Obsession

This recipe is so easy. It is unbelievably easy. And it tastes AWESOME. Severe overuse of that word but I swear it's true. Do you know those almond macaroons you get at the supermarket or at the chainstore bakeries? Or at the occasional artisan market stall. *snorts* I love these. My sister loves them more. We're not talking french macarons and if you're not a fan of those, these are definitely not the same as the guy at work hates those and loves these. These are, in the shop bought form, large round cookies stuck to rice paper, delightfully chewy, with a fat almond stuck in the top. If you made these a bit bigger, you'd get that. Anyway, my recipe came from Alldessertrecipes.com  based on a google and ignoring any that forgot to tell me how many eggs I needed. Technically these make 12 if you make a decent size. I made 18 and they were reasonable hershey kiss cookies sized. They don't spread too much either, easily just larger by 1cm in diameter max after. Ing

It's not the most elegant of cakes. It's covered with crumbs which defaults to messy. Very messy. Messy in a sweep all the counters and a few floors cake. It is however, really rather yummy in a Sara-Lee / Trifle kind of way. I did this for my sister's birthday when she requested a chocolate and cream cake. I didn't quite do double cream but it did meet the not too sweet criteria. I would say this though. Lower the sugar in the cake. The frosting is actually really nice. Not too sweet, pleasantly foamy and easy to cover the cake. The cake itself just has a slight aftertaste which may have came from my choice of chocolates and cocoa. Words of warning to follow: Watch out when you transport it. The top two levels slid an inch across and left the rest of the cake... it did gently smush back in place, but just in case it's for company. Warning 2. The book may have it showing beautiful, full, crisp white layers in between the chocolate. Mine... less so. And based on

My nephew turns ONE this week and so we made a cake to celebrate. This little number was my usual vanilla buttermilk sponge, which encountered a lot more problems than usual. Check this. Firstly I forgot to put the sugar in which I didn't notice until I poured the batter into the tins - when I thought, hang on, usually there's more of it. Which after tipping back into the mixing bowl to remix, might have resulted in the cake becoming a little more flat than usual. Brilliantly though, my solution was effective - slice the layers really thin, sandwich with whipped cream and peaches and you don't notice the texture issues. Really. The peaches were so beautiful. I have to make a chinese style fruit cake with them before the season is over. White peaches. Beautiful and pale with a light flush. It was such a shame to hide them inside a cake. This is the sheep in production. It was my first time working with fondant for modelling. We've played around with making roses and

I'm gonna say it. I like these better than my chilli brownies. Check out that picture. I took them to work the next day. The chocolate lumps were still molten. No idea how the science works but it tasted yummmmmy. They didn't have the papery crust as promised, but possibly it's my oven. As it was, it was blatantly uncooked  when the timer pinged so I left it in for ten minutes longer, then turned the oven off and left it in for a further ten minutes. Bizarre, but just the mood I was in. Anyway, the recipe was from Dorie Greenspan, but I omitted the coffee, the nuts and the cinnamon and because my tin was about 8 inch square, my brownies were about an inch square (I like small brownies so they don't bend and break). Recipe found already typed by this lady .

Perhaps it's wrong to call this a gateau. It's only got two layers for a start. Anyway, it's my attempt at the chinese-ified gateau's that you get in Chinatown, without the faux cream because I still don't want to try the lard concoction. This is the sky-high vanilla buttermilk cake (rather than chiffon) and covered with whipped cream and fruit. The intention was to wrap the cake in mango like they do in the shops, but I realised that a) my mangos were overripe and slightly squishy, b) I'm a bad slicer, c) the mango is not very "tall" compared to my cake (even though there are just two rather than the three that the sky-high recipe makes - that other layer was eaten hot.) Anyway, just a picture then.Nom.

This lady made a cake at work and it tasted amazing. I asked for the recipe and I was surprised to hear it was Nigella's Victoria Sponge from How to be a Domestic Goddess. I very rarely make anything from Nigella's cake book any more and never this sponge. Probably because it was a Victoria Sponge as well, for which I've used the Good Housekeeping book that my mum has had since the 80s. I think I messed up the temperature somewhat as it didn't taste as good though :( Just slightly tighter somehow. As it was Father's Day today I made it for him. Just cream, minimal fruit decorations etc. Parental approval all round.  I've been messing with chocolate lately and that's why it's got some leftover chocolate squiggle squares on top. The other little chocolate number I made was the below for my sister's colleague's birthday. They had a £5 kitty for a cake so I figured I'd experiment so she might get something nicer than a standard M&S tray b

I went to Cork last week for work and found a rather lovely shop called Brennan' s which I LOVED. The entire first floor is cake *stuff* and it's hung with all the icing cutters you could want on the wall. I was in there oohing twice over the same Saturday. The lady let me :) I decided to purchase a Gerbera cutter set, the biggest Wilton petal nozzle I could find, briar rose cutters, red fondant, and various other little flower cutters as well as the red fondant. So since I was home with no plans this weekend, this is what I got up to . The icing is strawberry flavoured icing from Silverspoon which I bought on a whim. It's interesting stuff. 125g which you add a spoon of water to and then mix with butter. Pretty effective as it doesn't cause huge icing sugar clouds to form. I might see if I can do that for my normal buttercream. Note that it does say it covers 12 fairy cakes, not cupcakes, and certainly with my decorations it doesn't really stretch. The colour

