Obsession

'Ello all. One assumes that we are all fed and... fed. Quite possibly you are hitting the mad Christmas sales like the rest of the world. I was quite petrified on entry to M&S in Marble Arch that we pretty much left as soon as we got there. Scary. Anyway, here's my baking run down - there's not much in fairness since we were mainstreaming on the savoury stuff. A chicken, some pork, a forerib of beef for boxing day. I did however make some truffles which though very yummy, pretty basic - chocolate, hot double cream and a drop of peppermint essence if you fancied it. I also made mincepies with some cranberry mincemeat from Waitrose. The recipe was from Nigella's Christmas. Since SOMEONE complained that we never get to see the failures, I want to post this. Personally I don't think of it as a failure - I KNEW it was going to bubble over, but then I wanted the volume of mincemeat that we had. If you don't want it to do this, one option is to put a lid on it (lit

Afternoon tea on short notice. One of my new favourite websites http://www.afternoontea.co.uk/ featured this one, and we went as it was convenient. First off, it's a Hilton. Therefore do not expect much. We were one of two tables that afternoon, and it took 45 minutes to serve us. The tea comes from Twinings in bags, the sugar is granulated without their own serving spoons (I hate using wet spoons). But to the review: It was £14. What do you expect? You are served one of these little stacks each. The scones are warm and plain (joy for my sister, the non-raisin eater). However - you get ONE pot of jam each. Strawberry. I'm a purist. I expect a selection somewhere. There's clotted cream in the little black scoop, which did not match the tea set at all. Those little brown cones were either frozen mousse or very stable chocolate ice cream - nice, but when there is only one choice of cake on the stack - apple and walnut, you feel a little robbed of afternoon tea joy. The sandwi

It's raining, it's pouring, we had to do SOMETHING!! Adapted from Marcus Wareing's Nutmeg and Custard, I made these little babies. I don't think the honey flavour is to my taste, but they are a brilliant texture and look like the picture :D My adaptation stems from, you guessed it, a lack of almonds. I probably won't make these again as is, but it's worth having listed so I can adapt later. Dessicated coconut (100g?) 12 leaves of gelatine (yep seriously - 12!) 150g sugar 7 tbsp clear honey 100ml water 2 egg whites 1. Line a wet dish with clingfilm. I used a circular dish around 3o cm in diameter, however the book recommends 15cm square. A nice brownie pan would do nicely (which I need to add to my christmas list). The wetness lets the cling stick to the pan. If you have OCD like me you will try and get the wrinkles out of the cling, but it doesn't matter because you won't see anything. 2. Toast coconut. I put mine on a metal dish and placed under a grill

Every now and again, someone asks, "What is your signature dish?" I never really know how to answer but I think, after a few years of proper hobby baking, my top contenders are as follows: - Lemon cheesecake - Chilli Brownies - Cheesecake cupcakes - Vanilla Bundt Cake I'll add to these at some point (I hope!) but these are the ones which get eaten first time round with limited comments from the parentals. A lot of these, I admit, are very recent additions to the fold. But hunt on the site and the recipes should be up. x

There's something called the Iron Cupcake competition which has been around for around six months. I've followed it from the beginning on the Caped Crusader's site (see right) but I've never been because I was always out of town with work. This was the first time I made an entry and it was lemon and ginger. First off, I'd like to say it is not a good idea to bake something first time for a "competition" but since it's free entry for bakers I thought I may as well. The lemon and ginger recipe came from the book Decadence, with some adjustments because I didn't have any stem ginger, and so instead I did a coning job and filled it with a little bit of lemon curd mixed with a ginger syrup I made. The gingerbread cookies however was a pretty wonderful recipe, also from Decadence.

I'm not a major fan of brownies, when you get them from the shops or even Borough Market they tend to be a touch dry, or they fall apart. So with the exception of Nigella Lawson's philadelphia cheese brownies, I rarely make them. Today I made chilli brownies. The reason being is that there is a spice cupcake competition in town and I was wondering if chocolate chilli cupcakes would work. They probably would but whether that would be against the rules almost. Anyway, I'd already made cupcakes this morning - apple and spice cupcakes which on tasting, were definitely more muffin than cupcake. My fault. Any recipe using oil instead of butter comes out like that. I'll post an apple muffin pic up here, but not the recipe because it wasn't fabulous. You can find others just like it, but whereas I want the spice to meld into the cupcake, it was more like cake, with spice stuff. So back to the drawing board if I'm going to be entering that one (it's a fun competition

