Christmas Baking

Today is Christmas Adam, or Christmas Eve Eve if you're boring. Which for me is a very exciting day as you get all the excitement for christmas without the wrapping/cooking/last minute panic shopping (happens to the best of us) stress of Christmas Eve. And every year we have drinks/dinner/some kind of celebration with our various neighbours (one of whom came up with the genius name of Christmas Adam) and usually watch Love Actually and it's just all very christmassy and lovely :)

Anyway, obviously Christmas is a key time for baking and although I rather disappointingly didn't get round to making a gingerbread house I have done rather a lot of Christmas baking. 

I made gluten free christmas cupcakes for my school bazaar using this recipe and just piped melted white chocolate into shapes, left them to solidify on greaseproof paper and put them on top:

We do secret santa at my school and I got my friend Molly, who is one of those people that is extraordinarily tricky to buy for - especially with a £5 budget. I therefore decided my best option was to make gingerbread men and wrap them in a nice box, and they went down very well :)

I used this recipe and then used mixed icing sugar and water into a reasonably thick paste, divided it into bowls and using liquid food colouring dyed each amount a different colour. I piped it onto my biscuits using a small plastic bag with the corner snipped off, although you could also use a piping bag with a small nozzle.

I was asked to make pudding for my friends christmas dinner, and as no one actually likes christmas pudding I thought a yule log was a pretty good plan. However I've since been told that what I made is actually a roulade, not a yule log as it doesn't have icing or branches so, here's the recipe for my very easy christmas roulade:

Birthday Season

Apologies for the lack of posting recently, but it's been birthday season. If you aren't familiar with this phenomenon, let me fill you in. Between September and December, almost every single one of my friends (albeit this isn't a huge figure) gets a year older. Therefore this usually means a large amount of baking. This year however, late in August when my mum realised what was approaching we mutually decided that I would only bake for people I actually liked (in previous years I have got slightly carried away I'll admit) and that whatever I baked had to be preplanned and the amount of time it will take has to be seriously considered (I once spent 12 hours baking... my kitchen/my mums nerves have never fully recovered).

With these rules and regulations in mind, I set to baking. I made chocolate cake with surprise smarties in the middle, various forms of sponge cake and a rather large quantity of Slutty Brownies. However, in all my birthday excitement I didn't take any pictures of these creations... I know I'm a terrible blogger. 

So many many apologies. I will post soon but until then you can still read about the amazing time Rosaline is having at university here (she got 59% in her first essay as well - proud!)

- Ellie x

Armed with cake and wine, she left me...

Saying goodbye to Rosaline was the most ridiculously emotional event that has occurred in my life in a while. Ridiculous because she's only gone to Bristol and I'm going to see her in a few weeks time. Emotional because SHE'S ALL GROWN UP AND MOVING ON WITH HER LIFE AND SHE'S GOING TO MAKE NEW COOLER FRIENDS AND THEN WHO WILL I EAT FROYO AND TALK ABOUT DIFFERENT ICING STYLES WITH?!

Ahem. Sorry. 

Yes, so Rosaline left for Bristol a few weeks ago (apologies for the lateness of this blogging, UCAS ruins lives) and the day before she left happened to be her 19th birthday. Which was a convenient excuse to have a classy get together and weep. In honour of her birthday and her leaving, I made her possibly the best cake I have ever made in my life. Which is not an understatement. Due to our shared love for the infamous chocolate peanut butter combo I scoured the internet for a suitably amazing cake. One recipe kept coming up again and again, however I was reluctant to use it because it contained 'white vinegar'. I know, vinegar in cake... weird. Especially 'white vinegar' which, after much googling, I could only take to mean white wine vinegar... even weirder. But after reading rave review after rave review and about two hours of dithering over the vinegar situation - tears followed by my mum telling me to pull myself together did occur many a time - I decided to take the plunge and bake it.

And thank the lord I did. It was a spectacularly moist, chocolatey, peanut buttery mound of deliciousness and went down extremely well. So well that Rosaline, on taking it Bristol, has made loads of lovely friends and is having a brill time (yes I am taking full responsibility - without my cake she would be nowhere). So if you have a rather large amount of time on your hands (there's a lot of chilling/melting involved) and someone especially important to you to make a cake for, you've hit the jackpot with this one. 

