Out & About Magazine, Chiswick, Brentford, Isleworth and Osterley, Dec-Jan 2023

Happy Christmas - Chanukah - Winter holiday

As ever, there is plenty to do, not all of it expensive. Gunnersbury Park has Christmas and Chanukah activities for children and Osterley Park has a family trail. There are also some great children’s theatre productions, Christmas markets and some spectacular light shows to go and see. Pages 6-7

At Hen Corner, Sara Ward is running workshops on wreath-making and Christmas food gifts, including a Mince Pie masterclass. Page 8

Jazz at George IV presents a Blues and Soul Christmas Party on Thursday 22 December. Page 23 Looking forward to 2023 there are more Blues and Jazz dates for January and The Arts Society Chiswick already has the schedule for all their lectures for the year, from the jewellery of René Lalique to the statues of Easter Island. Pages 14-15

We have some ideas for presents. Clare Johnson’s fabulous kimonos and men’s shirts are a riot of colour and pattern. Page 12

There’s a new book out on Rock & Pop in Swingin’ London in the 1960s and ‘70s with a collection of photographs of many of the bands in the charts at the time. Pages 20-21

Donna Freed has published a memoir which explores the thrilling story of how her birth parents faked her mother’s death and became the subject of one of the biggest true crime stories to grip the United States in the 1960s. Pages 10-11

We also have a recipe from Jo Pratt’s new book The Flexible Baker, from her flexible cookbook series, offering homecooked food to include different dietary requirements. We’ve chosen her ‘Festive almond, olive oil and orange cake’, which looks delicious. Enjoy! Pages 26-27

Bridget

Editor: Bridget Osborne

out&about is the local community magazine for Chiswick, Osterley, Brentford and Isleworth. It is distributed to 8000 homes and businesses.

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Happy holidays and a happy New Year to you.

For over 240 years, seven generations of the Lodge Family have been proud to help local families in their time of need. We provide all funerals, whether modern, traditional, green or alternative, with care and compassion.

“The staff at Lodge Brothers have been sympathetic, understanding and supportive. They were with us every step of the way throughout a very difficult time and we are and will be forever grateful for their support.”

Andrew & Robert Lodge with their eco-friendly hybrid funeral fleet

Mr Robinson

Christmas THINGS TO DO

with a family

What to do with children this Christmas? There is lots on: wreathe making, children’s activities, theatre…

Theatre at the Tabard Beginning with the theatre, Theatre at the Tabard have two productions: A Christmas Carol and Five Children and It, running throughout December. A Christmas Carol performances: 4th, 11th, 18th and 24th December; Five Children and It runs from 8th – 31st December. Stage, television and film actor Clive Francis plays Ebeneezer Scrooge in the Dickens classic. The show has received four star reviews from the Daily Telegraph, the Independent, the Daily Mail and the Sunday Times. The Daily Mail calls him a “Wonderous Old Skinflint” while the Daily Telegraph describes it as the

“Performance of his career”.

Five Children and It, from the book by E Nesbit, tells the tale of five siblings who discover a magical, ancient and grumpy sand fairy, whose wish-granting isn’t always as straightforward as they might hope.

Tickets: tabard.org.uk

Watermans

Watermans arts centre in Brentford has The Wizard of Oz as its panto this year, presented by the award winning St Faith’s Players, Thursday 1 – Saturday 3 December and for young children (3 years +) The Three Billy Goats Gruff, 16 – 20 December.

Tickets: watermans.org.uk

St Michael’s Players

St Michael’s Players in Chiswick present Rapunzel from Tuesday 6 – Saturday 10 December

Tickets: stmichaelsplayers.weebly. com

Lyric, Hammersmith

The Lyric, Hammersmith present Jack and the Beanstalk as their panto this year, until 7 January and for young children they have Raymond Briggs’ Father Christmas playing throughout December.

Tickets: lyric.co.uk

Christmas at Kew Kew Gardens’ annual Christmas extravaganza of lights illuminates its 12,000 trees until Sunday

8 January with thousands of twinkling lights. The Palm House and the lake are lit-up with a series of projections set to a soundtrack of beloved Christmas classics, while food vendors try and tempt you with a hot chocolate, mulled wine or spiced cider, halloumi fries and chocolate brownies.

