166: Raspbery vanilla ice-cream cake, p316

Hmm, not convinced about this one... used nice buttery Madeira cake and vanilla icecream from Waitrose, and lots of raspberries and mixed summer fruits (moo, miscalculated and didn't have quite enough raspberries so added some berries from the freezer). Perhaps the late substitution was part of the problem, but the fruit was rock solid when it came to serving - even after over 30mins on the work surface before slicing as per the directions. The fruit shattered as the cake was being sliced, the icecream was very nice (mmm, Waitrose...), the Madeira cake was, well, just very cold Madeira cake which started to crumble when sliced. Posh Arctic Roll gone a bit wrong.

140: Lemon-frosted pistachio cake, p146

Om nom nom. Macmillan Cancer Support Coffee Morning at work this morning - so needed a cake to take to work, had the ingredients for this one, so another recipe to tick off the list!

The picture in the book looks fabulous, big thick cake, beautifully decorated, but unfortunately, even using the same sized cake tin specified in the recipe, the cake I produced was all of an inch/inch and a half thick. Ho hum, admittedly there are no raising agents in the ingredients - so there's no way it could have risen, but still, it looked rather flat... I'd recommend using a smaller cake tin, if making this! Perhaps that what was used in for the cake in the photo - either that, or twice the volume of ingredients!

Pistachio nuts turn out to be damned expensive too - £7 for 300g! Shelled, luckily, that's not including shells, but still. Who knew?

The cake ended up deliciously squidgy and moist though, with lots of flavours - the orange and lemon coming through particularly nicely. Lots of compliments - and it was one of the first cakes to vanish from the tea table - within 30 minutes!

(I skipped the (optional) crystallised rose petals to decorate... life is surely too short?)

105: Strawberries with fromage blanc, p185

Strawberries and cream! But a very long winded way to prepare cream... Very nice cream, light and airy, and kinda fluffy, but I'm not sure all the whipping of cream, whipping of egg whites, and folding was entirely worth it, other than to try. Oddly the consistency slightly (and heretically) reminded me of that 80s fav, spray cream... Oh no!! Good to try, and to make once, but I'm not sure I'd bother again :)

Strawberries very gratefully received from one of my reader's allotment - and some of the best strawberries I've ever tasted too. Thanks!

96: Marmelade cake, p10

Another cake to take to work - am feeding up the team, trying to get them to all put on some weight... Another one of Nigel's super easy pound cakes, and another success. People grumble that they can't make cakes, or don't have time to make them, and yet these recipes are so so easy - esp if you've got a food processor. Just bung the sugar and butter in to cream, mix everything else in, splodge it in the cake tin, and bake for 40mins. Easypeasy! And I have two shocking cheats, to horrify the purists out there... firstly I don't bother sieving the flour most of the time (started when I bought that McDougall's 'so fine it doesn't need to be sieved' flour, and then went back to normal but forgot, and found it didn't actually make much difference...), and secondly I don't bother cutting out baking parchment to fit the tins, I just tear a piece to large than the whole inside area and scrunch it in, with the leftover uneven edges sticking straight out the top. Seems to work fine! And the added bonus is that you can just lift the cake straight out of the tin, no more turning out disasters, cool it in the paper, and wrap it straight up to take into work with the leftover edges. Lazy, moi?

57: Coffee and walnut cake, p355

Bad me - I forgot to post this one, just over a week before I went away. We had a cake sale at work in aid of Marie Curie Cancer Care, and I made the coffee and walnut cake that kick started this challenge idea back in November last year. Bizarrely, I didn't get to try it... I put the cake up in our tearoom with everyone else's and dashed off to a lecture, and an hour later went back to slice it up into pieces so people could buy it slice by slice - but the whole cake had vanished! A week later I was chatting to a friend in another department and she said she'd dashed over to the cake sale and bought a whole cake to take back to the office for her team, and that it had been fabulous! It was mine! So at least I know it turned out okay - and I did get to try it last year when I made it, so think I can get away without having to make it again...

49: Rosewater and yoghurt panna cotta, p204, and A passion fruit puree for panna cotta, p204

Nearly a disaster - halfway through simmering the milk, cream and vanilla, I realised I was missing one of the ingredients - not only that, but one of the ingredients in the title, yoghurt. Doh. So a quick dash up to the corner shop and yoghurt retrieved, the pan is now boiling instead of simmering... Whoops.

I love rosewater, and have had an unopened bottle from a little Asian food shop in the cupboard for quite a while, so this was a good excuse for opening it. I must make rasmalai and baklava and other such yummy things with the rest...

The passionfruit puree reinforced my conviction that life is too short to try to obtain the juice/pulp (sans seeds) from a passionfruit... mashing the flesh through a tea strainer (for such a small quantity it seemed daft to use the big flour sieve...) with a spoon, and cursing as drop by drop I managed to accumulate about 5ml of the damned stuff, T came in several times to see what on earth I was doing, before beating a hasty retreat to the living room. Really - why wouldn't you just use all of the pulp - juice and seeds together? It was like trying to squeeze frogspawn.

And the sodding panna cottas wouldn't turn out, so were more like little custards than anything. I had the splodgy one, T had the one left in the coffee cup which I hadn't tried to turn out. I spooned the miniscule amount of passionfruit puree on top, as you'll see in the photos, on the splodgy half-turned out pudding it just looks like it's the yolk of a fried egg, and on the one left in the cup, it looks like just a cup of orange juice. Brilliant. I'm very glad I didn't save this one for a dinner party... More gelatine next time? Or less boiling of the mixture at the start perhaps?

Nonetheless, it did taste as panna cotta should, jolly scrummy, and vanished in record time :)