It Finally Occurred

We baked together.

Even though we've shared a blog for almost 7 months, and known each other much much longer, this seemingly rather obvious event has never actually occurred.

So, before Rosaline leaves for Bristol (sob) we decided that enough was enough, and finally, after many empty promises and cancelled dates, we did it.

And it was so much fun!

This momentous event occurred in Rosaline's lovely kitchen (interrupted by the arrival of the new toaster which was very exciting) and after much indecision (obviously, it's us) we decided to go with trusty BBC Good Food and make...

 'The Ultimate Chocolate Cake'

Even for the BBC, that's quite a large claim. In fact, considering the variety of chocolate cake we have both consumed in our lives, it's an enormous claim. 

But OMG did it live up to it's name.

We decided we were officially ADDICTED. It was so gooey and moist (ew ew ew) and delicious that once we'd started we just couldn't stop. (True Fact: Chocolate is marginally addictive. So, err, that's our excuse for glutenous behaviour)

We made this for our Say Goodbye To Our-Only-Follower Polly Party which was, as you can imagine very emotional, (she went to Manchester yesterday; we're sad) and so this seemed an appropriate cake to make. As in, one you're unlikely to forget in a hurry.

And Ultimate Chocolate anything is an appropriate send off really.

Polly seemed appropriately blown away by the whole thing. The champagne candles are optional (but really quite a necessity, we would say)

Pre Bristol Baking

I head off to Bristol very soon , so this afternoon Ellie and I are going to bake together!!

 

Eek I'm excited. And frantically clearing up my kitchen. Ellie has the nicest kitchen and mine is, at present, putting me to shame. My mother is thrilled by this development and thinks that Ellie should come over more often for baking (rather than just for parties and froyo dates which is normally the case) if it makes me tidy up this much.

 

We can't decide what to make (my crippling indecision once again) so watch this space...

 

I'm just off to buy some eggs.

Excitement!!

 

xxx

Slutty Brownies (aka heaven in a baked form)

These are, without a doubt, the easiest yet most delicious brownies ever. Yes ever.

I know what you're thinking - 'Oh but what about my grandmas/aunts/neighbours super secret recipe'... no. Nothing compares to these.

They consist of cookie, oreos and brownie. All in one. All made in under an hour. See? Easy yet delicious. Have I persuaded you yet?

Maybe this will:

I discovered this glorious creation whilst browsing (aka stalking)  The Londoners Blog. She's amazingly classy, cool and, from what I can gather, eats for a living. And she's got an amazing figure. So basically I want to be her (in case you hadn't got that yet). Due to their less than healthy state I'd been debating when was an appropriate time to finally bake them, and the fact that I go back to school again in a few days is definitely a good enough excuse. Speaking of going back to school, ROSALINE GOT INTO BRISTOL!! This is amazingly exciting and I'm so proud of her. However this does mean she's leaving me (but not for like a month yay) and I'm not entirely sure how I'm going to cope. Probably by making and eating many of these brownies whilst quietly weeping into a mug of tea (I'm being slightly overdramatic I realise, it's only like an hour away and I'm planning on regularly visiting). 

So yes, these brownies are possibly the greatest thing you will ever eat (although I slightly overcooked mine) and I highly recommend making them whenever possible. And obviously you can make them from scratch, but the box versions are just as delicious and much easier!

Blueberry Mad

It's official, summer has turned me and my family blueberry mad. There are blueberries everywhere in my house, including the larder because we've now run out of room in the fridge. So as you can guess, due to their short life span, it's becoming quite a challenge to eat them all. Therefore I thought, being the noble and selfless person that I am, I'd try to use most of them up in various baking escapades. My first use of them were in the 'Healthy' Blueberry Muffins however that merely dented the enormous quantity of blueberries, therefore I moved on to bigger and better things in the form of... Blueberry Cheesecake.

Personally, I don't really like cheesecake anymore. This shocking turn of events probably occurred due to the fact that my GCSE Food Tech final product was a cheesecake, and therefore I spent about three months testing every single possible variation on the classic vanilla cheesecake, so I'm slightly cheesecaked out. However I was required to contribute something to a barbecue, and as most people love cheesecake and it's quite a summery dessert I thought it would be the perfect opportunity.

