Christmas Pudding Cupcakes

Next on my list to bake were Christmas Pudding Cupcakes - I've really missed making cupcakes whilst I've not been baking. This recipe was one I saw in the second Primrose Bakery book and I must say as soon as I saw it I was intrigued to know what the cakes would taste like.

I had an absolute disaster the first time I made them - the recipe stated it made 12 but infact it would have made double this and I ended up with overflowing cupcake cases and throwing the whole lot in the bin - something that I've never had to do before!

On my second attempt I halved the recipe and got 12 perfectly sized cupcakes. The Christmas pudding flavour of the cupcakes comes from a combination of mixing mincemeat into the cake mixture and then adding brandy to the butter cream. I got quite a taste for brandy whilst making these cupcakes and added nearly double the amount to the butter cream! They really did taste like Christmas! I sent Karl off to work with this batch as apparently the lads at his work seem to be craving cupcakes.

Cherry and Ginger Florentines

Wow, I can't believe that my last post was back in May! So much has happened in the last few months and I have been super super busy!

I started a qualification in Housing through my work which was only supposed to be '3 hours or so on a Sunday afternoon' according to my teacher which ended up taking over mine and the other girls on the courses lives!

As well as this we were also trying to buy a house. It was a very stressful 6 months as the first house we wanted fell through, but we have finally bought our perfect little house - a 3 bedroom, semi detached and we love it!

So unfortunately, due to both of these things baking got a little bit forgotten about. However, as soon as my course finished 2 weeks ago I dived straight back into the kitchen to bake! Every year I see everyones post on their blogs about what lovely cakes and bakes they made for christmas and I'm always either too busy or too ill to do anything so this year I was determined after not baking for months on end that I too would make delicious christmas treats!

First on my list was florentines. I always always buy a box of florentines without fail at christmas - they are definitely one of my favourite christmas nibbles and I've seen several different recipes for these treats but in the end I decided to go with a Hairy Bikers Recipe for Sour Cherry and Ginger Florentines:

Ingredients

2 tbsp butter
75g/2½oz golden caster sugar
2 tsp flour
75ml/2½fl oz crème fraîche
50g/2oz flaked almonds, toasted
2 tbsp candied peel
2 tbsp crystallised stem ginger
50g/2oz dried sour cherries
150g/5oz good quality dark chocolate, broken into pieces

Method

1.Preheat the oven to 180C/350F/Gas 4.

2.Heat the butter, sugar and flour in a pan over a medium heat, stirring continuously, until the butter has melted and the sugar has dissolved.

3.Gradually add the crème fraîche, stirring continuously until well combined.

4.Add the almonds, candied peel, stem ginger, and sour cherries and mix well until combined.

5.Line a baking tray with greaseproof paper and place teaspoonfuls of the florentine mixture onto it. Space the teaspoonfuls out at 2.5cm/1in intervals so they don't merge together when heated.

6.Transfer the florentines to the oven and bake for 12-15 minutes, or until golden-brown. Remove from the oven and set aside to cool on the tray, then transfer the florentines to a cooling rack.

7.Bring a little water to a simmer in a pan. Suspend a heatproof bowl over the water (do not allow the base of the bowl to touch the water). Add the chocolate pieces and stir until smooth and melted.

8.Turn the florentines so that the flat base is facing upwards. Spread the melted chocolate over the florentine bases and set aside to cool and set.

I tried this recipe using the sour cherries - but in the end I preferred the much cheaper alternative of glace cherries. Don't leave the florentines to go completely cool on the greasef proof paper or it can be an absolute nightmare to get them off it!This recipe made about 12 small florentines which had a lovely chewy texture to them. These are perfect for little christmas presents too - I bought some cellophane snowflake food bags and gave some to my parents on a recent visit.

Nanaimo Bars

I recently received a copy of Cox Cookies and Cakes. I've been pondering over buying this book for a little while but must admit never really got round to it! There are some gorgeous cupcake recipes in this book that I can't wait to try, however as I haven't been well again recently and snowed under by course work for the housing course I have just started I just wanted to make something easy but still yummy. I was very intrigued when I saw the pictures of the Nanaimo Bars. They were so eye catching in the book with their bright yellow layer, I couldn't wait to make them.

Apparently these chocolatey, butter creamy bars are a popular sweet in Canada - I'd unfortunately never heard of them. They have a base of biscuit, coconut, coco powder and walnuts and then a yellow custard butter cream filling with a chocolate layer on top - seriously good!

