Cherry Cake and Sneaky Crochet

I realised the other day that the 'tag line' or whatever it's called for my blog is 'crafting, cooking, camping' and I have clearly been very biased towards the former!! Yesterday I decided to make my favourite cherry cake recipe, so thought I would share it here. I cannot for the life of me remember where I got it, but it's written down on one of those scraggy old bits of paper and in my recipe book. It's very easy (as most of my cooking tends to be!) and C loves it.

You will need:

200g Margarine (the recipe says butter, but I use flora to feel a bit more virtuous, it works fine but you probably won't need to add much milk at the end because of the higher water content)
150g Caster Sugar
3 Eggs
225g Plain Flour
2 tsp Baking Powder
Pinch of Salt
100g Glace Cherries (I ignore this and do it by sight: I love cherries!!)
Milk

1. First of all the oven needs to be heated to 180 degrees (mine's a fan oven, so 160 for me). Cream together the marg and the sugar until it's fluffy and smooth. (The other benefit of the marg is it makes this stage SO much easier than butter... I don't even cheat and use the food processor!)

2. Next of all add the eggs separately and beat well to incorporate (mix looks gooey but this will soon be rectified :)

3. Sift the flour, baking powder and salt into the bowl and mix gently.

4. Favourite Bit! Add the cherries :) I coat mine in flour to try and stop them sinking, but this works to varying effect.

5. Fold cherries in gently and then add milk if required. Pour mixture into cake tin (I use an 18" silicone one from Lakeland). Bake in the oven for approx 55 mins. (Now this is the bit I find the hardest as my oven seems so unpredictable, I tend to set the timer for 45 mins and check every 10 mins thereafter. The original recipe says 1 hour 15 but mine would be burnt to a crisp by then!)

6. And Ta Dah! forgot to take a picture of the cake cooling so here it is all nestled up in its stylish (!) Roses tin.

Yum yum yum.

And in other news I neglected my firm promise to focus on more wedding crochet and started a new project. It's using this cowl pattern from the Fiber Flux blog, and I am going to use up some of the wool I bought that wasn't right for the blanket I'm working on... Here it is so far,

It crochets up really quickly so hopefully I will get it done soon!

Have a lovely week everyone!