Tickets: kew.org

Osterley Park

Osterley Park has Christmas wreath workshops and a winter family trail. The wreath workshops, priced at £30, run on selected dates from 7th – 18th December. The winter family trail has ten activity stations and two games to play along the way as Sarah Snow seeks your help selecting gifts for all her friends, Fee £2 includes a small prize to be collected from the shop. Suitable for children 4 and over, 5th –27th December.

Tickets: nationaltrust.org.uk/ visit/london/osterley-park-andhouse/events

Gunnersbury Park

Gunnersbury Park Museum is now open Tuesday – Sunday from 10am – 4.30pm, with a selection of activities for Little Flamingos: Storytime with Father Christmas from

2nd – 16th December, the opportunity to meet a Victorian Father Christmas from 3rd –18th December and a session on making a 3D lightbox to celebrate Chanukah on 18th December.

Chiswick House & Gardens

The Duck Pond market visits Chiswick House & Gardens twice in December: Friday 2nd –Sunday 4th and for a whole week from Saturday 17th- Saturday 24 December, 10am – 3pm

Chiswick Flower Market Chiswick Flower Market on Sunday 4th December offers Christmas lights, carols by children at local schools, a brass band, adult choirs, mulled wine, children’s theatre and a wreathmaking workshop. There will also be a special vegan market annexe. Oh, and lots of plants and flowers!

Chiswick Antiques and Vintage Market

Chiswick Antiques and Vintage Market on Sunday 11th December is positively bursting with Christmas present ideas.

Chiswick Cheese Market

The last Chiswick Cheese Market before Christmas is on Sunday 18th December – perfect timing to fill up your larder with

special cheeses for the Christmas weekend.

WWT London Wetland

Centre

A bit further away, but worth the visit, the London Wetland Centre at Barnes has a trail of illuminated sculptures of animals and birds to visit after dark until 8th January.

‘Meet giant light-up otters and explore the phases of the everwatching moon in owl woods. Discover the lustrous lake using night vision goggles to discover what the wetland’s real-life inhabitants are getting up to. Spot the curious nēnē geese and dreaming ducks!

‘Hop between giant interactive lily pads, beneath glowing fireflies

‘Head to the mystical marshland to start your illuminated bird spotting mission before heading into the fantastical forest full of mesmerizing neon birds. Take a peek into our real-life otters’ den for the chance to spot our furry family tucking up for bed.

‘Finally, journey through the twinkling tundra tunnel and back out into the real world.’

Tickets: wwt.org.uk/wetlandcentres/london

Hen CORNER

I love every season, even with the extreme weather this year, but I view Christmas and New Year as the highpoint, a mountaintop, a summit.

I love that final push to squeeze as much out of the old year, seeing as many people as possible, celebrating all the good stuff. Our build up to the festivities includes Christmas courses, festive baking and helping as many people as possible create their own evergreen wreaths, a symbol of eternity and promise.

If you’d like to join in the creativity, I’m running a Christmas Wreath Workshop as part of the Chiswick Flower Market on Sunday 4th December, at 2pm.

At home, I’ll be making reusable Christmas Crackers out of linen, complete with chocolates, party hats, snaps and cheesy jokes. Our goose is booked and I’m

researching recipes to make the best stuffing to accompany it.

Year on year, we keep records of how much food we have harvested from the garden. This year as well as the monetary value, the online calculator can estimate how much carbon dioxide we are saving by growing our own, thus saving on packaging, pesticides and petrol. Our 55kg of apples were worth £253 in monetary value, and we saved 18.2kg of CO2 by growing our own. The eggs from our hens, all 2,132 were worth £852.80 and have saved us a whopping 250kg of carbon dioxide!

Looking forward to 2023, the biggest highlight that I can see at the moment is the publication of our book, Living the Good Life in the City: A Journey to Self-sufficiency. I’ll be ‘out and about’ promoting it, probably with a chicken or two in tow and hope that all readers will find

encouragement to make steps towards living a little greener.

