"Valentine" cookies

A week or so before Valentine's Day, I picked up a sugar cookie mix box in Lidl. It was a quid and I'm a student. Plus it came with a heart cookie cutter, which I didn't have any of. So for that alone I figured it'd be worth it.

I never actually got round to making them for Valentine's day. So a few weeks I cooked them up. With great difficulty - I've never made sugar cookies before & this mix wanted me to add 6mls of water and nothing else of liquid consistency! I was tempted to bin it. 

Added more liquid & eventually got the dough to combine. I followed the rest of the instructions & let them cool before using the tube of raspberry flavoured gel icing.

Made up the bag of strawberry flavoured icing (yuck!) & smoothed it carefully on.

Well, I tried to smooth it carefully on, fill in the gaps & not have any spillages. I didn't quite manage it.

And then I decorated them. For giggles.

I'm bloody awful at decorating cookies!! It was easier than piping, admittedly, but still a loooooong way to go before I want to actually give someone a hand decorated cookie of mine!

Craig doesn't count, he's a bit like a hoover & I know he'll eat almost anything. Including chicken hearts & reindeer, while on his travels. 

In the end though, the cookies were okay. And some were almost pretty. 

Bubbling away!

I made some fermented, no-knead bread last week & it triggered an urge to try sourdough. I've been in love with it for a while now, and I'd love to make it at home.

I bought a San Francisco culture to use as my starter & kicked that off yesterday. These are some pics from today's feeding. Its already bubbling away loads, so I might try moving it to a cooler room if it gets out of hand. It smelt wonderful before feeding today but its not that great right now, 8 hours later!

Still very, very early days though. It wont really be usable for at least 3-7 days and I'm tempted to leave it until 2 weeks old before I try baking with it. Fingers crossed I don't kill it off in the meantime!!

Edible glitter!

I had my first official snow day today! Up until now I've either been at uni (and I rarely went to lectures during my previous degree) or at work in Thames, where you have to make it in because only 4 of you are scheduled to work late and there's no one to cover you without them having to work 9am-10pm - which is never fair. 

So today was exciting as my lectures were cancelled & the Healthcare school officially closed. So I went on Pinerest for a bit & came across a recipe for edible gliter that only took 10 minutes. Seeing as I've done nothing all morning I felt like I should at least do something productive!!

Looks a bit odd next to my other spice jars! Matches the colour of the magnets nicely though ;)

Merry Christmas!!

And a happy new year! I hope you all have time to do something you like over Christmas :)

Yesterday was lovely. I had a sewing machine!! Well excited about that, does anyone know of any blogs with sewing tutorials on? I've not used one before so I'm looking forward to doing new projects and learning as I go. There is a dressmaking for beginners course run by the centre where I attend my knitting course, but it's 15 weeks long and it's going to be too difficult for me to rearrange all my shifts in work so that I can attend them all.

I also had a brilliant knitting solutions book (I'll get the proper name soon) which is written by an experienced knitter and is basically full of answers and solutions to problems knitters may come across. I've only had a quick flick through but it does look great - a brilliant Ravelry alternative if I can't get online as well!

I made a chocolate log yesterday, I'll post a picture soon. It looked pretty good (even if I say so myself!).

Unfortunately 3 out of the 4 of us are ill with something, but it's still nice to be home even if I am ill!

Merry Christmas xx

Cakes Galore!

Evening,

As I mentioned, I spent a looooong time yesterday making cakes. Why? Because we organised a cake sale to supplement our fundraising for this:

Yup, I ran 5km for Race For Life (which raises money for Cancer Research UK) on Saturday. I decided to do it on a whim about 3 weeks back, and started my 'training' two weeks before the race. I was pretty pleased with a time of 32 minutes :)

My work has a scheme where you can apply for matched funding if 3 or more employees take part. One person took part in the race with me (and kept me going), and another in a different department completed her race two weeks before. So we decided that between us we'd organise a cake sale.

I made a cupcake mix using this recipe from iVillage. I made 12 large (normal sized) cupcakes, and 16 mini cupcakes using mini silicone moulds. I've never used silicone moulds before but I was rather impressed. I picked them up from a Poundshop, and even if I never use them again I got my worth out of them!

I substituted strawberry flavouring for vanilla as I didn't have any, and used some leftover chocolate icing from a chocolate cupcake kit (see below).

My boyfriend was over and decorated these chocolate cupcakes themselves. They looked (and tasted) yummy. These were the first cakes to sell out when they went on sale! 

There was loads of the icing left over, and it was a fairly runny consistency so I decided it would be a lot easier to just dip the mini cupcakes into the icing rather than trying to spoon it everywhere. It also makes them really smooth. My boyfriend thought I'd accidentally dropped the first one though :) The strawberry flavour wasn't very noticeable, so the chocolate/strawberry combination worked.

These were the 'large' cupcakes made using the same cupcake mix. I made up some icing and used one tiny drop of red food colouring. The whole thing went a perfect shade of pink so I decided not to tempt fate and to leave it as it was!

(The Race For Life encourages women running to take part wearing something pink - which makes for an awesome sight when there are 2500 women in pink running around a park.)

I also made some jammy fair cakes using a victoria sponge mix and some seedless raspberry jam. I iced those with white icing but didn't take any pictures of them. I need to figure out a way of stopping the jam from sinking and pooling in the bottom of the cases...

I decided to stamp some labels for the cakes so that people would know what was what. The jammy fairy cakes and normal cakes looked pretty similar as the pale pink icing wasn't too in-your-face pink.

I used a Papermania stamp from a Birthday themed pack I picked up in Hobby Craft for £2 in a bargain bin. I saw the same stamps on sale in WHSmith on Sunday for £7.99! That's probably what reminded me of this particular stamp and gave me the labels idea. I was going to cut each one out like this but my hand started cramping and I decided it was too fiddly.

So I stamped about 10 on some pale pink paper I already had and trimmed them to size.

I'm really annoyed I didn't take any pictures, but photography isn't allowed at work. Should have sneaked one on my phone though...

My running partner brought in a cool, chirpy multi-coloured polka dot tablecloth and loved the labels idea. She has pretty funky handwriting too, so she wrote the labels and we stuck them to the plates/tupperware the cakes were in.

Altogether we had a multitude of cupcakes, jam tarts, an iced banana & sultana bread loaf, coconut macaroons, 'dream cakes' (caramel shortbread) and chocolate brownies. We laid out the cakes at 10am, and by 5pm the coffee mug we put out for the donations was full! Looking forward to counting it tomorrow :)

xx