Macarons

First attempt at macarons. Used the recipe from Tartelette. Worked quite well. made a filling from creame fresh, sugar, a bit of lemon juice cos I put to much sugar in and some rose oil.. tasted like turkish delight. Think it was a good first attempt, possibly should have whipped the egg a touch more so they were a bit less flat. I want to experiment with other more stable fillings as I would like to make several batchs so we can fill the cake stand in the previous post and serve them at the next maelstrom event.

Yoink

Yoink - to aquire an item of friends or family that they had sitting around which you feel would be better off living with you.

In this case a cake stand which did belong to Tom's sister.

It is actually a lot closer to the colour of the kitchen units than it seems in the picture, possibly one shade different at most but the shiny cupboard compared to the matt finish on the cake stand combined with a flash changed the colour balance quite a lot. The colour of the cake stand is the more accurate one.

It will come on roleplaying events with us to hold biscuits and flapjack and the like and also be used at home i am sure. I think i need to get or make one to go with it which has flat layers too so we can have cupcakes and the like which would do less well in the basket style this one is..

Plum and Walnut bread

Got a couple of punnets of plums from the market at closing time so they were going cheap. I was going to make banana bread but the bananas were to far gone even for that so i decided to use Plums.

Found this recipe so tried it using Dove Farm gluten free flour.

Very nice. the texture was a bit crumbly and it's really a teabread/cake. cake itself is fairly sweet but the plums added a tartness to it and the walnuts added texture.