I was er just slightly indecisive in choosing exactly what cheesecake I was going to make and therefore ended up making it the morning of the barbecue, so had to go for a baked cheesecake as there wasn't enough time for a chilled one to set. 

'Healthy' Blueberry Muffins

I know what you're thinking, the words healthy and muffin aren't usually put together. And if they are the result is usually tough and bitter and just generally an unpleasant experience. However, due to the whole summer aka wearing shorts and bikinis ALL THE TIME situation that has suddenly occurred I decided to try and find a solution to the fact that cakes aren't exactly low in calories.

It took a lot of googling, recipe book reading and consultations with my mum before I finally found a recipe that sounded like it could actually taste nice. And it was blueberry muffins, which is always a bonus because who doesn't love a good blueberry muffin?! Especially in summer, with a glass of lemonade and a really good book (even if it is 50 Shades of Grey -yes I'm talking to all you creeps that read it in public - just why?!) 

So I set about to making BBC Good Foods Blueberry Muffins with 'virtually no saturated fat', making a few adjustments along the way.

Chocolate Cake and An Apology

ROSALINE CAME HOME. And then I went away. And then I came home. And she is away again. So I still haven't managed to see her which is very upsetting. However in her absence I baked a lot, mainly to try and do something other than wistfully wish I was also travelling. However I didn't blog about it - dreadful I know - so that's what the apology is for.

But I'm back to my blogging ways in full force, having been inspired by Rosaline's multitude of posts. And trust me, this chocolate cake is worth the wait.

My uncle is one of those lucky people in that whatever he cooks will be absolutley delicious. Especially his chocolate flapjacks. So having been given the daunting task of making his birthday cake, I knew I would have to step outside my comfort zone. He loves chocolate, as most people do (except for those crazy ones- I don't associate with those people) and so after many hours of recipe searching I discovered what I felt was a suitably exciting but not too fancy chocolate cake recipe and so I set to work.

The original recipe calls this 'Moist Chocolate Cake' which although is true, moist is not a very  pleasant word so I would probably replace 'Moist' with Intense, or Delicious, or possibly Extraordinary.

Indecision: every cupcake under the sun.

I am horrifically indecisive. Going out for meals with me is really quite a traumatic experience because everyone else has chosen what they want to eat and are hungry and I take at least half an hour to reach a decision and I change my mind at least six times and then usually go back to my first choice and everyone else sits there getting more and more hungry while I dither. It's the same when it comes to clothes. A hundred outfits later I'm back in the one I started with. It also causes issues when choosing cocktails because they all sound so yummy I can never choose and everyone always complain of dieing of cocktail drought while I dither over the menu and then at some point in the evening I invariably decide that really it's my civic duty to just stop fussing and try them all which normally leaves me with quite a sore head the next day.

So when I arrived home, having dumped my rucksack (never want to see that beast again) had a very long bath and caught up on some sleep, the first thing I did was bake. Well, at any rate, this was my intention. But then I ran up against my usual dilemma: indecision. What to make?? Ohh what to make, what to make. It was hell. Literal hell. All I wanted to do was bake but couldn't for the life of me make a decision as to what I actually wanted to make. Dither, dither. There are just so many possibilities!! And then, as always happens, I got really horrifically (perhaps excessively) stressed about making the wrong decision because what if I make a coffee cake but really the perfect thing to make is macaroons? This was a big issue for the whole choosing a uni debacle. What if I made the wrong decision and the love of my life went to York and I've picked Bristol and then we never meet because I chose the wrong uni and so then I marry someone I don't really love and suffer ten unhappy years of marriage before a messy divorce leaves two kids in a mentally unsound state and myself on the shelf, an old unlovable spinster with six Border Terriers all because I put Bristol on my UCAS form instead of York and oh my goodness isn't life horribly random and stressful and I think I better sit down.

