So, the third and final cake that was baked at the weekend for Fathers day! Loyal readers may remember the cream and jam-laden confection surprise that I made my Dad for his birthday. What you may not remember is that my Dad ate maybe half a slice before discreetly handing his plate over to one of my siblings because he’s really not a sweet tooth. And yet, I still made him a cake! My poor wee Dad is awfy awfy thin and I’m determined to fatten him up a little so he was given a Nigella Chocolate Guinness cake. Luckily he works on a building site so at the very least his workmen will have had a tasty treat with their tea!

Before icing:

After icing:

You will need:
250 ml Guinness
250 g unsalted butter
75 g cocoa
400 g caster sugar
142 ml sour cream
2 eggs
1 tbsp vanilla extract
275 g plain flour
2 1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda

For the icing, I used a third of this icing recipe and it was plenty enough to cover the cake.

1) Preheat the oven to gas 4/180C, butter and line a 23 cm springform or loose-bottomed tin
2) Pour the Guinness into a large wide saucepan, add the butter gradually and heat until the butter has melted. At which time, whisk in the cocoa and sugar.
3) Beat the sour cream with the eggs and vanilla and pour into the pan before whisking in the bicarb and flour.
4) Pour the cake batter into the greased, lined tin and bake for 45 minutes to an hour (actually, I had to leave it for nearer 1h 20m). Leave to cool completely in the tin on a cooling rack.
5) Ice the top of the black cake so that it resembles the frothy top of a pint, or like me smooth the icing across the sides and top of the cake. Devour with a good cuppa.

Posted under baking, recipes

Yet another offering from Fathers day for me – this time, the carrot cake I made for Bob’s Dad. David kindly shared his cake with us and although it was really tasty, for me it was a little too nutty. I’d make it again purely because it turned out so well!

You will need:
150g plain flour
1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp cinnamon
150g caster sugar
250g carrots, grated
100g shelled walnuts, finely chopped
150ml vegetable oil
3 eggs, beaten
1 tsp vanilla essence

1) Preheat the oven to 180C/gas 4. Grease and line an 18cm diameter round cake tin.
2) Sieve the flour, bicarbonate of soda, baking powder and cinnamon powder into a mixing bowl. Stir in the caster sugar, carrots and walnuts.
3) Pour in the corn oil, and add the eggs and vanilla essence. Stir to mix and keep stirring for a minute to let the egg mixture pull everything together.
4) Pour the cake batter into the prepared tin and bake in the centre of an oven for about 30-35 minutes, or until risen and firm to the touch. Remove the cake from the oven, leave to cool for 5 minutes before turning out onto a wire rack. Leave to cool completely.
5) To frost the cake, I used a third of the icing from this recipe. Using a spatula, smooth a thin layer of the frosting across the sides and top of your cake to catch any crumbs before icing the cake to your taste.

Posted under baking, recipes

I should guiltily admit that this cake was actually made for my very lovely brother-in-law, Gary, who celebrated his 27th birthday on the 15th. This was supposed to be his birthday cake but since I didn’t get to see him as I’d expected at the weekend, I generously told Bob it could be his Fathers day cake.

Before icing:

After icing:

You will need:
2 bananas (the riper the better)
170g caster sugar
170g self raising flour
170g butter
3 eggs
1 tsp vanilla essence

1. Preheat oven to 180C/Gas 4. Grease & line a 2lb loaf tin.
2. Slice up your bananas, place in a bowl and add the other ingredients.
3. Using a handheld whisk or blender, mix up the ingredients until completely blended and your bananas are mushed to bits.
4. Pour the mixture into your tin, place in the oven and bake for an hour until your loaf is done.

For this loaf and the two cakes which I’ll be blogging later in the week, I used the cream cheese icing from Nigella Lawson’s Guinness cake recipe. This made enough to generously cover all three cakes so bear that in mind!

