So what on earth are mirabelles?!

This week I made my first every batch of Mirabelle Jam and what a delight it is too. The fruit cooked beautifully into jam-consistency mush in just a few minutes, it came to a delightful set with ease, it had a beautiful colour and the flavour is just gorgeous. But when I proudly tell people I have made Mirabelle Jam I'm mainly met with blank expressions and queries of, "What's that?".

I have to admit that until about two years ago I didn't know what mirabelles were either. As many of you know, I'm always keen to take surplus fruit and veg off people's hands in exchange for a jar of something yummy from the Jammy Cow stores. And it was in a conversation with someone offering me plums from their tree that I was introduced to mirabelles. They lived in Loughton and said there were lots of mirabelles growing in the hedgerow and that I really should come and pick some for jam making. Unfortunately, I was away on holiday just at the critical harvesting moment and I never managed to get to Loughton to pick them. Still, I had by this point Googled mirabelles and discovered they are a member of the prunus family so related to plums, cherries, gages, peaches and apricots.

Having had mirabelles brought to my attention back in 2011, the following year I once again found myself wondering about visiting Loughton for some mirabelle picking. But with the picking season falling within the school holidays I somehow never made it out there but I did begin to wonder if the yellow fruits along gridroads could in fact be mirabelles and not some sort of weird yellow cherries after all.

This year I was determined to crack the whole mirabelle mystery and became progressively convinced that the yellow fruits I was seeing absolutely everywhere were mirabelles. Not only to be found in Loughton, I realised! So, at the weekend I took my girls out for a short cycle ride, with telescopic picking tool strapped to my crossbar, with the intention of picking mirabelles. I knew where I was going because I had seen the bright fruit from the car all week. And sure enough, there they were, glowing yellow and so ripe they jumped eagerly off the tree with the slightest touch. Soon we had a bagful and could head home, to chop and remove the stones ready for jamming.

The fruit looked beautiful before I started but I had no idea they would create such a lovely jam. I gave my girls a taste the day I made the jam and they liked it so much they requested it on their toast for breakfast the next day. I gave a friend a spoonful to try and she took a jar home with her. It looks like it should taste like marmalade but instead it is sweet and fruity and nearly plum-like but altogether different. It is fantastic on toast but I can see it would work well between sponge cakes or instead of apricot jam under marzipan or icing on a cake.

I quickly realised I needed to go out and pick some more but sadly the mirabelle season is short and is now over but be sure I shall be raiding the hedgerow again next year.

Lemon Layer Drizzle Cake

Back in June I received my weekly delivery of "family essentials" from Farmison. Along with the selection of fruit and vegetables and meat, there were a couple of "pantry" items. The slab of butter was most welcome, the jar of lemon curd was not. In a household overwhelmed with homemade preserves, a jar of preserve was not required.

Still, I'm not one for food waste and it occurred to me that my brother's birthday would be the ideal opportunity to use up some of the lemon curd. He had, I remembered, always been a fan of lemon curd, enjoying it in tarts even back in the day when it was bright yellow and had probably never even been near a lemon (what happened to food during the 80s?!). So I saw this an opportunity to make a Lemon Layer Cake using the recipe from my daughter's set of Usborne Book recipe cards.

Usually with recipes I can't help but fiddle and tweak as I go along, often reducing the sugar content to match the lack of sweet teeth in our household. However, this was destined for a large 40th birthday party where there would be an audience of sweet teeth, so I left well alone.

Lemon Layer Cake

225g (8 oz) margarine
225g (8 oz) caster sugar
4 medium eggs
1 lemon, zest and juice
225g (8 oz) self-raising flour
1 teaspoon baking powder

Lemon curd

1 lemon, zest and juice
125g (5 oz) icing sugar

Preheat oven to 180°C, gas mark 4 and grease and line 2 x 20cm round sandwich tins. Cream together the margarine and caster sugar then mix in the eggs one at a time and then add the lemon zest and juice. Sift in the flour and baking powder and mix until well combined and smooth. Divide equally between the two tins then bake for 20 minutes. Cool in the tin for a few minutes then turn out onto a wire rack to cool completely. Once cool, smear a generous heaping of lemon curd onto one cake and place the other one on top. Next mix the juice of the other lemon with icing sugar and pour the icing over the top of the cake. Finally, scatter the lemon zest on top.

This proved to be a triumph of a cake. It both looked and tasted gorgeous. However, when I asked my husband what he thought of the cake he admitted that he found it too sweet and particularly didn't like the layer of white icing on top. Still, I had lemon curd left to use up so a few weeks later I made the cake again. This time, I took an ounce of icing sugar out of the icing layer and this turned it into a drizzle instead of an icing. To my mind it kept much of it fabulous character (although arguably it didn't look so appealing) and Steve was much happier with it too.

Then this week, Nicola from PicNics asked me if I could make something lemony for them to use as a filling in their cakes. "Maybe one of your lemon marmalades," she suggested. I pondered this and decided that my Honey & Lemon Marmalade would work well if it wasn't so lumpy. So on Thursday I set about making a fine shred version of this popular marmalade, which I'm pleased to say looked very promising.

As Friday was Steve's birthday I decided this was the perfect opportunity to try out my new lemon cake filling and once again tackled the lemon layer cake recipe. This time, with Steve in mind, I removed 2 oz of the caster sugar from the sponge layer, glued the layers together with a good dollop of fine shred Honey & Lemon Marmalade, and created a drizzle using 3 oz of icing sugar. And wow! what a revelation... the flavour of the lemon really taking centre-stage and no overdone sweetness. Yep, this is the one to add to the family recipe notebook. Steve, by the way, went back for seconds... but, hey, it was his birthday!

Lemon Drizzle Layer Cake

225g (8 oz) margarine
175g (6 oz) caster sugar
4 medium eggs
1 lemon, zest and juice
225g (8 oz) self-raising flour
1 teaspoon baking powder

Honey & Lemon Marmalade (fine shred)

1 lemon, zest and juice
75g (3 oz) icing sugar

Preheat oven to 180°C, gas mark 4 and grease and line 2 x 20cm round sandwich tins. Cream together the margarine and caster sugar then mix in the eggs one at a time and then add the lemon zest and juice. Sift in the flour and baking powder and mix until well combined and smooth. Divide equally between the two tins then bake for 20 minutes. Cool in the tin for a few minutes then turn out onto a wire rack to cool completely. Once cool, smear a generous heaping of lemon marmalade onto one cake and place the other one on top. Finally,mix the juice and zest of the other lemon with icing sugar and pour the drizzle over the top of the cake.