I can’t believe there are only 10 days till Christmas, I’m not sure where the time has gone! Finally getting round to doing some Christmas baking and really enjoying trying out some new recipes. Making fudge is a really simple easy thing to do for homemade Christmas presents and it keeps for ages, so it’s perfect for giving to friends and family over the next couple of weeks. Click here to keep reading and try the recipe.
I’m getting a bit behind with blogging about the Bake Off technicals, but we have been giving them a go! I think I have only made doughnuts a couple of times as I don’t have a deep fat fryer, but these looked so good that it seemed worth the effort of filling a large saucepan with oil and using the thermometer to check the temperature, its definitely much harder to regulate it on the hob. We were all very excited to give these a go! Click here to see how we got on.
I didn’t have any strawberries, but had some of my parents homegrown raspberries in the freezer, so used some of these to make the jam instead. Emily and Chloe helped measure things out and helped with kneading the dough a bit too. Chloe loved poking her fingers in the soft dough! Pauls recipe can be found here.
I fried the doughnuts while the girls were having their tea so we could all have them for pudding. I couldn’t believe how big they got when they were put into the hot oil! They had just enough time to cool down so I could pipe in the filling and the jam. We very much enjoyed eating them! Probably one of the best technical challenges ever, they were so good!
This year on Christmas jumper Friday at Emily and Chloe’s nursery they had a cake sale to raise money for Save the Children. So I couldn’t resist offering to bake some Christmas themed cupcakes for them to sell to help raise some money. I needed a design that I could make in advance, so these Father Christmas cupcake toppers were perfect. Click here to see how I made them.
We’ve had a really busy couple of months with various wedding cakes and visiting friends and family, so I made the most of a quiet 20 mins earlier while Emily was watching Stickman to write about the cupcakes I made for everyone when we visited friends this weekend. The wedding cake I made a couple of weeks ago had 2 tiers of coffee cake in and I tried a Hummingbird recipe that sounded like it would give an amazing coffee hit. The cake was so good that I decided to make some coffee cupcakes for this weekend too. Click here to take a look at the Hummingbird Bakery’s espresso cupcake recipe.
Hopefully this will be the first of many Christmas baking blogs this year and as usual there are so many scrummy looking recipes to try out it’s going to be hard to narrow it down. As it’s the last Met League before Christmas I couldn’t resist making some red and gold Christmas cupcakes for the Serpie runners. We haven’t been to any xc races yet this season as we now live quite far away and Rich injured his knee recently which has meant he can’t run at the moment. But after 4 years of not being able to run because of a back injury, I am now able to run 6km so I am very excited to be able to take part! Click here to try out our first Christmas recipe.
This week was caramel week on the Great British Bake Off and I was intrigued to see what the technical challenge would be. I didn’t watch it live but Becky text me after it finished and asked if I fancied buying an ice cream waffle cone maker – I was intrigued! Since neither of us own one, and Becky said she wouldn’t use it (it’s a bit hard to make them gluten free) I said I was happy to buy it but asked her to order it for me since I was away and worried it wouldn’t arrive in time. When I got back on Thursday it was waiting for me! Click here to see how I got on.
The best way to use up left over cake decorations is to do some more baking! I have a pot filled with left over flowers of various shapes, sizes and colours, so I picked out these ones to create some elegant biscuits! I usually use a biscuit recipe from the Biscuiteers Book of Iced Biscuits as they are always tasty and have the perfect texture. Click here to try their vanilla biscuit recipe.
Time for GBBO technical challenge number 2! I love Viennese whirls, the biscuits just melt in your mouth, so I was really pleased with this weeks challenge. I have made them before, but probably about 10 years ago, so it’s nice to give them a go again. Click here to find out how I got on.
It must be time for some Easter baking! This year I haven’t had time to bake a big cake, so I decided to make a couple of batches of cupcakes – some for our family trip this weekend and some for the local baby group I go to on a Thursday morning. I hadn’t managed to go shopping this week, so I had to pick a flavour that had only store cupboard ingredients in – I really struggled, but found that Earl Grey tea cupcakes were the same as the vanilla ones and the only extra ingredients were a few tea bags. Click here to hop to the full blog for the recipe.
Last weekend we had a Reunion/ Christmas get together with our NCT friends, which we offered to host. Baking with a 7 week old baby is challenging, but I was desperate to bake something Christmassy and fun! I chose a design that could be done in stages so I could fit it in around looking after little Emily. Click here to see what I baked.