Third time's the charm. I gave in and bought cake-release from the dreaded Lakeland. I love it. But I hate it as well. Love hate Lakeland. So commercial. But so necessary. It never has quite as specialist a gear that I need, but it still has more than the regular high street and more over, I have to go to odd places to get it!! Still, this concoction of hydrogenated fat allowed me to turn out a perfect bundt cake without any digging at all! *pop* cake. The recipe itself also was a winner. Dorie Greenspan's recipe, I do not believe I've made her before but boy does it rock. The recipe repeated here so I don't lose the yummy recipe which I did not change for once (although using my usual subs for sugar when I ran out) is as follows: 2 cups flour 1 tsp baking powder 1/2 tsp salt 2 sticks (220g ish) unsalted butter, softened 1 3/4 cups sugar (used 1 golden caster, 3/4 granulated white) 2 large eggs 2 tsp vanilla extract (used one) 1 cup sour cream 3 Tbsp jam, optional 1. P

Going through a chinese baking phase so that my food gets eaten, but these de-lovelies I found were in want of a touch more sugar I think. Will adjust for next time. However, as a first attempt, the parentals were very pleased at the reduced sugar content. A bit of background before I get into this, Bor Lor Bau's are a staple of chinese bakeries. They are called "pineapple" (bor-lor) buns (bau) because they have the funky pattern that look like pineapple. Occasionally you will see recipes with a tiny touch of crushed pineapple in the mix, but I suspect that may have been the result of a rogue trade descriptions officer. This particular recipe was extracted from a newspaper recipe my new sort-of-cousins-in-law supplied. The triple rise was also a helpful hint from their dad. As for most chinese cakes, I have little clue why the ingredients are as they are. I mean, milk powder, custard powder and 1 piddly teaspoon of carnation milk?? What do these things DO?? By the way, th

Completely not posted for ages, but there was this little thing called my brother's wedding. Anyway, despite completing the Cookie Carnival, I forgot to send it in. They were lemon ricotta cookies as below. In addition, other baking things involved foccacia with red onion, mushroom and mozarella: some buttermilk cupcakes with vanilla buttercream.

So I've indulged in a little comfort baking lately. Which is to be understood given my current situation. I'm not saying it's the best idea in the world, being that it means I now seek comfort in baking rather than, I don't know, socialising, meeting people and friends. These days my social circle is limited to a few stress-heads that I know and love, and somehow I've left the rest of my world just to fall away because it's too hard to concentrate. Either way, enjoy some of my little delectations. The above is a Lemon cupcake with lemon butter icing. The recipe for the cake is as follows, but it gives you slightly too little for the cupcake size and alarmingly grease soaks into the cupcake papers like crazy. The buttercream icing I suggest you find your own as, whilst I had a recipe, I possibly ended up putting twice as much icing sugar in as required, and felt it could have used a lot more lemon juice to give that punch. The swirls I was quite happy with, a bit

Here we go. Early as usual, but these few weeks are manic and since I had to be home to sort out my expenses and the state of my room, why not bake at the same time? Here in lies Martha Stewart's rendition of Strawberries and Cream in cookie form. The recipe is remarkably easy, just make a crumble and add cream to it and then the fruit. In essence it's not bad, but makes it feel more fattening because you're tipping in a load of cream to boot. The recipe is here , but I made a few changes. One, I added a tablespoon of lemon juice because I didn't read it before I chucked it in (and I cba to drain it off either). Two, there's no sanding sugar because I don't own any. Three, I added a slug of vanilla to the mix because I could. All in all, a very nice cookie, especially fresh from the oven. But after that I think it lacks a certain punch, even with the lemon juice. Maybe I should have considered adding black pepper or balsamic? Those tend to add some tang to the m

So I forked out some hard-earned cash this Friday (well, less forked out, more electronic transferred and therefore it didn't feel like I paid anything at all... dangerous that!) to go to a buttercream class. The lady in question is of Faircakes. She's been in business for about a year and has quite a following on facebook and twitter (which I don't use). Anyhow, in an effort to get some me time, and just blowing stuff on something "for me" I went along. It was a small class (just two students including me) and it was pretty damn interesting. Firstly, she's from the same university as me, and evidently experienced the hideous office politics barricade and left the rat race for the baking tray. Interestingly enough she's not a lover of cake. It is to her, a business, which makes a lot of sense to an LSE girl like me as well. Whilst I love, love cake, I'd be reluctant to lose my tastebuds in an "Eat, Drink, Man, Woman" sense. If you didn't

