I hope we can shortly put aside the January nonsense of healthy living and no booze – it’s never looked sustainable anyway. That’s a joke, but it’s a truth universally acknowledged, that cake baked at home is superior, healthwise, to anything bought in the shops.
As Michael Pollan said, you can eat anything: just cook it yourself. When you bake at home, you don’t use any nasty additives. You can cut down on sugar. You can use best quality stuff. You control the sensitive ingredients like nuts or gluten. And it’s much better value if you want good quality bakes.
Here’s a small collection of everyday cakes to cheer up the gloomy start to February, with classic carrot and banana, easy chocolate, posh French ginger and more. All easy recipes, most not requiring the use of an electric appliance.
Pain d’épices is a delicious honey and spice French gingerbread cake, not overly sweet in spite of the huge amount of honey it contains. It’s spiced with cinnamon, ginger, star anise, cloves or whatever spice combo is your personal favourite.
Sticky pear and ginger cake is dark, moist and incredibly easy to make. It’s like a sticky toffee pudding with juicy chunks of pears and crunchy pecans scattered over the syrupy surface, and you can skip the syrup if you wish.
Sticky pear and ginger cake
RECIPE
If you have some marzipan left over from Christmas, use that instead of homemade, though it’s worth the effort. It’s a simple plain cake with marzipan in the mix but there’s nothing plain about the way it tastes.
This midnight cake is one of the easiest and nicest chocolate cakes in the world. Super easy to make, it’s topped with a mixed dried fruit salad topping for a citrusy tang.
Dan Lepard’s orange and walnut loaf cake with cinnamon and fresh ginger, a wonderful combination of flavours. One saucepan, a loaf tin and zest from five oranges!
Orange and walnut loaf cake
RECIPE
Authentic Spanish recipe for tarta de Santiago, a traditional Galician almond cake. Tarta or torta de Santiago has only three basic ingredients and is the most famous Spanish dessert.
We couldn’t do without the classic: easy chocolate brownie. Homemade fudgy chocolate brownie, made with the mix that takes only minutes to prepare using a hand whisk, no need for electric mixer. The simplest and quickest brownie recipe and the result is fantastic.
Another classic, the perfect banana cake with raisins and cinnamon. This banana bread recipe is very easy and the batter can also be made into banana muffins or banana cupcakes.
The last of the classic trinity, carrot cake, simple and easy but unconventionally filled with apricot jam and decorated with a chocolate ganache. Classic carrot cake with a zing!
Gateau Breton is French butter cake, Brittany's finest. It's an enormous shortbread, a gigantic jammy dodger, the impossibly buttery double tart and it’s much easier to make than you’d think.