Birthday cake and jelly

(You probably already know that when Brits say jelly they mean jello. But I thought I'd mention it just in case anyone is reading this hoping for a jam-type jelly recipe.)

So yes, we made birthday jellies and birthday cake. Mainly because I really wanted to try out our new jelly mold/muffin tins. And I also wanted a birthday cake, of course. We made Cranham Honey Cake, which involves glacé cherries. I love glacé cherries.

Baking this week: Nussheckli, or Swiss nut cookies

I happened across these on the internet and the author asks not to be reproduced without permission so if you want the exact recipe please visit her own blog. She has a photo too, so you can compare!

I'll just say that the basic ingredients are nuts, sugar, eggs and flour. These seem to be the main ingredients in a lot of Swiss recipes! These cookies caught my eye because they claim to be native to our canton. I've never seen them or heard of them but that means nothing as we have few local Swiss friends - most are immigrants from other cantons. So Froglet and I thought we'd make a half-quantity in case we didn't like them...

Mixing - Pretty round and heart-shaped balls - Um...???

We don't think they were supposed to all run together like that. Maybe we should have spaced them further apart, or most likely my measuring was at fault. Swiss recipes seem to need precision - well they are Swiss after all! As we don't own a weighing scale, and I seldom have all the ingredients that I need, my baking usually goes something like "100 g - let's say a cup - of flour or sugar. 100 g - roughly half a cup - of butter. Chopped nuts? We've got ground nuts, that'll do. Eggs can be replaced with bananas*..." and so on. I did not replace the eggs in this recipe though - pretty sure that wouldn't work!

The finished product:

Not quite how they're meant to look! But still tasty.

*A vegan friend taught us this. The ratio is one well-mashed banana for two eggs, if the eggs are mainly being used to bind rather than to raise (and you don't mind the taste of bananas, of course). Try making banana bread or chocolate cake with this substitution, it's yummy! Excellent way of using up those going-black bananas that no one wants to eat. You can also use apple sauce, I think it's 1/4 cup for one egg, but I prefer banana.

Edited to add: We are linking up this post to Simply Made Sunday retrospectively. Click the button to find out all about it!