I made these insanely early, but here is my schedule: 4th May the Cookie Carnival email came out from Kate, this weekend I made them, next weekend I'm in Scotland, that gives me two weekends left. Yeah, looking at that, now I have no idea why I thought I HAD to make them this weekend (10th) :S I'll figure out what I HAVE to do in May soon. Probably some hen-do or wedding for someone I've forgotten. Ouch. I've always struggled with macaroons. I've made them... twice. Once using the Roux brother's book, once from the wonderful Tartlette blog (see right). Both failed miserably. The first one was edible. It probably wasn't a good idea to try and use teaspoons which they SAID was okay, the second time I tried to risk it with greaseproof and naturally everything stuck everywhere. They also make scarily little so by the time you've peeled them off the tray, you've eaten most of them. This recipe made a shed-load. There's pictures of the macaroons on eve

What with my new cupcake books arriving from Amazon, one look at the Raspberry Cream Cheese buns on someone elses's site (made with blackcurrant there) and I had to make them. Knowing full well my family wouldn't touch them. Four of these babies were therefore made with big dollops of lemon curd instead, which made delightfully caramelly messes of the tin, but also on the buns, not that I get to touch those - I have eight buns to eat! The original recipe is from Buttercup Bakery book (New York) and one of these days I'll try the dried cherry one from Magnolias (since I own the book...) What you need to know about these is that the recipe is easy - as easy as muffins are, but they sink like heck given the amount of preserves you're putting in them. What they give back though, is something so moist and rich you just want to sink yourself into them. And since I've eaten two of them, I'm doing quite well! As you can see, massive craters. If you don't want that

I accept that no one should really put more than one, MAYBE two pictures up on any baked good. It's like looking at pictures of people's kids. Odds are, one is enough, unless of course your child is super-adorable and super fantabulous. Which of course they are! But hey I was playing with icing and I actually made the effort to crumble gingernut biscuits over the top as decoration (I know, I know, the effort...) so appreciate the fact that I am insane. Carrot cake cupcakes are a stalwart of cupcake books. They go with the peanutbutter and chocolate ones I have yet to make. But anyway, I love really good carrot cake and after the super finance woman who made amazing cupcakes blew me away with the her carrot cake one (recipe was not forthcoming - grrrrrr) I decided I needed to try my own. These ones were from Elinor Klivans Cupcakes! book. They were pretty decent. I love golden raisins/sultanas in carrot cake so it worked well. The frosting had butter and cream cheese in and I h

Oh happy day!! Oh happy Dayyyy... last weekend I made snickerdoodles. As you do. It came from the Ultimate cookie book and I downsized on the sugar for the parentals and they liked it. Snickerdoodles (such a cool name) to me should be softer and more cookie bendy like the chocolate chip things you get in shops. However, that might be because M&S once upon a time had bendy snickerdoodles in their shops. Those might have been more peanutty and chocolatey though. Not sure if it's my memory or whether they thought that was a cool name to call american cookies. Anyhow, as usual, I digress. Snickerdoodles are apparently originally German and the name got mutilated by the good ol' US of A. But it is such a cool name! These babies, probably because instead of making 36, I made 15 -20 golfball sized blobs on a few baking pans, turned out a bit humped and less cracked, which doesn't look like the wikipedia picture but I'm not that bummed. As a result they kept really well

My first Cookie Carnival project. Many thanks to the organiser and this month's host for letting me join in. Lemon bars from The Sweet Melissa Baking Book by Melissa Murphy. I have no idea who Melissa is but I'm not a fan of her lemon bars. Hmm, I sense I'm already at odds with the cheery Cookie club mentality, but to thy own self be true. (Lord, I'm quoting Clueless again...) The recipe looks close to Lemon Meringue bars, but with less yolk and a touch of flour. And missing all important meringue. Now here’s the thing. This is the UK . We don’t HAVE Lemon Bars. I’ve just done a quick search on Google Images and it appears they have a very standard appearance. Adding meringue would definitely be cheating, as would my first thoughts of drizzling these babies with dark chocolate. These babies are rectangular, they are dusted in icing sugar and they better be made with lemon. I made a few changes but not enough as far as I'm concerned. More yolks would have made the