But most of all, at this time of year, I love the peace and quiet of Twixmas, the precious days between Christmas and New Year, when expectations have been delivered, loved ones are near, and there’s a good opportunity to rest by the fire.

With every blessing for a Merry Christmas and a peaceful New Year!

Christmas Food Gifts (Make A Hamper), Tuesday 6th Dec

Mince Pie Masterclass (Virtual), Monday 12th Dec

More info and all courses can be found at HenCorner.com

Christmas Wreath Workshop, Sun 4th December, see: chiswickflowermarket.com

All courses, virtual & face to face, can be found at HenCorner.com

Christmas at Hen Corner by Sara Ward

Duplicity: MY MOTHERS’ SECRETS

By Matt Smith

Donna Freed was adopted. When her adoptive mother died in 2009 she set out to track down her birth mother. What she discovered forms the basis of a memoir which explores the thrilling story of how her birth parents faked her mother’s death and became the subject of one of the biggest true crime stories to grip the United States in the 1960s.

After finding her birth mother’s identity from the few records available from a Manhattan adoption agency, Donna found Miriam “Mira” Lindenmaier as a possible maternal match. With further research on the internet she found Mira had had an affair with her biological father Alvin, a married man with four children.

He was 34, living in a tiny flat on East 92nd Street. She was 26, from a well-off family who lived in a sprawling six-bedroom mansion in a leafy suburb in New Jersey. Eventually after three years he said he was ready to leave his wife for her.

They concocted a plan to fake Mira’s death, cash in her life insurance and escape to Spain to raise their unborn baby Donna. They took out life insurance policies and Mira made Alvin her beneficiary so

they could collect $36,000 on her ‘death’. They had it all sorted out, or so they thought.

One afternoon in July 1966 Alvin, his friend and Mira made their way to City Island in the Bronx, where they rented a boat. Later that evening they reported Myra had disappeared, apparently drowned.

Alvin told police she had fallen asleep on the deck and he had decided to wake her up by “zigzagging” the boat to spray her with water. But, he claimed, the boat had capsized and Mira had fallen overboard.

They told police after searching themselves, calling other people in boats nearby and bringing in the coastguard to search for Mira, she was nowhere to be found. Her parents, and police, sensed something was wrong and believed Mira to be a victim of homicide after finding out Alvin was the beneficiary of her life-insurance policies.

Months later, on Thanksgiving Day, the game was up when police intercepted a call between Alvin and Mira, who was working at a restaurant in White Plains, NY. Police turned up at the restaurant and

How an adopted west London woman discovered her birth parents were notorious criminals

were served coffee by Mira, who was six-months pregnant, working under a pseudonym and living in a nearby hotel.

Police knocked on the door of her room at 6.00am on 13 December 1966 and took her to the nearby police station where she was reunited with her disappointed parents.

Mira was released to the custody of her parents and later given a suspended sentence, but Alvin went to jail for three years. The story was national news in the US and New York was buzzing with the story in the late ‘60s.

When Mira’s daughter Donna was born on 28 March 1967, she reluctantly gave her up for adoption through the Louise Wise Services agency in the hope she would have a better life.

Donna’s memoir Duplicity: My Mothers’ Secrets tells the tale of how she discovered their story and tracked down her mother in December 2011, now 80-years-old and living in a retirement home in Florida. Her father had died in 2004, a year before Donna herself moved from New York to London.

In the hopes of finding an agent to help her write her book, Donna said she went to the New York

Post to tell the story in 2019. Donna said the resulting press coverage left her mother feeling “exposed”, but she shrugged it off and said “well, at least it wasn’t the New York Times”. Donna added: “I think in general she was a really shy, reserved person and this whole escapade happened because she was so head over heels in love, it was this Amour Fou! She was a fool for love. It was so out of character for her to do anything like this, I think my father was a bit of a charmer. A charmer, and a scamp.”

While her mother never remarried and never had more children, she did eventually meet another “important” partner but he didn’t come close to Alvin.

“Alvin was really the love of her life, it’s not everybody you fake your own death for. It’s a once in a lifetime activity!”

