Did you know that Jamie Oliver has teamed up with Moshi Monsters favourite character Furi to inspire young budding chefs around the world to get into the kitchen and learn how to cook? The duo have been cooking up a storm in Jamie’s kitchen to create a delicious Butternut Squash Muffin.
Hidden Easter Egg Chocolate Truffles
For this Easter, I decided to make these delicious hidden mini Easter egg chocolate truffles for my little guests. This recipe is inspired by Co-Operative Food Home Bake’s March week 2 chocolate truffles recipe. I was going to make a huge centrepiece dessert recipe – a chocolate egg filled with chocolate mousse but changed my mind at the last minute, and decided to make these simple chocolate truffles with hidden mini eggs.
Mini Monsters Cake
Learning to make creative cakes is something I’ve always wanted to do. Having only a couple hours of a sugar craft course, I did made a few creative cakes like a Batman cake and Spider-man cupcakes I made for my son’s birthday.
Baseball Cakelet
Baseball cakelet is a recipe I found on Cupcake Envy by Amy Eilert published by Tuttle Publishing. She is a self-taught cake designer whose love of baking and working with her hands found a perfect outlet in cake making. She founded Cupcake Envy in Wake Forest, North Carolina in 2006. In this book, it showcases a range of her cleverly single-serving cakelets that resemble a stylish party dress, a desktop humidor, a cheery coffee cup, an adorable baby bottle, a wicked voodoo doll, a stylish purse and even a baseball!
Mother’s Day Cake Bouquet
This coming Mother’s Day, I decided to bake and make this mini Cake Bouquet. I have a sweet tooth and I can eat cake all day long. This is perfect as a Mother’s Day gift or even breakfast with tea!
Vanilla and White Chocolate Choux Buns
Dr. Oetker wants everyone to celebrate the great and good about chocolate and get experimental by trying new chocolatey bakes you have never attempted before. To get everyone excited, throughout March, Dr. Oetker is running a Twitter competition to encourage everyone to have a go at baking their own yummy chocolate cakes and bakes. To enter, simply Tweet @DrOetkerbakes a photo of a chocolate bake you have made and tell them who you will be sharing it with using the hashtag #evenbetterbaking for the chance to win a deluxe hamper of Dr.Oetker chocolate products! What are you waiting for!
We are a huge fan of chocolate and I frequently bake chocolate cakes or cookies to share. Chocolate always tastes better if it’s shared with your loved ones and friends. I tried baking traditional chocolate profiteroles recently, but this time around, I decided to make a creative linked heart effect pattern on the Choux buns. This chocolate recipe can be found on Dr. Oetker’s website where you can find lots of baking inspiration for chocolate cakes and bakes.
Chocolate and Vanilla Marble Cake
I have never tried to bake a marble cake from scratch as it is often easier to use a pre-mix to bake with my children! We all love marble cake for its chocolate swirls in the cake! But there isn’t much choice of marble cake pre-mixes on the market.
Anyway, recently The Happy Egg Co have kindly sent me a signed copy of Eric Lanlard’s Totally Chocolate cookbook, which features all his favourite chocolate recipes! I was so excited when I saw this chocolate and vanilla marble cake recipe which also happened to be his first listed recipe. I was thrilled to make it from scratch!
The fabulous chef, Eric Lanlard also created Peanut Butter & Chocolate Egg Cups for the Happy Egg co which can be found on their website.
Peanut Cookies
Peanut cookies are one of my favourite snacks to eat during Chinese New Year. Normally we will buy them from shops in Singapore but now living in the UK, it is impossible unless I buy them from Chinatown. So I decided to make it myself using the recipe book given to me by my aunty.
The first obstacle I found to making this recipe was trying to buy roasted peanuts without added salt. In the end I bought raw peanuts and made everything from scratch. You can usually find packets of raw peanuts in the health food aisle of a supermarket. To make roasted peanuts, I chopped the raw peanuts in a blender and roasted them in the oven at 160°C for 15 minutes. I stirred the peanuts every 5 minutes of baking.
