Granny's kisses

I had 10 minutes to kill in town before I started work today, so what did I do? Go to the Curiosity Shop! This is what I bought.

They're suitably chintzy and match the cakestand I bought from the same shop at Easter. I love the octagonal rim of the teacups, it makes them nice to drink from. They were priced at £5 each but when I got to the till the lovely lady gave me £5 off because she had come across my post about the cakestand on my blog after googling her shop name! Hurray! Fancy that. So I'm going to shamelessly promote the shop again. Look at how beautiful the teacups are! However I can't visit this shop too often as I would end up buying half of its contents.

Despite feeling tired after work and suffering from sore feet, I knew I had to bake something to put on those little plates. It had to be my Granny's kisses.

They're girly, pink, sweet and biscuity. What's not to love! I thought I would include the recipe this time as I'm a bit more organised this evening.

Granny's kisses

6oz margarine

2.5 oz icing sugar

6oz self-raising flour

2oz cornflour

Cream together the margarine and icing sugar. Add the flour and cornflour (I mix this together by fork as it makes a stiff mixture). By hand, divide into little knobs and put onto a lined baking tray. I keep them quite a rough shape and the mixture should make around 18 knobs (9 kisses). Set onto the middle shelf of the oven for 10-12 minutes at Gas mark 6. Keep an eye on them as they burn really quickly. Leave to cool, then sanwich together with pink butter icing.

Not so successful scones

I noticed we had pears in the fruit bowl this week so I saw it as a perfect opportunity to try out this scone recipe from my Avoca book. It's not a very sugary scone (don't know if that's a good or a bad thing?) and I was a bit disappointed that I couldn't taste the pear.

What confused me about the recipe was that it said they would take 15-20 minutes in the oven at gas mark 3. I always thought scones needed a high oven temperature, but I followed the recipe. After 30 minutes they were only just starting to turn golden, so I whacked it up to gas mark 6 to cook the second tray.

Later update: The scones have gone solid, I don't know why. I was very aware of not over working the dough and if I had put any more milk in the mixture it wouldn't have rolled out properly. I think I'll stick to my usual scone recipe in the future.

What a load of crock...ery

Out of boredom I decided to upload a photo of the bookcase in my bedroom which holds the majority of my fancy crockery. It's an old bookcase from my Granny's house which Mum inherited after she got married and repainted white. It was in my room for a while when I was little, but for the past 8 years or so it has been sitting in the garage storing boxes of nails, hammers etc. (shameful treatment!)

When I moved home after uni, and moved bedroom, Mum thought it would be a shame for my crockery to stay packed away in storage, especially when I had moved to a bigger bedroom and had space to display them. She remembered about her bookcase so we gave it a good clean and moved it back into the house. My dad thinks it looks grubby (he obviously isn't familiar with the phrase "shabby chic") but I think it looks beautiful.

The top shelf holds my old, tiny teasets which I've either inherited or been given as birthday presents when I was little. The teaset on the far right belonged to Granny Thomson when she was a little girl. The second shelf holds my Cath Kidston crockery; check out my mix and match teacups and saucers! The third and fourth shelves are a mixture of new crockery (such as the portmerion cake stand), second hand shop finds and things I've inherited from grandparents. The bottom row is my retro shelf. I inherited the tins and the other things were found in Iconic, a second hand shop in the Grassmarket in Edinburgh, except from the teacup which I bought in Munich. My flowery piggy bank boot also seems to have snuck onto that shelf, but it does match the storage jar.

Eoin's Battenberg Birthday

It takes a lot of courage for a man to request a partially pink cake for his Birthday. I was truly impressed and more than delighted to bake one. I've never made a battenberg cake before so I was really pleased with how it turned out. It was fun and not too complicated to make either. I doubled my go-to sponge recipe, making one half pink, and baked it in an oblong tin using a strip of cereal box as a divider. Cut the cake sections in half, reassemble, stick together with jam and roll it up in marzipan - hey presto you've got yourself a battenberg!

The battenberg train hurtling towards the tunnel. Choo choo!

Like I said in the previous post, no Thomson birthday is complete without trifle. There was left over cake from making the battenberg so Eoin ended up with a beast of a trifle.

Why yes, we always blow our birthday candles out on the livingroom mantlepiece. Don't really know why it ended up there, lack of tables perhaps?

Isn't it pretty!

Andrew's birthday cake again

More photos of the birthday cake. Everybody really enjoyed it and it disappeared quickly. It was a super juicy cake, but not quite as light as I had hoped (I'm probably being picky). I think I prefer the recipe as a cupcake though.

As you can tell from the photo below my sister in law, Fiona, likes Cath Kidston as much as me.

Alex helped Andrew to blow out the candles.

Fiona had the honour of cutting the cake.

Cake cross section. Not the clearest photo but had I waited any longer little fingers would be all over it. You can even see some little fingers sneaking in there! 

My piece!

Banana and chocolate layer cake and trifle

I'm a lean, mean, baking machine! It's my brother Andrew's birthday tomorrow so I decided to use the Hummingbird cupcake recipe to make a massive birthday cake. Admittedly it's not the smoothest icing job, but it still looks pretty spectacular. I like the rustic look and cannot wait to sample a piece tomorrow.

Although the recipe didn't come from the new Hummingbird book, I felt the title was appropriate. It really has been a cake day.

Andrew also requested a trifle (in our family you can't have a birthday without a trifle) so that's what I'm working on at the moment. I'm currently waiting for the jelly to set. It'll be tomorrow before I upload photos of that. I only needed one sponge for the trifle, so I added chopped apples and a bit of cinnamon to the rest of the batter to make some more buns similar to the ones I made last night. I like the dinky spotty cases.

Although I can't upload photos of the trifle tonight, I can upload a photo of the trifle I made at Christmas last year. It even had sponge fingers up the sides. What a beauty!

1.45AM update: TA-DAH! I thought I might as well stay up and finish the trifle. Perhaps not as impressive as the Christmas trifle, but it still looks good.

Apple and walnut cupcakes

After a few weeks of dithering, and very little persuasion from Sarah, I finally bought the new Hummingbird Bakery Cake Days cookbook today. Boy that is one exciting book! It was hard deciding which recipe to try out first, but I went with the apple and walnut cupcakes. I also have my beady eyes on the maple and pecan layer cake but that'll be for another day.

Needless to say the cupcakes turned out beautifully. They are very tasty and look pretty in the new cupcake cases which I also bought today.

I shall be baking cake and trifle tomorrow in preparation for my brother's birthday on Monday, so watch this space!