I haven't been baking cakes for that long, but my relative lack of experience doesn't stop me going 'freestyle' with recipes.

I fancied making a cake or some biscuits (as I do about once a week). One past-its-best russet apple in the fruit bowl, and 100g plain chocolate in the cupboard weren't a promising start. Not enough apple for Dorset apple cake, and not enough chocolate for indulgent choc chip cookies... Then inspiration struck! Instead of apples, I'd use cherries picked last year, in the freezer. Then further inspiration: I could use the perfectly preserved cherries from the bottle of cherry gin I made with last year's cherries, still in the cupboard (gin of course, long since drunk. And it was delicious).

I shook the cherries out of the bottle and prised out the stones. To those, I added frozen cherries until the pile looked like the equivalent of two cooking apples.

A further amendment was to substitute about 50g of cocoa for 50g of flour. I chopped up my 100g of chocolate and stirred it into the cake mix. Once in the tin, I scattered the cherries on top.

The recipe I used was from Rachel Allen's book 'Bake'. You can find the recipe online here. Baking time was slightly longer because, I reckon, the cherries produced more liquid during cooking than apples would.

And the result? Gorgeous! Cherries and chocolate are two of my favourite things, and this combined them very well: moist sponge with juicy cherries - and you could still taste the gin! - with chunky choc chips.

Have you had any successes or failures with reworking recipes>