Claire's Cake Bake & Other Foodiness

As is becoming habit, its been a long time since I last posted.  I have had my hands slightly full but after our annual holiday in the Highlands and baking for the Zoe’s Place Summer Fair I feel ready to start cooking properly again.  I am also starting to wean Elodie so I think its about time I start again.

I haven’t much foodieness to write about just now (except the discovery of smoked brie – oh my goodness it tasted soooooooo nice) – so I shall share a few recent pictures including Elodie helping herself to my doughballs in Pizza Express :)

Yes, I haven’t blogged in months but baby baking can be hard work (well, not hard work but a little tiring from time to time).  Anyway, I thought you’d all like to know Baby Elodie Louise arrived at 8.01am on Monday 16th February 2009 and after a long stay in hospital we finally got home on Friday afternoon.  I hope you don’t mnd me sharing a few photo’s of what we baked :)

I know I havent blogged for a looong time but we’ve had a bit of an eventful summer.  I went off my food (eating & cooking) and there’s been sad times and happy times.

But it’s the happy times I wanted to (eventually) share with you all and the reason I have been off my food.  We’ve been baking a little baby :)

The other good news is that I am just about back to eating more ‘normally’ and am even venturing into the kitchen again.  It is the only time I have ever been off my food and Hubby didn’t know what to do with himself when all I could managed for tea was a crumpet!

I’ve held off until today to blog about this as it was our 20 week anomaly scan this morning.  All seems to be ok and it looks like the Little One is going to be a girl – despite us both thinking it would be a blue one!

So in the last 20 weeks, this is what we’ve been baking ;)…

My mum kindly offered my services a few weeks back to bake some cakes for the cake stall at the Zoes Place Summer Fete.

It seemed like a great idea at the time, come Saturday evening post-baking it seemed altogether exhausting.  We arrived to set up our stall very last minute, but despite the rush, it was nothing less than a huge success.

Every year Zoe’s have a cake stall & the local Greggs bakers supply them with numerous freebies to sell so we had a front stall of homemade cakes and a side stall of Greggs baked goodies.  I am pleased to say that the homemade cakes sold out quickly & we were left with lots of Greggs muffins and cookies but by the end of the day everything had been eaten.

Between us, we made:

• 3 sandwich cakes
• tray of rocky road
• tray of mars bar rice crispy bake
• 24 sponge cakes with icing
• 24 rolo cupcakes
• chocolate muffins
• blueberry muffins
• chocolate cornflake cakes

We’re not sure of the final figure but it looks like we made just over £200 which will be doubled by my mum’s work, so it was certainly worth an exhausting days baking.

I just wanted to pop by & say Hello. Things in real life have been hectic the last few weeks for many various reasons – the best being I’ve started riding lessons on a Tuesday night with a lovely horse called Larry (in fact Tuesdays have been renamed Larryday in this household)

With everything going on I’ve not been making many exciting new dishes & resorting to quick, easy, tried & tested ones so I’ve not had much to report.

The only nice tasty meal I can report back about is a steak & cous cous salad we enjoyed a little while back…

Quite a simple cous cous with green beans, a little red onion and chickpeas served with a steak cut into slices & marinated in a little oil with some spicey herb rub.  Quick, simple but very nice.

Last weekend I made some Lamington cupcakes as a ‘Get Well Soon’ gesture for my brother who had just had an operation.

I had intended on following Bill Granger’s recipe for Lamingtons themselves but the sponge mix didn’t set and with 6 eggs in it I wasn’t overly surprised. So after a quick re-think I whizzed up a batch of Nigella’s trusty cupcakes and then topped each with lamington icing.

Carry on reading & leave a comment…