Early Friday Cake

This past friday was the last early friday that our year organised, from now on it has been handed over to the 3rd years who will see it through into next year. We raffled tequila bottles for each major, obviously printmaking was the best, who wouldn't want a tequila bottle cast in concrete?! anyway, i made this cake for the last early friday, im practicing my icing skills now. (thanks Glenda for the see through icing gun, its earning its keep!) it was quite big and quickly polished off. a chocolate buttermilk cake never survives for long in any situation.

Cinnamon pinwheels

A yummy and lightning quick recipe for any left over scraps of instant puff pastry you may have.

take a rectangle of the pastry, the thickness doesnt really matter. 

sprinkle generously with cinnamon and castor sugar, 

roll the pastry up into a long sausage

chop roll into 1-2cm sections

position them on pan

brush the tops with melted butter

put in a moderate oven until tops brown

melt a few tablespoons of honey in the microwave, pour over hot pinwheels

shake the pan around so that the pinwheels get covered with the honey

fend off hungry bystanders until the pastries cool

eat and enjoy

Toffee shards

These shards are very hard burnt sugar pieces. they are the debris from my gingerbread and sugar window panes ive been churning out for my exhibition on the 16th of november. maybe the artist Zander Blom should start using sugar in his models? its a pleasure Zander, anytime.  

when life hands you lemons... make lemonade!

so thats what we did. 

i baked some interesting biscuits, the experimental kind, not the give-to-your-neighbour kind. and we exchanged them with a neighbour for a basketful of lemons!

alex squeeze their juices out and i mixed up the lemony syrup.

Hard toffee gone soft

alex eyeballing the setting toffee

i realised something was afoot once i had lovingly cut the toffee into neat squares, put them in an airtight container  and they all decided to squidge themselves back together!

Balls of toffee awaiting a chocolate coat: so they were rolled into balls and coated in dark chocolate and cocoa powder, and made more yummy.

there are no pictures of the finished chocolates, they were gobbled up before i had a chance to snap a photo of them.

the recipe for a hard chewy toffee will follow shortly but you have to be careful exactly how long you boil it for or it will end up softer then expected!

but still delicious like the photos you see here

Chocolate cake with marshmallow icing

this buttermilk cake was iced with marshmallow icing due to circumstances,
cocoa was used to stencil the pattern ontop. We dug out this pretty stencil from the depths of the recipe book cupboard.
(recipes will follow when i get round to it, sorry)