BB vegetable pot pie

I'd never made or eaten a pot pie before.. yup im one of those... but i was exicited to make this (even with its licorce ness)
I only made half the recipe of filling and dough and had enough for 3 portions so there is still one pie sitting in the fridge. i was amazed at how creamy this was despite having no cheese.. yum!

TWD Pumpkin muffins

This week i felt a bit more like pumpkin cupcakes, so I omited the raisins and nuts and frosted them with some ginger cream cheese icing.. fabulous.

These baked up really easy and I even used my own pumpkin puree (it seems impossible to find it in cans in the UK!)

TWD Lenox Almond Biscotti

This week's recipe was delayed as my oven decided to explode during the self cleaning cycle! Glass was replaced today and I decided.. or rather was spurred on by the fact that I had no almond extract to make two different flavors to the recipe a lemon poppyseed (where I added 2 tsp lemon extract and 1 T poppyseeds.

The second flavour was 'Christmas' themed.. with dried cranberries, 1 t orange extract, chocolate chips, and pistachios

In both flavors I put flaked almonds.

I dipped some of the lemon poppy seed ones in white chocolate.. they were great!

I found my dough mix very stiff, like proper cookie dough, and the cornmeal was hardly tastable.. maybe people who found it too grainy had very coarse grind??

I had mine with chai tea.. Yum!

Finishing the cake

The finished product was a lot of time in making! After making the cake on friday night I decided to make a basic buttercream from the Cake bible and try and play around with some white chocolate buttercream and making a kiwi buttercream..


First off the 'basic' buttercream. This recipe was based on egg yolks and since we have our own hens it was a really bright yellow crumb coat.. I did puree and sieve a bit of kiwi and mixed that into enough to put in between one of the layers (I torted my two cakes) so with four layers I ended up with 2 plain butter cream, 1 white chocolate and 1 kiwi buttercream (I wasn't so sure kiwi was so great.. maybe I should be 'experiementing' in cupcake sizes.. not 9"!!)



The white chcolate buttercream came from the cake bible as well and was a very easy recipe with only 2 ingredients, however required some substancial messign about with whisking and chilling and taking off chill.... needless to say the first attempt went from thick liquid to whisk stuck solid in reformed chocolate... Whoops! so i tried again and with the aid of a hand mixer (my wrist couldn't hold out much longer) finally got it made, but once on the cake realized it was only going to cover the top and 1/2 way down the sides!.. i should of taken a picture of this, but was so stressed out with a hairdryer trying to get it all to come together!



I left it there until today and made some 'simple' buttercream which i tinted very pale green (for kiwi) and did a baskeweave and cornelli with a 'message'. my first time for both...

I'll let you know how it tastes! ---Its Delicious.. rich like a wedding cake!

White Chocolate Craving

i was eating a kiwi earlier this week and thinking wow, this would be so good as a layer of filling in a cake.. a white chocolate cake. So turning to the Cake Bible (really its called that!) I picked out velvet white choclate cake or something titled like that.. I'm still debating the icing, filling etc, but that's all for tomorrow!
Here's some pics of the baking of the cake. The batter started out quite chunky, but then...

TWD: Carmel Peanut Topped Brownie Cake

I've just joined Tuesdays with Dorie and missed this weeks entry as I didn't get my book from Amazon until Wed. Neither I or my BF were particually excited about the carmel peanut cake, but I decided to make it Thursday night anyway.. I'm really glad I did!

I decided to only make a third of the recipie for both cake and carmel topping. I baked it in a deep 4 inch pan and got a nice slim layer of brownie.

This was my first time making caramel and I was a bit afraid of what might happen reading other's comments. I'm not sure what happened but I made this perfect the first time! Maybe it was my smaller amount of ingredients in a big 2 qt saucepan, or maybe it was just the fact i had the sugar and water /corn syrup sitting in the pan ready to go while the cake baked and cooled.. I dunno but carmel is cool. I think I would name this candy bar cake, while the BF says its a Snickers cake.. in anycase it was good, but i'm glad I only made a 1/3 as I'm already onto another baking project!

Re- Kindling childhood

The Last time I got excited about things it was the idea that I could re-live some of my childhood by tracking down and making the character cakes I had as a kid. I remember there was a lady in our neighbourhood that did cakes on the side and each year we would pick them up and the sheer impact to see all that color on a cake.. and a cake that was whatever my current favorite toy as well.. sheer bliss!

here is my first re-creation.... Any guesses?!