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!