Home grown pudding anyone ?

How do you like them apples ?

It's Bake Off night which means my annual Kitchenaid craving is in full force and I'm thinking about what to bake pretty much all the time. In my waking moments I'm concocting grand plans for cakes, biscuits and muffins and in my sleeping moments... well I'm pretty much doing the same.

At the weekend I gave all the boys the important job of harvesting the first apples from our trees in the garden. When we moved to this house we were told that the trees grew cooking apples and sure enough the following autumn we had a glut of apples and it was crumbles, cakes and all manner of apple based cuisine for months. We only get apples every two years and with this being an apple year I was very excited when they started to appear.

A small sample of our first harvest of the year

Last year I discovered that we also have quince growing in our garden so I made quince jelly. We also have blackberries, but some overzealous pruning left us with a paltry amount of them last year. This year I've been a bit more judicious and as a result the ratio of apples to blackberries is far more promising.

So, having collated and photographed the fruit I remembered I had some shortcrust pastry in the freezer and my mind began whirring with ideas. In the end I went for a very simple apple and blackberry pie with a pastry topping.

I made this ! 

It's clear my food photography is not quite up to scratch which is why I'm not a food blogger, but it did taste delicious :)

Then we ate this :)

I did also make some simple marmalade straws for Big Boy who is obsessed with Paddington at the moment. He's never shown any interest in marmalade but he did like these. I managed to even keep some for him to enjoy our daily showing of the Paddington movie tomorrow afternoon :)

Movie snack marmalade straws anyone ?