Donna is one half of the longest running all female podcast Radio Gorgeous, and writes for The Oldie. Her book Duplicity: My Mothers’ Secrets is available to buy online from Amazon and in all good bookshops.

Kimonos

By textile designer Clare Johnston

Profile of textile designer and maker based in Chiswick

West London has quite a few small businesses which people have set up in what would in a previous generation have been their retirement years. Often based on big careers, they bring decades of experience to a flourishing community of small-scale entrepreneurs.

Clare Johnston has found her niche making and selling handmade kimonos and shirts which she exhibits through Artists At Home and the W4 Art Group and sells through her own website.

A textile designer by profession, she worked for several years as colour and textile consultant to M&S, was head of design at Liberty and Professor of Textiles at the Royal College of Art.

Now, she says of her business: “I like the idea of it being local and not having the pressure of selling to production demands. I want to keep it small and do what I enjoy doing.”

What she enjoys doing is rifling through her collection of fabrics, picked up on journeys around the world working in the textile trade and creating glorious kimonos and men’s shirts which are a riot of bold colours and patterns.

Originally from Whitby, Clare trained as a textile designer at art colleges in Sheffield and Birmingham.

She caught a lucky break when she failed to get into the Royal College of Art to study fashion and textiles in the 1970s.

She had been interviewed by Pat Albeck, a successful designer of printed textiles who lived on Chiswick Mall, whose 1960s Daisychain design for John Lewis was a bestseller for 15 years. Pat recognised her talent and potential and happened to need an assistant.

“I learned a great deal from her” says Clare. “She had an extraordinary eye for mixing colour and shape.”

Decades later when she became Professor of Textiles, Clare took great delight in regaling her students with the tale of how she had been turned down to study at the Royal College of Art as a student.

Since she stopped working there full time Clare has started making and selling kimonos.

“I had dabbled at making kimonos for family and for myself. I suddenly saw there was an opportunity to turn it into a microbusiness, using the fabrics I have collected all my life from all over the world.

“After 20 years of working with students I wanted to make things myself; I had this pent up need to make things, to use my hands and use the fabrics I already had.”

Find out more about her work from her website clarejohnston.com

THE Arts Society

CHISWICK

The Atlas Mountains of Morocco, as painted by French artist Jacques Majorelle, ‘Two Great Hellenistic cities: Alexandria and Pergamon’ and ‘The Jewellery of René Lalique’ are all part of the programme of lectures organised by The Arts Society Chiswick (TASCH) for 2023.

The topics are deliberately wide-ranging and diverse, to suit different tastes and the lecturers are chosen from a pool of speakers who have all had to audition with the national Arts Society to be considered, so they are of a reliably high standard.

Other topics for the coming year include: ‘The Wind in the Willows Revisited through its illustrators’, the work of architect Norman Fowler, ‘Britain’s Archistar’, the Carry On films and the Statues of Easter Island.

‘The Arts Society’s core belief is that the arts are essential to enriching people’s lives. For the past 50

years, it has been committed to opening the world of the arts for everyone, connecting people to the arts and to each other’.

The lectures are held at POSK, the Polish Centre in Hammersmith, which has a good restaurant and bar, but during the pandemic meetings had to be held online and with fewer costs to cover, the society racked up a small profit, which it is now spending on a range of worthy causes, particularly sponsoring young artists.

Feltham Young Offenders Institution is one beneficiary. The society has just given money to Koestler Arts, which encourages young people in the criminal justice system to change their lives by participating in the arts. They have sponsored a display of art at the Supreme Court by inmates in prisons and secure hospitals, including Feltham: 29 pieces in all, including photography, woodwork, drawing, spray painting, poetry and collage.

Art works by young offenders at Feltham

Supporting young artists in West London

The Arts Society Chiswick’s funding was matched by funds from The Arts Society Patricia May Memorial Fund and the work is on show at the Southbank Centre until 18 December. Five Pieces of work from Feltham Young Offenders were chosen and the artists given £25 each.

“Having people show an interest in their work and having it publicly recognised like this is a huge confidence booster” says Caroline Lees, the committee member who looks after Young Arts for the Chiswick branch.

