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.