Motivation and a multitude of bakes.

I hate how lazy I can be with certain things. I've had a lot of time on my hands recently as I've moved cities and am looking for work. It's the perfect opportunity to bake and blog and paint and make and read and basically do everything I feel I don't usually have time for. And I have baked, I have the pictures to show for it and the pounds on my hips too but for some reason I haven't had the motivation to blog about it. It's the same for other things too, baking is about the only thing I have done for myself in the last 3 weeks. When I say 'for myself' I mean a hobby, I have spent a lot of time cleaning and I've even become a little obsessive about making sure the gas hob is shiny and streak free.
In the last week or so I've picked up my paints and a canvas as I feel the motivation returning but I've yet to make a mark. It seems to be a slow process and Sod's law will be that the day after a start will be the day a job offer comes through, then I'll go back to not having free time. Perhaps with a little foresight I can avoid that and make time to get back into other hobbies.

So let me show you what I have been up to in the kitchen.
Easter is coming up next week and my a 12 pack of creme eggs turned up in our kitchen (I guess my partner intended on working his way through them one by one but I had other plans for them). I'll admit I'm not the biggest fan of Cadburys Creme Eggs but stick them in a brownie and you have a sticky, sweet chocolate overload that is right up my street. These turned out so tasty, (thanks to this recipe at goodhousekeeping.co.uk) that I had to make them twice. They were very popular and the boy has suggested stockpiling creme eggs for when they go out of season.

17th of March was also St Patrick's day and although I don't usually celebrate it the boy is Irish so I decided to do something special for him. His Mam would have been proud of the Guinness chocolate cake we celebrated with.
I only made this cake because I'd been assured by Cupcake Jemma that it does NOT taste like Guinness. Due to the sweetness and high malt content of Guinness you get a chocolate malty taste that isn't overly sweet and the cake is very moist. It's delicious! I also followed her recipe for cream cheese frosting which works so well with the dark cake. I'd never made it before and it did come out with little lumps of butter throughout but I think with a little practice it would become a firm favourite as an alternative to buttercream.

As I look back at the photos of everything I've been baking lately (I've gotten into the good habbit of taking pictures of everything) I realise it would take me all day to catch you all up on everything that I've done so I'm just going to share the pictures and a brief discription of what it is. If you want to know more you can leave me a comment!

I've made Tea Braec before but this recipe from Odlums is the best I've found. My partner loved it so much he posted it to Facebook claiming it could compete with his mothers, I guess I've proved myself as I am now privvy to that secret recipe!

Millionaires Shortbread is one of my favourite treats. I love biscuit, I love caramel and by now you should have realised I love chocolate. I could the biscuit base on this so it was a little crunchier than i'd have like but still delicious. It was a quick bake using a basic shortbread recipe with tinned caramel and melted chocloate on top. Very simple but very delicious.

I spent most of the Autumn and some of the Winter looking for tinned pumpkin to make a pie, trying all kinds of shops and supermarkets and coming away empty handed. I finally gave up in January and resorted to making Sweet Potato Pie. Over the Winter I have seriously developed a taste for sweet potatoes and I can't seem to get enough of them lately.

After the Creme Egg Brownies I decided to try another type of Brownie with Oreos. This Brownie is from Lorraine Pasqual and was very dense and gooey. Now don't get me wrong It was good but in my opinion the Brownie base for the Creme Egg Brownie was much better, still sticky and gooey but not so heavy that it makes your jaws stick together.

These were a bit of a mash up, last minute Viennese Whirl. I'd made some butter biscuits from a baking book I have with the intention of dipping half in icing and sprinkles for a fun,sweet treat. After baking them I ran out of time and pit the into storage. A couple of days later I had a small amount of left over cream from the Guinness cake so I decided on a couple of these. They'd be perfect for an afternoon tea.


Just before I leave you for today I wanted to make a point about baking parchment. I started off not owning baking parchement and making do without it and then when I did get some I felt it was such a faff to prepare tins with the curling paper that I didn't really bother. Since January I've started using it religiously and I can't believe how much time and effort I save cutting circles out of the parchement compared to the skill level and patience required to extract a cake from it's tin without breaking it plus the extra time it takes to clean said tin. So if you ever wonder if it's worth using baking parchment...ABSOLUTELY!!