Three years ago my debut cookbook, Homemade Memories, hit the shelves. I adored the process, a labour of love written, tested and tasted during the evenings and on weekends whilst working a full time job. The day after my book launch, I found out I was pregnant and since then Nino has been born and his little sister is cooking up nicely for her summer arrival. I guess you could say this book was my first baby, a trial run of late nights and hard work and ever so slight obsession. When I was working on the book, people often asked how I managed to find the time. But if you truly love, believe in and benefit from something, somehow you make time, whether it’s baking, or jogging or juggling a family alongside a career.
That’s what I’d like to believe, anyway. Recently – most likely due to our house move last weekend – the scales of work and family and personal projects feel slightly off kilter. Suffice to say I’m excited for maternity leave, for nesting in our new family home, spending time with Luke, Nino and our imminent arrival and reconnecting with the kitchen. Everyone knows new baby visits must be accompanied by cake, right? So there will be cake. And scones and biscuits and bringing out the ice cream machine in time for hot summer days spent in the garden without dreaded commutes or deadlines. I’ll be making a lot from Homemade Memories – is it odd to bake from your own book? It truly is a collection of my favourite recipes, so I suppose not. Anyway, I’d love for you to make things from it too, so in the spirit of moving house and discovering some spares (!) plus the thrill of a third birthday and need for celebration, I’m giving away three signed copies.
How to enter
Simply leave a comment below or on Instagram telling me your favourite childhood food memory. Maybe it’s baking with your Granny, the birthday cake your Mum made you every year or a melting ice cream cone on holiday abroad. It could be nibbling the jelly from a Jaffa cake, licking a bowl of Angel Delight or eating an entire packet of Fig Rolls. Whatever gives you those warm fuzzy feelings of food nostalgia, I want to hear it – you never know, maybe your memories will make it into a second book 😉
This giveaway is open worldwide and will close at midnight on Monday 11th June. The three winners will be chosen randomly and notified by email within one week, with cookbooks posted out as soon as I receive your postal address. Good luck!
Coming home from school on cold winter days and smelling beef stew or spaghetti bolognaise cooking long and slow for tea that night. Simple food is often the best and both dishes I still enjoy on a cold winters night.
My mum’s apple pie made with the softest, lightest rough puff pastry that melted in your mouth. Delicious!
How can I resist ? Thank you for the opportunity.My favorite memory of food would be my mom’s dream bars:) A looooong time ago..very long….Congratulations on your new bébé.
I think probably my mum making our birthday cakes. She made me Humpty Dumpty, a snuggle bum (popular toy), a train and she made my sister’s favourite teddy one year.
My favorite childhood food memory is baking alongside my mother when I was a little girl. This was in the era of homemade desserts made from scratch. I had my own little pans. I especially remember making pie just for me in my own little pie plate when Mom made a full-size pie for the family dessert. (I’d love to win your cookbook.)
The food memory that instantly comes to mind is smelling my mom’s homemade spaghetti sauce when walking into the house after school. She made it from canned tomato sauce and paste, and cooked meatballs for hours in it on top of the stove. We weren’t allowed soda much as children but for a reason I’m still not sure of, we were permitted to drink soda with dinner on spaghetti nights as a treat. My mom is long gone, she passed away when I was a teen, but it is one dish that when I make it, I immediately think of her. I sometimes use fresh tomatoes, sometimes tinned, but always slow cook my sauce for hours. I include sausage along with the meatballs. Speaking of which, I make this every Valentine’s Day with heart shaped ones! My family loves it.
My stand out childhood food memory is the iced buns that we were allowed on Sundays. Nothing fancy: just those plain oval buns with a thin layer of sugary pink or white icing on top! It was essential to eat the icing first and then the bun second.
Happy Book-a-versary! With so much going on I don’t blame you for looking forward to maternity leave, and I hope it’s a time filled with much cake and cozy new memories. My favourite childhood food memory is pancake Sundays. In the summer’s we’d stay in our summer home with our grandparents, cousins, aunts, and uncles all nearby. Each Sunday morning my grandparents would host a pancake breakfast that everyone would come to. The rule was you were allowed one glass of orange juice, two strips of bacon, and all the pancakes you could eat. It was the best!
My fondest memory of food is one I shared with my brother at my grandparent’s house.