It's been a while since I last blogged, but in fairness I've not made anything blogworthy. Nothing uber pretty, no recipes I thought were inspiring, but here come the pictures and the round-up of my recent bakes. Coconut and lime cake - tangy. The sponge was quite unique in that it used 1/2 a grated block of coconut and it became very light and a different type of sponge to normal. Not chiffon, not victoria, not muffin, but different. The topping was a bit tangier than I wanted, but next time I'll get it to marshmallow properly. As a nice afternoon tea kind of thing, I'd make it again. Low fat strawberry gateau - call it shortcake. This was an interesting proposition, and wasn't that bad. You had to accept that the "sponge" was more biscuit, but then there wasn't a raising agent and when you poured it onto the swiss roll tin it spread so thin the creases in the baking parchment showed and the cake curled when the paper curled from the heat. Wh

I made this cake after watching Kitchen Secrets and thought WOW that cake is YELLOW!!! Sadly it seems, this was not something to be repeated with mine. Note to self - retune the tv. Anyway, the recipe is here , but oddly the voiceover lady gets it wrong (based on the producer comments) so when the recipe says add zest only to the cake, and she says add the juice, she is wrong. Ho hum. Having made the cake, I'd say ADD THE SODDING JUICE. Without it, it tastes distinctly... eggy. And not of lemon. So after the first mini cake (I split the cake into two batches - one for work and one for a taster for my hard-done-by dad who had to watch me make cheesecake yesterday and waltz off with it to a friends.) I made some adjustments. 1. Stab and drizzle. If you've made lemon cake before, the usual rule is when it's warm from the oven, stab it with a skewer and pour over lemon juice mixed with icing sugar. 2. His recipe calls for an apricot jam layer of glaze. I used lemon curd.

Today I decided to try some new recipes from my books. Corn custards from Marcus Wareing's book Nutmeg and Custard. Funnily enough, there's both Nutmeg AND Custard in this... It was a really basic recipe although I had to amp up the heat to Gas Mark 5 rather than 1/2 as after 20 minutes it still didn't set. It was lovely... but I'm not into it. It's too sweet as a side dish, and that's just from the natural sweetcorn! I also made mushroom risotto and a large meat stew. Naturally mushroom risotto took twice as long as usual and twice as much stock as it said on the back of the packet, but it did taste fabulous! This was from yesterday. Strawberry and cream chiffon swiss roll. It was my second attempt at chiffon as it's drives my mother's competitive streak so I try not to touch it too much. I used Sunflower (see blogs on the right) recipe for Orange Chiffon, replacing the orange juice with water instead. I poured far too much and therefore made th

Cookie cutters are a horrible addiction, bested only by my addiction to Bundt tins. However, whilst I use my Bundt tins, I rarely use my cutters because I reckon drop cookies (chocolate chip anyone?) taste sooo much better. Flooded cookies have been en vogue for awhile and Biscuiteers is definitely the most famous. So, when I was in town checking out the latest bookshop to go bust (boooo...) I found the Biscuiteers book. I have to say, I didn't buy it. There wasn't enough recipes for me to buy - probably about eight and most of them were "adjustments" of the basic recipe whereby you replace flour with cocoa etc. Moreover, it didn't take me long to spot an editing error whereby the Anzac coconut cookies didn't tell you how much coconut you needed to put in the recipe. Anyway, I digress. I didn't buy the book, though it was a very pretty book. You might like it all the same, but I'd rather have more recipes for my money. There were some handy points

After obsessing about the Sky High baking group pics from several years ago, and buying the Sky High book, I've funnily only ever made one recipe - the buttermilk cake recipe, that is *drumroll* up till now!! It was my brother's birthday and ... I realised that in our family we don't have any "favourite" cakes. My sister doesn't do raisins, my parents don't like cinnamon or anything other than vanilla sponge with whipped cream, but we have NO FAVOURITE CAKES. Which, can be quite handy. So today I made Banana and chocolate chip cake from the book. Shockingly easy, but also in the american way of baking, not so great on the results. Let me explain, if you gave me a list of ingredients I am almost always going to go butter, sugar, eggs, flour - in that order. This cake is almost muffin-like in it's creation. Dry meets wet, meets some more wet. I think the texture suffered as a result and it didn't have the lushness of banana bread. A bit more cream

You have to love January sales. But as it's me, I hit the 25% off deal online for the London Hilton Chocolate Tea on Park Lane . Which, on the date that I went was a bit of a horror. I must explain - Park Lane is just near Hyde Park. Where the students were having their protests that day. And the President of Bangladesh was staying at the Hilton as well so there was some protesters outside the hotel specifically for that too.  It gave us a rather odd feel of Marie Antoinette in a way. "Let them eat cake." We were also very grateful not to be sitting near the windows.  The service/protocol at the restaurant was mixed. They offered to switch the sandwiches if we wanted to, were generally lovely and doggy bags come as standard. When I say doggy bags, I mean hopelessly elegant pink cardboard and glossy carryouts. I'm saving it to carry my own cakes later. The bad side was that it's not a place where they pour the tea for you, but also that you feel a little pressur

Yes I bought another bundt tin. It was on sale!! Okay I suppose Selfridges puts them on sale every year but still. I think if I get the Bavaria tin which is used mainly for the Tunnel of Fudge cake, I will be happy and complete. Just as well they don't sell them in the UK that frequently, and by frequently I mean in a place other than the internet. Today's cake comes from the book Bundt cookbook by Nordic Bakeware. By book, it's more of a pamphlet with some very random recipes in. Unfortunately a lot using mixes, but bizarrely lots of gelatin moulds. Moulded salmon anyone? In a ten-cup mould no less. Anyway, the recipe I used was the Orange/Chocolate Marble cake, but as we didn't have any orange extract I used almond. Things you should also know was that I screwed up reading the recipe and forgot to dissolve the cocoa in water before I added it to the mix, which was why I was mixing it thinking, why did I whip egg whites if it ends up as this stupidly stiff mixture??