But before I reached this state of frazzled terror because omg fate exists but I might miss it because I catch the wrong bus, I realised that cake isn't one of those life changing, can-only-do-once type of things. You can make endless cake. So that's what I did. I made everything. Well, I made hundreds of cupcakes with hundreds of flavours. My poor mother's very clean kitchen was a total mess. And there she had been, saying she'd missed me.

Basically, I made it up as I went along, randomly choosing ingredients to add to our basic cupcake mixture (http://elliemaybakes.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/less-is-more.html)

I raided the fridge and the cupboards for exciting things to make into exciting flavours. Nothing was left undisturbed. It got sooooo messy it was actually incredible. I suddenly stopped and was like, woah. As I say, my mum was thrilled to have me back.

I multiplied by five (yes, really) the normal mixture - is there a word for multiplying something by five?? I'm feeling there should be, like quadruple, in fact there probably definitely is, but I don't know it so sorry about that. Answers on a postcard please - and then divided it into eight bowls so that all ten flavours had enough mixture to produce six cupcakes.

And then I went insane and added:

One mashed banana and a tablespoon of honey. For some reason (don't ask me why there is probably some very serious science behind it) this took aaaaaaaaaaaages to cook. About double the normal time but I just sort of randomly tested with my trusty skewer as I went along.

A cup of mashed blueberries (also, when I say mashed, I whizzed it with the hand held blender because, as I think I might have mentioned before, I have a lotta love for that thing. But you could totes do it with a fork too. Its just not quite as fun)

A handful of glace cherries (the juice makes the cupcakes really good so use that too! This was my taste testers fave, apparently)

Two tablespoons of coco powder and a handful of chocolate chips. This is quite a lot of chocolate for such a small quantity of cake mix (although, to be honest, measurements were going a bit wayward at this point so it might actually have been more. I was just sort of chucking it in) so it made uber chocolaty cupcakes but no one was complaining

Orange zest, which I then iced with white chocolate ganache. OMG. I thought I might die it was so yummy.

Strawberry jam. I baked some with jam in the mix and some I put jam in once cooked, and then topped with cream. Both were pretty tasty and quite a cool twist on scones with jam and cream. My mum was a big fan at any rate.

A tablespoon of cooled coffee. I love coffee cake strong so I heap up the coffee and use very little water (you don't want to use too much otherwise the mix goes runny and the consistency of the cake goes dodge. You wouldn't want that now, would you?) and then add a teaspoon of cooled coffee instead of milk to buttercream icing.

Peanut butter. OBVIOUSLY. This whole exercise would have basically been a pile of metaphorical poo if peanut butter hadn't entered in somewhere. And then I made Ellie's peanut butter icing too (http://elliemaybakes.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/chocolate-and-peanut-butter-cupcakes.html) because in my opinion there is no such thing as too much peanut butter and so peanut butter flavoured cupcake with peanut butter icing is definitely not peanut butter overload. I unfortunately made wayyyy too much so had the really very traumatic task of eating all the unused peanut butter icing which was really quite scarring. I used crunchy for the cake mix and smooth for the icing. And now I'll stop talking about peanut butter before I actually turn into a jar of peanut butter or something.

A tablespoon of dessicated coconut which, when also used in the icing, made a fab creamy texture to the buttercream and a really nice light flavour because I often think that coconut is too strong a flavour to actually be nice. But that's just my opinion, go mental with the coconut if you want. Totally up to you, which is kind of the beauty of this indecisive cupcake mayhem.

I kept one batch as your basic vanilla cupcake and decorated with your basic buttercream icing. Sometimes a bit of simplicity in a world (ok, kitchen) of chaos is a good thing.

Indecision can sometimes lead to beautiful (or yummy at least) things

Cherry and blueberry

And there you have it. My day in the kitchen was amaaaaaazing and really quite a genius way of solving my indecision. If only all decisions could be solved by just giving everything a go. But no, I think some decisions have just got to be made and stuck with. Fate will totally direct me to the love of my life anyway. I hope. I eternally hope...

Anyway, enough musing on the existence of fate and soul mates, I hope these have inspired you. There's definitely way more to be tried (I've just thought that ginger would be nice, or maybe even fudge and ooh! I wonder what would happen if you put marshmallows in??) so go mental. Think of it as a science experiment: it's all in a good cause.

