Ichigo Hearts

My dear friend Michelle and I made these a while ago and they were a huge success, I didn't get to take a proper picture though which is a shame! Ichigo is japanese for strawberry and its a nice sounding word so I decided to call them 'Ichigo Hearts'.

Anyway...

First of all we baked a flat sponge and used a heart cutter to get all of the hearts and even shape. Then we made strawberry cream cheese (highly addictive due to its yummyness) and sandwiched them together. The icing on top was a mix of strawberry, icing sugar and white chocolate. Nom.

We then abused the icing pens as you can see, These make a wonderful Valentines gift and they're very fun to make.

Please excuse the messy picture. They were devoured too fast for me to get a decent one...

My first attempt at making a yule log!

I remember a few months back I watched 'The Great British Bake Off' and they were making swiss rolls (or roulades...I forget) at first I thought 'WHY U BREAK THE ROLL. ITS EASY' After today I eat my words. Very difficult to get right but I'm very pleased with the outcome!
I mixed everything together and instead of taking my bull in a china shop approach I actually decided to take time and be delicate. In the oven it went for 10 minutes and then I let it cool down, things are going a little too well for my liking! 
So I made my Brandy cream up and put some aside to put in the roll, and some in the chocolate buttercream. As I unrolled the log, it sprung back nice and according to plan, on goes the brandy cream...THEN IT DECIDES TO BREAK. 
Oh its not easy is it?


How I am cursing. but still, I carried on knewing I would totally drown it in buttercream anyway. So then I began the decorating! funfun! I layered the logs (I cut it in half) with chocolate brandy buttercream and got out my fork, gently scoring down the cream to create a tree effect (it looks AWESOME right now) then goes a sprinkle of icing sugar and white chocolate. Done. 
I'm very proud of this. It did break, but it looks more like a log now....

Christmassy baking!

As its Christmas I wanted to get all festive and spend my day off baking yummy things!

I spent the morning making gingerbread cupcakes! Oh what a success they were! I looked through my cookbook and realised I didn't have cinnamon or nutmeg so decided to add triple the amount of ginger. I also found 3 blocks of chocolate, 2 dark and 1 white. So a cube of dark chocolate was pushed inside each of the cupcakes to add a nice surprise to the person eating them!

They turned out much better than expected, considering I made up the recipe as I went along, now time for the buttercream....

The buttercream was originally supposed to be plain vanilla, but I decided to add my own touch to that too and threw some brandy cream and more ginger in it, finishing it off with a sprinkle of white chocolate.

Beauuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuudeeeeful. If I do say so myself...

First ever attempt at macaroons!

Right. They may look like scones or ice cream but they are ACTUALLY macaroons...I need to work on this I think. It was a nice easy recipe but left me wanting to tear my hair out as I read instructions on the internet such as 'LEAVE THE OVEN DOOR AJAR WHILST BAKING THESE LOL.' I did this and the first batch looked like frisbees. Nice one. Second batch I decided to bake in cupcake cases. Which as you can see was more of a success but they don't really resemble macaroons...
Anyway.
The filling is crushed rasperries and the macaroon itself is strawberry flavoured due to my allergy and massive dislike to almonds.
Enjoy having a giggle at these pictures. They do taste rather noice though I must say.

Crunchie cake

This cake was an absolute beast, So much fun to make though! It included 12 mini Crunchie bars which I smashed to pieces using my trusty rolling pin. I made a chocolate fudge cake and added larger chunks of Crunchie to the sponge mix, a light dusting in the middle of the cake on top of my homemade chocolate buttercream and on top of the cake. I'm proud of this cake because this is the first time my cake has come out of the oven completely flat! Yey!


This was made for a birthday and was a great success! 

Chocolate Swirl Cupcakes

I had a bit of cream cheese left over from yesterdays red velvet cake, so I took this opportunity to make something else. I found my recipe for chocolate fondant cupcakes and decided it'd be a good idea to split the cream cheese into two bowls and make one part chocolate cream cheese. This was so I could then put it in the piping bag and make it go all swirly. Error. I forgot about it not being to thick so it didn't keep its shape- though it looks nice and marbally now. 

Red Velvet Cake!!

Quite possibly my favourite recipe, even if it does involve a shocking amount of red colouring, I've had a long battle with this recipe, never managing to get the cake to actually go red or it go bright red only for me to realise I forgot the cocoa powder which meant I had just made a big ol' red vanilla cake. Fail. My only problem this time was the cream cheese frosting. Tasted delicious BUT I'm still having problems with it not being thick enough! Here is my cake, I took it to my boyfriends. It was devoured.