The Wedding Cake

Photo by Paul Summerfield

The cake, like my flowers, was another thing I didn't want to spend too much money on. So I turned to the best baker I know. My Mum. Does she now wish I had gone a different route to save her the stress? Probably. But I think it turned out great.

Photo by Paul Summerfield

We wanted a simple, two tiered cake with layers of jam and butter cream inside, covered in a thin layer of butter cream and decorated with berries. And the top layer had to be gluten-free.
My Mum definitely delivered!

She found the cake stand at my Grandad's house and her friend Debra lent us her fancy knife from Liberty. The two of them, with my sister, successfully got the cake to the venue on the morning of the wedding and got it assembled and decorated, all while I was still at home getting my hair done.

Photo by Paul Summerfield

For the cake topper I knew I wanted one of the phrase ones in a fancy font. Andrew and I settled on it saying 'You're my favourite' which is something we say to each other a lot. Because we're adorable!
I used my Cricut to cut out the words from card and glued a wooden kebab skewer to the back. Then I sprayed it gold.

Photo by Paul Summerfield

I am so pleased with how the cake turned out. It looked legit! Though my Mum has said she won't be applying for Bake Off any time soon.

Oh, and it tasted delicious too!

As a memento of the day I took the cake topper, removed the stick and stuck the words to the front of the mount in this frame. I added some paper which matches the colour scheme of our living room and added the frame to our gallery wall. I like how it's a subtle reminder of our day rather than something that screams, 'we had a wedding!'

Recipe Cards

I find a lot of my recipes on the internet. If I have a particular ingredient I want to use, like if I have some bananas that are going brown, then I'll google 'banana recipe' and see what I fancy. I save the recipes I like in a draft email and cook from the laptop screen which isn't ideal. Especially when there isn't enough clean kitchen work top to put the laptop on and I have to keep walking across the kitchen to find out how much flour I need.

So I decided to print out the recipes I've found online and use repeatedly. I know this isn't a revolutionary idea, but this post is more about sharing some of my favourite recipes, and it might give you a nudge to do the same.

I designed my recipe cards in Publisher and made them roughly A6 size, because, as I mentioned, I do not have an abundance of work top space. Typing out the recipes gave me a chance to make alterations where needed. For example, there's a few recipes that I alway make half as much so I listed the ingredients at half the original quantities instead of having to calculate it each time.

I added a few coloured shapes purely for aesthetic reasons.

I printed out the cards, cut them up, and - here's the important part - laminated them. Now they're wipeable!

I punched a hole in the corner of each card and attached them together with a metal ring. Doing this will mean they take up less space than having to keep them in a box.

Here's some of the recipes I chose to print out:

Baked Oatmeal

I read about baked oatmeal on a blog and looked up a recipe for it as I was intrigued. I like the idea of porridge as a warm, filling breakfast but I have an aversion to sloppy food so it's a no go. A baked version is perfect; all the goodness of oats but with a texture that's almost like flapjack. I throw in whatever dried fruit I have and always make extra to freeze for a quick, special breakfast on a work day. Or when we've run out of milk for cereal.

Chocolate Orange Tart

I found this recipe when I was looking for a way to recreate a delicious chocolate dessert that I'd had as part of an afternoon tea in Cambridge. I made up the filling from this tart recipe and piped it into little plastic shot glasses. I highly recommend it.

Banana Pancakes

A prime example of needing to use up black bananas. These pancakes are suprisingly filling and with bacon, as the original recipe suggested, they made for a delicious breakfast.

Chicken Pie

My boyfriend and I are all about this pie. We've started buying a whole chicken to roast and then making this pie with the leftovers. The second time we made it we decided to add stuffing and cranberry sauce since it was around Christmas time and it was a game changer! 

Banana Flapjack

Another way of using up black bananas. And the recipe doesn't use eggs which is good because we don't regularly buy them.

Vegetable Pikelets

I think I found these when I was looking for healthy snacks and have made them many times. I usually go for a combination of grated carrot, courgette and spinach. My boyfriend likes them with a sweet chilli dip. I've also made sweet versions with apple, sultanas and cinnamon.

The great thing about these is that they're freezable. I think they're best when re-heated in the toaster.

What are you favourite recipes?

