The Big Bake

Baking lots of gingerbread and jammy empire biscuits for the students sitting in at UCL.

Nine photos under the cut...

Baking

Chocolate, rosemary and olive oil loaf. I got the recipe from here.

More Truffles

Been making choc truffles again...

Peppermint Plops

Hugh Fearnley-Whittingsticks, your peppermint cream recipe doesn't work.

Snickers Cake

'Peanut Butter and Chocolate Stack', bought at Tiki Cafe, Finchley Road.

This is half the stack. Unlike a Snickers bar, it contained crumbled up wafer bits. It was delicious but it did make me never want to eat chocolate ever again, or at least not for the rest of the day.

Marzipan Menagerie

I got these for my birthday, they came from Patisserie Valerie.

13 photos under the cut...

Christmas 2009

Stained Glass Biscuits

These didn't work out quite as well as I'd hoped, but they were only a first attempt. They're a basic biscuit recipe, and you cut out holes inside each biscuit. Into the holes, you sprinkle crumbled up boiled sweets, and they melt to look like glass. They're not very tasty, but they do make pretty tree decorations.

My mum (who's better at this sort of thing than me, hers are much more attractive) puts a hefty helping of salt in the recipe to make the biscuits last better. A batch had just come out of the oven when her neighbour came over, and the neighbour said, 'Mind if I try one?' and popped it in her mouth before my mum could say, 'They're not for eating!'

My main problem was finding the right sized cookie cutters -- hours and hours of futile searching round the shops -- and then I couldn't find any boiled sweets that weren't diamond-hard. I bought Fox's glacier fruits and could barely even break them with a hammer. But there comes a point with this sort of thing at which you've invested so much effort in getting together all the equipment and ingredients that you can't possibly give up, otherwise your whole day will've been entirely wasted. So, stained glass biscuits: achieved (sort of).

Nutmeg Biscuits

They're a cross between Viennese whirls and custard creams, sprinkled with grated nutmeg. They're very small because a little one goes a long way.

Marmite Bites

I tried out this recipe for Marmite bites. No photos of them (snaffled up too quickly) but here's the picture of the recipe page which @violetcreme sent me.

The Perfect Lunch

The perfect lunch for a summer afternoon (sausages with bubble and squeak at the S&M Cafe) and a new purse from a shop in Spitalfields.

Fiona and Macaroons

Birthday drinks for Fiona, with my mate Chris. We gave her macaroons from Yauatcha.

Chocolate Truffles

 13 photos under the cut...

I tried a chocolatey recipe from the book Cook Yourself Thin, which is full of delicious things.

Oat and Raisin Biscuits