Baked & Delicious

Vanilla Cupcakes from first edition of the Baked & Delicious magazine

First stop: Vanilla Cupcakes!

Baked & Delicous Vol 1

 

Fancy a spot of bank holiday baking?

My bread ready for the oven with visible Rosemary sprigs

Over the bank holiday period I decided that it would be fun to make my own bread.  I was really feeling for some fresh bread and began trawling the internet for ideas.  I stumbled upon a recipe for Rosemary Focaccia bread which really tickled my taste buds and I thought would challenge me a little.

Why, oh-why did I choose to make this bread?  It is not that the bread was extremely difficult to make. More the fact that the whole process took almost 6 hours!  Yup that’s right, 6 hours and that’s a whole load of hours to wait for anything.

I am always a little apprehensive when making bread as I don’t want to see it go wrong.  This time, I thought that I would put the experimentation aside, making sure that I have all the ingredients and followed the recipe to a T.

Is there anything more delicious than the smell of fresh bread from the oven?   There was no exception with this bread either. You could especially smell the rosemary in the bread which was so fragrant.

The taste I cannot even describe. It was aromatic, fluffy, salty and olive oily.  It tasted like a pizza base, I loved it and would recommend the recipe!

Just Out Of the oven Rosemary Focaccia Bread

 

 

It’s Boo Boo’s Birthday!

 

It was my nieces first birthday a couple of weeks back for which I was asked to make a chocolate cake ‘Only’ for the adult guests.  Ooh, I love making chocolate cake.  I especially enjoy using this particular recipe, taken from a  book I bought a couple of years ago, by Tessa Kiros .  Again, like with all recipes, I only use it as a guide.  I like to experiment with the ingredients, this time  by adding dark rum! mmmmmmmm….

Strawberry Cheesecakes

The cake turned out light, fluffy and really moist.   The added extra of dark rum really worked with the Lyndtt dark chocolate and made the cake seem that  little bit more grown-up.  I split the cake and added Chantilly Creme which is a mixture of whipped double cream and icing sugar.  I covered the cake with an improvised, yet delicious, chocolate butter cream recipe of dark chocolate, cocoa powder, golden syrup, clarified butter and solid butter.

Err, is it just me, but every time I make butter cream icing, I seem to always end up with little butter specs left in the mixture!  I think people are starting to think that it is deliberate as it always happens.  Help!!!!

 

Not for the faint hearted Chocolate Cake

There is actually a cake board under all that chocolate. However I did transfer the cake onto a bigger board which wasn’t too difficult or too messy.

 

 

 

 

 

 

I was on a roll that night and thought that I would make a few more goodies for all to enjoy.  This included two baked strawberry cheesecakes and a big batch of chocolate and raspberry brownies.

Dangerous Chocolate and Raspberry Brownies