At lunch yesterday, I met up with Julia. She wanted to go to WHSmiths to look at cook books that were on offer so I said I’d go with her. She’s a very bad influence on me and pretty much forced me to buy another cook book – ok, maybe that’s an exaggeration… I saw the Green & Black’s Ultimate chocolate cook book with 75% off, asked her if it was any good (since she owns just about every chocolate recipe book), she said yes, so I bought it. I then had the urge to bake something chocolatey. So instead of cleaning/tidying the house yesterday evening before Julia stays tonight and my parents come up for the weekend, I made myself an early birthday cake. I’m sure Julia won’t mind (she’d much rather have a slice of chocolate cake than see a tidy house) and my parents will understand (they know me well enough to realise that I prefer baking to tidying 🙂 If you’re looking for an excuse for not doing the house work, or have an urge to make something really chocolatey, then keep reading.
Posted in Chocolate, Other Cakes | Tagged birthday cake, caramel, chocolate, chocolate brownie cake, chocolate brownies, chocolate cake, rolo | 2 Comments »
On Thursday night last week there was an amber warning in place for heavy snowfall overnight and all day Friday. It was also bitterly cold. Despite turning the heating on and having the fire on as soon as I got home, it still felt cold so I decided that in order to warm the house up a bit more, the best option was to turn the oven on. And if the oven is on then it’s rude not to bake something. So I decided to try out a new recipe for gingerbread biscuits – they keep for ages and they’re perfect dunked into tea. I cut some of it up to build some sledges and then the rest I used to make mittens.
Do you need some mittens to warm up? Yes I do!
Posted in Biscuits, Christmas, royal icing, Spices | Tagged baking, Biscuits, gingerbread mittens, gingerbread sledges, mittens.gingerbread, sledges, sleigh, winter | 4 Comments »
After going sledging with Kiri this morning I decided to warm up this afternoon by doing some baking. My neighbours very kindly cleared the 6 inches of snow from my path and doorstep this morning, so I thought I would bake something I could give them as a thank you. Kiri also wanted to bake something so I looked through my cookbooks for ideas and the first book I pulled out was my favourite book – the Hummingbird Bakery Cake Days. Since I’ve nearly exhausted all the cupcakes, I decided to look at the other things in the book and came across a recipe for cinnamon and raisin loaf. If you want to have a go at making it keep reading.
Posted in Other Cakes, Spices, Winter | Tagged cake, cinnamon, cinnamon and raisin loaf cake, loaf cake, raisin | 4 Comments »
I only started this blog at the end of September 2012 but I’d done a lot of baking before that – I hadn’t realised quite how much until I started drafting this post. Although I’ve manged to post some of the things I made at the start of the year, I doubt they’ll all make it onto here in their entirety. So, here’s a summary of my favourite ones from each month….
Posted in Biscuits, Celebration Cakes, Chocolate, Cupcakes, Figure Modelling, Iced Cakes, Macarons, Other, Other | Tagged autumn leaves, baby boy, beehive, Biscuits, brian the snail, butterflies, cakes, chocolate, cookie monster, cupcakes, daisy, macaroons, olympics, poker, sugarpaste roses, Toblerone | 4 Comments »
About a year ago I was lacking inspiration for what I could bake one week. For some reason I decided to ask Jamie for ideas. He said I should make “a giant popping candy cake with a dragon on top”. I laughed and said I wanted serious suggestions! But then when I got home, and I realised I didn’t have anything else to do that evening, I thought why not try making a dragon out of icing. After I’d made one I decided it was quite cute so had a go at making another…. and after a couple of nights I had a small family of dragons!
If you want to see the whole dragon family click here to keep reading…
Posted in Chocolate, Cupcakes, Figure Modelling | Tagged caramel, chocolate, cupcakes, dragons, kids, vanilla | 3 Comments »
Last week the other batch of cupcakes I made were these – happy birthday ones for Sarah. These weren’t what I intended to make but I didn’t have the ingredients I needed for the decoration and Tom had gone out for the night with our only set of house keys so I couldn’t leave the house! In the end, I was pretty pleased with them and I think Sarah enjoyed them too (even if we were all completely stuffed have eaten a massive curry just before!).
Need to make some birthday cakes? If so, click here.
Posted in Chocolate, Cupcakes | Tagged chocolate, cupcakes, happy birthday, kids, smarties | 2 Comments »
It’s been a while since I made cupcakes, but like buses, two cupcake-making occasions came along at once last week so I spent Thursday night making cupcakes – firstly some leaving cupcakes, then some birthday ones. These are the leaving ones. I decided I wanted to make some which would say “miss you” or “goodbye” so I chose to make biscuits to go on top decorated as Love Hearts. Click here to find out how to make them.
Posted in Cupcakes | Tagged Biscuits, cupcakes, goodbye, love hearts, valentines, vanilla | 1 Comment »
Happy New Year! Last night Tom and I decided that we would have a quiet new year’s eve with just the 2 of us – Tom made the cocktails and I made the food. For pudding I made these: salted caramel profiteroles.
I haven’t made profiteroles, or choux pastry, for a while and it wasn’t as tricky as I remember. I made them the night before and then assembled them and made the chocolate sauce just before I served them – I’d had a few cocktails by that point but luckily it was fairly straight forward!
If you want to make some profiteroles, click here.
Posted in Chocolate, Christmas, gold, Other, Puddings, Winter | 2 Comments »
December 24, 2012 by Emma
So it’s probably a bit late to actually make a Christmas cake (I made mine about 6 weeks ago and it’s been injected with brandy once a week since then!) and maybe even too late to decorate it. But if you’re feeling ambitious then how about decorating it with drunken robins?! If you want to, here’s how.
Posted in Celebration Cakes, Christmas, Figure Modelling, Fruit/Veg, Spices | Tagged baking, cake, cake decorating, Christmas, drunken robins, festive, fondant animals, robin | 6 Comments »
December 23, 2012 by Emma
If you make a whole batch of brownies and don’t want to turn them all into reindeer, what do you do with the rest of the brownies? Eat them? Or if you’ve eaten too many already there is another option. Turn them into snowmen cake pops!
Posted in cake pops, Chocolate, Christmas | Tagged baking, brownies, cake pops, chocolate, Christmas, festive, snowman, snowmen | Leave a Comment »
« Newer Posts - Older Posts »
Gloverly Cupcakes 