The Autumnal Equinox approaches fast. It doesn't really feel much like we had a summer. Not like the summers of the last few years, anyway. There was a last-ditch attempt for a few days at the beginning of the month, it's true, and I think I remember June being wonderfully sunny, but that's been our lot this year.
And now the days are definitely beginning to shorten, and darken.
However, to help us cope, Autumn does bring her own rewards. The hedgerows, for example, are full of ripe blackberries. Apples and pears are in season. The leaves are all crunchy underfoot. Tiny will soon require wellies for puddle-jumping.
We're lucky. We only have to open our front door to be confronted with a big blackberry bush.
Tiny and I have done a lot of blackberry-baking. They've gone in fairy cakes and flapjacks. And the freezer for later. Fortunately, we haven't been inundated. It's a big bush, but we've had enough for our present needs, plus some to see us through some more recipes, but not so many that we've been drowning in them, as is often the way with growing fruit and vegetables.
We've done ordinary chocolate fairy cakes with a handful of blackberries thrown in, and blackberry and raspberry yogurt cakes, because we had a raspberry yogurt, and blackberry and lemon flapjack, a chuck-it-all-together-and-see-if-it-works affair. Spoiler: it did. We'll probably make that one again, with some of the blackberries from the freezer, when the dark days of winter are getting us down.
The blackberry and chocolate fairy cakes were not my best: they ended up a little over-done. Tasty enough, just not brilliant. They were just my basic fairy cakes, plus cocoa powder, with blackberries thrown in.
The yogurt cakes, though, worked very well. It's an easy recipe, given to me by a friend, using a standard-sized individual pot of yogurt, and then using the pot for measuring the flour, sugar and oil, plus some eggs.
1 pot of yogurt, 1 pot of oil, 2 pots of sugar, 3 pots of self-raising flour, 3 eggs.
Into the bowl, one after the other. Mix it up, add any optional extras (blackberries, chocolate chips, chunks of fudge, whatever you fancy today), and spoon into cases. It also works as a big cake. 15-20 mins of 180C later, and you should have cake. Easy-peasy.
The flapjack was my basic banana flapjack recipe (two ripe bananas, 250g oats, 3 tbsp oil), plus a couple of spoonfuls of lemon curd, a handful or two of blackberries, and a bag of chocolate chips. Bake for about 20 mins at about 180C.
In between times, we've also been testing some shortbread recipes, more anon.
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