Time for picnics

With Spring officially sprung, and some lovely warm weather over the last few days, I've been desperate to jolly off for a good ol' picnic. We had planned one for Mother's Day - we were going to visit Sandringham and have a great treat of cakes, sarnies, and strawberries under the watchful eye of the Queen (if she'd been there...). But the weather that weekend was dull and grey, so picnic was postponed.

Hopefully the ongoing project of the other half's VW Golf cabriolet will be completed this summer (it's been going on for about 4 years now!). As soon as the car is ready, we are off to the coast with picnic basket in hand, I'll make lots of goodies, we'll put the top down on the car and zoom! Off we'll go! That's the plan anyway.

In readiness for soft-top car completion, I've been looking for a fancy picnic basket to make the scene complete - we've decided we'll wait until the car's ready before treating ourselves to a really lovely one. I've found the most wonderful picnic basket company, Life's a Picnic, and their beautiful baskets are definitely on top of my 'wanted' list now.

The willow baskets are all unique and really sum-up the brilliance of a British summer. Handmade and vintage, I'm really covetting one of the baskets, although I don't know whether I'd prefer a teatime theme, or maybe one complete with Champagne flutes, for those extra special picnics...

They're not cheap, but then you really do get what you pay for in this life, and I think these look like they'd last a lifetime. I saw one in a local shop recently, and it was about a quarter of the price - but it was so badly designed that when the lid closed, it hit the glasses inside (I know this, because I closed the lid, and I heard glass smash...and quickly exited the shop).

They also do lovely cake stands. I have about 4 cake stands already, but you can never have too many - I certainly bake enough cakes to fill them all.

So, if anyone wants to treat me to a summer present, maybe if you missed my birthday in January, you know what to do....!

The bells of St Clements

For Mother's Day, I baked St Clements muffins - orange and lemon, with a lemony buttercream on top. They were meant to just be dusted with icing sugar to finish, but who can resist buttercream.

The muffin base was quite simple:

100g caster sugar
1 egg (although I only had 2 small bantam eggs to hand)
100ml milk
50g melted and cooled butter
1 tsp baking powder
175g self-raising flour

Cream together the sugar and egg, mix in the flour and baking powder gently, and add the melted butter, followed by the milk. The mixture looked a bit of a mess at this point - but I had faith. To the mixture, I added the grated rind of one lemon and one orange, plus a few chunks of orange, chopped up into small chunks.

Bake at 180 degrees (fan oven) for about 25 minutes.

Once cooled, I creamed together butter and icing sugar, with a splash of milk, together with more lemon rind, orange rind, and a splash each of lemon and orange juice. I like to make the buttercream quite tart, so I add more lemon than orange.

The muffins are light and fluffy, but still with that chunkiness of a muffin, with added luxury of the buttercream. Happy Mother's Day!

I have to add, those paper cases were a sod. They'd expanded in the drawer, so I had to re-fold every single one of the creases on every single blummin case.... it took forever. I won't be buying that brand of paper case again!

Not cakes, currently

I haven't made any cakes for a while. In an attempt to eat more healthily than of recent times I thought giving up the cake making would be an easy way to be healthier. But don't I miss the fun of baking!

I did make some rather brilliant fish cakes the other day though.

(It's not a great photo - I'm getting used to my new iPhone)

2 white fish fillets (I used basa fish)
1 mackerel fillet
2 potatoes, boiled and mashed with a little butter
1 tsp capers
Zest 1/2 lemon
1/2 chilli, chopped
Breadcrumbs (plus flour and egg) to coat

I've found that mackerel really helps fish cakes not to end up bland and tasteless; I don't think salmon works too well. 

Other things that are making me happy, in the absence of cake, are:

Snow.

Ugliest cakes in the world?

These are my chocolate cupcakes. The ugliest cakes in the world, don't you agree?

The recipe seemed simple enough:
100g plain flour
20 cocoa powder
140g caster sugar
1tsp baking powder
40g marg
120ml milk whisked together with 1 egg

Beat together flour, cocoa, sugar, baking powder and butter. Add milk & egg mixture in two parts. Make sure it's not lumpy. Pour into cake papers, bake at 170C until risen and bouncy, with nothing left on the cake tester stick when inserted.

Sounds easy, huh? Well, the mixture didn't go as far as it was meant to, and for some reason, rather than making fewer, I just assumed it would perhaps expand a lot and made the 12 I was expecting. Uh-oh... I should trust my instincts. Some didn't rise enough, and they were just too small for the size of the paper cases.

The paper cases! Now we come to one of the main issues. I think they've grown! They seem FAR too big for my muffin tin all of a sudden. So the cakes ended up a right dodgy shape and not cake-like at all. Ridiculous.

 

Looking at it again, I can see a very ugly man's face surrounded by a Victorian lace collar....

For the frosting, I mixed together butter and icing sugar, as normal... Then I melted some dark chocolate and mixed that in, rather than my normal procedure of just some cocoa powder. That didn't seem too happy either, and so the cakes got a bit uglier....

Hurrumph. If not the ugliest cakes in the world, they're definitely the ugliest ones I've ever made! However, they do taste quite nice. And, it was the inaugural bake of my new Kitchenaid mixer - which was A-Maz-Ing. Apart from being an element in the ugliest cake competition, it was brilliant. I love it. 

Time for teapots...

I haven't bought or received a new teapot in ages. It's a bit like an addiction, teapot collection. 

I could treat myself to a new Le Creuset teapot... It would match the gorgeous pie dish I got for Christmas. Then I could also get the espresso cups to match!