buttery orange cake >> cup cakes

I had some clementines that were just awful to peel. Decided the best plan was to juice them into a cake. Australian Women's Weekly have an excellent book titled "Best Food", and in there is a great recipe for Buttery Orange Cake. I made it into cupcakes. The only downside is the cooking time: 45 minutes until they're golden. Anyway, they're delicious so it's worth the while

quiche lorraine from charlotte

My dear friend Charlotte is a baking whizz and recently shared her fabulously light and tasty Quiche Lorraine recipe with me. It is scrumptious and takes about an hour in total to produce. It uses a mere 50g of gruyere which flavours the quiche entirely without overwhelming it. It is not stodgy or heavy. Really a most excellent creation.

melktert/ milktart

Milktart or "melktert" as it is colloquially known is a rich, custard tart usually in a soft pastry shell (not biscuit). It's served slightly warm or cold. The commercial offerings are usually about an inch high and cream coloured. My product was at least 2 1/2 inches high and a rich eggy yellow. You dust it with cinnamon before serving. I produced 2 of them (using 7 eggs in all) - one for (what I thought was...) International Book Week at Calvin's nursery, and the other went to the office with HRH. All devoured.

Beetroot and chocolate cupcakes

We've been reading Margaret Atwood's A Handmaid's Tale at bookclub. As I was hosting the evening, I thought it would be appropriate to serve something RED. I proved a little harder to do than I'd anticipated, but the finished product was delish.
I trawled through the recipe books and websites, and settled on this one : http://www.britishlarder.co.uk 's recipe (click on the link)
250g of 70% cocoa chocolate is a lot to go into making 16 cupcakes, but they are fabulous.
A positive: the paper wrappers came away really nicely too.
I made the chocolate fudge spread, but must say it was more like a jelly by the coooling stage, and didn't pour like the photograph shows. It looks to me like crumbly jelly-bits ontop of my cupcakes now. Not to say that it isn't yummy (and oh-so-light), but it could have been more of a "spread".
All in all however, a huge success.