See here:
http://ourfamilymenu.com/rich-polenta-with-a-vegetable-ragu-and-fried-polenta-sticks/
Sitting on the garden wall, aged about five, on a summer day and eating my first peach straight from the tree in my grandmother’s garden. Peach as big as my hand, juice dribbling down my chin. Her jam was glorious too!
Fairy tea party supplied by my patient Nana – tiny little sandwiches with her homemade cream cheese and cucumber, raw snow peas wrapped in chives, tiny pickled mushrooms she took all us grandchildren on walks to pick (we didn’t realise it was to give our mums and dads a break!), miniature Battenberg cake slices and tiny chocolate crispie cakes. Washed down with her homemade nettle pop (except once she put too much yeast in it and we all got tiddly on nettle beer!!) All served on a picnic table with a jam jar of flowers (buttercups and other weeds!) Happy days … 🙂
My favorite food memory is baking with my grandchildren.
Coming home from school to see my mum had made ‘nanny Dunne’s fairy cakes and fruit scones, that we would have warm with lots of butter and strawberry jam. The fairy cakes are named after my wonderful mum because she looked after lots of children and was nanny to them all. Even though she died in 2010 these cakes are still called nanny Dunne’s fairy cakes. I take after my mum and bake for family and friends and people still ask me to make them.
Our family always had fierce competition for the best chocolate cake recipe, and everyone was constantly swapping. So all of those chocolate cake variations really stuck in my mind, trying to find a cake that was as fudgy and brownie-like as possible without actually being a brownie. They generally have very little flour, and lots of butter and eggs.
So many memories, it’s hard to choose – from marzipan remnants from the Christmas cake, being allowed to lick out the bowl or stir the pudding (3 times, clockwise and wish!) I only hope my own children carry such fond food memories with them as they grow up!
making honey cake for the jewish new year! we make at leats 30 of them!
My favorite food memory is making pierogis with my grandmother and mom. We’d roll out the silky soft dough and make little mounds of mashed potato and cheese. I’d sneak bits of the filling. Then we’d fold them over and gently press the edges together. Eating them all together later that day and finding extras stashed in the freezer long after grandma had gone back home.
My favorite food memories definitely include my grandmother. Baking and cooking with her was pure comfort. The memories of learning about her Pennsylvania Dutch heritage, finding joy and comfort in the warmth of her arms and her kitchen, and cooking and baking favorite foods will live with me forever.
The memorie that comes to my mind is licking the bowl of my favorite Cheesecakebatter that mom made for my birthday. My sister and me were always arguing whose turn it was to lick spoons and bowls of batter whenever she would bake. But not on our birthdays. I would sometimes be more exited for the bowl-licking-part than for the cake itself.
Hmm, I think my favourite is cooking with my mum and great grandad. He was a baker and my taught my mum how to make pastry without weighing and she taught me. My favourite was fairy cakes and licking the bowl afterwards and home made mince pies. The homemade cooking smell is still something that makes me feel all warm and happy.
My favorite food memory is grilling in the summer. We’d spent the evenings on our back porch with grilled burgers, fresh corn, and watermelon. When I think back to those memories I immediately embody the carefree nature and outlook we had then.
My Grandma’s egg custard tart..sprinkled with nutmeg. The best ever!
What a lovely idea. My memory is of making fudge on the Aga with my grandad. With hindsight, he was brave to mix molten sugar and small children (!) but I know my love of cooking comes in a large part from his enthusiasm to teach us how.
It’s been so lovely reading everyone’s memories x
Walking the bakery on a Saturday morning with my mum and carrying the loaf back, often picking the flufy bits of bread from the inside out of the ends on the way home *naughty*
The familiar, comforting and heart warming ritual of Christmas baking and the overwhelming scent of festive spices that were unleashed from batches of various styles of mince pies, such as frangipane, macaroon topped, star topped…jam tarts, coconut tarts, lemon curd, almond biscuits, fig, nut and dark chocolate flapjack…an endless list of names for the season. Also, making fruit scones with my nanny, grandpa’s proper chips and the anticipation of mum’s apple crumble with apples picked from the tree in our garden; always primed by September to relinquish its ripe, tart fruit. Also, the perfect birthday cake my mum made…milk chocolate, with evaporated milk in the sponge mix, making it incredibly moist and moreish…chocolate buttons had to adorn it, otherwise it was never complete. There are just too many to mention here…enough to compile a book myself!