The society has also given money to the Woodbridge Park education service, which caters for young children not able to be educated in a mainstream setting and has centres in various parts of Hounslow. In 2022 The TASCH bought them two Black & Decker portable workbenches and a set of tools for woodworking.

The society has supported Hounslow Music Service, which provides instrumental and vocal lessons to learners of all ages and abilities, working alongside schools across the borough. This year they sponsored a trip for the Junior Brass Band to perform at the National Youth Brass Band Championships in Derby. They have also given funds to Magic Lantern, an arts education charity that uses great works of art to help children observe and explore the world around them.

The Arts Society Chiswick has been going for 15 years now, holding lectures on the second Thursday every month except December and August. It also organises art trips for members, including a foreign trip each year, which in 2023 will be to Lisbon.

The January lecture will be ‘A Symphony in Blue – The Artist, the Couturier and “Atlas, the Most Fabulous Mountaine of all Africke”, discussing the Atlas Mountains and the paintings of Jacques Majorelle. The first visit of the year will be to Tate Modern on Thursday 19 January, for tea/coffee from 11am, followed at 11.30am by a one-hour introductory exhibition lecture with an expert Tate guide, 12.30 buffet lunch and timed tickets to the Cézanne exhibition.

HEAD

Gardener’s

Eddy, Head Gardener at Osterley Park & House, writes

“Much as we gardeners like to plan colour and maybe even special effects by planting our favourite trees or plants sometimes, often by lucky happenstance, mother nature takes over and we are enthralled by the result! In the accompanying photo you can see planting in one of our restored features at Osterley – Dickie’s Border – a recreation of a ‘theatrically’ ranked 18thC shrub border with shrubs clipped for effect and repeat planted along its length. Interestingly I named this border for the last of Lord Jersey’s gardeners – a man called Dickie Denton – whose nickname was Tick-tock as he lived in the part of the 16thC stable block where are clock is housed and it was his job to keep it wound up. The two shrubs that we see here are a lovely evergreen ‘Strawberry Tree’ – Arbutus unedo – with unusually bright fruits on the plant at the same time as its flowers and also Clematis cirrhosa balearica ‘Freckles’ – a beautiful variety of the fern-leaved clematis that blooms right through the winter months.

The clematis was originally planted ten feet back form the arbutus and trained up the old, brick walls, however over the last few years it has grown through the other plants – towards the light – and elegantly draped itself over the arbutus. Now as luck would have it these two plants both flower and have ornamental fruits at the same time in the winter thus producing the wonderful effects that we see here. Both of these plants are suitable for any gardens large or small or even in a tub on a balcony.

Of course I would love to take credit for these effects but it’s just luck sometimes that gives the best results.”

www.nationaltrust.org.uk/osterley-park-and-house

Andy

Enjoy a winter wander

at Osterley Park and House

This season enjoy the twinkling fairy lights in Osterley's courtyard, wrap up warm for a woodland wander, or follow a festive family trail through the tranquil garden. nationaltrust.org.uk/osterley-park-and-house

Photography © National Trust Images/Chris Lacey

THE CHISWICK Calendar

The Chiswick Calendar is a local website which tells you what’s going on in our area on a day to day basis. Beautiful photographs by local photographers - Page per day listings of what’s on, constantly updated - Interesting videos - Our own events. Subscribe to the weekly newsletter and get a free club card, giving you access to deals and discounts from quality local businesses.

POP ROCK Icons

Richmond publishers Aurora Metro Books / Supernova have brought out a new book of photographs of rock and pop from Swingin’ London in the ’60s and ’70s.

Many of the ‘icons’ such as the Rolling Stones and the Who came from west London and made their names playing clubs in Richmond, Teddington and Ealing, and Pop Rock Icons; London’s Swingin’ 60s and 70s has pictures of them rehearsing, relaxing, just being themselves as well as the set piece publicity images published to promote their tours and albums.

The book starts with the Stones and the Beatles and makes its way through the London of the Mods and the Anglification of R&B to the eras of progressive rock, heavy metal, pub rock and glam rock.

Rock & pop journalist David Sinclair, who wrote the foreword to the book, says: “Philippe Margotin has assembled a fantastic snapshot of that era.

