This was almost a complete disaster.  Billy is very good at helping in the kitchen  He likes to reorganise the cupboards and if I say it’s time to make a cake he waddles across the kitchen and gets out the scales and the big plastic mixing bowl.  Sometimes he’s a little bit overenthusiastic and he tends to drag everything out of the cupboard and slams it down on the floor.  Doesn’t really matter with a plastic mixing bowl but digital measuring scales don’t take kindly to that kind of treatment.  I started weighing out the ingredients for this cake and noticed that the amount of flour looked very small for the amount it was meant to weigh.  I got a new packet of dried apricots out of the cupboard and weighed them and it told me that rather than the 200g it said on the packet they weighed 525g.  I tried a few other things and it was way out (oooh, I could have put in a terrible pun there!)  I tried new batteries but it made absolutely no difference so I now have a new set of scales which are going to be kept well out of reach from the small destructive one!

You will need: 250g self-raising flour, 110g ground almonds, 165g caster sugar, 165g butter, 3 medium eggs, 100g chopped dried apricots, 1tsp baking powder, 20g flaked almonds.

Preheat the oven to 160°C and grease and line a 19cm cake tin.  Cream together the butter and sugar.  Add the eggs and mix to a smooth batter.  Add the flour, ground almonds, chopped dried apricots and baking powder and mix until well combined.  Pour the batter into the prepared tin and sprinkle the flaked almonds on top.

Bake in the oven for 55 minutes until golden.