Strawberry Macaroons
Valentines day is just around the corner, so I picked this recipe to try. I’ve baked macaroons before but they were either burnt or under baked. It’s not my favourite biscuit but I’m determined to master it. I think it’s not too hard but it’s very time consuming!
Anyway, I bought this Love Food Macaroons book for £1 and decided to make this simple macaroon recipe.
I used a macaroon tray for this bake. I find that the macaroon are very smooth on the side unlike those that are piped onto the baking sheet. I think baking on a baking sheet gives the macaroon a more authentic look.
Valentine’s Day Whoopie Pie
Recently, I was browsing in a bookshop and found a whoopie pies cookbook. I had no clue what a whoopie pie was but the photos looked great. So I decided to give it a try since the book only cost £1!
If you have not heard of whoopie pies before, they taste cakey and originated in the US. It is made of two round mound-shaped pieces of cake, filled with a filling or frosting sandwiched between them.
Celebrating Valentines with Meringues & Pavlova
This Valentine’s day, why not try to bake your own meringues, pavlova or roulade for your loved one instead! It is cheap as it requires minimal ingredients and it is delicious! However, do allow plenty of baking and cooling time.
I am so delighted to receive three different natural flavoured white icing sugars from Sugar and Crumbs to try. They are Pink Lemonade, Chocolate Milkshake and Banana Split. They come in a 250g resealable bag which is very handy for storage.
Over the past week, I had been using the icing sugars to bake pink lemonade with almond meringue, chocolate milkshake meringue with white chocolate and banana heart-shaped pavlova.
Caramel Almond Crisp
Caramel Almond Crisp is a cookie recipe from The Secret of Cookies by Gu Huixue. I absolutely love this book my friend bought for me in Singapore and have been trying out many of her recipes!
Steamed Rice Cake
Steamed rice cakes are one of my favourite childhood snacks when I was in Singapore. I grew up eating them for breakfast. They come in various bright colours and you simply dip the cake into orange sugar (brown sugar coloured orange) to eat. The cake is very plain by design, so dipping sugar makes it more delicious to eat. I bought a packet of orange sugar when I was in Singapore in August and have wanted to bake this cake for a while. Now I have finally got around to do it. It requires minimal ingredients but it takes a long time to prepare. So if you want to have it for breakfast, remember you need at least 2 hours.
In addition to the ingredients, it’s also useful to have these small aluminium cups which I bought from Singapore too. This recipe is to make with coconut milk but I have replaced it with fresh milk which is a good substitute.
Edible Tea Cup – Cupcake
Over the years, I have grown from amateur cook to a mom to three kids (including a massive old one). During my free time, I enjoy looking at Pinterest for ideas, baking Chinese cakes, learning piping etc.
I always find working with good food brands really rewarding. So when I was approached by Gü Puds, the purveyors of decadent desserts, to make an edible tea cup, I was very excited! Gü is famous for its chocolate puds and have recently launched a new, ready-to-heat, hot chocolate (or chocolate milk if you prefer it cold). Now I have seen edible tea cups that you can pour hot chocolate into, but the techniques required here are beyond my skill set and I’d be worried of it leaking. I believe it requires a really thick cookie base with a thick fondant icing. So instead, I made an edible tea cup cake to go along with the Gü Hot Chocolate instead.
Colourful Cookies Recipe
I’ve always wanted to bake colourful cookies whenever I saw the picture on Pinterest. So last week, I managed to spend some time with my daughter to bake them. This is a very easy recipe but it does require time to bake and is a workout for your arms. To mix the dough with four different food gels took me a long time to get the perfect colour. My daughter did get quite impatient with me mixing the food gel into the dough so I had given her a plastic glove to help knead the dough too.
To make the cookies colourful, I opted for food gel rather than food colouring liquid. Gel is much easier to mix than liquid and liquid may make your dough too wet and soft. This is my first time I bought the gel and the colour is not too bad. I had also used the food gels for my icing when I made my gingerbread house.