Dress Up

Last Sunday, had a day out in town then went to visit my parents at night.

I wore this retro dress I got from T. K. Maxx. It's a bit big for me, but I tied a scarf round the collar and threw a cardigan on and I think I got away with it. 

Lunch at our favourite coffee bar. I had a posh-looking broccoli pastie (a poshtie?) and we shared a pistachio brownie and some billionaire shortbread. I can't even describe to you how phenomenally tasting this home baking is. 

Then, at night, when we visited my parents, we had the surprise of seeing my little niece and nephew. I spent a good while before dinner making dress-up dolls with my niece. She's so cute.

Bike Birthday Cake (Not Made By Me!)

First of all, I need to say that I did not make my husband a cake for his 30th birthday. Not because I'm a terrible wife (cough), but because the past couple of weeks have been ridiculously busy for me, both at the fabric shop and with my own personal work. It doesn't really matter though because Tim's mum made this awesome cake for him. How cute! It's got a little bike on it and wee bike patterns round the side (he likes mountain biking). 

Gingerbread Christmas Tree Decorations

This year, I thought I'd have a go at making some gingerbread Christmas tree decorations. I used this great recipe (I had to add extra flour though as the dough was too sticky at first) and had enough left over to give to some away too.

I just heard that my wee niece was helping my sister put them on their tree yesterday. How cute is that! The best thing is that they make the whole room smell like gingerbread.

And after finishing our last little bit of Christmas shopping last night, Tim and I (finally) got our tree up. I'd bought some pastel multicoloured lights for it the other day along with some tiny baubles in different colours to make it a little bit more cutesy-looking this year. The long teal coloured baubles were a lovely present from one of Tim's sisters.

Here's a gingerbread heart nestling in the tree. It's hard to tell from the photos, but the tree is black, of course.

Finally, after completing all our Christmas shopping last night, I bought myself a Christmassy treat in the form of a gingerbread muffin from Costa which I only got round to eating this afternoon. I felt a bit cruel eating the cute little gingerbread man on top, but I coped.

Chocolate Chip Cookie Cake

I made a chocolate chip cookie cake yesterday following this recipe from Love, Life and Sugar. Again, I was working with what I could find in the cupboard so it wasn't as chocolatey as it should have been since I didn't have many chocolate chips in the house. Despite that, it was still really tasty and was an exact mix of cookie and cake! Exactly what you want from a chocolate chip cookie cake, really...

'Cupcake Secret' Silicone Cake Mould

I've recently been eyeing this baking tray in a shop in town. I had decided not to get it since we don't have much space for things in our kitchen cabinets and it's a bit of a gimmick after all. However, seeing it reduced from £5 to £3 the other day, I gave up trying to resist. 

The idea is that the tray has little space-filler "cups" in each indentation. You fill up the tray with cake mixture and, as the cakes rise in the oven, they rise around the little cups and you end up with a finished cake that has a ready-made reservoir in it perfect for pouring in icing, jam or chocolate etc. Sounds neat to me anyway. 

It seemed a huge box for just six cake indents so I figured they were more muffin-sized than cupcake-sized, but that's no bad thing.

I should say the actual contents were not like photo on the box at all. The little pins were underneath the bases instead of sticking out of them. For three quid, I ain't gonna complain though! I managed to make it work (sort of) by squeezing the pins up inside the silicone and stretching the hole inside the cups so they fit over the much wider plastic sticky-uppy bit (Sounds painful, I know...).

Okay, so I was a doofus and filled the moulds way too high with cake mix. The cakes had totally enveloped the little cups by the time I took them out the oven. No need to worry though...

... I managed to dig them out with a spoon (Okay, now I'm realising that I maybe should have just made cupcakes the normal way and dug holes out of them with a spoon, but hindsight is a wonderful thing).

Once that was done, I spooned some chocolate spread inside the holes (behave yourselves).

I decided to top them with coffee icing to make them into nice (if a little large) mocha flavoured treats. I got the recipe from a book.

After spreading the icing on, I topped them with the left-over crumbs I had from digging the cups out earlier.

And, just like every good biology lesson, I'll finish with a cross-section. These cakes are flipping huge, by the way (but very, very tasty).

Chai Tea Cupcakes

I decided to make some chai tea cupcakes. I adapted a recipe for Earl Grey tea cupcakes (you can see the London Fog cupcakes I made using the same recipe here). The truth is that I wanted to use up this pack of Chai Tea teabags. I found that, in a tea, the teabags smell very much like lovely chai tea. However, the taste isn't the same - it seems to be all in the smell. So! The perfect solution: use them in baking! I think it worked pretty well. They sort of tasted like gingerbread, but gingerbread's tasty so it's all good, yeah?

Next time I'm going to try it with loose leaf tea and see how that goes. I already have a tin of amazing Yogi Yogi Chai from Tchai-Ovna, a local tea house here. I might try it with that!

This time I opted to skip the icing and sprinkled glitter straight onto the cakes when they were still hot so it stuck. You can use icing if you want though. Vanilla buttercream icing goes with everything.

Chocolate Pie Pops

I had a go at copying the recipe for pie pops from the amazing Call Me Cupcake! blog. The pastry recipe was definitely a winner: I've tried it since with bought pastry and it just doesn't compare to the first time I did it, following the recipe. I even bought a cookie cutter especially just to make them, although I think I filled them too much as you can see from the chocolate oozing out. They were great fun to do though and don't take too much preparation as long as you have enough time to leave the pastry before making the pies up. What do you think?

Pies on a stick. What could be better?

