Flaming Nora

  Having fruit trees in the garden is quite wonderful. We get beautiful blossom in the spring from three apple trees and two pear trees.  That's followed by wonderful foliage in the summer and then fruit in the autumn. The only problem is, neither himself nor I like pears and we're not that fond of apples either.  We tend to give a lot of the fruit away to those who want it and this year we've got pear wine on the go.  While I'm not keen on eating apples raw, I do like apples cooked and in cakes. So when I saw this recipe in The Guardian for apple curd tart I thought I'd give it a go.   Here's the final thing, fresh from the oven.  And here, below, is how it should look (on the left) and how mine looks (on the right).  The difference in colour can be explained by the fact that I ran out of sugar so I used half white sugar and half demerara sugar. This never happens in Great British Bake Off, does it?  My tart also appears to look less 's...

I've had a moan before about not being able to cook without the help of Sir Nigel of Slater. Yet oddly, I can bake remarkably well. I think this might be because with baking you can't really deviate from the recipe too much, you just follow it and end up with great results. With cooking, you have to jiggle things a bit and I'm no good at that. This means that athough I've never been able to cook a decent roast dinner, I can bake for England and usually do. Dan Lepard's How To Bake column in the Guardian's Weekend magazine has some interesting recipes and this one for soft white baps gets full marks from me - and usually a rude snigger. Well, baps , it's just one of those words isn't it? Here's some I baked earlier today.