Just don't expect a tidy kitchen. You have been warned.

Ros xx

I tidied up and arranged flowers so my mum couldn't hate me too much for the mess...

Less Is More

We're not, generally speaking, 'less is more' kind of girls. We like sparkles and sequins and feathers and edible glitter and fairy lights and flowery wall paper and shoes so high we can't walk and multi coloured rainbow cake and cheesy movies that make us cry. But sometimes, just sometimes, less can really be more. Take this simple cupcake recipe, for example. It's classic and yummy and unfailingly reliable and definitely on the 'less' rather than the 'more' end of the scale (although obvs if you're feeling decadent and 'more'-ish it can be added to and jazzed up and smothered in glitter so really it's a win-win recipe). Every girl definitely needs a reliable cupcake recipe in her life, and this is ours.

Look who's back.

Guess who's back-back-back, back again? Ros is back-back-back, tell your friends.

Yes gals and guys, I am BACK. Back from A levels (beyond horiffic, don't talk to me about it. Melt down in philosophy, still not entirely over it. Maybe getting there), back from post A levels recovery (I had a massage. Apparently, I was her most tense customer ever. That is a claim right there and just goes to show what A levels do to you. Yeah, take that Michael Gove), back from UCAS, accomadation choice and university stress and, more sadly, back from interrailing.

We started from Chiswick with our backpacks; Eurostar to Paris (quick crepe stop. I remebered what sugar was in Fench; proud, proud moment); overnight train from Paris to Barcelona; two nights in Barcelona; Montpellier, Marseille, Nice, then on to Italy; Genova (sang the song that the fat guy in The Princess Diaries sings the whole time we were there. Ya know the one. Ok, well I do.) and then 3 nights in Rome. Ohh it was perfect. You'll hear all about it. You'll also hear all about some of the AMAZE food we consumed. Italian pastries are as yummy as there pizza, pasta and ice cream (and based almost soley on cream or custard and we all know my love for dairy products) and I'm totes going to make some. Or try to at any rate.

So get ready for some serious baking because I have missed having a kitchen (hostels have a toaster. Sometimes a microwave. No tea) and am thus planning excessive amounts of cake making. Sadly, my sister is away and she is key to cake consumption (if you saw her though you would tell me I'm lieing. Swear to God I'm not, she just got all the great genes for a superhuman motabilism) so I'm not entirely sure what we'll do with it all but I'm sure we'll cope somehow. We normally do; one moment I think we'll never have room in our kitchen ever again for all the cupcakes on every surface and then SUDDENLY we have loads of room and I'm feeling strangely full. Still have not got to the bottom of the mystery as to how that happens. All very strange.

I've donned my apron already and Radio 4 is on and I can make tea and so I almost don't mind being home. Lesgo.

Hope you're as ready as I am!

Ros xx  

p.s so I sort of decided that because I want to tell the world about my travels because I'm basically not going to be home this summer (I'm going to New York on Saturday!!!!) I would make a blog about that too. Err take a look if you want. Like, only if you're interested. You totally don't have to. But it would make me happy. http://tomorrowfatewillgetonmybus.blogspot.co.uk/

Chocolate and Peanut Butter Cupcakes

Rosaline and I have come to the joint decision that there is nothing better in the world than the chocolate peanut butter combination. Nothing. However the idea of an actual peanut butter cupcake has never really appealed to me so in order to achieve this glorious taste combination in cake form, I made chocolate cupcakes with peanut butter icing which, if I may say so myself, was extraordinary. 

I'd found these a while ago on Bakers Royale and was waiting for the perfect opportunity to make them, although really an excuse wasn't necessary. Due to the fact that Rosaline and Polly(our number one fan) love this combination so much and are currently doing their exams I thought these would be an excellent way of cheering them up. And so I set to baking them.

My mother said they were 'the best chocolate cake she's ever eaten' which is possibly the highest accolade I could achieve. I'd never made chocolate cake with sour cream before but obviously it went down well. 

Jubilee Cakes Part Two

Okay, so although most people celebrated the Jubilee yesterday, it's actually the official Jubilee on Tuesday with the parade and such. Therefore this post could still come in useful... if not you can just look at the cakes.