Posh Rocky Road

Sometimes you just need a super duper chocolate fix....for me thats unfortunately ALOT of the time! I think I've have found the perfect recipe for this. I am a massive fan of Rocky Road. I just love marshmallows and chocolate - amazing combo! I don't enjoy the super market rocky roads - there never seems to be enough marshmallows etc mixed in, so I have been searching for a good recipe.

My Dad has been raving for a while now about how good some Rocky Road is that he's tasted at work. Apparently, his colleague's wife makes it and then sends him into work with it. I have therefore been constantly nagging him to get me the recipe so I can sample it for myself. He's finally emailed me it so I set about making it last weekend for when my Mum and Dad visited and, well it is actually quite amazing. So amazing infact, I have made it again this week and taken it into my work (it lasted about 5 minutes!)and will probably make it again next week!

The recipe is so simple, no baking required but involves lots and lots of chocolate, maltesers, snickers bars, mars bars, marshmallows, cherries and apricots.

It actually made quite alot too - it seemed to go on forever. I managed to give some to my Mum and Dad to take home with them, take some to my friends Jenny's to have after our tea, give some to my friend Vikki whilst she had to sit for hours in A&E after breaking her ankle and then there still seemed to be loads left for me and Karl!

Posh Rocky Road

Ingredients
700g milk chocolate
4 x regular sized mars bars/snickers (maybe I'm just greedy but I used 6 in total, 3 of each!), roughly chopped
50g marshmallows, plus extra for the top
50g maltersers
50g diced apricots, roughly chopped
50g raisons/sultanas or cherries (I used cherries as Karl doesn't like raisons!)
50g cornflakes
chocolate sprinkles for decoration

Method
Line a baking tray 33 x 23 x 2.5 with grease proof paper (I didn't have a tin of this size so used a slightly deeper smaller one.)
Melt the chocolate in a bowl over a pan of hot water, stirring every so often.
Once melted, take the chocolate off the heat and mix in all of the dry ingredients.
Make sure it is all evenly distributed through the chocolate.
Pour into the lined tin and using the back of a spoon, flatten the mixture into the tin.
Decorate the top of the rocky road with more marshmallows and chocolate sprinkles.
Allow to set in the fridge over night or at least for a good few hours.
Once set, remove from the fridge and leave out for an hour or so(or else you'll never manage to cut it!) and cut into pieces.

Toffee Mocha Cupcakes - BakingMad.com

I have recently been contacted and asked to be involved with a Bakingmad.com campaign. Although I had heard of this website before from the recent Eric Lanlard tv programme (they sponsor it!), I had never taken a look at the website.

I was asked to re-create a recipe from the website and blog about it. After spending quite a bit of time looking through all of the yummy recipes on the website I thought I would try and find a cupcake recipe. I feel its been a while since I last made some cupcakes and am missing them!

There are plenty of yummy cupcake recipes on the Baking Mad website along with loads of helpful tips and solutions for all sorts of baking issues. If you've not had a look at this website then you definitely should.

In the end I settled on making the Toffee Mocha Cupcakes:

Toffee Mocha Cupcakes
Ingredients
100g butter unsalted
60g golden caster sugar
60g light muscovado sugar
3 medium eggs
1 tsp vanilla extract
200g self raising flour
1 tsp baking powder
50g dark chocolate, chopped or chocolate chips
For the butter cream
3 tsp cocoa powder, sifted
3 tsp hot water
3 tsp espresso coffee powder
150 grams butter unsalted
300 grams golden icing sugar
Fudge pieces, grated chocolate and toffee sauce to decorate

Method

Preheat the oven to 180 C/ 170 C fan/ Gas mark 4. Line the muffin tin with muffin papers, or grease and flour each hole individually.
Cream the butter and sugar together in a large mixing bowl until light and fluffy.
Beat together the eggs and vanilla extract.
Gradually add the flour and eggs into the butter and sugar mixing all the time.
Gently stir in the chocolate.
Spoon into the muffin papers, about two-thirds full. Bake for 20 - 25 minutes.

To make the icing, mix together the cocoa, expresso powder and hot water until dissolved for the mocha flavouring. Beat together the butter, icing sugar and mocha flavouring, until well blended. Fill the piping bag, and pipe onto the cupcakes.
Grate chocolate over the icing and scatter on some fudge pieces. Finally drizzle on some toffee sauce.

