We bought a big tub of mascarpone the other day which means we have had to find enough ways to use it before it starts to go off.

The first use was nice and straightforward: We dolloped a bit on a toasted hot cross bun.

Today I made a chicken and butternut squash risotto following the standard risotto method: I fried some diced squash, finely chopped leeks, garlic, and a pinch of dried chilli. I'm not sure if I've mentioned this before but when we have a glut of chillies, I make my own dried chilli. I slice the chillies in half lengthways then put them on a sheet of kitchen roll in a small metal tray, which I then put on the radiator for a week or so. I then smash the chillies up using a small food processor.

Back to the risotto. After adding the chilli I added risotto rice and home made chicken stock. When the rice was roughly half cooked, I added some diced cooked chicken and a generous pinch of salt. When it was all fully cooked I added a generous heaped tablespoon of the mascarpone and stirred it in. The risotto was very rich and creamy and the mascarpone seemed to help keep it fairly firm, instead of going sloppy which can sometimes happen when I use ordinary cream cheese.

Tomorrow I will make a pasta bake. The mascarpone and a beaten egg should hold the pasta together well so it doesn't collapse too much when I serve. I will find out tomorrow.

This afternoon we made some cupcake (or to be more accurate, Emma made them while I helped weigh out the ingredients). The cakes contained:

• 3oz margarine
• 4oz sugar
• 8oz flour
• 3 eggs
• just over half a tub of glacé cherries

They were baked for about 15 minutes at gas mark 6 and left to cool before being topped with a chocolate buttercream.

This was our second year taking the Hamster Club to the Tabley Showground in Cheshire. It was quite cold in the tent and the Hamster Club tent would suddenly become very popular and fill with people every time it rained.

Every colour of Winter White. These furry spheres were part of the 'display' to demonstrate the different types of hamster which are kept by members of the club. They spent most of the day lined up asleep but whenever someone got a camera out to take a picture, they would wake up and move. I think this was my third attempt to take their photo. The colours are (from left to right): Pearl, Normal, Sapphire-Pearl, Sapphire.

A giant chocolate muffin which we bought from one of the bakery stands. It was so big it was decorated with smaller cakes.

The recipe came from the Joy the Baker website.

We followed the recipe exactly as written but we had ordinary bakers yeast instead of 'active dried yeast' so ours took a little longer to rise.

It is the monthly cake day in work tomorrow. Normally it is held on the last friday of the month but it's been moved to coincide with Comic Relief day and the cakes are going to be sold for charity.

Since I like lemon drizzle cake I decided to have a go at making an Orange Drizzle Cake, based on the recipe in the Daily Mail. I followed the recipe fairly closely and only made a couple of small changes: I used granulated sugar instead of the caster and icing sugar and I reduced the amount of sugar used in the syrup because my oranges weren't very juicy.

I made one full-sized cake for tomorrow and two small 'samplers' in bun cases for us to try tonight. The cake turned out well - definitely a recipe I'd recommend.

Emma recently bought some professional quality food colouring. She made some 'practice cupcakes' before making a full sized cake.

The first cakes were made by adding the different coloured cake batter to the cake cases.

The colours had settled a bit in the cup cakes.

The full sized cake was built up from several thin cakes which were made individually then assembled.

Since it is Christmas, there has been a lot of unhealthy (but very tasty) foods being eaten. We made (and ate) 3 different desserts, which I will describe here, and not a single Christmas Pudding in sight.

For breakfast on Christmas Day, we had waffles with fresh cream and ganache. This was accompanied by the traditional bucks fizz, only we made a red bucks fizz using sparkling rose and an orange and raspberry juice.

The next two desserts were larger which we shared when we went to visit friends and family.

Pear Syllabub. The pears were peeled and sliced and poached in a sweet dessert wine. The cake was a simple microwave sponge cake. The syllabub itself was creme fraiche, double cream, icing sugar, the wine from the poached pears, and the juice and zest of 1 lemon, all beaten together. We layered the sponge, pears and cream mixture in a bowl and put it in the fridge overnight.

The roulade recipe was from the Daily Mail 'Weekend' magazine but was similar to a recipe on Delia's website.

This recipe was based on another from Channel 4 which contained turkish delight. As usual we adjusted the recipe according to what we had in our kitchen.

Yesterday I roasted 500g of sweet potatoes for around 1 hour at gas mark 5, until the insides had gone soft and the skins had gone crispy. I scraped the insides out of the skins and put them in a tub in the fridge until we were ready to start the recipe.

The new ingredients were as follows:

• 500g sweet potato

• 15 quail eggs (equivalent to 3 medium eggs)

• 140g light brown sugar

• 60g dark muscavado sugar

• 175g dark chocolate

• 25g ground almonds and 75g ground peanuts

• 2 tablespoons millet flour

• 70g fat reduced cocoa powder

• 1 tsp bicarbonate of soda

• 1 tbsp vanilla extract

• no turkish delight

The method was the same as the channel 4 version but we stirred the mixture instead of folding in the ingredients because the mixture was a bit too dry to start with.