As Rosaline said, we love the Queen and the Jubilee and just everything about this ridiculously long weekend. And what better way to honour the Queens Diamond Jubilee than with cake. My street had a street party, and although I avoided the cupcake competition (it was full of five year olds which was slightly embarrassing) I did make a cake and lots of little cupcakes as our contribution to the food side of things.

I thought I was being very original with my cake design, but it turns out almost everyone had the same idea. However one can never have too much cake, and it was all eaten by the end of the evening which in my view indicates success.

Diamond Jubilee Cake

Jubilee Week End is here!! Woo. We love the Queen; she’s everything that is great about Great Britain and she colour blocks like a pro.

So to celebrate her diamond jubilee we have gone all out. Like, seriously. We are in our sparkly diamond jubilee element. Why don’t they come around more often?!

Some people think we’re a bit weird. But there is nothing wrong with loving cake and the Queen, people. Nothing wrong at all.

So I’ll keep it short because, errm, I meant to be revising for my history A Level, but the Queens Diamond Jubilee only comes around once and when cake has got be baked CAKE HAS GOT TO BE BAKED and, well, you know, its important to get your priorities right.

So here are my two Union Jack Cakes and Royal Garden Party Cake

Royal Garden Party Cake

Union Jack Cake

Let Them Eat Cake! Oh no wrong Queen... But eat cake anyway

Diamond Jubilee Cake



Just cos we heart her. Look at her colour blocking fabulousness. And she's so cute! I want her as my grandma

Recipe to come I promiseeee but, like I say, I’m a busy girl with revision to do and – ok alright, I’m not fooling anyone: I’m off out to celebrate a long week end and I think that it being a Diamond Jubilee Long Week End warrants wearing as much diamonds/sparkles/glitter as possible.

Have fun, I’m crossing my fingers it doesn’t rain, stay sparkly and God save old Queenie!

Roz

-xx-

Gluten Free Chocolate Cupcakes

Wait! Don't stop reading just because you read the words 'gluten free.' (unless you're coeliac in which case read on!) I know it's tempting, but I promise these are nothing like the gluten free cakes you buy in shops. They're rich, moist (ew) and really quite delicious - almost more brownies than cupcakes.

I'll admit, the challenge of making a gluten free cake scared me at first. I did a ridiculous amount of googling/recipe book trawling before stumbling across what I thought was the perfect recipe. The pictures looked delicious and the reviews were great. However I then read the ingredients.... 'xanthan gum' 'tapioca flour'... these unfamiliar words did make me question what on earth I was letting myself in for but I decided to just go for it.

This attitude changed considerably after discovering that you could only buy said unfamiliar ingredients in health food shops and I'd left it a little late to be health food shop trawling. So after about an hour of near hysteria in Holland and Barrett I did some emergency googling and found a much easier, flourless chocolate cupcake recipe.

They were really easy to make, deliciously fudgy and very well received by gluten-free people and gluten eaters alike.

One Direction Topped Cupcakes (yes, really)

First of all, HUGE apologies for neither of us posting for over a month, I know our faithful follower (hi Polly) was very disappointed but I think our looming exams are a good enough excuse.

However, I realised that staring out of the window and rearranging my desk doesn't actually count as revision so I decided to do something productive and bake not once but twice (don't worry the second bake will be blogged about soon). Our friend Scarlett has been away living the high, exam free, life of a chalet girl for almost five months and she came home a few weeks ago which was extraordinarily exciting! So to mark the occasion, we threw her a surprise party in my basement which, if I may say so myself, was very well executed and (hopefully, she may be lying...) was a complete surprise. 

And what's a surprise party without cupcakes, especially One Direction ones. 

Before you ask, my mum - being the fangirl that she is - bought me the cake toppers for Christmas and I'd been saving them for the perfect occasion.