I did change the recipe slightly, rather than completely following the one on the Baking Mad website - I'm a chocaholic and felt the cake needed some chocolate adding to it so I mixed in 50 grams of chopped up chocolate. Also I changed the method - I made these the first time following the original method which said to melt the butter and sugar in a pan and then stir them into the beaten eggs. Even though I let the butter and sugar mixture cool as the recipe instructed, I still felt it cooked my eggs and left me with a really lumpy cake batter. The second time I made the cakes I creamed the butter and sugar together first, rather than melting them.

I also tripled the ingredient quantities for the butter cream (the quantities above provide the amount of butter cream I used) - I do like a LOT of buttercream on my cupcakes!! And then as well as grating dark chocolate onto the butter cream, for extra naughtiness I also added fudge chunks and a simple home made toffee sauce to to make them a bit more toffee-ish! The toffee sauce was made by melting 120g of light brown sugar with 120g of butter in a pan. Once melted, I added 100ml of cream and heated till it was bubbling and then took of the heat and allowed to cool.

Over all I really liked these cupcakes - the coffee-ish chocolatey butter cream was really good, especially with toffee sauce drizzled over it. I think if I was making them again though I would tweak the cake recipe - for me they were a bit too muffin like in texture, rather than a cupcake. I think some toffee sauce in the centre of the cupcake would be good too..yum!

Dotcomgiftshop Product Review - Tea Coffee Sugar Tins

As you have probably seen from my previous post Dotcomgiftshop recently got in touch with me to tell me they had featured my blog on their website.

They asked me if I would be interested in doing a product review for them, which of course I jumped at the chance to do - I am always having a little nosy on their website and longing to be able to afford every single product on my huuuuge wish list. They honestly have some gorgeous products on their website, so if you haven’t checked them out yet – please do! The website is well worth a visit.

This morning at work I received my parcel from DotComGiftShop. I was so excited when the delivery man walked into reception and I saw the pink Dotcomgiftshop logo on the box he was carrying. I was having such a bad day (feeling poorly and then some crazy lady tried to ram into my car and then blame me!) but when I saw my parcel I was grinning from ear to ear (the delivery man must have wondered what on earth I was having delivered!). I’d already told my friend at work I would at some point be getting a delivery so eagerly we opened the box and unwrapped the contents.

The products I have been sent are the pantry design tea coffee sugar tins. I have never branched out into tea coffee sugar pot ownership...they’re always something that I can be found perusing over in kitchen shops..pondering over the different styles, taking lids on and off etc etc but something I have never actually bought!! Perhaps it is because I have not yet found the right ones that suit me or maybe it is because I am not a huge drinker of tea and coffee – who knows…but when Dotcomgiftshop said I could pick a set to review I knew as soon as I saw these ones with their cute vintage style and pastel colours that these were the ones for me – I could imagine these in my kitchen, especially when the people at DotComGiftShop suggested using them for my baking ingredients – what a good idea!

When the tins arrived they were well packaged in plenty of bubble wrap - always a plus when your products arrive in one piece and not damaged! The tins are approx 14cms high and 10cms in diameter and are a cylindrical shape. They have a quirky 50's style design with each tin having a matt finish and and being coloured in either pale pink, pale turquoise or a pale moss green. The lids of each tin all have a singing bird design on a doily style polka dot background.

The tins are selling on Dotcomgiftshop for £12.95 which I think is really good value. I'm very impressed with how well made these are and how much they actually fit in. The design is absolutely gorgeous and would look beautiful in anyones kitchen. I would definitely recommend these to a friend - they'd even make a fab house warming gift.

I couldn’t wait to get home and start filling the tea coffee sugar tins up and of course this was the first thing I did when I walked through the door.

As you know from my coffee and walnut cake post I have found a new obsession with coffee in cakes..yum! And therefore this coffee tin came at the right time – who wants to look at a boring jar of coffee in their cupboard when they can look at this cute little tin.

The sugar tin was also a most welcome addition to my kitchen – there are so many afternoons when I have been happily weighing sugar out for a cake and realised that the bottom of the sugar bag has been leaking and I have sugar all over my floor – nightmare! The last thing I want to be doing in the middle of baking is to start having to clean my floor! This new sugar tin will hopefully put an end to this mishap that keeps occurring!!

