This cake is a sturdy autumnal number – gently spiced with chai tea and cardamom, and with a pleasant chew from semolina. Serve at room temperature with a cup of tea, or warm with a puddle of cream for a more pudding-y vibe.

These citrus melting moments are cheering in the extreme. Just the thing with a cup of tea …

Warm from the oven, these sweet buns really are a delight. They’re also very simple to make …

This cake combines quite a few of my favourite things – pistachios, rhubarb, and a hint of rose – and is also in my favourite colour-way, green and pink. Because who doesn’t feel cheerful in the face of pink icing?

I have one final sweet offering for you before I sign off for Christmas and a few weeks of eating too much and doing too little – a rather impressive Rhubarb & Raspberry Trifle (if I do say so myself).

These meringues are exactly what I want to be eating at the moment. The weather has finally warmed up here and I feel like clouds of whipped cream, syrupy strawberries and crisp meringue. 

Fruit mince pies are one of the items on my mandatory Christmas cook-list (along with gingerbread and meringues) – my mum always makes them in the days leading up to Christmas and it is a tradition I have adopted also.

Years ago, when I ran a cake stall at the Bondi Farmers’ Market, double chocolate brownies were my best seller. I would make trays and trays of them on Friday night and inevitably wish I had made one more tray when they sold out early the next morning.

Welcome to this week’s meeting of ‘The Plain-Cake Appreciation Society’. It seems only fitting that this week I give you a chocolate offering – the proximity to Easter and the weather positively demand it – and who am I to stand in the way of chocolate cake?

Our lime and lemon trees are laden with fruit at the moment. This is making me feel quite smug – as I can duck out to the courtyard and pluck a few juicy limes or lemons whenever the fancy strikes. O is making the most of it, managing to consume her own weight in fresh lemonade most days, and Kip is not adverse to eating them straight from the tree…