Fruit & Honey Flapjacks

I went for dinner at my dearest Jenny’s house a couple of weeks ago and her mum had baked something delicious. They were flapjacks but they were fruity and delicious and I needed the recipe ASAP. Luckily she obliged but of course I changed it up a bit, I’m so pro real butter but I was using these for my ‘healthy’ mid morning snack so I subbed the sugar for honey. The recipe was half honey and half sugar but I made it all honey. I know that sugar is sugar is sugar but I just feel better when the bees made it. Oh, I also subbed half the dried apricots for dried cranberries because I really love dried cranberries.

These are the perfect balance of nutrition and naughty, in my eyes, they are packed with fruit, seeds and nuts but also have that sweet, buttery deliciousness. These may be good for you but I’m not deluded that they are healthy in the sense that if you are torn between a banana or this, have the banana, but if you are torn between the triple layer chocolate fudge cake or the fruity flapjack then this is the choice to make because IT IS DELICIOUS. Unfortunately I was just sent a photo of the recipe so I am unable to credit it but I will do so as soon as I find it!

Vegan Peanut Cookies (GF)

I wanted to bake something vegan friendly to take into work and a quick Google search lead me to this useful article on Jamie Oliver’s website. I was instantly drawn to the peanut butter cookies as I’ve had a bit of a thing about peanuts recently and kept my fingers crossed that they’d be a popular choice. I was pretty excited to see that not only were they vegan but they were gluten free too!

They were tasty with a nice crunch and crumble. They seemed to go down well with everyone but I kept a couple at home and they definitely didn’t last long!

Breakfast Crumble

So, I thought I’d break up the constant stream of cakes there has been lately with a breakfast dish; we’ll pretend that it isn’t a dessert inspired breakfast dish. I promise I will start posting savoury, healthy dishes again soon as I’m determined to get re-inspired and back on track but life has been hectic and I’ve been cooking the old faithful dishes (and baking a lot of cake too, as you know). I made this crumble one Friday night ready to pop in the oven on Saturday morning, a plan that I was most grateful for when I woke up.

You could use any fruit for this, I went for berries; the crumble is a more oaty and less sugary than traditional crumble topping and has some flaked almonds thrown in for good measure. I hadn’t heard of breakfast crumble before and thought I’d had a great new idea, since then it is all I’ve seen on the internet but I am not complaining, the more the merrier.

Mini Christmas Cakes

These were another creation for my Christmas gift hampers. I also took some into work as the batch made 24 of the little beauties. I used a mini Victoria sandwich tin, which has loose bottoms (don’t we all?!) and straight sides, but otherwise looks very much like a muffin tin. If you don’t mind your mini cakes having angled sides then I’d just use a muffin tin. I’d had my eye on the mini sandwich tin for ages though and when it was reduced to less than half price, I just had to have it. I have a cake tin addiction, you might have guessed.

Ideally, you should soak the fruit for a few days to a week, until it stops absorbing brandy. If you end up making these on the spur of the moment then you can gently boil the fruit in the brandy to get a similar effect, the fruit doesn’t quite have the same boozy impact though but still tastes pretty good.

Grain Free Granola

Since giving up grains, there are a few (many) things I miss; I’m not totally strict, I eat white rice (because I really love rice noodles). I have adjusted pretty well but I find weekend breakfasts the most difficult to come up with, in the week I have some variation of kale, eggs and bacon but at the weekends I want pancakes, toast & jam or granola. Very occasionally I make gluten free pancakes of some sort, even rarer I’ll have gluten free toast and jam but I have been longing for granola and yogurt for a while now. Last Friday I was inspired, I’m unsure where it came from but I was thankful for it, by this recipe that popped into my head. I’m very please to say it worked and was pretty tasty; I made a batch that had about 5 portions in it, perfect snack sized portions that I very much enjoyed at work this week, as well as for a scrummy weekend breakfast.

I did no measuring for this recipe, except with the highly accurate measure of ‘a handful’, feel free to swap ingredients to ones you’d prefer. Let me know what creations you come up with!