Possibly the best carrot cake ever

So about 2 years ago, I had to make a healthy cake for food tech (yes I did food tech gcse and yes it's a real gcse don't be rude) and I just googled carrot cake and found this recipe -I justify my eating extraordinary amounts of it by telling myself it's healthy, it's not THAT healthy but sshh - I changed it slightly to fix my brief and then made it in my lesson. Unfortunately I doubled the mixture and then put it all in one deep cake tin, meaning it didn't cook for like an hour and a half which isn't good when your lessons are fifty five mins...
But anyway when it eventually cooked and iced it turned out to be absolutley delicious and somehow became slightly famous and I ended up baking it all the time and even got paid once which was quite exciting.And then I got more and more work and had less money (walnuts are expensive when your mother refuses to pay for ingredients for your 'bloody baking') so I stopped making it as much but it was my friends birthday and she is a big fan so I thought I'd make her cupcake versions, I used the same recipe but just cooked it for a shorter amount of time and if I may say so they turned out rather well :)

First Day of Spring

 Guys!! It’s officially the first day of Spring and, while we do concede that we might be being slightly overoptimistic, today does have a certain Spring-like air about it. We are thrilled!

The sun is shining, blossom is on the trees, there is a vase of daffodils on my table, I’m imagining rabbits with white tails cheerfully hopping somewhere and I for one am wearing my favourite flowery dress.

(One should always be suitably dressed for the occasion, I feel)

Yes, Spring may, might, possibly finallyyy (and temporarily I’m sure) have sprung. And so on this jolly day we welcome all the great things that come with the entrance of Spring. I’m envisaging lamb for lazy Sunday lunches, hotcross buns with melted butter in the morning sun, wearing my new pastel pink blazer, going for premature picnics and eating Easter eggs. Woo!!

So, to celebrate this long awaited day, I thought I’d make something suitably cheerful; Sweet and Simple Strawberry Cupcakes. These are very quick and easy to make, and bring a little extra bit of (sweet) Spring Cheer to today.

This is the first recipe I’ve tried from my newly bought ‘Saved by Cake’, and am so far loving it

Did you think I'd Crumble?

So, I would like to say, before I continue, that I am a sociable and fun loving girl. I really am. Just to prove this to you I’ve drawn up a list of some of my Favourite Activities which include, but are not limited to, drinking cocktails with ‘the gals’, eating sushi with said quotation- ringed gals (in fact, add ‘with the gals’ to the end of most of these),  being the first one to start dancing at a party and the last one to stop, singing very loudly to One Direction while driving with all the windows down, spending unnecessary amounts of time drawing up a list of top five men we’d marry (and ditto for women we’d turn for), trying on sunglasses, pretending to be in ‘Sex and The City’, drinking cider at concerts, going out for breakfast, attending absurdly themed fancy dress parties, having baking days with my best friend when it rains, going mental in the perfume section of Duty Free, riding my brilliant blue bike and painting my nails in the bath before a party.

SEE?!

I’m good fun and I generally go about my business thinking that life should be enjoyed.

But sometimes things can get a bit crap, and when they do, all this pretending to be Carrie Bradshaw can be a bit of an effort, or even, just veryyy occasionally, make things worse.

It was because of this that, a couple of week ends ago, drowning in coursework, suffering a rejection and unable to drink owing to a course of antibiotics for an infected wisdom tooth (don’t even ask. Seriously. My actual life) I spent Saturday night watching the best of 1970s disco on BBC 4 with my mother. It was literally one of the most enjoyable ways to spend a Friday night!! Seriously, no word of a lie, I LOVED IT. (And this is why you needed to be reminded that I am normally a little bit cool and sociable and vaguely 18 year old-ish). We got so into the whole 70s disco thing. So clearly, just that first twang of Gloria Gaynor had us singing along. (Maybe shrieking/howling/caterwauling if you’re asking the neighbour. Whichever.) By the time we’d reached the chorus fists were in the air.

It was all most enjoyable, and a reminder that shit happens; you will occasionally feel utterly depressed; you will, from time to time, get the impression that some higher being is conspiring against you to make it all as difficult as possible; you will every so often feel completely powerless and you will sometimes feel like giving up and going to hide under your duvet with a tub of Ben & Jerry’s and the Downton Abbey boxset as your only companion. But – without wishing to sound overly Disney – life goes on. Gloria was on the money; yeah, you will survive. Totally. Girl Power!! Woo. Ahem. Anyway.

We went to bed wholly empowered.

