I have been baking a lot recently. I think it’s because usually I make cakes for celebrations and associate cake with being happy, so when I am depressed or unhappy I bake to cheer myself up. Oddly enough I don’t feel the need to eat what I’ve made – if I’m honest I prefer something savoury, the act of baking is enough to improve my mood.
The first time I cooked myself to a better mood was April, it was the week I stumbled on the most amazing recipe for Sussex Pond Pudding
The problem with needing to bake away depression is you don’t necessarily have the opportunity to go shopping for missing ingredients and it’s a matter of taking pot luck with what’s in the cupboards. So possessing as I did almost the entire worlds harvest for cashew nuts 2007 (they weren’t the freshest of nuts admittedly) a cashew heavy recipe was required and Google shortly provided
One of the first things to come up on Google was Allegra McEvedy’s Orange Blossom, cashew and semolina cake