Cornflake Cookies

For Christmas I made my boyfriend an advent calendar using variety pack cereal boxes, which meant we had 24 little packets of cereal.
The Frosties soon disappeared over a few mornings as my boyfriend's breakfast and we've made one batch of chocolate crispie cakes (and we'll do more once Tesco decides to restock it's own brand milk cooking chocolate). But that still leaves us quite a few little bags of cereal.

In order to try something new to use up a few bags I found this recipe for cornflake cookies. I looked through a few recipes online but chose this one as it put cornflakes in the cookies mixture, not just on the outside so I thought that would use up more, and because it included chocolate chips and sultanas for extra flavour and what's not to like about that?

Once the cookie dough is made you roll blobs (technical term) of it in cornflakes. I found this part a bit tricky. I wasn't sure what kind of coverage I was meant to be going for and maybe my mixture was a bit wet as a lot of cornflakes stuck to it.

Regardless of the correct cornflake corverage these cookies were yummy and did not last long. The cookies have a bit of a cakey texture - not a bad thing - and the cornflakes become chewy rather than crunchy. The chocolate chips and sultanas are welcome additions and I even think I could've done with putting more of them in the mix.

Bring and Share Desserts

As I said on Sunday last week my friends and I had our Bring and Share Christmas Dinner.

For a look at past dinners click here.

We always split up the meal so each person brings something and this year I was given desserts.

I made an apple crumble, Christmas cookies and a chocolate cake.

This was the recipe I used for the apple crumble. Just some notes I jotted down from my Mum's instructions.

I'd never made one before but I think my first attempt when pretty well.

It was just your standard apple crumble, but I added some dried cranberries in with the apple for a festive touch.

I used a simple sugar cookies recipe for the Christmas cookies and made some into snowmen...

...and some into snowflakes complete with a sprinkling of edible glitter. Because it's Christmas!

There were also some angels, stars and Christmas trees.

The cookies were a big hit with my friends wrapping up the left over ones to take home.

And finally the chocolate cake.

I used this recipe and it is a winner.

I finished it off with some dark chocolate curls from Jordans Mill.

Jordans as in the cereal company, so these chocolate curls are the same ones you get in the chocolate Country Crisp.

We had way to much food so some of these came back home with me - but my family weren't complaining!

Banana Flapjack

We still have an abundance of over-ripe bananas so as well as the muffins, we now have flapjacks.

I used this simple recipe from Netmums which is just oats, bananas, brown sugar, syrup, butter and raisins.

In a recipe I've used before it said to soak the raisins (I also added sultanas) in boiling water first, which I did this time. I makes them a bit juicier.

My family concluded that this recipe could have done with an extra flavour.

They don't taste bad, they could just do with a little something something.

If I'd have had my head in the game I would have added some mixed spice like I did with the banana muffins.
But I didn't have my head in the game. Because Steel Magnolias was on tv.

And because there's fruit in them you can totally have two pieces at once and not feel bad about it.

Banana Muffins

My friends and I always buy too much food for things like picnic lunches, and shopping for Centre Parcs was no different. I ended up taking home the leftover, well travelled, bananas only to find that my parents already had a lot of bananas at home.

There was only one thing for it.

Banana muffins.

I used this recipe which I followed exactly, except for adding some mixed spice for an extra flavour. I left them in for exactly 30 minutes so the top has a nice crust.

I added sultanas to the last few just to try it out and they're a good addition so next time I'll add them to the main batter.

What do you do to use up brown bananas?

Any good banana bread recipes around?

Courgette Cake

My parents like to grow courgettes in the garden.

Then they like to go on holiday and leave me to look after them.

This year I didn't forget about them and then find some were way over a foot long.

I picked one at the appropriate size, I think. I'm not actually sure if this is a good size because I don't like courgettes all that much which is why I decided to make cake with it!

I'd never tried this recipe before, but I have eaten the cakes that my Mum's made with it and I think I did a pretty good job.

(This recipe is from somewhere on the internet but I've just typed out the printed copy we have)

Ingredients:

60g raisins

250g courgettes [2 or 3] weighed before grating 

(I've just properly read this bit. My one courgette was something like 340g before grating. Once I'd grated it and strained the excess water it was exactly 250g. Oh well, extra courgette!)

2 large eggs

125ml vegetable oil

150g caster sugar

225g self-raising flour

1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda.