You will need:
300g cream cheese (like philadelphia – I use the generic version)
150g icing sugar
125ml double cream

Whip the cream cheese until smooth, add the sieved icing sugar and whip after every few spoonfuls. Add the cream and mix until you have a spreadable consistency with no lumps of sugar. Using a spatula, put a very thin coating of this icing over your cake – this will seal in the crumbs. Once you’ve done this, load up your spatula and frost the cake. Slice and munch!

Posted under baking, knitting, recipes

Well I have to tell you, friends, I have had a most productive weekend.

Yesterday I took a shower for the first time in I’m not admitting how many days. I don’t think I’d mentioned here but followers of my twitter feed will be aware that I hurt my neck badly at the start of the week and I’ve been pretty much confined to bed trying to ease it off since Wednesday. It’s still very sore and indeed I’m seeing both my GP and midwife tomorrow to discuss a plan of action from here but I’ve got a little more stability back today. I think the hot shower helped!

This of course has meant I’ve had most of the week to plot out things to make and do. I’ve managed to finish one little project, more or less finish the prototype of another little project AND spend some quality time with my cooker today! I’ll blog it out over the week so as not to deluge you with a mammoth post!

So today I’ll tell you about my cherry bakewell cake. Actually, I typed that and started salivating because this cake is good cake. Not “alright” cake, not “mmm that was nice” cake. This is “I want to have your babies” cake – well, it is if you like almonds. Otherwise not so much

My one error with this was that my icing wasn’t thick enough. My icing is never thick enough, I’m an icing sugar failure and should just accept it and move on. But looooooook! (Edit – whilst typing up the recipe I realised that it failed because I misread tsps as tbsps. What a diddy.)

Doesn’t that look good?!

To make it yourself, you will need:

200g butter, softened
150g light brown sugar
100g self-raising flour
1tsp baking powder
50g caster sugar
100g ground almonds
½ tsp almond essence
5 eggs

Filling and topping
½ a 340g jar cherry jam
175g icing sugar, sieved
5-6 tsp lemon juice
Flaked almonds

Preheat oven to 180C/Gas 4. Grease and line two 20cm sandwich tins.
Stick all of your cake ingredients into either your food processor bowl or a medium sized mixing bowl, then using your electric whisk or food processor beat together all the cake ingredients with a pinch of salt until smooth. Divide equally between the tins, smooth the tops and stick them in the oven for 30 mins or until you listen to your cake and you don’t hear tiny bubbles anymore. DO NOT open the oven before 25 minutes is up or your cakes will collapse. Ask me how I know this.

Once they’re done, give them a couple of minutes to cool slightly then tip them out onto a wire cooling rack to cool completely. Get your half jar of cherry jam and loosen it up in a bowl with a fork then spread all over the top of one of your cakes before sandwiching it with the other. Mix your icing sugar with the lemon juice before smearing it over the top of your cake and garnishing with flaked almonds. Done!

This is honestly the easiest cake in the world and it’s SPECTACULAR. Go on – make it and see for yourself

Posted under baking, recipes

I feel a bit of a cheat posting this recipe for banoffee pie because I’m sure I’m the last person in the world to make it, but it’s just so ridiculously easy that I feel it’s my duty to tell you all how to make it yourselves. As a word of warning this is so sweet that even I, the self-confessed Queen of the sweet toothed, only managed to eat a small slice before drinking a massive glass of milk.

I used the following in a 20cm loose-bottomed cake tin. For a bigger but shallower pie use a 24cm tin and double the hobnob base.

300g packet of chocolate hobnobs (digestives will do just as well)
Butter
2 x 397g can of condensed milk
4 bananas
Small carton double cream
Sprinkles, mini smarties or suchlike for the top

Firstly you’ll want to make your toffee. This can be done days in advance but the cans will need to have cooled before you start making the pie so at the very latest you’ll want to have finished boiling them a good few hours before making this.
To make your toffee, put the unopened unpierced cans of condensed milk into a big saucepan and cover them with cold water. Bring the water to the boil and leave for 4 hours, remembering to top the saucepan up with boiling water if the water level drops. It’s VERY important that the pan doesn’t boil dry as your cans could explode if this happens. Please be very conscious of this.

