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I’d never made a lemon cake before and we have thyme aplenty on the balcony so how about a lemon thyme cake as featured in the Observer mag a few weeks ago? Oh and the cake master herself was coming to visit Yumblog Junior, perhaps I could show off my culinary skills – she’s tasted [...]

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Bored with biscuits out of off of the cupboard? Want to eat a flapjack that will taste nothing like the dense sugar marathons that you can get in packets labelled ‘Mrs Futtocks’ home-baked country goodness treats’? Have you a spare half hour? I have the answer.

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In our new guise as parents we have entered a world where being invited to someone’s house for lunch doesn’t necessarily mean that you will be leaving at midnight having drunk the Rhone valley dry. It’s novel and despite our underlying fatigue, sensible drinking on a weekend still seems inherently wrong. So we had been [...]

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In the lull between milk extraction and nappy changing I remembered the vast amounts of 85% plain chocolate I had bought and sought to put some of it to work. I was looking for a chocolate biscuit with a melty bit as I’d never made one before and none of my books could help. A [...]

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Victor: A scone and tea at half past three, makes the day a little brighter. So you can keep your cakes and fancy tarts…. Jack and Victor: …and stick them up your shiter.

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This recipe is from the poetically titled and yet to be published ‘Purple Citrus and Sweet Perfume‘ by Silvena Rowe which was featured in the latest OFM. If this and the other published recipes are anything to go by, this particular publication could well be joining the myriad cookbooks gracing the West Wall of the [...]

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This recipe was the result of a pioneering scientific experiment to recreate something similar to Dr. Karg Crispbreads which, despite their medical honorific and Teutonic wholemeal worthiness are surprisingly tasty and addictive – especially if topped with a wedge of Extra Mature and a dollop of Branston. And so to the experiment…not being experts in this [...]

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Another Simon Hopkinson recipe, although this time one he borrowed from a cookbook written by Roald Dahl, who in his turn took it from a nice man in Arnhem who made these tasties at his patisserie. Judging by the photo in the (subsequently purchased and truly delightful) Roald Dahl book, these biscuits aren’t quite the [...]

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Ok, so if your beloved pussy approached you for a friendly lick and offered a tongue as mis-shapen as any of the examples below, you’d probably recoil with disdain, bundle it into a sack and rush it to the nearest canal vet. In our defence, this was our first attempt at such butter-rich chocolate-filled biscuits, [...]

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Hmm, onions, hmm, bread, hmm, onion bread, hmm, onion bread in individual portions, hmm, lovely lunch.

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What to do on Easter Sunday when you’ve already filled the cupboards with tasties but there is a sweet tea-time shaped hole in the kitchen – it’s actually a hatch, but I saw Doctor Who and I know all about holes and cracks in walls and time/space continua and giant eyes. So anyway, hot cross [...]

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Cornish Yarg is a mild yet flavoursome firm cheese not to be confused with the Cornish ‘Yarp’ – the only word uttered by Michael in ‘Hot Fuzz’.

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Well I suppose that’s the surprise spoilt already.

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Residents only. Another HF-W recipe from the Guardian magazine. His ability to tap into the Blogger-D taste-psyche is uncanny.

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Here’s a great idea – why not get up early on Saturday morning and spend an hour baking for a cat? After all it has to be a rewarding experience, our feline colleagues are renowned for their un-fussy attitude to food and the appreciative way they savour every meal lovingly placed before them. What could [...]

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This is a recipe from the Hairy Bakers/Bikers. It’s meant to contain brown ale but we didn’t have any so instead I used an alcohol-free driving Cobra which was gathering dust in the fridge. Let’s be honest, it was never going to get drunk.

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I found this Lemony Cheese delight in a back issue of the excellent Donna Hay magazine – the eponymous title from food editor, best-selling cookery writer, and from what I can gather, Queen of Australia.

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If you follow the link you’ll discover this young Gorgonzola came to us from Sardinia via Acton. Roasted Tomato and Gorgonzola Tarts with Balsamic Vinegar Caramel

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The plan is at some stage to make our own Ricotta from the whey left over from Yumblog Amalgamated Dairy Industries yoghurt-making enterprise. However I suspect the quantities involved will be minute and certainly a lot smaller than our massive combined appetites.

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I came across this recipe in last month’s Wa’ro magazine and it looked so tasty I had to give it a try. It also gave me the opportunity to photograph it alongside this stylishly knackered old fork which I bought recently in a charity shop purely for use as a prop. Everybody’s doing it – [...]

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There was a first birthday party to attend and we thought that, in the interests of encouraging the eating of biscuits from as young an age possible, we would make chocolate chip cookies. Thing is we had plenty chocolate but no chips, plenty cocoa powder but no desire to add nuts to the mixture, so [...]

