New Recipes: Bake off final buddies!

My friend Michelle (Mish) and I have been saying for a little while that we should have a baking session. And last Sunday we finally got round to baking! We are both fans of bake off and in the final Tamal did an amazing sticky toffee pudding cake. As that is one of my favourite desserts, we just had to give it a try.

I hadn't cooked with Mish before and it was great fun. We made a great team, from getting the ingredients, to dividing up what we had to do, it just worked like clockwork.

The recipe wasn't that complicated which was surprising as I thought because it was in the bake off final it would be. The only complicated bit was the spun sugar decoration but we didn't have enough time to do that. Also I reckon it would have been seriously messy, so we gave it a miss.

The most exciting part was making the toffee and using the sugar thermometer, the excitement built as we waited for it to reach 115 degrees! It finally did and it was a great feeling as it hadn't burnt and was just the right consistency.

Mish had to leave once we got the cake and sauce made, so I did the finishing touches and cut the cake and spread the toffee sauce between the two cakes as well as spread it on the top.

By far it’s the best cake I've ever made, and definitely the best cake co-baked. The cake mixture had lemon and orange zest which gave it even better flavour than normal.

We've already planned what we want to bake in our next baking session, so hopefully it will feature on here in a few weeks’ time.

New recipes: Gluten free baking

Every year my school friends and I have a girlie Christmas get together. We do meet up throughout the year as well. I had the idea last year that instead of Secret Santa presents, we do Secret Santa experiences. So we each pick a name and then an experience. Then you’ll do that experience with that person. It also meant you got two presents each as I didn’t fully think through how the whole thing had worked.

The idea I thought was a good one, but with all of us being so busy, I’m the only one that has done both my activities so far. The first was months ago and it was painting nails with my friend Rachel.
The second was to do baking with my friend Louise and last Sunday I went over to her house and baked in her very stylish kitchen. She runs Whimsical Wonderland Weddings, a very successful wedding blog, so if you’re getting married anytime soon, check it out for inspiration.

We made a pavlova which I had already done before, coincidently for my 29 challenge earlier this year. And we also did some gluten free baking, which I hadn't done before.

The mince pies we made were gluten free, and all that was different in the baking was the flour we used. There was a slight difference when rolling out the pastry as it wasn’t as strong and broke when rolling it out thin. But we got there in the end, and as you can see the results aren’t too bad. They tasted pretty good as well!