“What people forget about pop music in the UK at the start of the 1960s was the extraordinary effort you had to make to hear it.

“You might stumble upon a Chuck Berry track on the BBC kids’ radio programme Saturday Club or catch a glimpse of The Searchers on the only TV music show Thank Your Lucky Stars. Otherwise, it was a case of tuning into Radio Luxembourg, where the songs were deliberately faded by the DJ before the end.

“If you managed to hear a song you liked, you had to dash out and buy the record to be sure of ever hearing it again.”

London’s Swingin’ 60s and 70s

60sbus.london

The arrival of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones on the scene triggered a “Big Bang” in this world of “grey cultural conformity” that echoes to this day.

Though the origins of R&B were American, it was British bands who were responsible for the revolution in music, fashion and the culture which went with rock and pop.

“Americans were almost embarrassed by the Blues” he says. “They weren’t celebrating it. Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, The Kinks put a British spin on it and the Americans were pretty impressed. They called it the ‘British invasion’.”

The first time the Beatles and the Rolling Stones met was 14 April 1963 at the Station Hotel in Richmond.

David frequented venues such as the Half Moon in Putney, the Crawdaddy Club, which opened in 1963 and moved to the Athletics ground in Richmond, and the hotel at Eel Pie Island which burned down in 1971, as both a punter and a musician.

“Nowadays, music is everywhere” he writes. “You can download virtually any song you want to hear at almost any time from just about anywhere on the planet. It is part of the cultural air that we all breathe.

“Yet with so much to choose from, the catalogues of the stars which started their journey from these

islands in the 1960s and 1970s remain the gold standard by which contemporary pop and rock music is still judged.”

As chief rock & pop correspondent of The Times and a contributor to Rolling Stone, Billboard, Q magazine and many others, David has seen and met many of the bands featured in the book.

“I spent a day with David Bowie” he tells me. “We went to Trident studios in Soho where he recorded Ziggy Stardust and the telephone box which he used for the back cover of the album. We had a great day out.”

ACDC were fun, he remembers. Malcolm and Angus Yaris were “hilarious”, while his fondest memories are of a couple of days spent with the Stones in 1995 or ’96 in Toronto.

“I did a terrible interview with Prince in New York. It was a contractual obligation for him to do it but he didn’t want to and he wouldn’t let me record it. He gave me monosyllabic answers or said either ‘that’s too personal’ or ‘I don’t want to talk about that’ to more or less everything I asked.

“He had a surprisingly deep voice and strong handshake. I spent three days trailing after him.”

Everyone has strong memories of the bands they followed in their youth, because I suppose we were young and they were a big part of those years. The book is aimed at “all those who missed out” on this era of British rock & pop, says David Sinclair, “and all those who were there and want to reminisce.”

of the book are available to buy online from: aurorametro.com

A “Big Bang in the world of grey cultural conformity”

Copies

Photographs of the Beatles and the Stones by … Tony Gale/ Pictorial/DALLE

The Beatles David Sinclair

Rolling Stones

Jazz AT GEORGE IV

Jazz at George IV Christmas and New-Year line up

Jazz and Blues nights at George IV, 185 Chiswick High Rd, London W4 2DR

Thursday 22nd December –Soul / Blues Xmas Party

This December the Chiswick Calendar and Live Music To Go are hosting the Soul / Blues Xmas Party. Featuring the award-winning drum legend Sam Kelly, (Robert Plant. Dr John, Gary Moore) the band will be celebrating the official release of their forthcoming new album, Every Song Is A Journey, the show being a special collaboration of four blues and soul masters joining up the musical dots between the genres with a distinctively festive

feel on Thursday 22nd December. Sam is joined by much-feted Fijian bluesman, Atama Blues Bentley on powerhouse guitar and soulful vocals, the noted bassist Richard Sadler and the Japanese blues harmonica ace Aki Awai, this unique showcase brings out the very best in the fields of blues and soul.

