The best thing we've ever baked

It's nothing fancy but honestly I had three slices in a row

Litearlly the last slice - the rest of it was demolished before any thoughts of photos - but see those swirls!

I mentioned last week that my youngest son, who is seven, loves to bake. He watches episodes of Nadiya Bakes on Iplayer (he is obsessed with Nadiya, and I think he thinks her name actually might be ‘Nadiya Bakes,’ as in Bakes being her surname), and pauses them with the remote control to write down recipes on scraps of paper, even though he has two of her books, and sometimes reads them at bedtime.

Every Sunday, he chooses something to bake. It’s become a habit. If I forget, he most certainly doesn’t. It started partly to make up for the fact that I forgot to enrol him in after-school cookery club, and by the time I did remember it was full. The other part is because, well, I love to bake too. When I was about his age, I used to do exactly the same and I love that he is so into it and is so determined to do it all himself. But whereas I like to go for something simple, a perfect pound cake or a lemon cake say, he goes all out and isn’t put off by a recipe with endless proving and kneading stages that takes four hours, no matter how much I try to talk him out of it. Let’s just say, we must have been the only house in the country to have had homemade hot cross buns at Christmas time. It is often very hard to say no to him.

Last week, he had his heart set on baking something extravagant involving crushed rhubarb and custard sweets and other unnecessary additions. I’m not going to lie, it sounded awfully sickly to me (what is it with people putting sweets, as in actual sweets, in cakes?) and very full of faff. He was adamant but it was raining and we didn’t have half the ingredients so in the end after showing him recipe after recipe, I talked him out of it and managed to convince him to try something simpler: a marbled raspberry cake. He liked the look of the raspberry pink smile and so reluctantly agreed to meet me half way.

Readers: it was delicious. It was the best thing he’s ever baked. I had three slices in a row and my only photo - see above - is of the last slice left.

I take zero credit for the recipe - we followed this one - only there is an error in the original ingredients which says to use a tablespoon of baking powder which can’t possibly be right, so I’ve popped what I see as the correct one below - for my reference, and yours!

White Chocolate Raspberry Marble Loaf Cake

For the ‘jam’:

• 150g frozen raspberries

• 1 teaspoon sugar

• 1 teaspoon lemon juice

• 1 ½ tablespoons chia seeds

For the cake:

• 3 large eggs

• 150g sugar

• 120g unsalted butter, melted

• 125g Greek yoghurt (we just used Greek-style)

• 1 teaspoon lemon juice

• 180g plain flour (I used gf, it was totally fine)

• 1 teaspoon baking powder

• Zest of 1 lemon

• 75g white chocolate chips (melted at the end)

Start with the jam - heat the berries, mash, add the sugar and lemon juice, then cool and stir in the chia seeds and set aside to thicken.

Preheat the oven to 180 and prep your loaf pan. Blend wet ingredients in one bowl, dry in another. Add dry to wet, stir to make a gorgeous batter; pour into loaf tin, swirl through the jam, bake for 45 minutes. When cool, melt the chocolate chips and drizzle over.

I cannot stress how gorgeous it was; the flickers of lemon, the rippled raspberry that gets kind of sticky, the extra creaminess of the white chocolate on top. Just! Oh! You have to try it.

Make a pledge! If you like!

As I write all this, there’s something else I wanted to share with you. Earlier this week, I was away tutoring at a writing retreat where I was asked to read from all of my books. I started with the first chapter of my memoir, How We Met.

Now, I don’t ever prepare for readings (I think it’s okay to admit this) because, well, I’m just reading out loud. I don’t think I’ve done a reading of How We Met since all its book events when it came out four years ago. The opening line references my eldest child being six but he will turn twelve this year and I hadn’t even really realised it had been that long ago since I wrote it! When I wrote it, my youngest - the baker - was practically a baby, I think; in the book I refer to him as my sunshine summer-born boy.

When I read the following lines:

‘I love you to infinity,’ I saw at bedtime.

‘INFINITY NEVER ENDS!’ my son shrieks. ‘INFINITY GOES ON AND ON AND ON!’ He jumps on the bed .

And so it goes, on and on and on.’

I had the biggest smile on my face and I couldn’t at times help laughing a little bit at some of the scenes I’d written; the arms flung tightly and hotly around my neck, the breathing them in. It still happens but I was smiling because I was remembering how it must have been as I wrote it, and I remembered it so clearly, so honestly.

When I finished the reading, someone in the group said how much they felt my love for my children as I read, and how contagious it was. I thought that was so lovely. Though my children are after all getting older, and I don’t want to write anything that might ever reveal too much or embarrass them, I did think how special it is to be able to collect these moments again. I remember how I used to do that before, on my blog and my older version of my newsletter… (does anyone else remember that?). As it happens, this kind of vignette writing is exactly what I teach in one of my courses, Postcards Home. It’s been a while since I’ve done it myself, and it’s beginning to make sense to me that that is kind of what I am doing here. Scenes from Home, little postcards of life. It’s very reaffirming, in a way, like finding a way back to myself and the things that truly matter.

So, thank you for being here, again, and letting me share these little moments with you. If you’d like to write little moments too, please do let me know and I’d love to fill you in about Postcards Home because I think lots of you will like it.

Enjoy the cake and if you make it this weekend, please let me (and my son!) know!

With love,
Huma x