A couple of months ago I made a rice pudding but it curdled slightly. I decided to freeze it until I had a chance to do something with it. I had the idea of doing some kind of cake so I looked up rice pudding cakes on the Internet but they all seemed to be more like set puddings and less like actual cakes. I decided to have a go at making up a recipe myself.

I took 2 eggs, ¼ cup of brown sugar and ¼ cup of vegetable oil and mixed them together. I added the tub of slightly curdled rice pudding (approximately 300g) then added 1 cup of self raising flour. I baked it at gas mark 5 until it looked done. It was a huge improvement over the original rice pudding, which didn't have a very pleasant texture. The cake has a moist cakey/puddingy texture and a good rice pudding flavour. The photo is of the second slice I cut - the first slice got eaten very quickly.

This meal was based on two recipes.

I mixed the turkey mince, spinach and cheese together and formed sausage shapes out of it. These were fried and put into a wrap along with some salad.

This is another recipe from the Hairy Biker's European baking book. They cooked Curly Pies in the Romania episode and their suggested filling included cheese, ham, chorizo and mushrooms. I went with cheese, chorizo and falafel for mine since our stocks of suitable pie-filling foods were getting a bit low.

The pastry is more like a dough and was made by mixing together 200ml of fizzy water, a pinch of salt, a small glug (approx. 1 tbs) of vegetable oil and 270g of plain flour. This was mixed to make a soft dough which was put in the fridge to rest for half an hour.

The quantities above should make 4 pies but I halved the amounts. I split the dough into 2 and flattened them into disks then spread the filling into the centre, folding the dough over to meet and overlap in the middle.

The original recipe suggested a glaze of 2 eggs and 100ml of yoghurt. We didn't have any yoghurt so I used 1 egg and 50g of a mix of milk and cream cheese (remember I was making half the amount). After brushing a generous amount over the pies, there was a lot of the glaze mixture left over - enough to make an omelette by adding the leftover filling which wouldn't fit in the pies.

I baked the pies for 35-40 minutes at gas mark 4 on our pizza stone.

The pies were good but the pastry was a little on the chewy side. The CO₂ from the fizzy water had helped the dough rise a bit during cooking so the mix might work well for an emergency pizza base.

I have a couple of cakes to report on this week. The first was a Bounty Bar cake, based on a recipe from the River Cottage Cake handbook. A version of it has been posted here so I don't have to re-type the recipe myself. I scaled the recipe down because my tin was smaller than the suggested size in the book but I might have made a slight mistake because mine took longer to cook and went from sloppy in the middle to completely cooked and dry in a few minutes.

The resulting cake did taste good but was a bit too dry and crumbly. The cake was fairly quick and easy to make so I'll probably try it again. Next time I will stick more closely to their recipe and pay a bit more attention to the cake during baking.

The second cake was much more successful. It was inspired by the grapefruit cake from the The Great British Bake Off but was based on another from the River Cottage Cake book.

The cake part was very similar to this recipe. I didn't get much zest from the grapefruit so I added a tablespoon of my lime curd.

I do like drizzle cakes (they are among my favourite cakes) and this one certainly didn't disappoint. The outside of the cake had developed a slightly crispy sugary crust and the centre had gone a bit puddingy.

I dread to think how many calories were in the cake. I should probably try to cook more new main courses but there are still so many different cake recipes I need to try.