Marie Cookpad

  I really struggle with finding good light for taking my food photos this time of year, when the days are getting shorter and the sun is finding its way differently in the sky. It always takes me a few weeks to adjust to it all. Oh well!    I hope you won't let poor photography dissuade you from baking what is a really lovely cake.  I adapted the recipe from one I found on a site called Once Upon a Chef. It looked really nice and I had picked up a couple of punnets of purple plums at the shops as they were on offer.   I adore plums, they are one of my favourite fruits.  I was quite disappointed in the plums we bought the other day. They were mealy.  I hate mealy fruit.  The only way to really use them was to cook them, hence the cake.   I'll be honest here and say I think its really bad that you should buy punnets of mealy fruit at this time of year when fruit is so fresh and readily available!  Bad. Bad. Bad. Shouldn't happen!  ...

  I always like to bake Todd a treat at the weekend.  Because we are both retired, the weekend can easily blend into our weeks, so I like to do something which marks these two days apart from the other five.  It is so easy to lose your weekend when you are not working any longer.  I try to mark Saturday and Sunday as still being special days in our lives.    For the most part (with a few exceptions) I only bake at the weekend.  Sunday is set apart because that is the day we go to church.  We don't shop on Sundays or order takeaways, we have designated Sunday as our day of rest.   I usually try to make Todd something special to enjoy with his early morning cuppa. I am not one much for hot drinks, but Todd he is so British . . . .   he really needs his morning hot cuppa.    That can be a barley cup, or a hot chocolate, sometimes an herbal tea.  So long as it it wet and hot, he is happy.  Adding a tasty bake into th...

  One of my favourite magazines to buy (aside from Country Home)  when I was bringing up my children was Good Housekeeping. They always had great recipes in them, plus collectible recipes, which yes I always collected, and crafts, useful articles, etc.  I used to clip out the recipes that I thought looked good and save the craft patterns and any articles I thought would be useful. Every Christmas they would have a Gingerbread House on the cover.  So lovely . . .  I always aspired to make one like theirs, but never quite managed it.   They have Good Housekeeping Magazine over here in the UK as well, although now my family is grown I never really buy it.  I do find it difficult to resist their seasonal and Christmas special magazines however!    This year I have collected their Spring collection and the Summer one and the other day I was in the grocery store and spied the Autumn one.  You know Autumn is truly in the air when the magazines ...