Monday 31 October 2011

Creepy cupcakes

As it's halloween, and I haven't baked anything special for it, I thought I'd use the occassion to show off some pictures of my hen party.  Except, it wasn't a hen party actually. Ian and I have quite a lot of shared friends so we decided to have a joint hen and stag party, or a hag party.

I wanted to do cupcake decorating and decided I'd force Ian to do it too! He wasn't the only guy dragged along, and they all decided to team up and have a zombie cupcake competition. I'm not sure the cupcake lady was expecting this kind of turn of events, but she seemed to really like the finished results, and they guys all seemed to have a nice time.
Here are some of their cupcakes. 
 
 


This post would have more pictures, but my internet is down, and not wanting to miss halloween for this post, I'm using the internet on my phone and it's unbearably slow.

Wednesday 26 October 2011

Baking Wedding Vow

Now, I didn't actually make this vow on my wedding day in front of all my guests. But I did vow it to Ian in private and I am intending not to break my vow. I vowed to bake something for him every month. That was it - there were no rules about whether he got to choose what I baked or if it had to be sweet or savoury (I imagine it will always be sweet though),

We got married on the 13th, so I reckoned I had until the next 13th to bake. I put it off, because I was too busy looking for enough clothes for a 16 night cruise. Then I realised that it was almost cruise time, and I'd not baked a thing. So, my plans for a cherry pie went out the window (I didn't have a pie dish and I had no time to pit all the cherries)  so I fell back to my ultimate cookie recipe and made white chocolate chip cookies so that we wouldn't waste anything when we left the next day for our cruise because we could freeze the leftovers. 

I sent Ian out for white chocolate chips. This, I have decided, is fine.  My vow, afterall, was not 'I must bake something for Ian every month and not force him to run errands related to it.' Ian returned without chocolate chips, but with white chocolate buttons instead, so I spent 5 minutes just breaking the damn things in half!


I used one of my measuring cups (think it's a quarter one) to make little discs of cookie dough, baked about 8 and open froze the rest on the quick freeze shelf of my freezer. I then wrapped them in clingfilm and put them in a 'in case of emergencies' box in the freezer. The cookies were yummy as usual, but I always seem to cook them too long.  I know that I'm meant to take them out when they're still uncooked looking, but I can't seem to let myself do it!


I'm afraid there is no picture of the finished article because we ate them all before I took a photo. Just imagine the ones in my other blog post, but crunchier. 


Tuesday 18 October 2011

Back to blogging

I've been gone 7 months. I'm ashamed. I didn't mean for it to happen, but I was away for good reasons. I married a wonderful man, and pulled off an amazing wedding that had everything I wanted, done the way I wanted it, and then I relaxed for 16 blissful nights on a very large boat in the med. The prep for a wedding didn't leave much time for baking, but I didn't manage a few things for key events, and I certainly ate out. I have plenty to write about - I could write ten blog posts about the cruise food alone. But for this post, I just want to post something, to get my motivation back and so that it doesn't say 'march' on the top of my blog anymore.