A couple of my favourite baking recipes

 After an early start to my Saturday morning I arrived home ready to do some baking... Not that this doesn't happen often, I just thought I'd share two of my (from two great books!) most trusted recipes. I did the quick item first: Nigella Lawson's fairy cakes. I bought How to Be a Domestic Goddess: Baking and the Art of Comfort Cooking with a voucher someone gave me for my 21st birthday and it's one of my most prized kitchen posessions. With recipes like this one you can understand why it's got pride of place in my kitchen :-)

Fairy cakes:

125g butter

125g castor sugar

2 large eggs

125g self-raising flour

1/2 tsp vanilla extract (much, much better than vanilla essence - I've tried both)

2-3 Tbsp milk

2-bun muffin tin lined with muffin papers. Preheat oven to 180 deg C

Put all the ingredients except the milk in a food processor and blend until smooth. Add the milk through the funnel, makind a soft dropping consistency - I never measure this I just add it bit by bit until I'm happy with the consistency.

Spoon the mixture into the muffin cases (one heaped tablespoon is all that goes into each case - yes, it looks tiny but works out perfect). Bake for 15-20 minutes or until the cakes are golden. Cool on a wire rack.

I never bother to cut the tops flat to decorate them properly, I merely make a very basic icing of icing sugar and water and a little lemon juice, coloured according to the occasion. They are so popular in our house that I make a double batch and unless they're hidden away, they're all gone within hours :-)

There's another book I probably couldn't live without: Biscuits and Breads by Lynn Bedford Hall. I make the banana loaf, muffins, breads, scones, etc and they're all wondeful. Today's choice was the buttermilk rusks with are also a real hit. Rusks get dunked in coffee, tea and hot chocolate depending on the season and there are absolutely always rusks of some description in the kitchen :-)

Buttermilk Rusks 

1.5kg self raising flour

10ml salt

250ml sugar

375g butter

500ml buttermilk

3 eggs

The original recipe says combine the dry ingredients and rub in the butter. I cheat a little bit and melt the butter and then use an electric beater to turn the mixture into bread crumb consistency which you would have achieved through the rubbing. This is because the recipe takes long enough as it is and I prefer to enjoy my baking experience, not loath it because of unnecessary work!

Next, beat the eggs into the buttermilk and in turn knead this into the flour mixture. This requires a very large bowl and some proper elbow grease! The more you knead, the higher the rusks will rise. If the mixture seems too dry put a little water into the buttermilk carton and add to the dough (I have never had to do this but in the beginning it looks like you'll nneed to for sure - be patient!) Knead until the dough forms a ball and comes away from the sides of the bowl. Roll it into managable sized sausages and cut into golf-ball sized chunks. Roll into balls and pack into an oiled baking tin (I use one big one but two bread tins will work perfectly too).

Bake at 200 deg C for 30 minutes, reduce the heat to 180 deg C and bake for a further 30min. Turn out, break apart the balls and return them to the oven at 120 deg C. remove them once they're completely dried out. If your balls turned out a little big, cut them in half lenthways before drying.