Birthday treats for a first birthday!

It was my daughter's first birthday at the end of April. I really can't believe she is 1 already! How time flies!! I wanted to blog about some of the treats I made for her birthday, as I felt the recipes were pretty good!

Nigella Lawson's chocolate chip cookies.

This recipe can be found in Nigella Lawson's latest book: Kitchen, the recipe can be found here, though I would highly recommend buying the book, it's filled with practical easy recipes, handy for those of us who have hungry mouths to feed and not much time!

Nigella Lawson's millionnaire shortbread:

 Oh these Milionaire shortbread were wonderful! The recipe can be found via the link or in Nigella Lawson's How to be a domestic goddess book. These are very sweet, but that is to be expected from Milionaire shortbread!I struggled to cut these and later read that I should have made slight cut marks with the knife before the chocolate set. I will remember to try this next time! I used chocolate transfer sheets to decorate, which are very simple to use and give a great affect! This was only the first time I had ever used these, and I loved the result.

I used a classic Victoria Sponge recipe for my daughter's main cake. This was my first ever iced cake! It was iced using sugarpaste, and then decorated with sugarpaste, fondant and chocolate decorations, and here is the end result

I made plenty of vanilla cupcakes that I decorated with buttercream and fondant butterflies:

I also made Nigel Slater's very good chocolate brownies, these were so so so yummy! I'm afraid I forgot to take a close up picture of these! These tasted like the brownies you get from Boots! They were fantastic! And everyone said how good they were! I'm tempted to buy his book, just to have the recipe on tap! I have just bought some new mini loaf moulds, which I plan to make some individual chocolate brownies in, then they really will be like the ones from Boots!

And here was the final spread! I did make a little too much food and my poor neighbours were eating cakes for the next week! Although they didn't seem to complain too much! All in all it was a good day, and I felt like I had piled on the pounds in the few hours the guests were here for!! I can't wait to bake for her 2nd birthday!

A simple Victoria Sponge cake!

Here's another cake I made for my husband's workplace. This is just a simple victoria sponge recipe. I used this for my daughter's first bithday cake and it worked a treat! You just bung everything in a bowl and mix it all at the same time...this is my type of cake!! It stays pretty moist, especially if you drizzle a little lemon syrup over the top, just for that added moistness. This also freezes well.

Just to show how versitile this cake is, here is it decorated for my daughter's birthday, I can't believe she is 1 already! This was the first time I had ever iced a cake, and I was pretty pleased with the results. The chocolate leaves were made by melting chocolate into a leaf mould, some of the butterflies I made using fondant and I bought the "In the Night Garden" Figures.

I have just noticed, one of my dogs can be seen in the photo! He looks like he is sulking in the corner! Bless him!

Home made chocolate truffles

I recently had an urge to try making my own chocolates. This is something I have always wanted to do, but wasn't sure where to start. These chocolates were stuffed with a baileys chocolate truffle and were really yummy, even if I do say so myself!! Again, my decorating needs practice! I was having a play with my new powder food colouring that had arrived, and it can be used to colour white chocolate!! I was trying to get a deep red, but I know this is not all that possible when mixing into white, I was pretty pleased with the final colour, and I reckon I could have gone slightly darker, if I'd mixed a little darker colour in.

I adapted this recipe from BBC Good Food, which can be found here, rather than 142ml of cream, I reduced this by half, and replaced the other half with Baileys, and the result was scrumtious! I then filled some ice cube trays with white chocolate, waited for it to set, and then added the filling, before adding more chocolate. I was pretty impressed by just how easy these are to make, and as a result have just ordered some chocolate moulds!

I did also make the centres of the truffles from BBC Good Food, and I used this as a centre all by itself, and did the chocolate in the same way. These were lovely! Sadly no pictures of those though, as they didn't last too long!! I have more caramel in the fridge and so may make some more. These choccies went down very well with the neighbours!!

I'll certainly be making more chocolates, I hope to make some as Christmas presents, they are pretty simple and quick to make, and the types of filling you can use is pretty endless!!  I'm actually very excited about trying new fillings! I'll keep you posted on good recipes I come across.

Nigella's chocolate Devil cake

This is my first blog on here! This will very much be a food related blog, as baking and cooking is my passion. I hope you enjoy my blog!

I have just started making cakes for my husband's workplace, mainly because I love baking and this gives me a great excuse to bake and try out new recipes!

I decided to make Nigella's devil food cake....everyone loves chocolate cake right?!? And I knew I couldn't go worng with trusty Nigella by my side! This recipe is from her wonderful book kitchen (I have her whole collection as I have just ordered 3 of her earlier books!!). I have made tons of recipes out of this book already, and hope to get round to blogging about them soon.

Now, sadly I was unable to taste this cake! It unfortunately came out of its mould a little too well, so I couldn't even use that as an excuse!! I did however try the frosting and it was scrumtious!! I added chocolate shavings to the top and tried to pipe some decorations, although I am very new to piping and feel I need a lot more practice! (oh no, that means more baking....what a shame!)

Apparently the cake went down very very well in the workplace! And people were telling my husband that this cake belonged in a cafe and that I should definately be making money from it!! Whoah thankyou Nigella!! So if you want a rich moist chocolatey chocolate cake! You really can't go wrong with this beautiful recipe!