A Little Note From Me...

Hi All, just to let you know I'm giving up baking - well for a week anyway. I'm off to get myself a sun tan so I can look like a bronzed healthy bride as opposed to a pasty white stressed one.

I will leave you with a picture of the magnificent (if I say so myself) Sausage and Egg Pie that I made probably about this time last year. I keep promising to recreate it for Jeff.

I know it doesn't strictly belong on here but look at it! It's beautiful!

Top Hat and Tails

This is my Blueberry bush. It's a 'Top Hat' Blueberry. It was tiny when I got it and now is huge and produces more berries than I can eat. I've picked 200 grams tonight without even trying. They freeze well though so is no problem.

I'm no gardener so would recommend one of these to anybody. All you need is Ericaceous Compost and some food and hundreds of little blue 'superfoods' will be yours! A cat (tails - see???!!!)  is handy too as blackbirds eat them all given half a chance.

Very Lovely New Blue Muffin Tray! 

Thought I'd better put the bumper crop to good use so these are Blueberry and White Chocolate Muffins from the BBC Goodfood website. They have 55 ratings and overall score four stars so thought they'd be worth a go. I got seven out of the mixture for some strange reason.

They went down very nicely with a cup of tea.

A word of advice.... If you want to make them, you need to double the amount of baking powder and don't over stir! 

And the winner is...

Greenhouse Maggie (who claimed her prize yesterday afternoon) closely followed by Lady Red. I owe you a cake/bake/biscuit Lady Red!

The answer, for those who didn't guess, was Custard Creams....mmmmmm!

Here they are in all their glory.

Thank you for following by the way. If you have no photo on though, please sort it out!

Thanks xxx

Competition Time!

Anybody who can guess what I am going to turn this little selection into gets a prize.... They get to eat one!

Star Struck

In hindsight (which is a wonderful thing incidentally) I would have iced half in a much deeper blue with a white star. Live and learn eh?

Photograph isn't doing my lovely blue and white spotty bun cases justice - sorry!

A Bun in the Oven

Twelve actually, I have so many things I should be doing - ironing, cleaning, job application form etc but figured if I did a nice cupcake job first then I might feel more inspired to tackle the boring stuff. I am on holiday after all!

They're just 'chuck it all in and see what happens' plain vanilla cupcakes but I'm going for a star design which will be great if I can carry it off!

This is my practise run. I think it might be not so easy on an actual cake! Photos to follow (good or not!) when I've iced them!

Little Pots of Happiness ....

Edible Glitter!

The one on the left looks gold but it is really silver!

Shopping for Goodies

It's Saturday afternoon and so far this weekend I've baked absolutely nothing. In fact I've cooked nothing full stop. I will try and rectify that tomorrow.

I have been to Lakeland in search of equipment though and chose a new muffin tin, a mini muffin tin and a cooling rack for my birthday from Jeff. Will be good and save them until it really is my birthday!

I also got a magic carpet liner for my baking trays - nothing at all sticks to them which is helpful when it comes to washing up as I am the messiest baker in the world I think. I get icing sugar and flour everywhere.

Got some bun cases too. Tiny silver ones and big blue and white spotty ones. Have an idea of what's going in the big ones.

As I was on a roll with buying cakey bakey stuff, we walked up to the nice cake shop in Gatley (Martyn Jackson Celebration Cakes) and got some edible glitter. They have loads of colours (which makes me ridiculously excited) and I want to get the full set eventually. I really wanted orange but need to plan an orange cup cake first! Went for silver which will go with most things (am I getting sensible now I'm approaching 32???) and disco blue for the new bun cases.

A word of warning - Edible glitter cannot be digested by the human body!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Finally chose some brown and white spotty bun cases which I thought would be good for chocolate muffins and some teeny tiny little cases that I don't know what to do with. I'll have a think about that....

Muffin Magic!

A quick one tonight as I'm sleepy.

A very fine big blue muffin tray is on it's way to me so lovely big muffins coming soon. Watch this space!

Beetroot Bonanza

My mum is coming for her tea tomorrow night. She's not a massive cake eater so thought I'd better try something different for her and not too sweet.

I had loads of beetroot ready in my veg plot (I say veg plot, I mean large wooden box with veg growing in it) so thought I would give these a go...

First dig up your chosen beetroot. Wash it, peel it, grate it.

THEN...

Sprinkle in some love (as well as a bit of flour and some eggs and that)

It really is that colour with no added colourings or preservatives honestly!

Spoon into some pink and lovely bun cases (you might need a wonderful boyfriend to buy these for you)

Pop in the oven at 200 degrees Celsius for twenty mins then leave to cool on a wire rack.

Add the magic pink frosting (food colouring is what made that pink!) et voila!

Beetroot bonanza eat your heart out.

Taste a bit like carrot cake, only PINK!

Love Heart Cupcakes

I was invited to a girls only dinner party last Friday night. It was decided we'd each take a course ... I somehow ended up with after dinner mints! What a cop out! I didn't ask for the easy option - honestly! Thought I'd better get creative so, having just bought a gorgeous new cake book (Baking Magic by Kate Shirazi) I made a love heart cupcake for each guest.I was rather pleased with the way they turned out!

I also made one much less girly cupcake for the hosts little boy.

They went down a storm but we had drunk about 15 bottles of Rose by then (apart from Ben who is only 7 that is - he had milk with his!)