Jenerally Speaking,

My beautiful chess cake!

In honour of the New Year, and my new Great British Bake-Off Showstoppers book, I had a baking adventure yesterday, which I REALLY enjoyed. I made up a batch of sponge mixture, then made half chocolatey. Then Rachel and I collaborated to pipe the mixtures in rings. With hindsight, we should have started with the vanilla, because once we'd done only the chocolate it did look like artful piles of poop. 

There was a very tense moment when one of the cakes started collapsing in front of our eyes because we took it out of the oven a little early, but we threw it back in and whacked the heat back up, and it recovered. Once baked, I was relieved that the pattern hadn't been spoilt. 

While the cakes were baking, I was busy playing with my new icing equipment. First I planned out what the top of the cake would look like, then selected the appropriate stampers. 

Next I spent quite a while rolling the colouring into my sugar gum. 

Then I had a LOT of fun stamping and creating, using my tools very carefully. I made the icing REALLY thin, so it was challenging getting the shapes to work and yet not collapse. 

Once my toppings were all ready and the cakes had cooled, it was time to create some chocolate buttermilk icing and stack the cakes. Rachel helped me with the stacking, I have to admit. But I did all the icing myself. 

Finally I arranged my toppings in an artful fashion. How beautiful is that?!!

I had to wait until today to cut it open and see if the chess effect had worked, down at Mum's house. There was a lot of oohing and aahing over the cake top, but I was desperate to see what it would look like when we sliced into it!

Imagine their surprise when a beautiful pattern emerged in front of their very eyes!

It worked near enough perfectly. And to top it all off, it was delicious too! I am feeling rather proud - it's the first big cake that I've decorated like that, and certainly my first Showstopper. 

The adventures of Alvin (the knitted reindeer)!

Quite a while back I made this little critter for my Grandma for her birthday:

He turned out to be very cute, and very curious!

He enjoyed exploring Mum's decorative sewn bowl:

He had a good chat to some IKEA reindeer:

Courageously, he climbed up the decorative willow stems in Mum's kitchen and clung on for deer life:

He braved the elements and went on a hike through an alpine garden:

Perhaps his most thrilling adventure was skiing down the bannister rail:

Then he showed off his talent by playing Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto:

Unsurprisingly, after all these adventures, he needed a nap in Mum's lovely crocheted blanket:

He has now retired and lives a quiet and serene existence on the sideboard in Grandma's house, no doubt whiling away the hours remembering his many thrilling exploits...

Kitchen tidy-up!

This Christmas many of our lovely gifts were of a cooking and baking theme, which is awesome. It also inspired us to have a grand tidy-up of our kitchen, so that we can store things in a more organised manner. Thus, midway through the afternoon, this was the situation in our kitchen:

The only real way to re-organise cupboards is to completely empty them out and start again:

It was surprisingly quick once we got going - and soon we had logically and neatly stacked cupboards! On the left of the cooker: top shelf - unusual carbohydrates, middle shelf - teas, coffee, porridge and raisins and bottom shelf - flours and sugars (and cereal bars).

On the right of the cooker: top shelf - drinks and other powdered foods which are seldom used, middle shelf - tins and jars and bottom shelf - cereal bowls, Nutella and cream soda (I HATE cream soda, but it's a bizarre migraine anti-dote which is safe during pregnancy). 

Most exciting of all, the shelf which used to be a messy mixture of nuts, pulses, lentils, oils and random cooking herbs and spices has been transformed into a haven of baking equipment, neatly lined up in a tray!

As part of this process, the dresser was de-Christmassed, so that we could arrange our new cake tins,  bowls and hippo (can you see him?!). Very chic!

And inside those three heart-decorated tins I have organised my cake baking equipment! Big tin - cookie cutters, cake moulds and icing cutters, medium tin - icing piping bags and nozzles and small tin - cupcake cases, both silicon and paper. 

Man, it was satisfying. We've also re-organised the tupperware cupboard AND I've even emptied and re-sorted the set of drawers in our downstairs cloakroom. But they really ARE too boring to photograph. I'm aware that I'm pushing the boundaries of what is interesting with this post, but to hyper-organised people like me, this was a very satisfying day! Tee hee hee!

Hand-sewn cookbook cover

Finally, now that Christmas is over and done with, I can blog about the various Christmas presents I crafted this year. The one that took the longest and was trickiest was a sewing project for my littlest sister, Kirsty. My idea was to design and sew a cover for a blank book that she could store her favourite recipes in, since she is a bit of a baking princess. 

