School fete tomorrow = Baking fest

School fete tomorrow, so fingers crossed for the weather. It can’t be any wetter than it was last year, but please don’t take that as a challenge.

Anyway, I decided to prove to Cherie Blair just how much value I can add, even though I ‘m no longer a super high flying career girl, by having a baking fest this evening.

Fortunately, Good Food June 2012 (they really aren’t paying me, I promise) had a whole section entitled ‘Baking for the school fete’ and reader, I embraced it.

We now have

Cherry oat squares with chocolate drizzle

Citrus bars

and

Chocolate marble cake

all courtesy of this vintage issue. The citrus bars were slightly more complicated in that they involved a 2 step approach (first make shortbread, then make curd topping) and I only had lemons, so I went off-recipe and made the curd with 3 lemons rather than 2 lemons and an orange, but otherwise, all recipes followed and the results are most pleasing.

I also made this onion tart. My mum had sent me the recipe, basically because it uses a lower fat, scone base rather than pastry. She was worried about my cholesterol – hers is bad, despite her being the healthiest nearly 70 yr old I know. Mum, you’ll be pleased to hear that at my 40+ health check, I scored excellent on cholesterol, but I made the tart anyway. I think I made the scone base too wet, so there was no rolling out, more squodging in to the tin, (with cursing) but it all worked out OK. As you can see, there’s not much left.

Finally, 2 rather odd shaped loaves of bread

and a rather delicious  looking banoffee pie, which I was inspired to make after reading this post about it by The View from the Table, which is a lovely blog that I always enjoy reading. The first time I had banoffee pie was at a big family party when I was about 10. I was totally and utterly hooked. For reasons that are too complicated to go into now, that weekend and the pie are one of my strongest ‘early’ memories. It’s not something that crosses my path that often, but when I saw it on her blog, I knew I had to make it. We are hosting the post fete BBQ tomorrow afternoon, so I have made double quantities in a lined tray bake tin. Oh, and I used Carnation caramel, rather than boiling the condensed milk, because I just wasn’t sure I could live that dangerously. ...