Prep Time: Less than 30 mins | Cook Time: 10 to 30 mins | Servings: 16
Nutritional Info: per 16th of the cake: 344 kcal, 36g carbs, 21g fat, 3g protein.

Ingredients:

Preheat your oven to 180’c, and grease and line two 20cm/smallish sandwich tins

cream together the butter and the sugar. The original recipe suggests you do this with a food mixer but if you’re a PROPER PERSON you’ll do with with elbow grease. It’s good exercise. Go on.

Add the eggs and beat together

then add the flour and orange zest and mix until they’re all well combined

Split the mix equally between the two sandwich tins, spread out so it’s even, and pop in the oven for 25-30 minutes

While this is happening, make the filling, for the jam, pop the rasberries, 2 tbsp of orange (don’t be tempted to add more, there’s juice in the rasberries too) and sugar into a pan and heat it really gently for 20 minutes

When the rasberries are all broken down, take it off the heat and allow it to cool. This is basically jam.

I don’t appear to have a picture of the butter icing, but pop the icing sugar and butter in a bowl, beat together and grate in the orange zest, and add juice until it loosens, but not too much. Should be nice and fresh tasting. DO NOT EAT IT ALL.

When the cake is ready (something sharp poked in it comes out clean, not with cake mix on it) take them out of the oven, leave to cool in their tins for a bit.

Turn them out and cool completely, COMPLETELY on the wire rack.

cover one with the icing, and the other with the jam, because you let them cool completely the butter icing now does not proceed to melt everywhere. Well done.

Put them together, and if you’re presenting as-is, pop some icing sugar dusting over the top. If covering with royal icing, brush the tops and sides with another bit of jam, roll out the icing, lay over the top of the cake, cover, press it all down, and cut away the excess. If decorating with colouring, leave it for a day to dry before mixing gel colours with vodka to apply pretty painting.

Pre-iced cake:

Happy birthday, Andy.

These are easy. Cookies are easy. You should make them. And find some people to help you eat them. And come and eat some of mine, tomorrow, at Performance in the Pub. Yes. Plug.

COOKIES.

Prep Time: 30 mins | Cook Time: 20 mins | Servings: Makes 16
Nutritional Info: 167 kcalories, protein 3g, carbohydrate 19g, fat 9 g, saturated fat 5g, fibre 2g, sugar 11g, salt 0.18 g

Ingredients:

Heat your oven to 180’c. Get out some baking tins, and a wire rack. grease the baking tins, line them with baking paper if you want to be slightly wasteful of paper, but conserve water by not having to wash them up. Weigh out the butter and sugar, cream together. If you just got the butter out of the fridge you can zap it for bursts of 8 seconds in a microwave until soft, but don’t melt it.

Add the mashed banana, vanilla essence, and eggs, and beat together until smoothly mixed

In a separate bowl mix together all of the remaining dry ingredients.

Add this to the wet mix, fold together until all lovely and clumpy, and then spoon onto the baking sheets well spaced apart. 1 Tbsp per cookie, and in a sort of heaped oval that’s technically called a ‘quenelle’. I don’t know why it needs a funny name, but what it does it make sure the cookie doesn’t get too flat when it cooks. GOOEY MIDDLES.

Bake for 15-20 minutes until lightly browned. Leave to rest for a minute or two, and then transfer to a wire rack to cool.

Eat all of them. Weep a little. Write a blog post with nice pictures.