Put the packet of hobnobs into a food bag and batter it with a rolling pin until it looks a bit crushed. Pour the crumbs into a microwaveable mixing bowl and finish the job so your hob nobs are now a pile of crumbs. The bonus of making this with the chocolate hobnobs is that the chocolate should hold your mixture together pretty well when it’s melted so put 4-5 small knobs of butter around the top of your crumb mix and microwave for 20-30 seconds until the butter is soft and melting.
Mix the butter into the crumbs – you’re looking for your crumbs to be obviously wet but not swimming in grease. Tip the crumb mix into your tin and press down. Open your cans of condensed milk toffee, put them in a microwaveable dish and give it 20-30 seconds in the microwave to make the toffee a little easier to spread. Spoon the toffee over the top of the biscuit mix and smooth down. Put your tin into the fridge to let the biscuit and toffee set.

About half an hour before you want to eat your pie, slice up four bananas and layer the slices in rows. Whip your double cream until it’s thick and fluffy then carefully spoon across the top, smoothing it carefully so as not to disturb the banana layer. Finally, cover the top with your sprinkles/smarties/sweeties and you should end up with something like this:

This is so easy to make that it’s a great recipe for working with the kids as long as you do the toffee boiling part. Nairn helped me make this – well, I say helped. He stood beside me and licked the spoons! Let me know if you try it.

Posted under baking, recipes, with the kids

Today it’s my wonderful husband‘s birthday. Not a particularly special age, but a very special man.

In our house, it’s almost always Bob who makes dinner. In fact, I think I could count on both hands how many times I’ve taken a turn while we’ve lived here because we cook the vast majority of our meals from scratch and Bob is very quick at putting meals together whereas I am distinctly not. The usual exception to the “Bob cooks” rule is birthdays and Father’s day because really, that’s only fair. I asked my dearly beloved what he wanted and he told me, “lasagne and crème brûlée”. Easy enough, I thought, before remembering that I also needed to make a birthday cake. Hmm. I had decided on a pavlova because Bob had mentioned in passing that he really liked it but I had NO IDEA it was going to involve so much work! Luckily for me he changed his mind about dinner and decided he wanted pizza instead so I didn’t have to spend the entire day in the kitchen!

The most time-consuming and annoying part of this entire process was having to separate nine eggs. I hate separating eggs but luckily this time I managed all nine without breaking any yolks. Hoorah! Following this pavlova recipe I made the meringue first, put it in the oven for the alloted time and opened the oven as recommended to allow the meringue to cool down and dry out before realising that it was only cooked on the outside. I turned it over and put it back into the oven for another hour but I suspect my error was that the egg whites weren’t whipped firm enough before I shaped the meringue (perhaps worth noting here that I used nine regular sized egg whites from our own hens and not the nine large whites called for in the recipe). Delia Smith recommends baking your meringue the day before and leaving it in the oven overnight to cool and dry out, I may do that next time.

In the meantime, I was extremely happy with how the crème brûlée worked out! I made it after I put the meringue into the oven and it was easy as pie. The one aspect I wasn’t happy with is that our grill isn’t really good enough to caramelise sugar so I’m going to have to get my hands on a little kitchen blowtorch. Which seems kind of pointless when I can use it on one thing that I don’t make very often!

Recipe – Lemon Raspberry crème brûlée (makes 8 )

750ml double cream
Grated peel of one lemon
170g caster sugar
9 egg yolks
2 tsps vanilla extract
pinch salt

8 tsps brown sugar
punnet raspberries
Chambord or crème de cassis (optional)

Preheat your oven to gas mark 4/180C. Mix the lemon peel with the cream, put in a saucepan and heat until the cream is simmering. Meanwhile whisk the egg yolk and caster sugar until thick – using a handheld electric whisk this took roughly two minutes for me – then add the hot cream gradually. Take your time at this juncture – I just about redecorated my kitchen at this stage! Add the vanilla extract and salt, then set your custard aside.

