cakes

Small one finishes nursery on Friday and has his forth birthday party on the Saturday. It is traditional for them to take sweets in for the remaining kids on the last day but I want to do something for the staff as well so plan to do chocolate brownies, which will be gluten free as they come out as good if not better than gluten ones.

I also have THE birthday cake to make. Sponge not fruit cake as he isn't keen on fruit cake which means I have less time to play with as I can't start days in advance. He wants pooh, piglet and tigger on it otherwise he hasn't specified so I could probably get away with the three figures on the top of a normal cake and it would be easier as he also said he wanted strawberries on it. However that seems rather boring to me so I am currently planning to do Pooh's house (which is a door in the roots of a tree stump on a mound) with the three of them standing or sitting on a log outside. Basic idea is round cake with a chuck of the side cut out and piled on top. shaped a bit so it looks like a tree stump on a mound then cover in icing, mould tree roots, door etc in more icing and cover the rest in spiky soft icing to look like grass. Make figures from fondant and log either from fondant or choc mini rolls. It may have strawberries round the base if he insists.

I used to do a lot of decorated cakes but that was 15-20 years ago so I'm a bit rusty. Keep fingers crossed it works. I'm fairly sure the figures will be fine so fall back is a new cake with strawberries. cream frosting and the figures on top.

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.

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.

Cheesecake

Experimenting with Cheesecake as himself promised to make one for work and there is at least one gluten free person there.

That said there is really only the base that needs changing. This one is a biscuit base with a cooked top. Looks great though very homemade, partly cos the tin is very old so i lined it to stop sticking.

Looks great. tastes OK.

The base was nice though I couldn't really taste the cinamon even though it looked loads when we put it in. Biscuits were a GF rich tea which worked well. The top was nice but a little bland. Texture good though so should be easy to improve the taste by adding a little more lemon or some vannila or similar.

Flutterby Cakes

We, as in the small one and me, made these last week but I forgot to upload them.









Recipe from the Big Cook, Little Cook cookbook, made with Dove farm gluten free plan flour (plus Baking powder) .

Very nice they were too.

Pumpkin and Noodles

I got given some pumkin by a friend yesterday which is not something we have really used much so we decided to try soup. I cooked off some onion, pumpkin and garlic in a little oil, added some fresh curry paste and then covered it all with veg stock and let it cook down. When everything was soft I thought I'd add some rice noodles to make it a little more substantial. What actually happened is the noodles soaked up all the liquid and we ended up with noodles in pumpkin sauce.

Worked really well and I couldn't have come up with it if I tried ! Probably helps that the pumpkin has flavour this time unlike the only other time I tried. Moral of that story is the ones they sell in the super market to carve may look similar but they are not woth eating!

Stilton Soup

We have a lot fo food left from an event we ran at the weekend. As usual there is lots of some things and nothing of others. One thing we have lots of is stilton, not sure why they bought so much but hey. So what to do with silton, baring in mind most here arn't that keen on it.

I decided to try this stilton and walnut soup recipe and it was really good. Tom loved it too. Not to agressive as they can be but still defiently silton taste. We ate it with drop pancakes becouse they were nice and quick. Look wise very bland but taste was great.