Almost everything looks better with icing sugar. With the possible exception of my stove. What I did notice was that it does, like makeup, accentuate the pores. Hmm. I think I'm transgressing because I spent Saturday looking for new foundation. Maybe I should consider dipping my face in icing sugar. The colour is probably in line with my goth-like skin anyway. The recipe came from Faircakes and I won't repeat it here. It was, a relatively decent recipe. Pretty much victoria sponge, give or take a few spoons of cornflour. It was... just vanilla cupcake. As it was designed for people to plaster with icing, it made only ten normal muffin tin sized cupcakes. For me, the minimum spoonage into one of those cups is one "plop" from a normal tablespoon (i.e. the non-officiated tablespoon people actually own.) This is why I only made ten. Once they were out of the oven, the first few were eaten warm by Daddy dearest, who asked me regarding timing so he could return from his w

Yes I cranked out the icing sugar finally. The blackberries are covering some HUGE cheesecake cracks, but the actual cake itself is as soft and melting as I always want, unlike the cakey, floury number I feared. Sister dearest informs me that whilst it was lovely, it was slightly eggy, which is probably the result of the two extra egg whites. Needless to say, I ended up with a lot of blackberries to eat after my family scraped them off.

Easter Monday!! Woohoo!! Okay so here is what I made. 2 cheesecakes. Cinammon and apple french toast. All before midday! It actually involved a sprint to Waitrose when I realised I forgot to add sour cream to my cheesecake ingredient list. I used the same recipe as last time doubled, but added 300g less cream cheese as we didn't have any, one egg rather than two egg yolks. Added a tablespoon of lemon juice because we had some. Added bigger heaps of tablespoons of flour (to firm it up) because we have to go Toby Carvery soon. That's about it. I'm kind of looking at it and thinking, maybe that's a BIT too much flour. Because it's rising slightly. French toast - I should have put the more aesthetically pleasing middle slice on top, but you know what? I wanted to eat it, and it was YUM. One shot only. Ingredients: 100ml milk 2 eggs 1 tsp and sprinkling of cinnamon Brioche Bramley Apple 60g brown sugar 1. Mix milk, eggs and 1 tsp cinnamon together with 30g of the sugar.

So they had a very pretty plate of cookies in the book. More to the freaking point. They were ROUND. I was suspicious. Very suspicious. But I went with it. They did have a few quirks to the usual chocolate chip cookie, and you know what? I think this may replace my existing recipe as "The One". The texture is a bit nicer, the only drawback being that they are that bit smaller and they don't spread so you do have to do what I did if you want them to be pretty. Instructions to follow on that. But check this out, they had dried cherries in this, AND MY SISTER HAD THEM AND SURVIVED!! She of the dried fruit hate at them. *WOOHOO!!* Chocolate and Cherry Cookies Ingredients 75g butter 75g caster sugar 75g light brown sugar (WOW I FORGOT TO ADD THIS!!! Umm... the recipe doesn't need it.) 1 egg 1 tsp vanilla 175g plain flour 1/2 tsp baking powder 50g dried cherries chopped in half 100g chocolate chips Method: 1. Grease the greaseproof. 2. Butter, sugar, add egg, add vanilla, a

No I'm not an academic. But here I was tapping my laptop wondering why suddenly all my web disappeared when my brother hasn't unplugged me. Turned out my dad unplugged the router for the vacuum cleaner. So here is my new purchase. The Usbourne Children's Book of Baking. Bear with me, I'll get it on my side list, especially as I cooked not one but two recipes from this book today. Both were pretty tasty, with minimal messing with. Pear and frangipane tart I used apple - sorry I had four giant bramleys left. I will of course next time do the proper pear tart because aesthetically speaking it's more attractive. Also, you can actually slice it properly like they instruct you to, without slicing a little bit out of your finger! (I'd like to say at no point did my blood enter my cooking, and also it was just a fleshwound babe ;) Papercut size and the result of trying to core an apple without breaking it into quarters first. This was parentally approved (the cake not t

I've taken the first steps to being affiliated. Ever since I've become hooked on reading food blogs I've been interested in the mass bake-athons that are baking rings. People bake, usually monthly but sometimes more regularly than that! the same dish. Now given that I'm not at home half the time with work, it makes it a little hard, but check it out. I found a group to join. Okay, sounding a little weird and psycho now. Kinda like "BE MY FRIEND.... PLEASEEEEEEEEEEE" And that's just not me. But hey ho, this might let me do my baking thing, indulge some of the showy off tendencies other than on facebook, and generally enjoy the company of other online bloggers in a non-perverted way. Oh and FYI I cancelled the gym membership. 3 months off due to illness and now 5 weeks solid client bookings, it's just money down the drain. Now it's money into a nice new camera or a Wii. I haven't decided.

