Obsession

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.