Tonight I made some stuff for Christmas!

Well this year me and my fella are heading to my sister-in-laws mums house for Christmas so, not really knowing what the etiquette is, i pet to make a couple of puddings! 

Now then, banoffee pie and nutella cheesecake are in the fridge setting , waiting for a good dollop of whipped cream and some decoration tomorrow night :-)

I'm right excited for Christmas this year! I've got a brand new nephew to play with and, by the looks of it, a fair few bottles of cava to get through! Game on! One more day to work then I'm on it! 

First the banoffee pie!

Digestives blitzed

Buttery biscuit base setting in the fridge

and on with the bananas

Ariel view (there's a few of these)

I cheated and got ready-made caramel

Another ariel view,  just the whipped cream to go tomorrow!

And now for the Nutella cheesecake...  

Cream cheese first...

Add lots of Nutella-y goodness!

Mixed it up with some icing sugar...

Gave it a whirl...

Popped it onto another buttery biscuit base!

And ta-da!!!  It's now in the fridge with the banoffee!

As a wee aside, I attempted to make cranberry sauce.  I just followed a basic recipe but added some clementine juice to it tonight to try and make it a bit nicer :)

I hope it goes with the turkey!!

Merry Christmas everyone!!

Tonight i took photos of the stuff i made yesterday!

Well, yesterday i was meant to be revising for a new autism module I'm doing with the open uni  for work. So naturally i found any way possible to distract myself from sitting down with my books. 

The result was a nutella cheesecake, meringues, and homemade vanilla ice cream.

Lovely, chewy meringueness!!

Questionable vanilla ice cream.

All in all they weren't too horrible - i was quite chuffed with myself if truth be told!  The cheesecake was a Nigella effort but with no hazelnuts. The meringues came from a basic Mary Berry recipe and the ice cream was the first one that came up on Google that didn't involve an ice cream maker! 

Nutella cheesecake.  Bloody awesome!!

Previous to these, i also made some blueberry and white chocolate cupcakes (that i made up myself really, and hoped for the best )and some pancakes that are slowly going hard in the kitchen as i type this! 

White choc and blueberry cupcakes.  I forgot to take the pic when they looked less stale...

Its my birthday on Friday so i think I'm might attempt some nice savoury food for then. Who am i kidding, I'll probably get a steak and eat it blue with an onion. I'm classy, me.  If anyone reading this  (anyone??) Has some nice birthday treat suggestions please let me know. I do enjoy a challenge :-)

Tonight i made traybakes

Well, tomorrow is my best pal's wedding party after she got married 2 weeks ago. I originally said I'd make lots of cupcakes but someone else who is better at them offered instead so when i asked her what she wanted she said traybakes! So here i am! 

My stuff!!!

The plan was to make about 7 different ones to cut into wee bits so everyone could get a bit of something. So far I'm  finished 4 of them! 

First off was the base for peppermint slice, then when that was in the oven i smooshed up some custard creams for a different one.  Then i made a mars bar crispie because that's the easiest one. With the mars cooling i made peppermint icing (a bit too minty i think but fuck it) and popped the tons of condensed milk i bought into the  custard cream thingy! 

Peppermint slice base and custard cream thingy.

And then i was done! Its amazing how simple things still take bloody ages to make!

But then i thought no- if i finish now them I'll have even more to do in the morning! So i made some fudge which -by the way- is fucking amazing! First time I've ever made fudge and its just brilliant! It doesn't look very much portion wise, but it says it cuts into 60!! 60!?! That should be interesting! 

Mars bar crispy.  Nom.

Custard cream slice with rainbow drop top.  How fancy am I?!?!! :)

So tomorrow I'll get cracking with boiled fruit cake (smiddy loaf to my friends), tiffin cake and millionaire's shortcake.  I'll probably have to buy more syrup as Andrew realised the other night that the combination of syrup and digestives was his favourite thing ever (wee shite).

Off to bed with a bottle of wine :-) see yall tomorrow!