Two sets of cookies I made today. Two somewhat different results. The first I made were the Pineapple and Macadamia nut thins from The Ultimate Cookie book. Except I have no pineapple, I used chopped nuts and er... I think there was something missing from their recipe. It was very much cream sugar and butter together, add flour... and then guess what? There was no binder. No egg, no water. Nothing. So I added an egg and made dough rather than crumble. It wasn't a bad cookie but not worth putting the recipe down. I used chopped crystallised ginger if you are interested, it tastes nice, but it still hasn't reached the pinnacle of cookie thinness and lusciousness. The dove cut outs you can see above are from Amazon marketplace. I put them on my shopping list awhile ago, forgetting to read how tiny they are. I think they are definitely better for fondant, although come winter I'm making the partridge in a pear tree linzer cookie I see so much of. Meanwhile, I also realised I de

I made a lot of damp food last week. Above is the lemon curd, which I am very proud of because a) it used up the lemons b) it came out well (and like the shop bought stuff) c) it was ridiculously easy Lemon Curd: 3 eggs 1/3 cup of lemon juice (2-3 lemons) 3/4 cup sugar 50 g unsalted butter 1. Stir lemon juice, eggs and sugar over a bain marie. 2. After around ten minutes it gets thick. 3. Pour through a sieve and then whisk in butter. 4. Cover and cool. The cake, the cake... I made a cake because I felt like it (mother's day at the time). The recipe for the cake was from Good Food and it was really tough! Looking at the photo they have, I think it's supposed to be. Don't know why they've rated it so highly. I stuffed it with pear and whipped cream. I covered it in a mixture of whipped cream and ready made custard just for a bit of a change. Yes I know it's sloppy, but since I realised the cake itself wasn't going to amaze me, I got lazy with the decoration.

Second baking session of the day - using up the cranberries. As a result, I have an entire tray of brownies to eat on my own because no one eats cranberries! Ai. First of all, the recipe calls for dried cranberries. Let me make that clear. I knew therefore at the outset there was a bat's chance in hell that the brownies I made would actually set, being that I used frozen berries defrosted. Other than that, recipe wise it was pretty decent. Used cocoa rather than dark chocolate which made it a darn sight cheaper than usual. Definitely fudgy since it won't set. I would like to try it with dried berries one day, to see if it will set, but since I whacked it in for another half an hour with the frozen berries, I have my doubts. Otherwise, it's a nice, moist, tangy chocolate pudding. Served warm with vanilla I think it'd go down a treat. Cranberry Brownies 1 cup sugar 1/2 cup oil 2 eggs 2 tsp vanilla 1/2 cup flour (probably add some more if you wanted it to set) 1/2 cup coco

It's time. To use up that half a pack of coconut I have left over. Not feeling able to commit myself to the full coconut cake as I have no one to offload it onto. Check this out, previous cake I have just demolished. 90% on own. Thankfully it's borderline healthy (I keep telling myself). This is because, yes, thy family does not do fruit in baking. And I still have a pile of cranberries to eat. *sigh* I'd make the coconut cranberry chews because the reviews are raving about them online, however, I can also read. And when it says 6 DOZEN, one should worry. 6 x 12 = 72. 72 cookies! That my family won't eat! Screw that. Save that one to try at Christmas when the offload potential is greater. Curiously the Metric recipe they offered uses 10 g more brown than white, but cup wise it's the same. Either way, will cheat and use margerine, even though I should really use butter in such a simple recipe because the ingredients really pop when you have less of them. Post making

After a bit of a horrible day off - me with the grumps, an aunt downstairs with a very loud voice, I finally got round to baking. Bring it on! I used up the apples, overdosing the cake with them since I'm sure four granny smiths does not equal 2 cups (see the massive chunks in the picture). But it all turned out well. I had the apple corer/slicer thing which I bought for a quid, and aside from drenching my top in apple juice, it did the job fine. I also managed to use a cup of cranberries, leaving another cup to use up tomorrow I guess, but since it's been sitting in my freezer since Christmas it's time. My verdict on this cake? I love it. The apples are slightly too bland, probably because they've sat around for awhile and because the chunks are so big, but the cranberries work a treat alongside. Plus it would seem this cake is ridiculously healthy. No butter, just 2 tbsp of oil and one egg. It lacks some punch though, so I think next time I'll add some more spi