Children In Need Cupcakes

As I'm sure yo all know, today is Children In Need. I decided to get involved and bake some Pudsey cupcakes. You may have seen them featured on The Great British Baking Club along with lots of others.

I've had an own clothes day at school and we've been doing lots of fundraising. Last year Children In Need raised around £18 million for disadvantaged children in the UK and I'm sure this year the total we be even higher so if you haven't got involved yet then go on, tune in to the appeal on BBC1 tonight and give what you can, even the smallest amount of money will make a difference!

Chocolate Mousse and Tuile Baskets

I had a late, well very late, Birthday party a few weeks ago- I will post my cake at some point, timings not my strong point as you can see- and I got The Great British Bake Off book from one of my friends so this week I  made my first recipe from it.

Chocolate mousse, not strictly baking but it was, at five o'clock on Sunday night, one of the only things I could find all the ingredients for. And I can, for a change say that I did follow the recipe. Not exactly of course, I couldn't resist making a few additions but I had the book open which is more than I can normally say. I added rum and orange juice to it which I thought worked really well, it gave the flavour more depth. 

To serve them I made tuile baskets but, I used a Masterchef at home recipe and probably should have stuck with Mary Berry as they didn't mould quite as well as I'd hoped.

You Can't Beat a Good Pizza

Being Italian it just wouldn't be right if I didn't like Pizza and being Italian and fancying myself as the next big chef, it definitely wouldn't be right if I couldn't cook a decent Pizza would it?

So having asked my friends round for lunch in half term a few weeks ago, I realised that it had been a long time since I'd made a proper pizza, from scratch and Pizza is, in my opinion at least, the best lunch food ever.

It had to be good because I'm always complaining about shop brought ones. Making the dough can be a bit of a chore, especially leaving it to rise but it is so worth it. In our house, we normally buy the bases and I'll make the tomato sauce and top them, it takes no longer than taking the ten different layers of packaging off a ready made one but, the Tesco down the road from me decided they would stop stocking bases the other day, I was not happy. I was even less happy I got home from school last week to find a ready-made pizza in our fridge, one bite and it was even worse than I remembered. I had an omelette.

Take a look at how a real Pizza should look here and maybe one day you can come to my restaurant/buy my recipe book and see how it should taste too...

I made a Peperoni and a Margherita pizza

Pizza and garlic bread, you can't go wrong.

Focaccia

First off, sorry for the lack of posts recently, me and technology haven't been getting on too well. But, we're friends again now (Touchwood) and there's been lots of cooking going on that can now go on here.

Being a big fan of The Great British Bake Off and of Italian food, I had to have a go at the focaccia technical bake.

I must admit, I didn't use all the water but I did use most of it and manage to make a lot of mess in out kitchen with the dough but I was really pleased with the result. I made two loaves, one was traditionally topped with sea salt and rosemary, the other with the addition of sliced cherry tomatoes. It had a good, crispy crust and the air holes look pretty irregular. Not quite star baker material maybe but  I don't think I would have come last in the technical bake!

Everyone enjoyed it, I've made it again since and I'm sure I'll be making it again soon!

Swiss Roll

Having started my GCSE's this year, I've been loving my cooking lessons. Our third practical of the year was swiss roll which I had never made before.

Of course, being me, I couldn't go down the standard jam route, I had to put cream in too. I got my cake out of the oven and rolled it without any problems (apart from dropping and breaking the electric whisk I was using for the cream-Sorry Miss!), I put greaseproof paper in the middle so I could unroll it and add the cream once it had cooled and wouldn't melt it. Then it went in the fridge to cool down.

I added my cream and jam, re-rolled it and it was all done. Once I got it home, it was gone the next day so that has to be a good sign right?

 

Strawberry Cheesecake Cupcakes

First and foremost, sorry for the lack of posts recently, apparently technology doesn't like me.

But here I am now, last weekend we had someone come to stay with us so it gave me an excuse to try out another recipe from my new Humming Bird Bakery book. After looking through the book, I decided on Strawberry Cheesecake Cupcakes and making the most of the short-lived heatwave, I walked to the shops and got my ingredients.

They have a layer of strawberries, then a vanilla sponge, topped with cream cheese icing and finished with crushed digestive biscuit and chopped strawberries.

They went down really well and we all agreed that they really did taste like strawberry cheesecakes! I'll definitely be making them again...

Mocha Cake

It's taken me a little while to get round to posting this one but I think it was worth the wait. I've wanted 'The Hummingbird Bakery Cookbook' for ages and I finally got it for my Birthday a couple of weeks ago. Once I had in in my hands, the tough decision of what to make first came so after going through looking at each recipe about a million times, I settled on the coffee cake with chocolate icing, a mocha cake.

It went down really well and was finished in a few days. I can safely it was the best chocolate icing I've ever tasted too.