How lovely do these two tins look in my baking cupboard (yes..i did give the cupboard a tidy specifically for this picture!).

I didn’t realistically feel I could use the tea tin for baking ingredients – although I have used tea in baking before I don’t use enough to warrant giving it its own tin in my baking cupboard and I couldn’t stand to have something other than tea in it when it says tea on the front. I do drink a lot of green tea though and so this is now its new home.

I couldn't resist taking a few piccies of the tins in my kitchen - they just look so pretty...

Now I'm just saving my pennies for the matching cake tins!

Dotcomgiftshop

The lovely people at dotcomgiftshop got in touch with me this week to say that they had included my blog in one of their posts about food blogs that they love.

I was over the moon when I got the email and so proud that my blog had got a mention! When I started my blog it was so I could share my enthusiam for baking with everyone, meet fellow bakers and really keep a record of everything I had baked - I really didn't think anyone would be interested in my little blog about cakes..but it turns out that maybe a few people are :)

I love Dotcomgiftshop - another reason why I was so happy that they have featured my blog! I'm always having a nosy at their website and have ordered a few things from them - I got the cutest heart shaped containers from them and people always comment on them when they see them in the fridge at work and I still love cooking with my pink spotty frying pan!

Dotcomgiftshop stock all sorts of gifts and homeware for everyone. They are always very cool and quirky but are also very affordable.

I'm hopefully (fingers crossed) moving house in the next few weeks/months so will definitely be making purchases in the near future for my lovely new home.

These are my personal faves on the website at the moment:

Red Kitchen Scales £19.95

Heart Shaped Measuring Spoons £1.95

Set of 3 Tins £12.95

12 Mini Loaf Baking Cases £2.95

White Love Bird Cake Stand £11.95

Coffee and Walnut Cake

When I had my fab week off work of baking I also made this fantastic cake. I seriously cannot stop raving about how good this cake is! The recipe is from the first Primrose bakery book but is apparently adapted from a Delia recipe. I had already made both the lemon and vanilla layer cakes from this book and adore the recipes - they always give consistently good results and I had been pondering over making this coffee and walnut one for a while.

Now, I'm not a huge fan of coffee and walnut cakes - if i was buying a slice of cake in a cafe and the choice was between a chocolate cake or a coffee and walnut cake, the chocolate cake would win hands down every time! I think this cake however, has converted me to the amazingness of the coffee and walnut combo!

The first time I made this cake (I've made it an additional 2 times in the space of about 3 weeks..thats how good it is!)I was worried it was going to taste too strongly of coffee. There is coffee in the cake, then once the cake is baked and cooled the sponge is brushed with coffee syrup and then more coffee in the butter cream. I had nothing to worry about - the sponge is a lovely flavour and gorgeously moist thanks to the sugar syrup and the butter cream is still lovely and sweet with just a hint of coffee flavour - just perfect! You'll see from my pics below, I liked the butter cream so much I put about an inch of it inside the cake - looks a bit messy but it was sooooo good!

I also liked the way the sponge had a nice marble effect to it - the coffee and ground up walnuts are added right at the end to the sponge mixture and you are instructed not to stir it too much.

I cannot stress this enough - if you have the primrose bakery book - you MUST make this cake!

Cake Pops

Since buying the Molly Bakes Cake Pops with my xmas money I have been desperate to try and make cake pops. The idea just sounded amazing - cute little mouthfuls of decorated cake on sticks. I spent quite alot of time flicking through the book, looking at all the different designs and memorising the different steps involved. I couldn't wait to make them!

However, my enthusiam slightly decreased after a having a read on other peoples blogs about their difficulties making Cake Pops...I must admit the first thing that popped into my head was cake on sticks - seriously...how hard can it be??? I was soon to find out....

I decided to just stick with a simple pop design - no fancy moulding the dough into shapes for me. I bought a huuuge amount of candy melts but for my first attempt thought I would go with the cheaper alternative of using white chocolate - the book said this was perfectly acceptable! I decided that I would make the pops in stages over the week I was off work. So on the Monday I set to and baked the vanilla cake - nothing eventful here - it all went to plan. Tuesday I made a lovely cream cheese frosting, crumbled my cake up and made a dough - still all going to plan. Wednesday I rolled the dough into lots of little balls and put them in the fridge to chill - again all going to plan.

