Go me!

I’m a good cook, but I’m not great at baking. And I’m lousy at pastry.

however, inspired by this recipe which claimed to be “easy flaky pastry”, I thought I’d give it a go.

I had to get perlmonger to come and grate for a while - it was hard work. But *I* rolled out the pastry, and rolled out the sausage meat, and brushed it all with eggy stuff, and put it in the oven, and baked them. And they were *gorgeous*.

The sage plant in the garden had died, so I made do with some rosemary, and a hefty grating of nutmeg.

Go me, I think. And we only ate three - the rest have gone in the freezer.

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Stepford Wife

Today, I have been mostly baking. I made a fabulous gruyere and cracked peppercorn bread. Or, at least, it would have been fabulous had I had a decent loaf tin instead of the ancient old things I use. It wasn’t quite cooked through, but we toasted it, and it was delicious.

And I made some shortbread bikkies, and cut them out with my festering xmas tree and star cutters. And I made some walnut shortbread, and cut them out ditto, except the recipe said to leave the dough in the fridge for half and hour,and I left it in there for about 5 hours, and had to soften it all up again. But they’re out of the oven now, and they’re gorgeous. I’m going to bung a bit of icing and some glittery balls [fnaar] on the shortbreads tomorrow.

Tomorrow - marzipan the cake, have a bash at sausage rolls {dear god - pastry; I can’t do pastry …), maybe some banana muffins.

I got Pete to drive me up to the Kitchen Shop this afternoon (I can’t park the Thaab, try as I might) and bought two new loaf tins, and another heavy duty baking tray - now I’m doing lots of this stuff, I want better quality tins, cos it makes all the difference.

And we called in at the local off licence on the way home and picked up 26 bottles of wine (including some vintage Pelorus - hurrah, and some pink fizz just for kalunina. There are six assorted bottles of fizz on the top row of the wine rack, which should do us through to next year.)

Now I’m sitting here while perlmonger cooks me a lump of Dexter steak before settling down to the X-Factor (which the Tivo is recording.

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yum

We had homemade walnut bread for lunch.

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fancy a slice

of a Discworld cake?

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pastry …

Pastry and I … we don’t get on. At all. I can barely manage with bought pastry, and if I try to make it myself it’s a disaster.

I’ve tried everything - food processor, mixer, by hand. It all goes grey and shrinks, and is as unappetising as you might imagine.

I’ve been hunting for one of these for a while, and found it at Lakeland [warning: do not go here unless you are of strong will-].

I used it once, and I don’t think it’ll work. I’ve just fetched it out to make some rock buns, and the handle had worked a tiny bit loose, and I didn’t feel comfortable with it. Pete has tightened its nuts (as it were) with his Leatherman mole grips and we’ll see how it goes.

And the rock cakes have just come out of the oven. They *smell* nice, anyway.

[edit] they taste nice too, but they’re not rock buns as I remember them.

Is it me, or is it my oven? [sigh]

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victoria sponge redux

Well, I tried it again. I used the right size tins, I checked that the oven was the right temperature with a thermometer, I even softened the butter Just In Case.

And still, my cake was more like a biscuit. An uncooked biscuit at that.

My sponge making days are over. Gloom.

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I’ve never been much cop at baking

But for some reason, in the past week or so I’ve been making some cakey things. I started with carrot and cinnamon muffins (delicious), then did some espresso flavoured cup cakes (also delicious).

Then, fired up with confidence, I decided to make a sponge. A SPONGE. How hard can it be?, I asked myself. I found a recipe in Nigella’s How to be a Domestic Goddess. I rummaged in the back of the saucepan cupboard and found a brace of 6″ sponge tins. I rummaged in the bottom drawer in the kitchen and found the pre-cut cake tin liners (cut them myself? Are you mad?).

Then, in accordance with the recipe, I preheated the oven to Gas 4, tipped all the ingredients in the Magimix, bar the milk, whizzed them all up, and then added the milk. I did think the ingredients looked a bit - well - odd, but I got Pete to check them. Then I poured the mixture into the sponge tins, set the timer for 25 minutes and went off to watch Doctor Who.

And never heard the timer … so they had 35 minutes instead of 25. But they weren’t burned, and hey had risen quite enthusiastically, and the skewer was clean, so I left them in their tins for a bit to cool as instructed, then turned them out. Then, a bit later, I spread one of them liberally with rhubarb and ginger jam, sandwiched them together, and triumphantly cut us a slice each.

And it wasn’t cooked through. On re-reading the recipe, Nigella uses *8″* tins, not 6″ ones. Stupid woman.

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good grief …

Ladies and gentlemen

I give you

The cheese wedding cake.

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christmas cake eggstravanza

Originally posted in my LiveJournal 19 dec 2005

So … I weighed out the ground almonds, the whole nuts (whizzed briefly in the food processor), the mixed tropical fruit, the sultanas, the blueberries and cranberries, the dried apricots. I rummaged in the back of the cupboard for Cointreau and Amaretto.

I beat 225g of butter with 225g of caster sugar and 1 tsp of Madagascan vanilla essence.

I added one egg.

Then I added another egg … and *as I cracked it* I realised it was bad, but it was too late - it was on its way into the Kitchenaid. Pete heroically dealt with the revolting sugary sulphury mess, while I washed everything up.

Then I found more butter, more sugar, more vanilla essence and started again. This time I did what I usually do - but inexplicably didn’t the time before - and broke the eggs into an intermediate container, but of course they were all fine.

The cake? Well, I’m not very happy with it to be honest. I think I might go and [whisper] buy one from Waitrose …

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