Adventures In Baking
Friday, March 15th, 2013 10:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tourmalineToday is Red Nose Day, but I haven't been watching the Comic Relief TV show, just seeing bits & pieces of YouTubery and TV inserts and whatnot. I think I'm past the optimum age now, back in the early days it was the awesomest thing ever but it's a generational thing, I know many of my favourite comedians from back then are still heavily involved but it's no longer "the gang". I'm sure, though, it's someone else's gang, so I hope the younger generation derive as much awesomeness from it as I always did. Instead, I have been donating by texting and via a QI-associated webpage, which I believe is a subset of Sarah Millican's team.
I have also been baking - like lots of workplaces we had a bake-off and bake sale at work. It was won by someone who baked a chocolate and Guinness cake, but we were told by the judges that she won by a margin of 1 point and that there wasn't much more separating the rest of us. My cake was a variation on carrot cake, with pistachios and orange, and by the end of the bake sale there was just a quarter left. When buying, I chose a red velvet Whoopie pie and a sliver of a cherry chocolate cake with Cadburys fingers around the edge. There was a wide range of cakes - two cherry chocolate cakes of contrasting styles, but none of the rest were particularly similar to any other. Altogether (including the Keith Lemon sweepstake) we raised £250, which I thought was very good considering the office hasn't exactly been full recently. Most of the other cakes were red nose-themed - I claimed mine was the 'breather' in between all the bright colours - but I baked this because I really wanted to join in, I didn't want to be in the general audience thinking 'I could've made a cake'. I'm really glad I did.
I have been baking bread, too. After three attempts at making straightforward loaves in the breadmaker over the past few weeks, which was fine except for the hours spent cleaning, I found this Nigel Slater recipe for rosemary and honey bread in last Sunday's Observer and spent this evening baking, et voila:
They're still cooling, so too late to have any tonight, but should be good for breakfast tomorrow. And the baking process was much quicker and easier than using the breadmaker.
I have also been baking - like lots of workplaces we had a bake-off and bake sale at work. It was won by someone who baked a chocolate and Guinness cake, but we were told by the judges that she won by a margin of 1 point and that there wasn't much more separating the rest of us. My cake was a variation on carrot cake, with pistachios and orange, and by the end of the bake sale there was just a quarter left. When buying, I chose a red velvet Whoopie pie and a sliver of a cherry chocolate cake with Cadburys fingers around the edge. There was a wide range of cakes - two cherry chocolate cakes of contrasting styles, but none of the rest were particularly similar to any other. Altogether (including the Keith Lemon sweepstake) we raised £250, which I thought was very good considering the office hasn't exactly been full recently. Most of the other cakes were red nose-themed - I claimed mine was the 'breather' in between all the bright colours - but I baked this because I really wanted to join in, I didn't want to be in the general audience thinking 'I could've made a cake'. I'm really glad I did.
I have been baking bread, too. After three attempts at making straightforward loaves in the breadmaker over the past few weeks, which was fine except for the hours spent cleaning, I found this Nigel Slater recipe for rosemary and honey bread in last Sunday's Observer and spent this evening baking, et voila:
They're still cooling, so too late to have any tonight, but should be good for breakfast tomorrow. And the baking process was much quicker and easier than using the breadmaker.