By the time I got to Thursday I was seriously thinking that cake pops were super easy to make - perhaps I was even feeling slightly cocky that I'd managed to get so far with no mishaps. Well Thursday was the day for dipping - I melted my white chocolate, found my lolly sticks in the cupboard and started turning my balls of cakes into actual cake pops!! I was still super excited at this point. However, it all went down hill from here. I kinda allowed myself an hour to get the pops coated in chocolate - totally underestimated on the time front there. It took me about 15 minutes to do 2. My face fell as I noticed the other 23 pops that needed dipping in the next 45 minutes!

The problem was that the book just said to dip the pop into the chocolate or candy melts - shake slightly and then stand the pop up in a polystyrene block. I had a series of problems with this method - some of the pops would just fall straight off their sticks as soon as I so much waved them near the bowl of chocolate, others would survive the dip but as soon as I shook them would launch themselves back into the chocolate minus the stick! When I finally thought I'd done a successful one, I'd shake it slightly and then go to stand it up and all of the chocolate would just pour down the stick. I ended up having to wait for aaaages just holding the pop over the bowl waiting for the chocolate to set a bit but even then I still got serious dripping down the stick that I had to wipe up! I re read the instructions over and over again and could seriously not figure out what I was doing wrong.

Anyway after about 8 attempts I got so frustrated and gave up..I just didn't have the time to dip all 25 of the cake pops! AND to top it off when me and Karl sat down to eat a few of the cake pops he didn't even like them and I was a bit of the opinion that if I'm going to put that much time and effort into something it needs to taste AMAZING! I said that evening that I am never ever going to make them again - however I may have to retract that statement since there are 2 bags of lolly sticks and 4 bags of candy melts in my cupboard and I hate wasting things!

Maybe it will be easier the 2nd time round...fingers crossed!!!







PS On a more positive note this was the first time I got to use my rose mould that I bought from Neit Moulds and I absolutely loved it. This company sell moulds of pretty much anything! It was so easy to use and my sugar paste didn't stick in it once..fab!

My Granny's Banana Cake Recipe

I've spent this week off work - I ended up with a weeks leave left over (do not know how I managed that!) so I thought I would have a lazy week off work. I have filled my time with plenty of baking, a teensy tiny bit of shopping (I've tried to avoid this expensive habit since we are saving for a house!) and a bit of Gossip Girl (love this show!).

The first thing I decided to bake this week was Banana Cake using my Granny's recipe. Perhaps this isnt one of the prettiest cakes you've ever seen but it definitely is rather scrummy - it's also super quick to make and an ideal way to use up bananas. I dont know about anyone else but I always seem to have at least one sad looking banana in my fruit bowl. This week I ended up with three so you guessed it - I made 3 banana cakes!

Banana Cake

Ingredients
5oz self raising flour
Pinch of bicarbonate of soda
1 ripe banana
2 oz soft butter
1 egg
5oz sugar
1/2 teaspoon of vanilla extract


Method
Place the egg, banana, sugar, butter and vanilla in a liquidiser and blend till smooth and creamy. (Alternatively, if like me, you don't have a liquidiser, just use an electric mixer!)
Sieve flour and bicarbonate of soda into a bowl and pour into the liquidised mix. Combine thoroughly.
Bake in a greased 7 inch square tin for 30-35 mins at 160C (fan oven).

Very Early Mother's Day Cupcakes

Don't panic everyone...its a few more weeks till Mother's Day! I just have to be super prepared as my Mum lives a few hours from me so I won't get to see her on Mother's Day. I always make my Mum something for her birthday and for Mother's Day - she adores lemon cupcakes so I made a batch of these using the fab Love Bakery book and prettied them up with lots of sugar flowers.

I honestly didn't think this batch of cupcakes wanted to be made this time. I normally don't have any trouble making cupcakes but I guess I haven't made them in awhile so am a bit out of practice.

I was nervous all the way through mixing as the mixture didn't look like it normally did. Then I popped all the mixture into the cases only to realise I'd picked the wrong cases from my cupboard..these cases never seemed to have enough strength to them and always seemed to flop in the over...goodness knows why I hadn't thrown these cases away! So I ended up having to spoon all the mixture into new, better cases! Once in the oven they worked their magic and rose nicely and I happily got on with making my lemon butter cream. As I went to fetch my piping bag from its usual place I realised the crucial part of the coupler was missing which sent me into panic mode for the second time. Luckily after turning my kitchen cupboards upside down I found it and got on with decorating!

