Cherry cake and ginger beer (or should that be rhubarb and ginger cake with peppermint tea?)

Cherry cake and ginger beer is the fantastic title of a book that I read a while ago, and managed to pick up a cheap copy of this week. This is absolutely perfect nostalgia reading (as provoked an enthusiastic response over on Paperback Reader's blog last weekend) as it is combination recipe book/digest of what they ate in classic children's books.
I shall definitely be making something from here soon, but I think it is one of those recipe books that is just as good to read as a book in itself as to cook from (in fact it may be better, as the illustrations are not of the recipes themselves, but relate to the books that the recipes come from).

Anyway, I've promised you the recipe link and picture of the rhubarb and soured cream ginger cake I made this weekend. I'm not sure if I'd make it again, I think the rhubarb needs to be cooked first to make it more moist. The ginger syrup worked well, and I enjoyed boiling it up, and I'd not made a cake with sour cream before, and it gave it a lovely light texture.




I've done some other baking too...
I made some oat and raisin mini cookies for my boyfriend's lunch this week...
...as well as some fairy cakes with sprinkles...
...and a Delia lemon madeira cake (although I didn't make mine wholemeal)...
...to go with some raspberry frozen yoghurt in my ice cream machine...
...and a quiche for tea tonight. I've not made quiche before so that was quite exciting, and enabled me to use my new quiche dish as well as one of my mini quichlet dishes. I didn't make my own pastry though, but was happy to see Anthony Worrall Thompson in Vegetarian Monthly this month saying that it wasn't worth the hassle since chilled pastry is of such good quality. These were a bit disappointing as the pastry shrank (when I blind baked them) which minimised the amount of filling I could put in, so they were quite pastry heavy...any ideas on how to avoid this??