Thursday 19th January –The Jazz Mondays

The Chiswick Calendar and Live Music To Go will be reconvening in the New Year with two special shows as we welcome back the 13 piece ‘Little Big Band’ The Jazz Mondays on Thursday 19th January. The Chiswick based band are famous for their eight strong ‘wall of saxes’ with their eclectic

repertoire ranging across Jazz, Ska, Blues & Funk, from Dizzy Gillespie to Amy Winehouse.

Thursday 26th JanuaryBlues Engineers

Then on Thursday 26th January we have the brilliant Blues Engineers showcasing the very best in jazz tinged Urban & Country Blues featuring vocalist and slide guitar ace John O’Reilly and multi-instrumentalist Nick Payn with their highly atmospheric repertoire of funky jazz classics and more.

Venue: George IV, 185 Chiswick High Rd, Chiswick, London W4 2DR.

Larry Pryce on Live Blues & Jazz in the Boston Room at George IV

Tickets from Eventbrite: Google The Chiswick Calendar + Jazz at George IV for how to get tickets.

The Jazz MondaysPhotograph by Jon Perry Blues Engineers

Sam Kelly of Soul.Blues

BAKE A Festive Cake

Jo Pratt has just published the latest of her ‘flexible’ cookbook series: The Flexible Baker. The former TV chef-turned cookbook author, who lives in Acton, is keen that when a family or friends gets together it should not be difficult to provide tasty meals to suit all dietary requirements. This recipe for a festive almond, olive oil and orange cake is gluten free and she also offers a nut free version by swapping the almond for coconut.

If you’re not a fan of classic fruit cake-based Christmas cakes, or simply forget to make one in time for it to mature before the festive period, then this is a fantastic alternative. The cake can be served warm as a dessert, but as it’s based on an oil and almond batter, it will stay moist for a few days and is equally as rewarding with a cup of tea in the afternoon.

FLEXIBLE

Nut-free: you can swap the ground almonds for desiccated (shredded) coconut, although it’s best to blitz the coconut briefly in a food processor first to give it a finer consistency. Finish the cake with toasted coconut flakes on top. Flavour swap: to make this into a lemon and rosemary cake, swap the orange juice and zest in the cake for lemon zest and juice. Omit the dried spices. For the syrup, use 100ml/3½ fl oz/scant ½ cup lemon juice with 100g/3½ oz honey, and swap the cinnamon and cloves for 2 stalks of rosemary that have been bashed with a rolling pin to extract flavour.

From Jo Pratt’s new book The Flexible Baker

FESTIVE ALMOND, OLIVE OIL AND ORANGE CAKE

INGREDIENTS

For the cake

4 eggs

100g/3½ oz/½ cup caster sugar

125ml/4 fl oz/½ cup olive oil, plus extra for greasing

Finely grated zest of 1 orange, plus extra zest to garnish 4 tbsp orange juice

375g/13 oz/2¾ cups ground almonds 1 tsp baking powder (gluten-free) ½ tsp ground cinnamon ½ tsp ground ginger ½ tsp grated nutmeg

25g/1 oz flaked (slivered) almonds, toasted

For the syrup

100g/3½ oz honey

90ml/3 fl oz/¹⁄³ cup orange juice 1 cinnamon stick 12 whole cloves

METHOD

Heat the oven to 160°C/140°C fan/325°F/gas 3. Brush a 22cm/ 8½ inch loose-bottomed or springform cake tin with oil and line the base with baking parchment.

To make the cake, put the eggs and sugar in a large bowl and whisk for around 5 minutes or until very light and fluffy. Add the olive oil, orange zest and juice and briefly mix in before adding the ground almonds, baking powder and ground spices. Stir to combine and transfer to the prepared cake tin. Bake in the oven for 45 minutes until risen, golden and just firm to touch.

While the cake is cooking, make the syrup. Put the honey, orange juice, cinnamon stick and cloves in a small saucepan and place over a medium heat. Bring to the boil and cook for about 5 minutes or until it is thickened, reduced by half and syrupy.

Cool the cake in the tin for 10 minutes before removing and placing on a serving plate. Remove the whole spices from the syrup if preferred, and pour over the warm cake. Finish by scattering over the flaked almonds, grate over some orange zest and serve warm.