Fudge, 74c

Fudge, 112c

Fudge, 118c

Goodies in the fridge!!!

Today i made some Mars Bar krispie.

Well, not exactly.

It was made from Titan bars- ALDIs own tale on a Mars Bar.  Titans, butter, syrup and ALDIs own brand rice crispies and voila!

I'm enjoying a sweet supper tonight, with some Seed&Bean chocolate for good measure.

Yum!

http://www.seedandbean.co.uk/

Today i enjoyed some of my wares

Tonight i enjoyed some Perthshire ginger oatcakes spread (spreaded?) with crunchy Biscuit Butter and Nutella, washed down with ginger chai tea by The Wee Tea Company :-)

I never actually made any of it myself, and it was far from crappy, but it's definitely worth a mention!

Yum!!!!

This morning I used up stuff that was about to go bad.

This morning I woke up with the intention of making a cake.  I still intend to, but first I decided to make stuff with the butternut squash and potatoes that were in the process of going off in the kitchen.  I always do that - buy things with the intention of making something lovely, then just don't!

So I made roasted butternut squash.  Ooh how exciting...  

Squtternut Bosh

I was thinking of doing something else with it so my next task is to find something to make with roasted butternut squash!!!

I also had to use up the tatties, so I opted for dauphenois (I had some double cream that I got earlier in the week, that actually went off a couple of days ago - but it still smells ok so bugger it).  Creamy, potatoey, garlicky goodness :D 

Dauphenois. Nom.

I'll probably be back later to update the cake attempt.

It was disastrous.  The first attempt of chocolate buttercream split bad and - as per the next photo - it was cuttable with a knife.  Not ideal.  But I pressed on and made another batch.

Which I then split again!!  This time I didn't use butter, only melted Dairy Milk and icing sugar.  It still split.  

But fuck it, I used it anyway!!

It's very dry, and could probably so with a ganache or something over the top of it but I'm out of ingredients lol!!

TA DA!!!

Stand Up To Cancer

I initially wrote this massive thing about losing both my parents to cancer, but it was awfully depressing.  So i just deleted it and replace it with this.  

Live every day like it's your best day.

Stand Up To Cancer
CRUK
Macmillan

xx

Tonight i used up the rest of my pumpkin puree

Well tonight i watched the GBBO Masterclass and decided to make something with the rest of my pumpkin puree that i done last night. I didn't want another roulade  (i didn't have enough pumpy left and also it was bloody messy!) so i took to t'internet and found a cupcake recipe :-)

Plain flour, bicarb and mixed spice combined with pumpy, egg, milk and a fair wee whack of sugar and i ended up with a no bad looking mixture!

Batter :)

I went to pop it into my cases them remembered i bought an ice cream scoop just for this very purpose :-D unfortunately, i overestimated the first cake and had to scoop half of it out again  (but i live and learn! !)

Ice cream scoopin :)

25 minutes in a 170° oven and wallah!

They wouldn't win a beauty contest, but well neither would I :)

There no bad eh? I've got the rest of my frosting left over from last night to use up so that'll get used up when they're cool!

I'm not counting my chickens yet, they might be mingin! But at least they're made :-)

Tonight i pureed my own pumpkin!

Right I'm doing this from my phone so i don't even know if i can post pics BUT tonight i found a method on the Pioneer Woman  to tell you how to puree your own pumpkin.  So i did. Try. 

This is what I'm aiming for...

I roasted it in chunks and then took the skin off. It was awfully watery, which it wasn't in her photo, but I seived it to get rid of the excess. Then i blitzed it in a food processor and drained it some more! Them i looked for something to make it with. 

My pumpkin.

Yesterday i found a Hummingbird bakery book at 2 for  £10 in WH Smith (i got Tom Kerridge too) and in there is a pumpkin roulade thing. 

So its in the oven just now. I'll update when it's out...

Ooh i also started making my Christmas limoncello so that's happily infusing in the cupboard!

Fingers crossed...

