Last year there was a day at work where we sat around the common room table and discussed our favourite biscuits, as thrilling as that topic is. My choice was Griffin's Hundreds and Thousands biscuits, which are evocative of fairy bread, another childhood favourite. Maybe it is the childhood association which is making Whittaker's new limited edition Hundreds and Thousands chocolate flavour so popular. I have wanted to try it all week but it has been sold out everywhere. This afternoon I happened to come across a supermarket worker unpacking boxes of the bars, but not to go on the shelf - they were selling too quickly.

The chocolate is not as pink as it looks on the packet. It's white chocolate with biscuit pieces and hundreds and thousands scattered through. It does manage to taste just like the biscuits, but in a concentrated, sweeter form. The best thing about it is probably the texture, melting chocolate with crunchy bits of biscuit and little rocks of coloured sugar.

Whittaker's definitely have the most creative flavour range out of the main supermarket brands. Their kiwifruit chocolate and white chocolate raspberry are other unique offerings - Cadbury's fruit and nut doesn't stand up to these fruit flavours in my view. I hope Cadbury will be inspired to come out with some more creative flavours. Their berry panacotta from their desserts range a couple of years back could do with a return.

My grandmother used to eat half a banana every day with breakfast. It fascinated me as a child, and rather than make bananas seem common place, it elevated them to something mysterious. Why only half? She would keep the other half to eat the next day. What possesses a person to eat half a banana? I now try to eat one banana a day, my own preference for the fruit borne out of the convenience of having a self packaged snack to keep at my desk at work. My grandmother wouldn't have been able to get away with her half a banana a day if she had lived not in a quiet unit across the road from a beach but in my glass box of an apartment. Bananas ripen so quickly during the warmer months that I must buy the greenest at the supermarket, and usually only two at a time. Whilst I don't like eating ripe bananas, they are of course best for baking so if I fail in my banana snacking all is not wasted.

Apart from her penchant for bananas, another strong memory I have of my grandmother is her teaching me how to cream butter and sugar while I stood on her brown stool in the kitchen. She said it was done when it didn't feel gritty. We were making shortbread, something I have never liked. But that is an aside to the whole point of this post - baking with bananas.

Banana Chocolate Chip Muffins

adapted from Nigella Lawson's recipe for Chocolate Banana Muffins in Kitchen.

You will need:

• 2 very ripe bananas
• 1/2 cup canola oil
• 2 eggs
• 100g dark cane sugar
• 225g plain flour
• 4 tablespoons cocoa powder
• 1 tsp baking soda
• 100g chocolate chips + extra for decorating

Directions:

1. Preheat the oven to 180 degrees celsius.
2. In a large bowl, mash the bananas with a fork.
3. Add the oil, eggs and sugar and mix with the fork.
4. In another bowl, sift the flour, cocoa powder and baking soda together.
5. Mix this flour mixture into the bowl with banana mixture. When everything is only just incorporated, add the chocolate chips and mix quickly.
6. Line a 12 muffin tin with paper cases and spoon mixture into each case. Dot the top of each muffin with extra chocolate chips.
7. Bake for 15 minutes or until a cake tester comes out clean.

I have made this recipe before, exactly as it is in Kitchen, but here I have added more cocoa powder, the chocolate chips, and removed a banana. There's nothing wrong with a bit more chocolate. The muffins are moist and keep for days if kept in an airtight container.

I'm still on holiday from work (starting back next Monday) but my boyfriend is already back. I wanted to take some time this week to stock the freezer with some meals for when we are both back to the the daily routine of adulthood. To that end I intended to make a pie today and portion it before freezing to make 3 nights of meals. I made the pie filling (recipe to come later) but that is as far as I got because due to my other exertions today, I ran out of butter so couldn't make the dough. It was also so hot today, and so hot in the kitchen, that I couldn't face more time in front of the oven. That will be a task for tomorrow.

The reason I ran out of butter? Nigella Lawson's Devil's Food Cake from Kitchen. I think Kitchen is my favourite book of hers. It was sort of gifted to me by a friend at the end of second year law as a thank you (and I say sort of, because she actually gave me How to be a Domestic Goddess, which I already had but she suspected I might and gave me an exchange card with which I gratefully got Kitchen) and is probably the cookbook I use the most.

Devil's Food Cake

adapted from Nigella Lawson's recipe in Kitchen

For the cake you will need:

• 50g cocoa powder
• 100g dark cane sugar (Nigella says dark muscovado sugar - this was the closest I could get)
• 1 cup boiling water
• 125g soft butter
• 225g high grade flour
• 1/2 tsp baking soda
• 1/2 tsp baking powder
• 2 tsp vanilla essence
• 2 size 8 eggs

For the icing you will need:

• 1/2 cup water
• 30g dark cane sugar
• 125g butter
• 300g dark chocolate buttons
• 100g icing sugar (optional)

Directions:

1. Preheat the oven to 180 degrees celsius.
2. Mix the cocoa powder and 100g dark cane sugar in a bowl. Pour in boiling water, mix and set aside.
3. Cream the butter and sugar together in a large bowl (everything will eventually end up in this bowl).
4. In another bowl, sift together the flour, baking soda and baking powder.
5. Add the vanilla essence to the creamed butter and sugar and mix lightly.
6. Crack one egg into the bowl with the butter and mix, before adding some flour and mixing then cracking the second egg into the bowl.
7. Mix in the remaining flour.
8. Fold the cocoa/sugar/water mixture into the butter and flour.
9. Distribute the mixture evenly between two sandwich cake tins. The type I have can't be lined with baking paper so I greased them with cooking oil first, but if you are using ordinary tins then do line with baking paper.
10. Nigella's recipe says to bake for 30 minutes or until a cake tester comes out clear. I checked at 20 minutes and the cakes were already getting toward well done so any longer would have been a disaster for me.
11. While the cakes are baking, put the water, cane sugar and butter in a small pot on low heat, stirring occasionally.
12. When butter is melted, take the pot off the heat, add the chocolate buttons and stir until all the chocolate is melted and the icing is smooth.
13. When the cakes have cooled enough for icing, mix the icing sugar into the cooled icing. Spread icing over the top of one cake (not quite to the edge as the compression from the top cake will spread the icing out), place the other cake on top and spread icing over the top of that cake too.

I added in the icing sugar because, although Nigella said the icing was meant to be runny and never quite set, it was really too thin for my liking and I couldn't see how I could use it to ice the cakes (particularly as a filling) without it all flowing away. I also wanted it to set because my boyfriend wouldn't be able to take any to work with him if the icing was sticking to everything. This might be because I used less butter than she suggested due to running out. However, I really liked the result after adding the icing sugar. The icing was still runny so that it flowed down the sides of the cake giving me a nice effect, but once I refrigerated it, it set and became fudgey.

The cake itself was rich but not overpoweringly so. It didn't rise as much as I expected it to, making it quite dense.