Valentines Day

Last year for valentines day I made my husband (then just my boyfriend) a heart shaped box full of Earl Grey tea cupcakes. This year, I managed to find a heart-shaped cake tin just in time to make a cake for our first valentines day together as a married couple. It was a chocolate fudge cake and, yes, our initials are indeed 'T' and 'A' which is kind of awesome!

I made some heart bunting too because I had about ten seconds free time and thought it would be cute (I think this is what having pinterest does to you).

It seemed pointless to try to go to a restaurant for dinner since everywhere would most likely be fully booked. Instead, we walked to our usual coffee shop in town which was happily nice and empty. I even decided to dress up a little (I don't need much of an excuse really). I'm wearing the cross pendant my friend Ruth made for us as a wedding present. My husband has a matching one too.

We got a free valentines cake slice thingy with little hearts on it from the cafe. They were handing them out all day to customers. How cute it that?

Lavender Cake Pops

Here's my attempt at making lavender cake pops. I've given up on using the sticks lately so I guess these aren't technically cake pops, I guess. More like cake... "fancies"? Hmm, I'll have to work on this idea some more. Anyway, I used my cake pop machine for this (like a toastie maker but it bakes little round cakes instead!) and the recipe for vanilla cake pops that came with the machine. I just substituted the vanilla extract with lavender extract and added a little red and blue food colouring to make it purple. It turned out a bit more grey instead, but you get the idea.

Recent Instagram Photos

I thought I might share some recent instagram photos this time with some little numbered description below. I  tried to filter out most of the photos of food I've been taking lately so it's a bit less... um... 'foody'? Incidently, I'm @xenocblood on instagram if you want to follow me and see all my uninteresting photos of make-up, cups of coffee and general goth housewife things.

1. Trying out some red/purple eyebrows for a change. 2. The first dinner I made in the flat and it wasn't a disaster! Jacket sweet potato with tuna, onion and chili. I'm never having normal, non-sweet potato jacket potatoes again. 3. Loving the Christmas coffee menu in Costa this year. My favourite is a honeycomb hot chocolate and this picture is of a black forest gateaux hot chocolate. Not my 'cup of tea', but it looks awesome. 4. 'Made' some peanut butter by flinging some roasted peanuts in the food processor. Got some monkey nuts now to crack and try making some more with. 5. The dark chocolate peanut butter balls I made with the pb. Not great looking and tasted pretty bitter compared to normal, but I kinda liked it! 6. Re-dyed my hair for my first time in the flat the other day. Happily the bath didn't get dyed purple as well so that's a relief.

Wedding Colours, Flowers & Red Velvet Cupcakes

Choosing a colour scheme for our wedding has been something I've really enjoyed recently. I can't say it's been too difficult though. The choice was an obvious and instinctive one so it's not as though I've had to spend hours deciding between different options. At least I haven't had to worry about the whole Should we go for lemon bridesmaids' dresses with orange and silver accents or fresh greens and whites??! thing, not being into those happy colours!

It's not that I'm not fussy about colours though. Heavy contrasting black and white makes me feel uncomfortable and reminds me too much of Tim Burton films. Pillar box red has always been a big no-no for me as well: way too cheerful. I'm the same way with home decor as well, I guess.

Anyway, here are the results of messing about with colour palettes in colourlovers. I found it pretty helpful.

Right from the start, muted reds and purples stuck out to me as a classy colourscheme and a great way to be colourful without being light and bright. That way you can have black, bruise and aubergine with deep wines and plums and rich, dark reds.

When we went to the florist the other day, I mentioned this to her. She was fantastic and knew exactly what I meant. I brought along samples of my groom's tartan and and pictures of the bridesmaids' dresses (cream with black lace!) and she set about making samples up.

She said she would give me a list of all the flowers she used because I can't remember them all and I thought it would be useful in case someone asks. There's definitely one type of calla lily in there, tea leaves (she sprays the leaves and it makes them look like shiny, black pvc! It's awesome) and freedom roses. There'll be black baccara roses as well, but they're not in the picture.

Since I'll be in a black dress, you'd be forgiven for thinking we'd be having a black, red or purple cake. It's being made my future mother-in-law who's a great cake-maker and it's actually going to white (something has to be, don't you think?!) and heart-shaped... Also it's not fruit cake because fruit cake is yucky. It's three tiers so we're going for lovely rich chocolate on the bottom, vanilla sponge on top and red velvet in the middle. Now I know that red velvet is a bit of a gimmick and also hopelessly trendy at the moment (it could be worse: it could be ombre...), but you have to admit there's something pretty awesome about a bright red cake that tastes like a lighter, fluffier chocolate cake. You know there is.

Anyway, before we decided on it, I had a go making some red velvet cupcakes myself to see if everyone else liked the taste. I loved adding all the colouring because it looked like bloooooooood.

Anyway I hope you enjoyed this needlessly long and detailed post about my approaching wedding (three weeks left? When did that happen?! Arggh!). I really hope it's not just me that finds this nonsense interesting! I love reading about other people's weddings though, don't you?

Charcoal Grey Pancakes

My nephew Angus requested black pancakes for lunch the other day. Black pancakes? How could I refuse! I couldn't get an explanation out of him for this very gothic request, but he seemed happy as anything with the result anyway.

Angus mixing the black food colouring into the pancake batter. 

I didn't want to put too much into the mixture in case it started to affect the taste so the mixture ended up more grey than black, but we agreed it was still pretty cool looking.

Time for a quick bit of dragon-flying while an adult the pancakes. 

Annie, not quite grasping the idea of dipping pancakes into syrup, manages to eat a bit of pancake while dipping her finger into the syrup.

She also requested some purple nail varnish so I painted her tiny fingers and toes a lovely shade of purple!