Unfortunately, at some time shortly before I commenced this sewing marathon, the presser foot fell off my sewing machine, meaning that the whole thing had to be done by hand. I'd always intended to do the embellishments and decorations by hand, but I had to do the patchworking, hems and seams ALL with just a needle and thread!

Anyways, I started by picking out some fabrics to patchwork the cover and sewing them together in a higgeldy piggeldy fashion:

Really higgeldy piggeldy, since it was all hand-stitched:

Just to be professional, I of course ironed all my seams flat!

Next, I drew a sketch of the front cover, then cut out each letter of the book title. These I pinned to coloured felt, making sure that I followed the pattern carefully. 

Then there was a lot of sewing. Much sewing. Some more felt cutting. A little bit of hysterics when, as usual, I forgot how to start off blanket stitch. And some more sewing. Sadly I forgot to photograph these stages. But here's the finished product!

The back:

And the insides, complete with little pockets to keep loose papers in:

   

Quite cute, don't you think?

Making and icing mini-cupcakes!

Today Kirsty and I had a post-Christmas bake-off, to make use of our many baking-related gifts. We'd got Kirsty a mini-cupcake machine, because I love mine so much. And Mum got us special icing moulds, which we were keen to try out. 

First step was to get everything ready:

Then we mixed up some the recipe - even using a seive for the flour, which I never normally bother with:

We split our mixture in half, and made half into vanilla (which Kirsty got to measure out with her new multi-coloured spoons - joy!) and half into chocolate:

First we popped the chocolate mixture into the machine for about 8 minutes to cook:

Then the vanilla mixture. They cook so quickly, and come out looking PERFECT:

While they were cooking, I was busy playing with the icing equipment!

We'd got some special sugar gum from a baking shop, which you can roll out and cut out with moulds. So much fun!

Soon, well, ok, not soon... eventually we'd made a whole collection of beautiful little shapes:

The final touch was to place all of our finished shapes onto the freshly iced cakes, then to sprinkle edible glitter on top with a fine paintbrush:

Et voila! Our finished cakes! How beautiful are they?

We were really quite proud. 

And they taste as good as they look. It's pretty heart-breaking to eat cakes which are so beautiful, though. By the way, check out the cute little lilac caterpillar eating its way through a leaf! So cute!

Next time I plan to use some different colours and maybe try out some of my really BIG icing moulds. Might need to make bigger cupcakes to fit them on!

Oh...we had a bit of a problem afterwards, because we had lots of leftover buttercream icing (the green and white icing we'd been using had been saved from Mum's pre-Christmas baking session, and there was STILL lots left). So Kirsty iced some biscuits! They're just a tad sickly! And we still had an entire bowl to scrape into the bin. Perhaps Mum had slightly over-estimated the quantity of icing she needed!

Preview

Crochet draft excluder

Despite the fact that we have a new-build house...or possibly BECAUSE of that, we have an appalling draft which whistles cruelly down the hallway and straight into the lounge all through the winter. In fact (and this is gross, by the way), there is a significant enough gap around the front door that somehow SLUGS regularly get in and are found happily meandering around our hallway first thing in the morning. There is nothing quite so unappealing as slug slime all over your hall carpet, let me tell you!

So, to battle both the elements and wildlife, I decided we needed a draft excluder, and what better way to create one than by crocheting? I carefully selected a big range of green, blue and brown wools from our wool box, to tie in with the colours already in the hallway. 

Then it was simply a case of starting off with a little round, gradually increasing the size and then crocheting straightforward rings of doubles or triples the whole way along. It took a LOOOONG time though, but it was fun working out what colour should come next, and how thick a strip of that colour I should do. 

Finally, I stuffed the whole length with old plastic bags (re-using - get me!) and decreased to seal up the end. 

Et voila! One stylish, practical and free (if you forget that once upon a time I bought that wool) draft excluder. Hall is much cosier, and since it's been there, I haven't noticed any slimy visitors in the house. 

PS: For the record, although I haven't posted for ages, it's not because I'm being lazy, it's because most of the projects I've been busy working on are secret Christmas presents which would be somewhat given away if I broadcasted them on the world wide web. So it's all hush-hush for now!

PPS: Ok, maybe I've been a bit lazy some evenings, but by 9pm I'm worn out from working and growing this baby, so I think that's fair enough, ne?