This weeks recipe came from the Mail on Sunday. When we first read it, it sounded unusual and interesting. Since we recently tried Chocolate and Beetroot Cake, we thought another strange vegetable cake was worth trying.

The cake came out quite moist and lightly spiced. We made a few slight changes, using allspice instead of ground cloves, and doubling the quantity of cinnamon. You couldn't tell it was tomato soup based unless you tasted carefully and tried to discern the flavour. If you didn't know, I don't think it would be obvious.

We have a monthly cake day in work, on the last friday of each month. My contribution was this chocolate and beetroot cake:

The recipe came from the Channel 4 website. A couple of months ago I mentioned to a colleague that I had some beetroot in the garden. He sent me the recipe and said it was better than you'd expect.

The beetroot from the garden was smaller than I expected. When I weighed it, it was closer to 75g than the 250g required so I had to go out and buy some more. The supermarket didn't have raw beetroot so I got cooked instead and I don't think it had any adverse effect.

The cake was quite good, with a nice gooey texture. I don't actually like beetroot so I was glad you couldn't really taste it in the cake. I peeled all the beetroot to reduce the chance of the cake having that 'earthy' taste which beetroot often has.

We have made cookies in the past but this was a new recipe so it counts here.

The recipe came from allrecipes.co.uk but we used smarties instead of chocolate chips.

I have reproduced the recipe here for convenience:

Ingredients

• 250g plain flour

• 1/2 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda

• 1/2 teaspoon salt

• 170g unsalted butter, melted

• 200g dark brown soft sugar

• 100g caster sugar

• 1 tablespoon vanilla extract

• 1 egg

• 1 egg yolk

• 325g chocolate chips (or smarties etc.)

Method

(tweaked slightly from the original)

1. Preheat the oven to 170 C / Gas mark 3. Grease baking trays or line with parchment.

2. Sift together the flour, bicarb and salt; set aside.

3. In a medium bowl, cream together the melted butter, brown sugar and caster sugar until well blended. Beat in the vanilla, egg and egg yolk until light and creamy. Mix in the sifted ingredients until just blended. Stir in the chocolate chips by hand using a wooden spoon.

4. Drop cookie dough onto the prepared baking trays, with each cookie around 1-2 tablespoons of dough (for smaller cookies, reduce baking time slightly). Do not flatten the dough. Cookies should be about 8cm apart.

5. Bake for 20 to 25 minutes in the preheated oven, or until the edges are lightly toasted. Cool on baking trays for a few minutes before transferring to wire racks to cool completely.

This was adapted from a recipe in the You magazine which came with the Mail on Sunday. The original version called for almond butter and rapeseed oil but we changed those for ingredients we already had in the house.

• 250g Peanut butter.

• 80ml Sunflower Oil.

• 120ml Maple Syrup.

• 1 tsp vanilla extract.

• 200g Spelt flour.

• 60g plain chocolate (around 70% cocoa), broken into chunks.

Mix oil, peanut butter, maple syrup and vanilla extract together.

Mix in the flour and chocolate.

Form into small disks and bake at gas mark 4 for about 20 minutes.

The Asparagus Festival was held at the Fleece Inn, near Evesham. We watched a cookery demonstration where a three course meal was prepared, with each course containing asparagus. The surprise was the dessert, which was an Eton Mess, containing asparagus ice cream and garnished with an asparagus tip. We tried some of the ice cream and it was unusual but not awful.

There was a craft tent in the pub garden. In addition to displays of traditional crafts, there were various things for sale, including cakes. The cupcake below was a standard chocolate cake (very tasty) with chocolate icing and asparagus shaped (but not flavoured) decorations.

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A few weeks ago we thought it would be a good idea to make a giant pizza sized cookie, using our 10 inch pizza trays.

Recipe:

• ½ cup butter

• ½ cup peanut butter

• ½ cup white sugar

• ½ cup brown sugar

• 1 egg

• 1½ cups plain flour

• ½ teaspoon baking soda

• ½ teaspoon salt

• 1 cup chocolate chips or m&ms

Soften the butter. Mix together the butter, peanut butter and egg, then add the rest of the ingredients. Mix well.

Bake for 10-12 minutes at gas mark 5.

(See measuring cup sizes to convert cups to volume or weight or oven temperatures for conversion information.

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Last weekend we bought a book of Pizza recipes from the National Trust 2nd hand book shops. We're going to work our way through some of the different dough and topping types but we've been impressed so far. We'd already made several dessert pizzas and calzone using our normal pizza base but the book had a recipe for a sweet base so we decided to try that.

Sweet Pizza Base

The book was published in the USA so uses cups rather than weights. Conversions can be found here.

• 1 teaspoon of bakers yeast

• 2 cups of plain white or bread flour

• 2 tablespoons of sugar

• ¼ teaspoon of salt

• 2 tablespoons vegetable oil

• 1 egg

• ½ cup warm milk

Follow the standard pizza method to make the dough. The pizza can be topped as normal or folded over to make a calzone.

Suggested Toppings

• Mincemeat - this makes a very good 'mince pie calzone'

• Summer fruits or berries - stewed with sugar to taste and a little cornflour to thicken

• Marshmallows and chocolate chunks