Limoncello stage one!

15 minutes later...

The cake's out the oven!  It's a bit pale!

To be fair, the other side looked a bit better!  Well, darker.

Cream cheese frosting...

Unfortunately I forgot that butter wrapper has metal in it, and I put it in the microwave to soften it a bit.  Oops.  

It was a lovely light show though :)

And all for..  Doo doo doo dooooooooo...

IT WORKED!!!!!

Look at all that lovely cakiness!!!

The view from above!

Unfortunately (I should probably get that word on auto-use, I can tell it's going to be used a lot lol) when I attempted to slice it, a lot of the filling squished out the end.  I never understood how people managed to make roulade neatly.  

Anyway, I just scooped up the frosting stuff and shoved it on top!!  It's bloody lovely :D  Even Andrew likes it, and that's saying something!!!

A slice!

An actual bake!!!!  I made that!!  From a book and I didn't even make any of it up!!!  WOOOOO!!!

Ooh i meant to say...

I'm going to the BBC Good Food show in Glasgow on Sunday! I'm right excited!

James Martin at 11 :-) hoping to fill my wee shopping bag full of goodies!!!

The sweet stuff!

Hopefully I haven't bored you to tears yet. 

Now the good stuff.  Starting with...

Fairy cakes.  I think.

These were part one of a 2-part concoction I made for work a few years ago.  I wasn't really into baking much back then, but decided to try these fairy cakes.  The icing was mint flavour and I hoped that the mintiness would seep through into the chocolate of the sponge and be lovely.

It didn't.

If I remember correctly, most of them went in the bin.  It takes a lot for a ward full of nurses to refuse cake.  I managed to make it happen.  Part of the reason was also these...

Mint chocolate truffles

They were vile.  I'm not sure how I could have got it so wrong but, alas, I managed.  They also ended up in the bin.

I did manage to make decent fairy cakes eventually, but the first ones I tried to ice went a bit wrong.  I honestly don't know how people manage to ice cakes well.  I'll do it one day, I hope.

I'm getting to something now that I'm right proud of.  I used Jamie Oliver's Bloomin' Brilliant Brownie recipe as my first ever attempt of brownies.

They. Were. Amazing.

I opted not to use the chopped fruit and nuts that he uses, and instead used even more chopped chocolate in their place.  Best move I ever made. I also took these into work and they were gone within about 20 minutes.  That was when I knew I'd done good :)

Once Blogger allows me to add more photos, you'll be treated to the delights of my first ever attempt of lemon drizzle cake:

The cut off bits from the burnt lemon drizzle cake.

Burnt lemon drizzle cake.

and a pimped-up, giant jaffa cake that looked brilliant but was unfortunately too dry to eat without at least a pint of tea!! 

Also, my rhubarb crumble float.  It moved about a lot in the dish.  It was pretty tasteless.  Looks a wee bit like a map though, don't you think? :)

And a half-decent attempt at scones (as in gone, not as in bone).  As I obviously can't get guidance from mum anymore, I use Mary Berry as my substitute, and she helped me make right nice scones.

Oooh, and the Richard E Grant recipe for sticky toffee pudding that I made at my pal Johanne's house one day (I can't remember the occassion, and I got toffee sauce all over her cooker as I didn't expect it to boil quite as high as it did...)

So that just about brings me to tonight, and the reason this blog started.  Today I attempted to make profiteroles.  I'm sure I've made choux pastry before, but unfortunately todays effort didn't quite work as planned.

They were very flat.  And the caramel didn't quite go to plan.  But on the plus side, I didn't burn myself this time!!  And the pan got to go back into the cupboard, unlike the last attempt where it had to go in the bin!!!

Go me!

And there I shall leave you for tonight.  To whet your whistle, I recently bought the Sweets Made Simple book that was on the telly recently, and I plan to attempt some sort of sweetie soon!  That, and whatever else takes my fancy for my friends and family to devour (or bin when I'm not looking!!).

See you soon,
S
x