When you have accidentally bought too many packs of medjool dates which need to be eaten before you go away on holiday, what do you do? Do you ration them out as healthy snacks, or do you mix them with butter, flour and sugar and make a sticky toffee pudding? I’ll let you guess which […]
Baking
Christmas cookie exchange
Okay, I am finally letting go of Christmas (and all the treats – it’s so hard to going back to eating normally instead of twiglets for breakfast and Christmas cake before bed, but I am doing my best!), but before my seasonal posts end I just want to do one final one on the Christmas […]
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Salt beef, bagels and pickled veggies … and lots of it
I have wanted to make this American deli classic of salt beef and bagels for a very long time. Two reasons really – firstly, I love it but when you but it in London the portions are rarely anywhere near as generous as the ones I have had in New York. Secondly it sounds like […]
That will do ice-ly – stir it up Sunday part 2 – how I iced my Christmas cake
I wasn’t intending to do a post about the icing of my Christmas cake … it’s not the most thrilling subject (well, not when I have my new pasta attachment for my KitchenAid to blog about) but I so love the picture I took of my mum when we iced the cake that I decided […]
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Getting steamed up – steamed suet and sponge puddings
When I was younger I never really wanted what my Mum cooked me for dinner. As a child of the 80s I wanted the kind of food that Iceland still seems to sell: crispy pancakes, mini kievs, chicken dippers, potato waffles, beefburgers with processed cheese ON THE INSIDE, and lots and lots of chips. MacDonalds […]
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Stir it up Sunday
Note from the idiot: I thought stir it up Sunday was on 17 November, so I made my cake – and wrote this post – on the 17th. Someone kindly pointed out on my Facebook page that I had the dates wrong – whoops. So I had to leave the post for a week to […]
GBBO challenge week 10 – pretzels
Oh woe is me – it was the last GBBO of 2013, and the last GBBO challenge blog post for me. I might have been feeling more sad about the end of this era of the blog, but I have been distracted by boiler problems, accepting a new job, and going on holiday. Well, after […]
GBBO challenge week 9 – savoury canapes
I can’t believe there’s only one episode of the Bake Off left! I have really been enjoying my challenges (except the evil choux nuns) and I have even managed to get to my Weightwatchers goal weight – I am pretty impressed with myself considering the amount of cake and pies I have been eating over […]
GBBO challenge week 8 – vegetable cake
Find out more about by Great British Bake Off challenge. Okay, I admit it, this week is a complete cop-out. The technical challenge during week 8’s GBBO was a dacquoise – a layered cake of hazelnut meringue, coffee cream, chocolate ganache and crushed hazelnuts. I did seriously plan to make this cake, until my lovely […]
GBBO challenge week 7 – Religieuse
Find out more about my Great British Bake Off challenge. If I wasn’t already an athiest, making Religieuse this week would have turned me into one. These little choux bun towers, named for the nuns they are supposed to resemble (you’d have to be on drugs to mistake mine for nuns), represent what I dislike […]