All sounds amazing, you definitely should compile your own book 🙂
i would always eat fudgsicles after bike riding on a hot summer day!
My favourite cooking memory is being stood on a little wooden chair next to my mum learning how to make all.my favourite cakes. Liking the bowl and waiting excitedly for the goodies to emerge from the oven….then the wait till they cooled. Being tormented by gorgeous aromas. Miss my mum and those days.
Happy blog birthday from the UK! Reading this post and through the comments above has made me feel so happy and I’ve been merrily reminiscing for hours, thinking about the wonderful memories that food and cooking have created over the years with different family members, some still with us, some now sadly departed.
One of my fondest memories is of going blackberry-picking with my grandmother and my younger brother. We’d go to the woods and have competitions about who could pick the most. We’d all end up with scratches from the thorns but arrive home with bags and bags of freshly picked berries. Once we’d cleaned them (and ourselves), we’d be allowed to pick the best ones to put into apple and blackberry pies which we would help make and then sit in front of the oven door waiting for the pastry to turn golden. I can still taste those pies when I close my eyes, and they were the best pies in the whole wide world!!!
I have so many favorite food memories with family and friends. One of my most favorite is making “My Grandma’s Soup” with my fraternal grandmother.
This soup started with grandma boiling what she would call stew meat with salt and pepper. While the stew meat cooled she would enlist any available grandchildren to help prepare the vegetables.
The vegetables always included potatoes, carrots, celery, cabbage, onions, bell pepper,tomatoes and turnips. We helped clean and peel everything.
Next came the fun part for us kids. Grandma would get out her old fashioned hand-cranked meat grinder and attached it to the pull out cutting board. Then all of us took turns grinding up all those vegetables and meat.
Then grandma put it all in a big kettle adding garlic powder, salt, pepper and ground sage. She cooked it in the broth from the stew meat with water or tomato juice added as needed.
I still love making “Grandma Soup”. My friend of 45+ years just asked me for the recipe this morning. She remembered me making it about 35 years ago and said it is the best soup she has ever had.
Trying to pick just one favourite food memory has caused me to end up in a near comatose state at my desk, reliving the good times! I think eating a bag of hot, chunky real chipper chips doused in salt and vinegar on the seafront with the evening sun moving slowly further and further away has to be the top pick. A Friday night treat that my sister and I built up to for days 🙂
making chocolate mayonnaise cake for my dad’s birthdays. since my brothers has allergies to chocolate it was the one time a year something chocolate was made for dessert. the recipe was from the when goods were rationed during ww2. it is the most delicious moist cake around!!!
Decorating pavlova with my Nanny. Nothing was off limits. We would layer it and still call it pavlova! Adding meringues as well just to see how big we could make it!
I already own your book so I’ll just take the opportunity to say your recipe for lemon curd is my absolute favourite – I even used it as the filling for a friend’s wedding cake that I made recently!
My favourite food memories are of my Nana’s apple pie, which she would make every Sunday…. when I went to University she would make one and send it down with my parents and I would cram about 15 people into my tiny room to share it! I remember her teaching me how to make it and telling me off for not whisking the eggs thoroughly enough, and me eating the raw pastry along the way. I now make it for my Sunday lunches!
I used to love macaroni cheese and after I had left home to get married and set up my own home my mum would still make it for me every time I went home for a visit. She even made it when she should have been sitting down letting me cook for her I understand it now because I make pizza for my son who has his own home. I don’t even need to ask him what he would like, it’s always pizza.
I remember, it would have been my 7th or 8th birthday and my mum made me a magic roundabout birthday cake in the shape of Dougall. I LOVED that cake and remember it now all these years later. Sadly I lost my mum just a few weeks ago, and although she as no great baker or cook, she was determined to make just ht I had asked for. This was a very happy memory I shall always treasure.
D. I’d not tasted butter until I was about eight when we were on holiday and my uncle made me buttered toast. I’d also never had brown bread. I remember the amazing sharp taste of the salty butter, the crunch of the hot brown toast and watching the chunks of butter melt and pool and eventually sink into the thick slab of bread. Heaven.