Rukmini Iyer - The Sweet Roasting Tin: One Tin Cakes, Cookies & Bakes – quick and easy recipes

While Ive paused my occasional secret daydream of opening a cake shop (which now has a marble-topped bar and extensive wine list, along with a savoury menu), the easy, one-tin cakes and bakes in this book are what youd find in my imaginary shop and real-life kitchen. Ive broadened the definition of one-tin to include muffin tins, cupcake tins and baking trays for cookies because why limit yourself to one shape of sweet thing? (The only shape I wish Id included was the mini dinosaur tins for dinosaur-shaped cakes, but perhaps thats for another book.)

Ive loved baking for as long as I can remember: it started with my mother, and a really good collection of cookbooks. At first, it was the brightly coloured ones aimed at children, from which we made flapjacks, butterfly and chocolate cakes (decorated with chocolate buttons), graduating not very long afterwards to a pale-pink-macaron-coloured Patisserie book, part of the Time-Life series. As a child, I began reading it obsessively over breakfast: the step-by-step photographs showed the reader how to whisk egg white and sugar into cloud-like meringues, with pages on melting and dipping chocolate and shaping it into curls, and guides to making your own piping bags and creating filigree decorations as entrancing as any picture book. Along with a book on cake decorating (rolling a cake covered in green buttercream through a tray of desiccated coconut to create a grassy effect) and a Cadbury book of baking (featuring elaborate chocolate castles with biscuit trellis-work), its fair to say that I read about cakes almost as often as I ate them.

Happily, the things we actually made at home were much simpler, and all the nicer for it. Childhood highlights included home-made doughnuts, laced with cardamom, my mothers pineapple upside-down cake and orange chocolate chip steamed puddings (both of which made their way into The Roasting Tin), and the coconut burfi which you will find on . Much as I still enjoy looking at photographs and how-to videos of elaborately iced and decorated cakes, my preference when baking or eating is still with those that are simple to put together and minimally adorned.

With icing or without, the premise of this baking book is simple: after all the reading and experimenting that I have done, I am convinced that for every category of baking a loaf cake, a cupcake, a cookie, a bread and butter pudding there is one very simple recipe template, from which you can make multiple variations for an almost infinite variety of flavours and textures. Take a cake, one of the easiest things you can make. As I explain in more detail on , for a basic cake you use equal quantities by weight of flour, butter, sugar and eggs. But if all you need is equal weights per category, then you can theoretically swap the butter for olive oil, or the flour for ground almonds, the caster sugar for soft dark brown sugar, or the eggs for mashed banana and peanut butter, and come up with a cake that is subtly different each time. While I really dont recommend making all these changes at once (I found this out the hard way), the gentle variations on the template within each chapter will I hope demonstrate that even if you find baking a little daunting, you only have to get a recipe right once before a whole array of flavour combinations is at your disposal.

The baking book that has inspired me most is undoubtedly Nigellas How to be a Domestic Goddess, which I read as absolute gospel as a teenager, and still consider to be so. Feeling that I must have the wherewithal to make a batch of cakes at a minutes notice is so deeply ingrained that even as a student I was never without flour, butter, sugar and eggs. The idea that you can create anything from a light, fluffy sponge to a melt-in-the-mouth pudding or tinful of cookies from such simple ingredients never fails to amaze me: it feels like very little effort, and time, for such a pleasing result. And as such the recipes fit perfectly into my Roasting Tin mantra of minimum effort, maximum return cooking a little light stirring, get your ingredients in a (muffin, loaf or cake) tin, and let the oven do the work.

Of course, its not just the flavours that youre altering when you swap out ingredients in the recipe templates in this book. For as long as I can remember, my mother has tinkered with gluten-free scone or cake recipes to cater for a coeliac friend or visitor, and more recently has been baking without sugar for my father, who is diabetic. I am not an expert on vegan baking, but my all-time favourite banana bread and cookie recipes happen to be naturally vegan, and so Ive applied the principles from those so you can easily veganise other recipes in this book should you wish. (Because I believe it to be the best recipe, inadvertently all the cookies in the book are vegan.) Similarly, when testing chocolate brownie recipes, I found that those made with ground almonds which I would initially have labelled the gluten-free option were far better in their own right than those made with flour, and so almost the entire brownie chapter of this book is incidentally gluten-free. Remember to always check the labels on ingredients, including baking powder and chocolate, to ensure theyre gluten-free, if you need them to be.

If, like my mother and me, youve got someone in your life who loves cake and cant eat it because theyre diabetic, I wanted there to be recipes in this book that you could easily convert to be diabetic-friendly. But as diabetic baking is a specialist area, Ive worked with nutritionist Jennifer Martin on the recipes in this book to determine which ones are easily adaptable with date syrup or xylitol, our preferred sugar substitutes. Youll find a table on for more information on obtaining medical advice if necessary).

For an at-a-glance look at which recipes in the book are naturally vegan/gluten-free/suitable for diabetics, and which ones can be easily made so with a quick ingredient swap, see .

The classic formula which was taught to me by my mother, and which I think holds true for most bakers of her generation and before, is that to make a cake you need equal quantities of butter, sugar and flour in ounces, with half the amount of eggs.

So your easily memorable cake formulas are: