Up until the end of my third trimester of pregnancy, the only things we had in our freezer were ice, a champagne jacket, frozen blueberries and petit pois. So much of what we eat is quick to cook or relies on an abundance of fresh ingredients, it barely seemed worth the hassle to prepare, pack and label portions of any given meal, let alone the time it would take to defrost before we wanted to eat. It wasn’t until the teacher at our ante-natal classes drew a twenty four hour clock portioned into hour long pieces for baby feeding, bathing and nappy changing on repeat that I realised a few pre-made meals might come in handy for the weeks after Nino arrived.

I duly spent a whole day of my maternity leave chopping, stirring, blitzing and baking the kinds of things I thought we might need in the way of easy, speedy nourishment. There was a turkey chilli and meatballs, beef bolognese, stock for soups and various marinaded skewers. I made dozens of herbed falafel and portioned up individual servings of green curry paste and pizza dough. And then, of course, my mind turned to the sweet treats I could stock up on for the inevitable inundation of friends and family wanting to visit for tea.

I’ve been developing a few recipes for the Great British Chefs website, including these hot cross blondies. Recipe testing always means excess quantities of any given treat so I packed some up as a present for my midwife team and froze the rest along with a double batch of these chocolate rye brownies and a pre-sliced loaf of chocolate freckled banana bread from my cookbook. Then finally, in the interests of including something a little more virtuous alongside all that chocolate and sugar, I baked two little loaves of Diana Henry’s date, apricot and walnut loaf cake.

The cake comes from Diana’s wonderful cookbook, A Change of Appetite, but I first bookmarked the recipe from the Food52 website. It has everything I love in baked goods – plenty of sweetness from (mostly) natural sugars, the crunch of seeds, a hearty inclusion of wholemeal flour and lots of lovely spice. Diana uses butter, which people really shouldn’t be afraid of, but if you’re vegan I would think that coconut oil would work here just as well. The original recipe calls for one large loaf but I baked it into two smaller tins then froze individual slices in pairs, ready to be buttered and eaten with company (or alone, in the middle of the night, while breastfeeding, which is what seems to have happened so far).