Life was still looking a little bit grey when I woke up the next morning. It was raining and spring still had not bloody sprung.

Meh.

Even Muffin (my old and normally very much cheerful Border Terrier) looked miserable.

So I decided that what the Williams household needed was something yummy and homely, which fills the soul with a little spoonful of warmth and that reminds me of childhood and baking with my mum in the holidays.

There was clearly nothing more fitting/worthy for this role than the humble Apple and Blackberry Crumble.

This lovely little pud is simple and cheerful and rather like a cup of tea in the way that it never fails to make me feel that little bit more human.

(Especially with custard. Yum.)

I used Sophie Dahl’s Voluptuous Delight (which, is AMAZE. I love her. I want to BE her. Total girl crush. It might be getting out of hand. She’s so great and jolly) but I took out the oats from the topping. Does a Classic Crumble have oats in the topping? Errm, no, I think not. (No offence Soph. I love you in every other respect. Sorry).

Not very adventurous but still delicious chocolate chip biscuits

Typically I suppose these would be called cookies, but I try very hard to say biscuits most of the time because I'm English and that's what they're called. The Social Services Team at my school sent out a pleading email for biscuits for their fundraising event and, as I reaaaaally want to be on the team next year and I love baking, I thought I'd make some for them. 

I had all sorts of plans but homework and life got in the way so I decided on these simple but delicious biscuits that I seem to make far more often than necessary. I also made them on Pancake Day, and then gave chocolate up for lent so it meant I couldn't actually eat any other than the one slightly misshapen one that I decided to eat as soon as it came out of the oven and promptly burnt my tongue, not a good plan. 

They're really easy and quick to make, and you can just chuck any sort of chocolate in there. I used Cadburys Large Buttons for these.

Chocolate Diet Coke Cake

I have a friend who's obsessed (aka addicted) to Diet Coke. I can't remember the last time I saw her without a bottle and so I thought it would be perfect to make her a Diet Coke themed (it's not actually Diet Coke flavoured, I looked into that and it all seemed a bit bleurghh) birthday cake. Although locating a cake tin that wasn't round in my overflowing baking cupboard was slightly harder than expected, I thought the cake turned out rather well :)

Insanity is just another word for interesting...

We totally believe that being insane is great. If we only did sane things, we’d have nothing of any interest to tell our grandchildren, and so it’s for this reason (and maybe a tiny bit to do with the fact that Lady Gaga exists) that we think that surrounding ourselves with insanity is definitely the way to go. We’ve got so good at this whole insanity thing that we’re beginning to forget what sanity actually is…(I’ve just raised a perplexing philosophical dilemma when I’m meant to be talking about cake. That right there is the power of baking.)

So when my Most Insane Friend celebrated the fact that she had managed to reach the age of 18 without any major mishaps (chipping her tooth on a toilet, nearly getting run over on the M25 to save the battered pair of Converse she’d left on the roof of her dads car and falling in love twice merely counting as minor incidents) by throwing a party with a ‘My Favourite Thing’ theme, I for one was one hundred percent behind the idea.

Her list of favourite things was diverse and extensive and, some complained, slightly difficult to pull off in fancy dress, but, the Australian Accent, the platypus, the semi-colon and puns (yes, I genuinely quote) being some of her favourite things is probably why I love her. She did concede that maybe her theme was slightly ego-centric, but, really, who cares? All the best people are. (Oscar Wilde wouldn’t have been half as great if he hadn’t thought he was the literal bees’ knees).

So, once I had examined the list and decided that I would be attending as a seventies protester (burnt bra and all) I turned my attention to The Cake. I show my love for people by baking; we one hundred percent believe that homemade cake is literally love on a plate. I therefore wanted to show my Most Insane Friend that I love her… I needed a cake which put her insanity, and my love for aforementioned insanity, into cake form. I went through various options before settling on a four layer rainbow cake. It seemed appropriate.

Union Jack Vanilla Sponge

It was my friend Zoe's birthday, and she has a crazy obsession with union jacks so I thought I'd make her a heart shaped union jack cake:

Hello :)

So we've decided to record our eventful and sometimes successful attempts of baking and share them with you, we hope you enjoy them and wish us luck! Love Ellie and Ros x