Here are the finished result...my Mum loved them and apparently after her journey back home last night sat down with a glass of wine and a cupcake..perfect!

Valentine's Day Sugar Cookies

I had a day off last Friday so as Valentines Day was around the corner and Karl loved my attempt at sugar cookies so much the last time I made them, I thought I would give them another go.

Obviously for the theme of Valentine's Day I went for a heart shaped cookie. It did cross my mind before I started that a heart shape looks easier to ice than the butterfly shape I used last time (hooray!). To be honest though I ended up getting distracted and then I got a bit behind and I had plans in the evening so the whole day just felt a bit rushed! The outline was a bit easier to pipe (I still need alot more practice!) but I couldnt seem to get the consistancy of the royal icing quite right and on some cookies it just didnt flood right, plus I really wanted to spend alot more time decorating them but just didnt have the time..hey ho...they still look quite cute and Karl has eaten nearly all of them in 2 days so they can't have been that bad.

Still lots of room for improvement me thinks - I don't feel as though I have quite perfected the technique just yet! I had a trip to the cake shop on Saturday and bought myself a new piping nozzle which is alot thinner than the one I've been using and looks better made as well. Fingers crossed this will help...hmmm what shape cookie to try next?!!

Anyways..I hope you all have a fab Valentines Day whatever you've got planned! My lovely Karl is apparently cooking stir fry for my tea and we've bought a scrummy looking Gu dessert for afters (well I have to have a day off from baking sometimes!).

Oreo Brownies

Ever since I bought the Lorraine Pascale book, Baking Made Easy, I have been itching to make these Oreo Brownies. In all honesty I don't know why its taken me so long - you all know my obsession with Oreos! I remember watching Lorraine show how to make these in the tv series that went with the book and thinking what a genius combination!

So this weekend I finally got round to making them..why on earth did I not make these sooner?! The brownie recipe was gorgeously moist and super chocolatey and adding Oreos to the mix made them even better. If you don't have quite the same obsession as me for Oreos the recipe did make suggestions for other things that could be added, such as pecans. As I seem to have ended up with a cupboard full of Oreos (how did that happen?!) I think I can safely say I will be adding Oreos to mine for awhile.

I sent Karl off to work with the leftover brownies and apparently they were polished off pretty quickly. It seems the lads at his work also share my Oreo obsession!

To top it off..it made my day that when I tweeted to Lorraine Pascale on twitter that I'd made her brownies and how much I liked them, she tweeted back to say thanks!! It may have only been one word but it showed she'd taken the time to read my tweet and respond..hooray!

Iced Butterfly Cookies

I treated myself to a Peggy Porschen book with my birthday money 'Peggy's Favourite Cakes & Cookies'. I was so impressed with the cookies decorated with royal icing I couldn't wait to have a go myself.

The cookies in the book are absolutely beautiful and full instructions are given on how to make the cookies and then the different consistencies of icing needed to decorate them.

I've only ever used royal icing once before when decorating a large cake to put little dots all over it so that doesnt really count at all...so basically I was a complete novice! I actually thought I was pretty ok at piping since I pipe butter cream onto cupcakes allll the time. However, ask me to pipe an outline onto a cookie...the pressure is on and my hands are shaking like mad!

The recipe made a huuuge amount of cookies...think I had about 30 in the end...so plenty to practice on. Have a look at my piccies...I don't think they are a bad first attempt but definitely something I want to keep practicing. I sooo want them to look as perfect as they do in the book!!

Back to Baking

As you all might have guessed, I haven't been doing alot of baking recently! The last time I baked was September and then after that I got a bit poorly - just my silly immune playing up. I was gutted I missed out on christmas baking - I had so many ideas for different cupcakes and wanted to make mince pies etc etc...roll on next year!!

I had Friday booked off work so I thought this was the perfect opportunity to get back into baking. My friend Jenny has been going through a rough time and as I was going round on Friday night what better way to try and cheer someone up than with cake...perfect!

I went for something really simple to ease me back into baking - a vanilla layer cake. I know I've blogged about this before but as this was my first time back in the kitchen baking I thought I'd get it on my blog! I was paranoid the whole time the cake was in the oven hoping it would turn out ok and it did!! Hooray! Heres a pic to prove it: