When I think of my childhood it is full of memories of my grandma in the kitchen, baking cakes, making cookies and savoury snacks. Granny’s cakes were always so amazingly delicious. One of my all-time favourite cakes was the so-called Easy Cocoa Cake. It tasted amazing, topped with a bit of yogurt and cocoa. I can still feel the sweetness of every bite it in my mouth. During one of my visits to granny’s house last summer, I decided to try baking the cake myself and to see whether it is indeed as easy to prepare as the recipe title boldly stated. As it turned out, baking the cake did not require a lot of time or products after all.

Here is what you need:
3 eggs
1 teacup sugar
1 teacup flour
1 spoon baking powder
3 vanilla drops
 
For the topping:
500 ml yoghurt
5-6 table spoons sugar
1 table spoon cocoa

1.Preheat the oven to 180C
2.Mix all ingredients in a bowl.
3.Put some oil on a tray and evenly pour the cake mixture into the tray.
4. Bake in the centre for around 30min.
5.Mix the ingredients for the topping.
6.When the cake is ready, poke some holes in it with a fork.
7.Pour the topping mixture over the cake and let it cool off
8.Enjoy!

    Baking is one of the things I always say I will start doing once I have free time. The thing is even if I have some free time, it is never the right time for baking. Until something happens like the time when I found out that my flatmates have left me some baking products in one of the cupboards in the kitchen. Shortly after that, while searching for my camera in my suitcase, I happened to find my baking book. These two things helped me remember my idea from a long time ago to bake some biscuits. Having two different types of sugar and some flour left I decided to give it a try. Once I made chocolate chip cookies from the baking book. However, this time I decided to make cookies with sultanas instead of chocolate chip, and honey instead of caster sugar, just to experiment a bit with the recipe. 

​   ​How many times have you thrown away bananas because they were very ripe, almost rotten? None? Well, this almost happened to me last Sunday, when I realized that I had forgotten two bananas in the fridge. They were dark brown, so I thought they were rotten. However, they were just very ripe and my flatmate suggested making banana bread out of them. I live with a gluten intolerant flatmate, so you can image how making banana bread for everyone in the flat can be a problem. So, I asked a friend of mine, who is into cooking healthy snacks, for advice and we decided to go on a journey to the Tesco Extra on Maryhill Road and check the Free From section. On the way there she told me about gram flour - flour made from ground chickpeas, which I’d never heard of before, and we decided to check if they have it at the store. I did my usual shopping and then went to the Free From section. The choice, between the three gluten free flours, was already familiar to me. However, my flatmate does not consume them for whatever reason.  I thought that since the gram flour is not made of wheat I might find it in the Free From section. However,  the gram flour was nowhere to be seen, and I thought that I was way too optimistic in my idea of making a gluten free banana bread. Then my friend came with a packet of gram flour in her hand, which she found at the World Food section, as it turned out this flour is very popular among the Asian countries. I read the ingredients and I wasn't surprised, when I did not see the statement “gluten free product” at the back. Apparently, Tesco doesn’t want to display all gluten free products in their Free From section. Anyway, we made our purchases and we headed home.
 I found this simple banana bread recipe online on a site called Simply Recipes.