Get the largest roasting dish you can find which will fit in your oven and put eight ramekins in it before filling the dish with boiling water to roughly half the height of your ramekins. Pour your custard into the ramekins through a sieve to remove the lemon peel then carefully lift your roasting dish into the oven. Bake for 55 mins-1 hour before taking them out of the oven. Chill uncovered until your custard is firm which will take at least three hours.

About an hour before you plan to serve your crème brûlée, put your ramekins on a baking tray and sprinkle 1 tsp of brown sugar over each one. Put under the grill (or use your blowtorch at this juncture) until the sugar has melted and browned. Put back into the fridge to harden. Put your raspberries into a bowl and add enough chambord or cassis to let your raspberries soak then leave for the rest of the hour. Spoon your raspberry mixture onto your ramekins immediately before serving.

Posted under baking, dyeing wool, family, recipes, sewing

As I’ve mentioned before I read a lot of blogs, including every blog written by the lovely people who choose to leave me a comment and my one recurring thought when I read your musings or admire your work is, “I wonder who taught them to do that?”

I was chatting with my wee Nana last week on the phone and telling her what I’d been knitting and sewing lately. I was the typical eldest grandchild when I was younger, spending weekends staying at my Grandparents and getting that one to one attention that was unavailable at home with a plethora of siblings. When I was growing up my Nana made me the most amazing jumpers – she was always knitting until she had a stroke when I was about 9 or 10 and then she just wasn’t strong enough – and she taught me how to knit when I was barely a toddler. Before that, she used to let me cut up all the scraps of yarn and play about with them so I had an appreciation of textiles from a young age. It was my Nana who used to let me help her bake, who taught me the basics of cooking and food preparation, and who first let me play around with a needle & thread. Nana commented during our conversation that she finds it amusing that I sew, knit and bake but my Mother never did. Maybe it’s a generational thing?

Anyway. Two things that I associate with my Nana are knitting and jam-making, so it would appear that I’m more like her than I ever thought! Last Summer I used a massive crop of rhubarb to try and replicate the yummy jam from my childhood and it wasn’t bad for a first attempt. Not quite the same, but not bad. Last week I decided to expand my repertoire a little and made lemon curd. It was so easy, despite me making a huge error, that I thought I’d share it with you lovely lot.

The other jar in the photo is the fantastic marmalade that my lovely husband made recently following this Delia Smith recipe. It’s a nice recipe but I’ve found it very tart, next time I think I’d play about with different quantities and perhaps add a vanilla pod to the cooking process.

Those are 1L Le Parfait jars (available from Lakeland) so the recipe I’m giving you will make approx 2/3 of a litre, or 2-3lbs. It’s a bit of a mixture of different recipes I found combined with what I had available to me at the time.

Lemon curd
4 lemons, preferably unwaxed
5 eggs
100g/4oz butter, soft
450g/1lb sugar

Set a pan of water to boil on the cooker ensuring that you have a bowl which will fit on top of the pan to create a bain marie. Crack your eggs into the bowl and whisk them briefly to break the yolks and combine. Add the butter and sugar, then set aside.

Grate the zest from your lemons remembering to give them a good scrub first if they’re not unwaxed. Squeeze the juice from the lemons then add both zest and juice to the egg mixture, then set the bowl on top of your pan making sure you keep the water simmering.

Stir your mixture with a wooden spoon until the mixture thickens to coat the back of the spoon and is all combined. This will take no more than 10 minutes. Do not do what I did and doubt yourself, as I ended up stirring my lemon curd for two hours before giving up and decanting it into the hot sterilised jar where of course it thickened as soon as it cooled down.

It won’t thicken much whilst hot from my experience, but if you are concerned about the viscosity then you can add another egg. Additionally you should feel free to play about with the quantities of sugar. This recipe used a lot of sugar in comparison to others that I found and the resulting curd is very sweet which may not be to everyone’s taste. It is yummy though!

