Grilled pineapple and butterscotch sauce

 More BBQ goodness.

1 fresh pineapple, peeled/cored/chunked, marinated overnight in the juice and zest of 2 limes, 1-2tbsp caster sugar (to taste), and a handful of chopped fresh mint.

Thread the chunks on skewers and grill, or just eat from the bowl. Delicious with butterscotch sauce - I used a recipe from simplyrecipes.com which translates as:

225 g / 8 oz light muscovado sugar (lump free) (original said dark brown sugar, but I think this made it too treacly, whereas light brown will not overwhelm)
112 g / 4 oz unsalted butter
175 ml / 6 fl.oz double cream
1 tbsp vanilla extract
sea salt to taste (original = kosher salt)

In a heavy bottomed pan on a medium heat, melt the butter. Add the sugar and stir well - it will look like wet sand. Let the sugar melt and the "sand" mixture become more liquid, stirring to make sure no sugar gets left behind. Once it's liquid (it will still be slightly granular), pour in the cream and whisk well. Keep whisking occasionally as the mixture bubbles away for about 10 minutes. Pour into a heatproof but cool container and leave to come to room temperature, then stir in the vanilla and salt.

Goes well on the pineapple, but also other fruit, ice cream, biscuits, fingers, etc...

And she'll have fun fun fun 'til somebody takes her sprinkles awayyyyy

I fancied trying funfetti cake. It's a USAnian invention, plain white cake with fun bursts of colour courtesy of sprinkles in the mix (you know, sprinkles, like these)

It was featured on The Kitchn food blog this week, with a from-scratch recipe rather than the usual boxed mix version. Having been asked to bring something sweet to a birthday barbecue, I thought this would be the biz, especially as cupcakes. And I knew I had some hundreds and thousands in the cupboard to be used up.

I thought I'd make the effort and follow the linked recipe for white cake. It was quite an effort... the flour + butter + sugar + milk mixing stage could only be described as claggy. I am sure I will be finding randomly flung blobs of cake mix for weeks to come, but most of it seemed to coagulate around the stems of my mixer's beaters. Weird. I think next time I may just make a normal sponge cake! However, kudos to the author for giving grams as well as cup measurements.

So I made the cake mix, gently gently folded in my hundreds and thousands, blobbed it into a dozen silicone cupcake moulds (and then another dozen paper moulds - there's loads), and baked. After baking, it was time to try one (in the name of science of course) so I eased it in half and... no sprinkles. No Sprinkles!

Having gone ahead and shared them anyway, I can say that in some of the larger cakes, there were vague smears of yellow and pink. But on the whole - No Sprinkles. I can only assume that my use of hundreds and thousands, which were tiny sugar balls with natural colouring, was insufficient. The colours just diluted and dissolved in the cake mix. Re-reading the recipe, I see it says "The best sprinkles for baking into a cake are the longer "jimmies" — multi-colored and waxy". Darnit. Bring on the artificial colours!

Just as well I iced them and sprinkled more H&T on the top, eh? No sprinkles. Pah.

Photo: Crazy Cool Colorful Candy Confetti Creative Commons by Pink Sherbet Photography, on Flickr