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‘Eating lots of white bread raises the risk of a cancer that kills thousands of Britons every year … those who eat five slices a day are almost twice as likely to develop the most common form of kidney cancer compared to those who have one and a half slices.’… or so says that putrid [...]

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The appearance of a dessert on the Yumblog table can mean only one thing. Yes, we had guests. Others who might judge our food. By the time we got to the dessert the assembled worthies had already eaten firsts, seconds, and in one case, thirds of a rather tasty roast lamb and accompanying roasted goodies. [...]

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It’s all very well making a tasty loaf of brown bread for your toast and sandwiches, but sometimes bread has to be a bit different. Sometimes it has to be made out of mashed potato. Think bread. Think potato. Think Walkers new Onion Bhaji flavoured crisps, between brown bread. You are of course nowhere near [...]

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Another recipe purloined from Dan ‘Pour some sugar on me’ Lepard, which was in turn of other provenance, but such is cooking, dishes are passed from one to another and in doing so they evolve. Talking of Darwin, he was 200 the other day you know and Google honoured this on their homepage. I wonder [...]

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This Saturday I had the urge to spend all day in the kitchen and there is no better way of achieving this than embarking on one of Dan Lepard‘s more involved and elaborate recipes. This loaf takes the best part of a day to create and requires the making of two separate doughs – one [...]

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The first rule of owning a freezer is always have some puff pastry in it. Other than that you can include what you want, though be sure to have at least one novelty ice-cube tray. Here at Yumblog Mansions it’s a toss-up between the Lego piece tray and the green Ampelmann tray, though for the [...]

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Here we have another superb and satisfyingly time-consuming recipe from Dan Lepard. This one caught my eye because two of the ingredients are cream and golden syrup.

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And so it came to pass in dying chill days of October that the idea of soup for lunch started to grow in its appeal and so it was that a pair of Thermos was bought. And then Blogger D did make a rather tasty spinach and rosemary soup. And it had been recommended even [...]

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At Christmas I like a mince pie and a few years ago I found the perfect recipe in my Katie Stewart book. Last year I took the bold step of also making the mincemeat from scratch so this year I felt duty bound to do the same, only this time I held back and made [...]

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If you’re making a multitude of mince pies for a mulled wine gathering and you just happen to have a large Kelner jar sitting in the cupboard then the excuses for not making your own mincemeat can be but few. It’s super easy to make, you get to marshall what goes in, to avoid any [...]

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Always on the look out for novelty bread flours, I came across a packet of Doves Farm organic Barleycorn in Way’ro. It’s a mixture of wheat and barley flours, malted barley flakes and linseed. Apparently this loaf was one of two things named in honour of Prince Albert.

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I had to give this one a try, if only because it contains treacle, soggy Ryvita and onion. What’s more, it takes a whole weekend to make.

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After the sourdough fiasco I felt the need to purge the memory by baking something successfully. This is a handy recipe as it uses only store cupboard essentials: flour, salt, yeast, honey and lager.

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What do you do when you want to contribute something to a party being held in the name of a 1 year old but which quite naturally will be dominated by adults drinking wine and getting the munchies. And when the mother of the host is a fantastic cook and will have covered all bases [...]

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Ok, so we now have our sourdough starter sitting ominously in a jar at the back of the fridge gently seeping brown water. Time to make some bread. For a recipe I turn to the Observer Organic Allotment Blog and follow their elaborate and long-winded instructions to the letter.

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If you believe the hype (well in my narrow Guardian reading world anyway) everyone in credit crunch UK is now an artisan baker spending their precious downtime in the kitchen fashioning crusty bloomers and squeezing out granary torpedoes. Generally (and childishly) if I find myself on a bandwagon I have the irrestable urge to jump [...]

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On Saturday we went to a rain-drenched Oxford and had lunch at the highly recommended Branca Restaurant. Before tucking into fried calamari with lemon and chilli dressing followed by a big fat skate wing with scallops and mash, I soaked up the house red by nibbling away at some fine rosemary focaccia. So fine in [...]

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There’s nothing finer than getting up at 05:00 on a Sunday morning, amassing on Clapham Common with 27,000 other Lycra-clad humans, and pedalling off on a six-hour ride to Brighton. To help us reach our destination we packed the traditional sausage and Branston sandwiches, a bunch of bananas, 2 gallons of Lucozade and, for the [...]

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Regrettably, and I feel unreasonably, Tower Hamlets Council won’t let us keep sheep on the balcony so making our own feta cheese is out of the question. We do however have a healthy and ever-expanding mint plant and so at least were able to locally source half the ingredients in the title.

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