Posted under cooking, recipes, sewing

My youngest two are at that nursery age where they spend a vast amount of time singing songs, their favourite being, “Miss Polly had a dolly” and OH how apt that song has been in the last 24 hours. I have been very unwell, and at 26 weeks pregnant was getting commands to go into hospital for an anti-sickness injection. Unfortunately hubby can’t drive and our hospital is a half hour drive away so I buried my head in the sand and slept all day instead. I am so rarely ill that I just can’t cope with it but the children bring every bug in the world home. Ah, the joys of parenting.

I promised yesterday that I would maybe post up the wool I dyed last week (tomorrow!) and some baking, and it occured to me that in my entire blogging career I’ve only posted one savoury dish. Unfortunately this is fairly representative of my domestic leanings because I really am not a natural cook. Hubby is responsible for dinner in this house and has been shocked that not once but TWICE in the last week he has come home from work and I’ve had dinner ready. The cheeky sod. Alas, I have not photographed by culinary exploits but suffice to say I made stew and the kids ate it. Hooray! I think it was the novelty element myself

Baking wise, I’m going to show you some Norwegian Cinnamon Buns I made courtesy of my much-loved Nigella Lawson. These were okay but not really what I was looking for. I love cinnamon buns that have icing smeared on top, gooey and sticky-sweet. This was not that kind of cake. That said, this recipe made 20 buns and they were gone within 24 hours so they couldn’t have been that bad. They got a little burnt due to a communication error with hubby (his fault!) but that didn’t affect the taste.

Recipe
For the dough:
600 g flour
100 g sugar
½ tsp salt
21 g easy blend yeast or 45 g fresh yeast
100 g butter
400 ml milk
2 eggs

For the filling:
150 g soft, unsalted butter
150 g sugar
1 ½ tsp cinnamon
1 egg, beaten, to glaze

Roasting tin approximately 33cm x 22cm or large brownie tin, lined with baking parchment bottom and sides

Preheat the oven to 230°C/ gas mark 8.
Combine the flour, sugar, salt, and yeast in a large bowl. Melt the butter and whisk it into milk and eggs, then stir it into the flour mixture. Mix to combine and then knead the dough either by hand or using the dough hook of a food mixer until its smooth and springy Form into a ball, place in an oiled bowl, cover with clingfilm and leave it to rise for about 25 minutes.

Take one-third of the dough and roll it or stretch it to fit your tin; this will form the bottom of each bun when it has cooked. Roll out the rest of the dough on a lightly floured surface, aiming to get a rectangle of roughly 50x25cm. Mix the filling ingredients in a small bowl and then spread the rectangle with the buttery cinnamon texture. Try to get even coverage on the whole of the dough.

Roll it up from the longest side until you have a giant sausage. Cut the roll into 2 cm slices which should make about 20 rounds. Sit in rounds in lines of top of the dough in the tin, swirly cut-side up. Don’t worry if they don’t fit snugly together as they will swell and become puffy when they prove. Brush them with egg and let them rise again for about 15 minutes to let them get duly puffy.

Put in the hot oven and cook for 20-25 minutes, by which time the buns will have risen and will be golden brown in colour. Don’t worry it they catch in places. Remove them from the tin and leave to cool slightly on a rack-it’s easy just to pick up the whole sheet of parchment and transfer them like that-before letting people tear them off, to eat warm.

Makes 20

Posted under baking, family, recipes

Our hens are all coming back into lay and yesterday I had sixteen eggs so I decided that a bit of baking was in order! I’ve typed up the recipes for the things I haven’t posted on here before but you can click the photograph of the lemon drizzle cake and chocolate chunk cookies to go to the flickr page and the recipes are there too.

Firstly I threw together a Nigella Lawson store-cupboard chocolate orange cake (from How to be a Domestic Goddess)

This is one of my favourite recipes ever!

You will need
125g unsalted butter
100g dark chocolate broken into pieces
300g good, thin-cut marmalade
150g caster sugar
pinch of salt
2 large eggs, beaten
150g self-raising flour

20cm springform tin, buttered and floured

Preheat the oven to 180C, Gas mark 4.

