Baking Successes & Baking Disasters

I'm not very good at wife skills. The important things like cooking and cleaning aren't going to come to me easily when I'm married, I don't think. We'll I do do a lot of cooking, but it's usually with my fiance rather than on my own and I never think of that as cooking - it's too much fun. Anyway, one thing I can do is bake.  So I decided to do some batch-baking to make the cupboards in the flat look a little less bare.

I made chai tea cupcakes by using a recipe for earl grey tea cupcakes and substituting  the earl grey teabags with Yogi Yogi Chai tea from the amazing Tchai Ovna tea house in Glasgow. Their specialty chai tea is to die for and you can get it from their website.

Brewing the tea with the milk. To make the tea you normally need tonnes of brown sugar to make all the spices palatable, but the sweetness of the cupcake mixture means you don't need any extra sugar in the milk.

And here are the ridiculously spicy cupcakes. I was following the recipe absent mindedly and put vanilla extract in without thinking. I wish I hadn't because I think that masked the taste of the chai a bit.

Chai tea icing too. I never thought spicy icing would work but it does.

And glitter is mandatory.

Some cinnamon cookies I found a recipe for in an old cook book.

I wish I had made more now...

This batch of cookies didn't come out so well as you might be able to tell, haha. Before I put them in the oven, they were the exact colour, look and consistency of what people around here call "jobbies". Look that one up if you have to. The recipe was for a chocolate biscuit called 'Midnight Cookies'. Hmm...

Actually they didn't turn out too awful considering the dog poo like baking mixture they came from. I covered them in black and blue sparkles and ta-da! They look ok, although I definitely went wrong with the recipe because...

The unfortunate side-effect is that they turn your lips and teeth black. And not just for a few seconds until you wipe it off either. It lasts pretty much until your next meal... so that went down well with all the workmen at the flat that week, I'm sure (I'm too scared to ask!).

Well, I figure it would be a good party gag maybe, like something you'd bake for a halloween party perhaps...