I have a MILLION blog posts to catch up on, and I'm hoping to get our trip to NYC and a post about my breastfeeding journey so far up soon, perhaps a little Christmas gift guide too. But for now I wanted to share the best apple cake recipe I've ever made. I know we're past peak apple season now but I hope to make this throughout the year - apple cake is one of my ultimate favourites and I've searched high and low for a recipe like this! The icing is heaven too.

Here's the thing about my relationship with banana bread. I hate bananas. I hate banana flavoured things like banana ice cream/sweets. Yet I LOVE banana bread. I think it started with our local coffee shop serving this incredible banana and pecan loaf that I've become addicted to - warmed up, as an occasional mid morning snack if I'm meeting a friend for coffee there. It's vegan so it doesn't feel tooo unhealthy. And to me, it just tastes like heaven, even though I don't like bananas?! And since entering this second trimester of pregnancy, now that I'm out of that savoury sausage roll, cheese or pickled onion weird craving stage, all I've wanted everyday is banana bread. Or some kind of soft, homemade cake of some kind. Before we went to California, my spending on cake at a coffee shop each morning was getting ridiculous. We then went to California and it didn't get much better, either hunting out banana peanut butter chocolate chip cake out there {amazing} or wanting a cookie of some type everyday. When I got home, I vowed to actually make my own banana bread at long last. So that's how I discovered this recipe. And I feel like it will become a weekly bake in our house, until I have the baby and realise I probably don't have a good excuse to just want cake all the time anymore. You probably make banana bread allll the time but this was my very first time in making it. I didn't even like peeling the bananas {yuk} but I did enjoy eating it afterwards. There are a million recipes online but I liked the look of this one as it was for one bowl, and didn't require any fancy ingredients.

I took this to a friend's coffee catch up last week, cutting a slice before I went just to test it - which by the way if you want to do this, you can cover it up by wrapping it in baking paper and tying it with some pretty ribbon. But I think it's time I made another, and maybe slice and put it in the freezer this time so I can quickly defrost a bit whenever I feel like it. And it has bananas in, so it's basically one of your five a day, right?! 

Are you beginning to feel festive yet? I, completely unashamedly, am! And last week I hosted an early Christmas gingerbread decorating party with three of my best friends to get us into the spirit. It was such a fun evening and a huge thank you to Hobbycraft for being the experts in all things Christmas crafting/baking.

It's that time of year again where our allotment is suddenly producing overtime. We're inundated with courgettes and kale which I have to keep coming up with recipes for. I love it, it forces me to come up with new things and use our produce straight out of the ground that we've spent time growing. I promise to get an allotment post up soon! One of my favourite summer recipes when we have a glut of beetroot is to turn them into chocolate brownies. At the weekend we were hosting a BBQ and these were perfect, and I almost prefer them to regular brownies? They're not exactly a health food with butter, a block of chocolate and sugar added but delicious, and you feel like you're getting some beetroot at least... 

Seeing as you all asked so nicely for the recipe of this lemon cake that I made for my Mum's Birthday this week I thought I'd share a few cake baking secrets before the long weekend in case you're in a baking mood... 

 

What have you been cooking recently? With the changing seasons I'm feeling more inspired to switch up some recipes and have been particularly inspired with a couple of new cookbooks. At the weekend I made this rhubarb & ginger crumble which lots of you requested the recipe for...

Ohhh Nutella Cheesecake. I mean, what's not to love?! I first had this at the start of the summer when a friend bought it to a BBQ and I've been making it ever since. It's ridiculously easy and of course ridiculously yummy. Nigella is a goddess when it comes to recipes like these and I just know that it's one of those classics in our family now that will be requested time and time again. Just ignore the fact that it uses a whole jar of Nutella and you're all good! I find you have to have this with lots of fresh strawberries to cut through the richness and make sure it's served really cold from the fridge. Yay for summer evenings.

I miss writing my weekly Friday blog posts with some favourite photos from the week just gone. With the house renovation, blogging has kind of taken a bit of a back seat right now. That being said, I have a full up camera roll on my phone so I wanted to publish these photos before they get stored deep in a hard drive or at the bottom of a Facebook album. Having them on here makes them so much easier for me to find! So, going back to the Easter weekend a few photos, it was also my Birthday on the Easter Monday so we certainly had our sugar fix with chocolate eggs, nest cakes and birthday cake! Back with a house update soon and photos from our trip to Oxford last weekend. Happy Friday, R <3 xx