Put the butter in a heavy-bottomed saucepan and put over a low heat to melt. When it’s nearly completely melted stir in the chocolate. Leave for a moment to begin softening then take the pan off the heat and stir with a wooden spoon until the butter and chocolate are smooth and melted. Now add the marmalade, sugar, salt and eggs. Stir with your wooden spoon and when all is pretty much amalgamated, beat in the flour bit by bit. Put into your prepared tin and bake for about 50 minutes or until a cake-tester or skewer comes out clean. Cool in the pan on a rack for 10 minutes before turning out.

Serves 6.

Note – I actually had this in the oven for 1h 10m at the correct temperature measured with an oven thermometer and it collapsed in the middle when it came out. It’s a very heavy damp cake, I think this is fairly expected!

This is quite an adult cake so I decided that I’d make something for my little people. At my son’s request we used chunky peanut butter and the kids loved these. I found them a little oily but I think that could have been because I used the cheap and nasty peanut butter instead of the good stuff. After my recently documented muffin failure I was very pleased to have this work! This is an American recipe so the ingredients list is in cups

You will need
2 1/4 cups all purpose flour
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
2/3 cup brown sugar
6 tbsp butter, melted and cooled (I worked this out as 85g)
1/2 cup peanut butter
2 large eggs
1 cup milk
3/4 cup chocolate chips

1. Preheat oven to 375F/Gas mark 5/190C. Line a a standard 12-cup muffin tin with paper liners.
2. In a large bowl, whisk together flour, baking powder, salt and brown sugar.
3. In a medium bowl, whisk together the melted butter, peanut butter, eggs and milk until smooth.
4. Pour into flour mixture and stir until just combined.
5. Stir in chocolate chips.
6. Divide batter into your paper-lined muffin tin. Each cup should be filled to the top, not just half way up, to ensure you get a nice dome on the muffin.
7. Bake for 17-20 minutes, until a tester comes out clean and the top of the muffin springs back when lightly pressed.

So things were going well by this stage, I had got rid of four eggs and only had a dozen left THEN my husband checked the coop and we had another four eggs. ARGH! So I decided to make another few things.

This is my favourite cake in the world, lemon drizzle cake. I’ve made and posted this before and the recipe is available on this entry.

Finally I quickly whipped up some chocolate chunk cookies for my little people, these are a pretty regular make for me and the recipe is on this post

Phew! I don’t think I’ll be baking for a while now! I think this should tide us over for a little while.

Posted under baking, recipes

Okay I’ll admit it. I get so excited by the prospect of new projects that I quite often forget to complete old ones. This has really struck me this week as I tidied up all my craft supplies and put all my unfinished projects together. This is what I have so far:

In there I have a half-finished Jean Greenhowe scarecrow, a vintage pattern baby cardigan which needs the button band sewn on, two baby jackets (one in Rowan All-Seasons cotton and one in Sirdar Snuggly) which both need put together and bits added, a pair of Lil Devil Pants from Stitch and Bitch Nation which need sewn together and a pair of Fetching wristwarmers. Oh, and a sweater I knitted for #1 in age 4 years (he’s now 7, it’ll just about fit #2 though!)
I am a disgrace. Tell me it’s not just me though? Regale me with stories of your half finished crafty endeavours please!

I was at home this morning with the youngest babies and decided that I needed to make some of my fallback comfort food – chocolate chunk cookies.



My sister loves these cookies and I was supposed to be meeting her today, unfortunately I had to cancel on her for the second time this week because I am a very disorganised and rubbish sister. I will make it up to you, Steph! The cookies were yummy though

To make them yourself, preheat your oven to 180C/350F/Gas 4.

Cream together 100g unsalted butter with 50g caster sugar until fluffy then beat in one egg and a teaspoon of vanilla extract. Mix in 150g sifted SR flour and 175g chocolate (either chopped up chunks or chocolate chips). I sometimes add 50-75g of chopped nuts here too. Grease a baking tray or two and put about a tablespoonful of cookie mixture at a time with enough space for them to spread during baking.

Bake for around 15 minutes or until they look like cookies. Don’t try and pick them up until they’re cool though as they tend to crumble!

Posted under baking, knitting, recipes