I’ve just noticed that’s there’s been a lot of crafty posts recently so I’d better rectify that with a cooking post!

I love a good gossip and it’s one of the things I’ve missed most about being on maternity leave!  Some work colleagues and I decided to have a get together to have a good catch up and we each bought some food to share; naturally I offered to bring cake!   We recently had a get together of our ante-natal group and we’d done a similar thing where we all bought some food to share.  We’d hosted this occasion so we had been left with a strange selection of leftovers; we had a lot of strawberries left over so I decided to make a variation of my more traditional marble cake.

You will need: 175g margarine/ butter, 175 caster sugar, 3 beaten eggs, 125g + 100g self-raising flour, 100g strawberries, 2 tablespoons of water and 2-3 drops of red food colouring.

Preheat the oven to 200°C and grease and line a 2lb loaf tin.

Cream the margarine/ butter and sugar together until light and fluffy.  Add the eggs, one at a time.  The mixture might curdle but will come back together when you add the flour.  Sieve 125g of the flour and fold into the creamed mixture.  Split the mixture in half in two separate bowls.

Place the strawberries in a saucepan with the water and simmer gently for 5 minutes.  Pass this mixture through a sieve and add to one portion of the batter mixture and mix well.  I didn’t think this had a strong enough colour so I added the food colouring, but this is entirely up to you!  You now need to make the strawberry batter into a similar consistency to the plain mixture; I needed to add about 100g of flour, but add it gradually so the mixture doesn’t get too stiff.

Place splodges of each mixture in the loaf tin and layer it up gradually.  When all the mixture is added gently swirl it with the handle of a spoon.  Place in the oven for about 45 minutes or until a skewer placed in the middle of the cake comes out clean.