As I was Reading Juliet Greenwood's blog, she said that  while researching for her new book, "Those That Are Left" discovered that rose hip syrup was used quite extensively in the two World wars as a very palatal remedy for various ailments and she made some to try.  She published the recipe t and there was a lot of interest in it and it made me wonder if anyone would be interested in the wartime carrot cake that I made for the launch of "Keep The Home Fires Burning". I enjoyed making it and it was far nicer than I imagined and it fact so popular amongst my Novelista friends that I was asked for the recipe by some of them, so I wondered if any of you would be interested as well. So here goes,

Wartime carrot cake. Serves 8
225g self raising flour
115g margarine
115g sugar
50g dried fruit
85g grated raw carrot
1 1/2 tablespoons malt vinegar
6 1/2 tablespoons milk

Rub the flour and margarine together till they resemble breadcrumbs. Mix in the
sugar, dried fruit and carrot. Mix the vinegar and milk together and add to the mix. Turn in to a greased and floured 8cm tin. Bake in a 180C/350F/Gas 4 oven for 1 hour 10 minutes. The mix, maybe for a special occasion, can be divided in two and a layer of marzipan laid over half of the tin, then the rest of the mix and another layer of marzipan laid on top of that.  Wartime marzipan was probably home made, but I bought mine ready made at Asda,

Compare this with the more modern carrot cake below which has far more margarine, sugar which were rationed in the war.  All dried fruit too were in short supply as they had to be brought in by our merchant ships and while people should have had one egg a week one egg every fortnight or three weeks was more the rule. Wartime housewives were very grateful for the Americans introducing dried eggs in 1942, though that too was rationed and nuts didn't feature in the wartime version at all.

225g brown sugar
4 eggs
125g chopped walnuts and 50g ground almonds
350g raw grated carrot
175g self raising flour
5ml (1 level tsp) baking powder

Cream the margarine and sugar together until light and fluffy. Slowly add the eggs beating well with each addition. Add the carrots, raisins and walnuts. Sift the flour and baking powder and add the ground almonds. Add to the cake mixture. Turn in to a greased and lined 20cm cake tin. Bake in a 180C/350F/Gas 4 oven
for about 1 1/4 hours. It is done when a skewer comes out clean when inserted into the cake,  This cake would usually be served with soft icing dribbled  or spread over the top,

If anyone trues these out could you please tell me what you think - Thanks

If You Were The Only Girl.

Hi again
This is the  book that came out on 17th Jan, but unfortunately I had computer problems and I was unable to access this site.  The title was one thought up by my editor, Kate and initially I didn't like it at all, but my writer friends did and then I began to see it in a different light altogether. It is in fact a very good title for if Lucy and Clive had been the only girl and boy in the world they wouldn't have been ripped apart by duty and class.  But then of course I wouldn't have a story at all.

To help promote this book I was due to give four talks at libraries in Birmingham towards the end of January, but the weather had different ideas and the quite extensive snow they had there made this impossible, but it was deferred rather than cancelled and will now take place on Thursday 14th Feb- just how romantic is that? when I will be at a library in Ward End at 10.30 am and Hall Green at 2.00 pm and then on Friday 15th I am at Yardley Wood at 10.30 in the morning and Frankley Library at 2.00 pm.

In the meantime I have had a short story printed in My Weekly out last week called "We'll Meet Again" and an article in People's Friend and they are printing the story I wrote for them this week called, "She Couldn't Help It."  It was a new venture for me writing short stories and I found it very interesting but a little limiting and though i wouldn't mind writing one or two more. I think I'll stick to writing novels.

Why Do I Write

I write because I must I suppose. I was a voracious reader from a young child and my head was full of other people that filled the stories that I made up in my head and wrote down as soon as I could. But for many years life got in the way of my pursuing this. I had a full time and very demanding job teaching, four children to bring up and a home to run and I told myself, like many others, that would write when I had more time to myself.
Then in 1990 an operation to my spine went wrong and suddenly my teaching life came to an end and I was in a wheelchair and set to remain there for life, according to the doctors. We moved from Sutton Coldfield to North Wales in 1993 where we could afford to buy a larger house that could be converted to accommodate not only my husband and myself in a wheelchair but also my two young daughters who moved with us. The conversion were completed by the following year.
Now I had all the time in the world, more time really that I wanted and I began to write in earnest. I was still coming to an acceptance of my disability then and the restriction this would impose on me as a person, as a teacher and a mother and and writing I believed saved my sanity, or if that is a little too dramatic at the very least stopped me feeling sorry for myself. I tried first books for the poor inner city children I had taught before my accident, then short stories for adults.
I heard about the Romantic Novel list's Society when I won a year's subscription as second prize in a writing competition for Valentine's Day in 1995 and I found that this organisation does a unique thing in that it runs The New Writer's Scheme where for a small fee unpublished writers can post off their manuscripts for critical analysis once a year. I duly wrote and send off my first manuscript, which they said was good, but not good enough but most important of all said why it wasn't and so armed with that critque I wrote and submitted another. This one they said was too long and if I lost 40,000 words I should then send it to Headline. I did just as they said and Headline took the book in 1997 and offered me a two book contract and I found out that the books I was writing were called Sagas.
I ended up writing four books with Headline before moving to Harper Collins in 2001 and my tenth book with them will be published in Jan 2010. The last four books, "A Sister's Promise", "A Daughter's Secret", "A Mother's Spirit", the latest book and was out in March of this year and the one yet to be published, "The Child Left Behind" are all part of a series. They all stand alone in that each one is a complete story but they tell the individual stories of members of a family called Sullivan who come from Donegal in Ireland and end up in Birmingham and of course because they are a family their lives do intermingle at times. This theme of linking Ireland and Birmingham is a common one in my books and it is because though I was born and reared in Birmingham ,my parents were both from the North of Ireland, Donegal and Fermanagh and I was brought up steeped in that rich Irish Roman Catholic culture and consider myself an Irish Brummie.
As I began to write these stories of The Sullivan's, a miracle occurred in my own life which I suppose could be construed as a story all on its own. In late July 2006 I regained feeling and moment in my legs totally confounding the doctors. I didn't leap out of my wheelchair with a cry of Eureka and dance a jig you understand. I had been 16 years in a wheelchair and my body complained that it had to hold me up at all, let alone that I was attempting to walk about. It took about nine hard and often painful months that journey into world of the able bodied an even then I wasn't walking really well. But I kept at it, walking my dog every day and continuing to exercise in other ways and my fitness levels have returned now I can honestly say that life really doesn't get any better than this.