I’ve needed to write a short blog to catch up on some of my recent bakes and food images. So here goes. First up is a Lemonopita, a Greek Lemon Pie. The idea for making this came about after we discovered lemon pie in a new Greek bakery in Bristol. It’s the same as a Greek Orange Pie, made with crushed filo pastry, but uses a lemon syrup, rather than orange syrup, to soak the cake.

We’ve never seen a lemononopita in any Greek or Cypriot bakeries, and we’ve visited a lot of those. I’m not sure why but I’ll ask next time we visit because it’s really nice. I liked it that much that I think I’d make this before orange pie for us to eat at home or for visitors. That’s saying a lot because I think Greek Orange Pie is my favourite cake.

Lin, my wife made this Banana Blackberry and Chocolate Loaf. We’ve had an unusually hot summer this year, here in the UK. As a result a lot of wild hedgerow fruits, like blackberries and damsons, are quite advanced They’ve ripened really early and there are lots of them. This bake came about as Lin wanted to use up some of the wild blackberries we’d picked and make use of some overripe bananas. She found the recipe on the internet and it turned out really well.

We didn’t actually make the cake shown above, it came from a local bakery, but I’ve made cakes with courgettes in the past. It works really well. They’re made using oil rather than butter. Think moist dense carrot cake and you’ll get an idea how good this was . There are also plenty of courgettes around this summer with many free to take from vegetables left outside our local allotments every day. This cake would make good use of those. I’ve used this pic rather than one of my images because I like the edible flowers this cake was decorated with.

Another cake purchase, this time Calpol Cookies. The flavour is based on the kids strawberry flavoured medication, Calpol. They’re made by the Get Baked bakery in Leeds, UK. Originally they were branded as Calpol Cookies but the guy who makes them was served a Cease and Desist branding letter by the manufacturers of the original Calpol medication. Get Baked turned that on its head by re-branding their Calpol cookies as Cease and Desist Cookies.

Get baked have done a superb job in marketing some of their products on social media and getting hold of these cookies is really difficult. New batches are released at midday, every day, and sell out in minutes. We’ve tried several times to buy some but were never quite quick enough. Eventually we got lucky and had a box delivered a week or so ago. After all that they were far to sweet for me. I struggled to eat one so we won’t be ordering any more.

Next up, a bog standard ‘Mary Berry’ Victoria sponge. I haven’t made one of these for some time but it’s always popular when I do. I’d made a batch of strawberry jam so I used that for the filling. Its always nicer than the supermarket jams and its nice using your own ingredients in your bakes.

This was another Linda bake to use up more overripe bananas. These brownies make for quite a tasty, healthy snack as there’s no refined sugars in them. Just a dash of maple syrup.

I’ll finish this round of bakes with a Hummingbird Cake. It’s made with, you guessed it, overripe bananas, pineapple, lemon and pecan nuts. Again sunflower oil is used to create a lovely moist cake. We initially tried the cake in a cafe in Weston-s-Mare and really like it so once we were home we found a recipe of our own on the internet. Our cake tasted the same and we were a bit more generous with the buttercream filling and topping. This will be a cake we make for visitors or family days.

Finally, a jam image. Whilst we were out foraging we also stumbled across a hedgerow tree and didn’t know what the fruits were. Google lens sorted that out and identified the fruit as cherry plums. A bit more research revealed that they could be used to make jam so we collected some fruits and I did just that. I added a small amount of cinnamon to this first batch and the jam is really good.

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All images: ©Stephen Hyde 2007-2025 – All rights reserved.