Ben and I love it. It's such a treat to spend Tuesday evenings snuggled up on the sofa dreaming of cakes, biscuits and soggy bottoms.I don't have a favorite contestant yet, but how awesome were those matchstick bread-sticks last week?
We actually do quite a bit of baking ourselves. Sadly at the moment I'm trying to be healthy so I don't actually eat much of what we make - usually Ben ends up taking most of our baking creations to work. Apparently he's now known to his colleagues as Mr Kipling.
Anyway, I thought I'd share with you a couple of our most recent creations:
Cookie Monster Cupcakes
These were so easy to make but don't they look amazing? The cake is a basic vanilla cupcake from the Hummingbird Bakery book, the icing is just blue vanilla butter-cream piped using a basic star nozzle, the eyes are white chocolate buttons with a chocolate chips and the mouth is well... a cookie, obviously!
.JPG)
Chocolate Cake
This was our first attempt at making a large chocolate cake. Yesterday was my Mum's 50th birthday and she's coming to stay at ours tonight so this is just a little surprise for her. We used Jo Wheatley's recipe from her second book- Home Baking. The cake was actually very easy to make but the tricky bit came when we tried to cover the cake in the chocolate ganache- definitely not as easy as it sounds. There was chocolate everywhere... (Ben even found some on the front door at one point). And then disaster struck... we ran out of chocolate fingers!!! Where can you find chocolate fingers at 10 o'clock at night? Thankfully we have a 24 hour supermarket not too far from us so my lovely husaband drove my (in his pyjamas!!) to pick up extra supplies (I don't know what I'd do without him). Despite the mess and the late night shopping trip, I think the cake actually turned out looking pretty good. Fingers crossed Mum likes it.
.JPG)
