Smarties Cake and Friends...

Good evening,

I've spent the last two evenings baking my arse off in the name of charity.  To raise money for my companies charities we often hold bake sales.  These rather inoffensive events can easily turn into a competitive 'Great British Bake Off' if you're not careful.  Ask anyone who knows me, they'll tell you I'm not famed for being careful.  So, I baked a cake I've seen over on the Pinterest.  I present...

The Chocolate Smarties KitKat cake (Hell Yes).

In all fairness, it was a pretty easy cake to make, although I never want to unwrap another KitKat, ever again.  It's basically a chocolate sponge, covered in buttercream, with KitKats stuck to the outside and Smarties poured on top.  Simple, but effective.  This cake is going to be raffled at the bake sale, so it had to be robust enough to stand a journey both IN and OUT of work again.

I also baked a carrot cake with cream cheese frosting, a regular chocolate cake, some vanilla cupcakes, a ginger cake aaaaaaaand a lemon drizzle cake.  What can I say?  I like to bake.

More epic Smarties cake... Actually, I think I'll dedicate this to my Blog Stalker.  You know who you are ;-)

And on that rather delicious note, I shall leave you!  I'll try and get some pictures of the cake trolley tomorrow laden with goodies, including homemade flapjacks, made by someone else, but from my secret recipe! (FYI, the secret is cornflakes.  Shhhhh!)

Cooking for a New Mum...

Good Morning All.

My sister has just given birth to a beautiful baby girl (cue 'ahhhhs')...

I know absolutely nothing about kiddos, and when I held her in the hospital I was straight up petrified.  I know it's nice to offer to help out at home when someone has a new baby, y'know, so that mum can nap and get clean and rest, but I have NO CLUE.

I figured the most helpful thing I could do would be to batch cook a few meals for them.  (There's mum, dad, and two boys already...)  Oh, I also made cupcakes with pink satin flags.

Welcome to the world, little'un!

Mini Apple and Blackberry Pie

Good Afternoon all,

As progress with the house has slowed a little, please indulge my frequent posts about baking. I've just bought two tiny, super cute pie dishes from Cargo Homestores, via Amazon. They arrived on Wednesday and I was amazingly keen to make a cute dessert for the Mr. Cue rummaging through the fruit bowl and freezer...In the end I used an apple and some blackberries that I picked and froze from our trip to Manor Farm Country Park. I also decided to try a lattice crust, which I've never really done before, and I think it worked rather well.

And here is a pic of the pie once baked and crispy...

To give some idea of size and scale of the cute mini pie dishes, here is how big they really are!

The pastry was ready roll shortcrust pastry (I know, I'm lazy) and the filling was made using one apple (I think it was a golden delicious or something, just what I had in the fruit bowl) peeled and cut into chunks. I popped this in a bowl with about a tablespoon of caster sugar and a teaspoon of cinnamon and microwaved on high for 2 and a half minutes. Then I added in a handful of frozen rasberries and drained off the syrupy liquid. I lined the dish with pastry and filled it with the fruit. I cut the rest of the pastry into strips and put a lattice on top, brushing the edge with milk to make sure it stuck. Then I trimmed the edges, brushed the top with more milk and sprinkled a little lot more sugar and cinnamon on top.

Bake at about 180C for 15 to 20 minutes (perhaps longer if you're making more than one) then EAT!

Ginger cake with Fudge Frosting...

Good Afternoon...
Still no progress with the house!  We hope to things a bit more up together by Christmas though, by that I mean we should having a dining room we're happy with...
So.  This weekend was the Mr's birthday, so I baked a ginger cake with fudge icing.  I struggled to find a recipe so I tweaked one from the various recipes that I found.  I present it here (mostly for my own future recipe searchings...)

Simple Ginger Cake
Ingredients:
285 g self-raising flour
3 tsp ground Ginger
1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
1 tsp Bicarbonate of Soda
A pinch of Salt
200 ml golden syrup
125 g butter
125 g soft light brown sugar
2 large eggs
240 ml Semi Skimmed Milk

1. Grease a 20cm tin, and line the bottom with greaseproof paper if you need to.
2. Preheat the oven to 180C/gas 4. Sift the flour with the ground ginger, cinnamon, bicarbonate of soda and salt. 
3. Put the golden syrup, butter and sugar in a small pan and gently heat until all melted together.,
4. Break the eggs into a bowl, pour in the milk and beat gently to break up the egg and mix it into the milk. 
5. Remove the butter and sugar mixture from the heat and pour into the flour, stirring smoothly and firmly with a large metal spoon. Mix in the milk and eggs. The mixture should be VERY sloppy almost like a batter, with no trace of flour. 
6. Pour the mixture into the lined cake tin and bake for an hour, covering with tin foil half way through, until a skewer inserted in the centre of the cake comes out clean. Unless you are serving it warm, leave the cake in its tin to cool, then tip it out on to a sheet of greaseproof paper. Wrap it up in foil and, if you can, leave it to mature for a day or two before eating. 

Bursledon Windmillery!

Good Afternoon all,

On Sunday we spent an extremely pleasant afternoon at the Bread and Honey even at Bursledon Windmill.

That's me, under the windmill, scratching my head.  That picture is totally candid, not posed.  There was a quiz about honey bees and I guess it was a bit much for me!

It was absolutely fascinating to see the journey from wheat to flour-windmills are a lot more complicated than we had initially thought!  We talked a lot with the guys and really got to appreciate the work that goes into grinding flour 'the old fashioned way.'  We got talking about baking and making, and knowing where your food comes from.  I'm looking forward to heading back to the windmill in the future, and perhaps taking down some cake that I've made with their flour.  Perhaps at some point I'd like to get involved with volunteering sessions, too, but we'll see how that plays out.

Just as we were about to head off for a nice long walk along their nature trail, the heavens opened and there was a big ol' downpour.  Not to be disheartened, we pulled on wellies and rain macs and went walking anyway.  We got soaked but we were happy.

Carrot Cake!

Good Morning!

I seem to be going through a 'baking' phase at the moment (never mind that it's lasted about 6 years...)  Until we get the dining room and hallway up to scratch, I present my carrot cake.  This recipe is taken from the Hummingbird Bakery book, and is the carrot cake with 1/3 quantity cream cheese frosting.

Enjoy!

Chocolate Ombre Cake!

Hello everyone!

I've had so much going on lately!  We've repainted our hall, stairs and landing, but this is still only half a job as we have two sets of stairs and have left the biggest wall white.  Here's an idea of the progress we've made...

It's really difficult to photograph as when the doors are closed, the only light comes from a skylight above the stairs.  Hopefully I'll have got the hang of it by the time the painting's done...

Onto the subject of the post then...Chocolate Ombre cake!  I've been feeding my cake addiction (No pun intende...OK. Pun intended) on Pinterest when I started coming across the pink swirly ombre cake, from glorioustreats.blogspot.com.  I am a chocoholic and started looking for a chocolate version.  Unable to find one, I made my very own...

On the inside I used two cake recipes-Lady Mary Berry's All-In-One sponge,  and the Brooklyn Blackout cake recipe from the Hummingbird Bakery cookbook.  I made one layer of chocolate cake, one layer of vanilla sponge, and two mixed layers so that the ombre effect continues inside the cake.

I baked the cakes and then used vanilla butter icing to sandwich and crumb coat the layers.

From there I mixed up the butter icing (some chocolate and vanilla, again from the hummingbird cookbook) and mixed some together to get graduating shades.  Then I filled up my piping bag and attached an open star nozzle and had at the cake with swirls!

Hooray for cake!  All ready for my dad's birthday party tomorrow...