1/2 tsp baking powder

Oven 180c/Gas Mark 4

1) Grate courgettes and remove excess water with a sieve.

2) Cream eggs, oil and sugar together.

3) Add flour, bicard and baking powder.

4) Stir in courgette and raisins.

5) Bake for 30 minutes as a whole cake or cupcakes.

I made 12 muffins and put the rest of the mixture in a loaf tin.

They taste good guys, nothing like courgettes, and you can legitimately eat more of them because there's a vegetable in them.

Gotta get that 5 a day somehow.

Snickerdoodles!

I've already shown you guys the best cookie I ate on my holiday last year.

(Oatmeal and raisin from the Country Music Hall of Fame Museum)

But I bet you were wondering what my second best cookie of that holiday was.

Well, as you may have guessed by the title of this post; it was a snickerdoodle cookie.

Not only that, it was a snickerdoodle cookie served on the flight home!

That was the first, and prior to this baking session, the only time I'd had a snickerdoodle cookie.

I don't know why it took me so long to try baking them myself.

I googled around for a recipe and lots of them had 'cream of tartar' listed in the ingredients.

I was thinking, 'what is this cream of tartar and why do people want me to put it in my cookies??'

Turns out it's kind of like baking powder or bicarbonate of soda.

So with the cream of tartar purchased and a recipe acquired (this one from Nigella, even though I was a bit put off that cinnamon was listed as 'optional'. It's one of the key ingredients!), I started baking.

A key step to baking snickerdoodles is rolling a ball of batter into a mix of cinnamon and sugar.

Mmmmm cinnamon sugar.

The cookies from the first batch didn't seem to be completely cooked on the bottom and they got a bit stuck on the tray, so I put them back in the oven for a bit longer. This didn't seem to do much, and my Mum wasn't home to ask, 'are these done yet??'. I was cooking solo.

I thought maybe it had something to do with the cinnamon sugar getting on the bottom of the cookies, so for the next batch I made sure not to get the cinnamon sugar on the bottom of the cookie balls.

This seemed to make things worse.

That, or turning to oven up a gas mark to see if that helped.

But whether the cookies ended up whole or in pieces they still tasted delicious, which is what really matters.

Though I'm still left wondering; why are they called snickerdoodles??

Nozzles

I got this piping set for Christmas and decided to try out the different nozzles (fun word) by making some biscuits.

The recipe, for butter swirls, says to use a piping bag anyway.

I tried out three different nozzles, with varying levels of success.

The one on the right worked the best with perfectly shaped biscuits every time.

The other two, which are designed to have a hole in the middle of the finished product, took a bit more practice.

And what's better than one biscuit?

Two biscuits sandwiched together with Nutella.

The recipe I used was from an old book from the 1960s and this photo of 'stuffed cucumbers' caught my eye  as I was flicking through.

Am I the only one who thinks they look like they're topped with fingers?? 

When life gives you apples...

...make apple cake!

Like most years the apple trees in our garden have given us more than enough apples, so much so that if you come to my house you won't leave until you've been asked if you want a bag of apples to take home.

So my Mum's got more creative with ways to use them up including apple and blackcurrant jelly/jam, apple and rhubarb jam, and apple cake. Which is delicious.

The recipe came with a Jordans flour pack many years ago.

And here it is with a few of my Mum's alterations. 

Ingredients

(For sponge base)

5 oz/125g plain wholewheat flour

4 oz/100g butter or margarine

2 eggs

4 oz/100g brown sugar

1tsp baking powder

Apple juice to mix

For topping

2 large cooking or eating apples

1 tablespoon of granulated or caster sugar

1 tsp cinnamon

Method

Sponge:

Cream fat and sugar until soft and fluffy. Beat in eggs gradually. Mix flour and baking powder and fold in water or fruit juice to make a soft mixture. Put into greased tin and spread evenly.

Topping:

Cut apples into quarters' peel, core and trim. Slice finely into crescents. Arrange these in overlapping rows to cover top of raw cake mix. Sprinkle top with mixture of cinnamon and sugar to taste.

Bake in moderate oven 375-400oF/ Gas mark 4-5 for 30 to 40 minutes until cake mix is cooked. Cut into wedges, following the lines of apples.

And you don't have to feel bad about eating cake, because there's fruit in it!