weight before peeling and chopping) of chopped cooking apples in a little water, until tender, then drain. Blend 40g cornflour with a little of the milk from 450mls. Bring the rest of the milk to the boil with 1 tablespoon golden syrup, 50g light muscovado sugar and 25g butter. Add to the cornflour mixture then return to the pan and bring back to the boil. Simmer for 3-4 minutes. Stir in 2 tablespoons single cream and two egg yolks, then remove from the heat before the mixture boils again. Fold in the cooked apples and pour into an oven proof serving dish (you need a pie or flan dish about 20cm in diameter). Whisk the 2 egg whites until stiff then whisk in most of 100g caster sugar (I whisked in about 2/3). Gently fold in the rest of the sugar, then spread the meringue over the apple mixture. Bake for 20-25 minutes, until the meringue is crisp and golden. Serve hot or cold.

NB - I received a free copy of The Little Book of Treats, from Macmillan Cancer Support,  but have tried to give an impartial review of the book, and the recipes I've tried.

The Little Book of Treats - Part 1

The 'World's Biggest Coffee Morning' is an annual fundraising event run by Macmillan Cancer Support. This year the event is in it's 21st year, and will be held on Friday 30th September. For the second year running, Marks and Spencer is Macmillan's official partner and will be helping to raise money in several ways detailed below.

The aim of the coffee morning is to encourage people to take time out together with friends, relatives and colleagues over a coffee, and help raise £8.5 million to support much needed funds for Macmillan's vital work to help improve the lives of people affected by cancer.

As part of their support, Marks and Spencer are selling, in the M&S Café, the exclusive Macmillan's 'Little Book of Treats' (£3) which features recipes from supporters and celebrities, including celebrity cooks Gwyneth Paltrow, Sophie Dahl, Eric Lanlard, Lorraine Pascale and Antonio Carluccio, with all proceeds going directly to Macmillan. Until 4th October, they are also donating 10p of the sale price of a range of products to Macmillan, and for every coffee sold on 30th September, an additional 50p will be donated.

It's probably too late to organise your own coffee morning by now, but you can find one to attend locally on the Macmillan's website, or you can have a coffee break in an M&S Café, and/or buy The Little Book of Treats

I have been sent a free copy of the book to review by Michael at Macmillan Cancer Support, but I am giving an unbiased opinion:

This little book contains 31 recipes, covering a wide range of baking, most being suitable for beginners but some a little more challenging. Amongst the ubiquitous fairy cakes, victoria sponges and Lemon Drizzle Cakes there were a few recipes which caught my eye - Red Velvet Cupcakes from Eric Lanlard, where the rich colour comes from vinegar and bicarbonate of soda reacting together (no added colour), which are then decorated with a cooked buttercream based on a roux sauce, some crumbly piped Polenta Biscuits from Antonio Carluccio, plus several brownie recipes!

I'm not sure an experienced and dedicated baker will find much new here, but even one new recipe that you bake again and again is worth the price of a book, and in this case the profits are going to a very good cause!