• Has to be Malteser cake! They used to make a white chocolate version of this at my school – heaven! I missed them so much I found a recipe online which I now use and works great and is sooo tasty.
  130 g BUTTER
  50 g GOLDEN SYRUP
  50 g CHOCOLATE
  50 g COCOA POWDER )
  220 g BROKEN DIGESTIVE BISCUITS
  *250 g MALTESERS, half CRUSHED, half LEFT WHOLE
  Ganache topping:
  * 50g chocolate (melted)
  * 50g whipping cream

  Begin with a large, heavy based saucepan. Melt the butter and golden syrup together and then add the chocolate, stirring constantly. Once you have a dark, sticky liquid, throw in the broken digestives, cocoa powder and the broken Maltesers. Give everything a good stirring around to coat all the dry ingredients with the sticky mixture. Allow it to cool slightly before stirring in the whole Maltesers.
  Line a cake tin with cling film, and then press in the mixture, being careful not to crush any of the whole Maltesers. Pop it into the freezer while you make the ganache – this will ensure a firm set and a cool base to put the topping on.Melt the other 50g of chocolate and whip up the cream, then add a little of the cream to the melted chocolate. This will make the chocolate runnier and easier to add into the whipped cream. This will form the ganache topping which you can spread over the cake.

• I made a rasberry ice cake yesterday and it was soo scrummy.
  300g dark choc
  200g rasberries
  125g butter
  40g icing sugar and 3 eggs-seperated.
  melt the chob with 30g of butter, remove from heat and add the icing sugar, egg yolks and the remaining butter and mix very well. add the rasberries and stir again.
  whip the egg whites until stiff and fold into mix. line a bread tin with cling film, pour in the mix and put in the freezer for 3 hours. when u take it out, let it rest for bowt half hour, remove from tin and serve

Hot chorizo salad with butternut squash & baby tomatoes

This salad is packed full of flavour. Serve it as part of a spread or just as a rich, punchy, deeply satisfying lunch dish.

Serves 4–6

Cooking time: 40 minutes

1 small butternut or onion squash, deseeded and cut roughly into 5cm pieces

1 chile de arbol or other dried chilli, chopped

1 teaspoon cumin seeds, ground

a small handful of oregano or marjoram, chopped (or 1 teaspoon dried)

vegetable or olive oil

sea salt and black pepper

2 red onions, roughly sliced

a small punnet of baby tomatoes

a small bunch of coriander, leaves, chopped

3–4 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil

4 large chorizo cooking sausages, casings removed and sausages bias cut into long rounds

150g cooked borlotti or pinto beans

a small bag of baby spinach

100g Pecorino cheese

Preheat the oven to 190°C/375°F/gas 5. Put the squash, chilli, cumin and oregano in a roasting dish with enough oil to coat lightly and season well with salt and pepper. Roast for about 15 minutes before adding the onion slices, turning to coat them in the oil. Roast for a further 10 minutes before adding the baby tomatoes and cooking for a final 10 minutes.

Meanwhile, pound the coriander leaves in a pestle and mortar with a pinch of salt until you have a green paste.

Cover with the extra virgin olive oil and set aside.

Heat a griddle or frying pan over a medium to high heat and fry the chorizo for 2 to 3 minutes a side. Drain on kitchen paper. Gently mix the roasted vegetables and beans together in a large bowl with a tablespoon of the coriander oil and the spinach leaves. Divide the salad among four to six plates, adding pieces of the grilled chorizo. With a potato peeler, shave the Pecorino on top and drizzle with the coriander oil.

“Prick your sloes, about 450g, with a needle or freeze them and bash with a heavy weight. Tip them into sterilised bottles, the fruit coming a third of the way up. Divide 350g of caster or granulated sugar among them then top up with gin or vodka. It will take about 750ml. Little point in using an expensive brand, by the way. Place the sealed bottles somewhere cool and dark. Leave for 8-10 weeks, turning the bottle occasionally, giving it a shake every week.”

The Yummy Dough kit comes with easy to follow instructions. You have to be precise when adding water to the dough mix, so the kit comes with a syringe to ensure you add the exact amount. As you can see here, the mix goes from pale to brightly coloured as if by magic – something that has kept my three enthralled as they try and guess the colour.

Children of any age can have a go mixing the dough, but parental help is definitely needed when pulling the dough together. You need strong hands to get it to a modelling consistency, and it takes around five minutes squeezing and squashing to get it right. Afterwards, my mitts felt as though they’d had something of a work-out! And then it’s up to you. There are no limits to what you can create, and my strange ensemble included a tree and a flower (not that you can necessarily see that that’s what they are!)

We’ll be adding lots more activities to the blog this summer, and as ever, would love to hear what you’re up to. Oh, and happy cooking!

Or if you can’t face betraying your support for England try Mexican Food Made Easy by Wahaca’s founder, Handpicked Panelist and original Mexico fanatic, Thomasina Miers. Available from Handpicked Collection for £19.95.

She hasn’t gone down well with all the critics. Giles Coren’s comments are literally unrepeatable (we’re a family blog!), while the New Statesman talks about her ‘assembling food rather than cooking it’. But her program was as easy on the eye as the presenter, and we enjoyed the first program’s theme of ‘Selfishness’. She cooked a day of recipes to indulge yourself with, and despite Anthony Worrall-Thompson describing her haddock omelette as a ‘car crash’, we’ve made and found it lip-smackingly tasty. Besides, Mr W-T isn’t one to talk, as anyone who has tried his motorway service station e-number fuelled sandwiches will know.

In a white-tiled kitchen, with wallpaper accents (take note, home trend fans), Dahl played with vintage tea cups, enamel ladles and mixed up a dirty Martini in an antique cocktail shaker. It was all very beautiful, and in reality a lot more about creating an atmosphere (albeit in a borrowed kitchen) than an award-winning series of recipes for Masterchef. But to follow her ‘selfish’ theme through, not everyone wants to spend hours labouring over a simmering stock pot and reducing sauces. Dahl whipped up Rich Chocolate Pots with Brandy-Soaked Cherries in about five seconds, and they probably take little more than that to eat. Neither of those things we’d consider taking her to task on. We’ll continue watching, and if her mozzarella fondling and low-cut tops start to grate, we’ll turn back to her recipe book for greedy inspiration.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/database/richchocolatepotswit_93633.shtml