Tag Archives: food

Let Them Eat Cake

19 Nov

This weekend saw the birthday of my friend Lauren, and since I didn’t have a clue what to buy her, I thought I would make a cake.

Let me give you some background. I used to be pretty bad at cakes. I had a dream that I might be a modern day Julia Childs, and at school I looked forward to the module in Home Economics where we made cakes. I whisked and prepped my first cake ever, put it in the oven, and promptly blew it up, taking out the two cakes in the oven above. Turns out you CAN put too much baking powder in cake mix. Who’d have thought it? I was kindly advised by the teacher to try something different for GCSE, and my hopes and dreams of becoming a chef were crushed (as if).

hyperbole and a half, one of my favourite cartoon blogs.

If you’ve been reading my blog a while you’ll know stubbornness is kinda my thing, and like the French teacher who told me I’d never amount to anything (I then proceeded to walk out of my final exam with a high A) I’m a pretty good cook. I do the Christmas dinner for my friends, and I’ve been known to rustle up entire three course meals for dinners. So f**k you, teachers!

So, back to the cake. Pinterest has been distracting me from daily life for a while now, and it makes me feel pretty inferior when i see all the absolutely outstanding recipes that people make, while I draw smily faces on the top of cupcakes. Out pops Stubborngirl! “Well if random, faceless Pinterest stranger can create masterpieces from cake, then so can I!” I think, without any background knowledge of said faceless user.

I looked at this one.

Bit much? Maybe.

Then I saw this one…

Yep, probably still a little too much effort for a Saturday.

And then I found my inspiration. A Kit Kat and M&M cake, In actual fact, I had my eye on it for a little while, but could never justify making it for a night in with a film. Although I reckon I could have had a good go at destroying one by myself :)

I went to the shop with a spring in my step, and some slight anticipation. I have done this before you see. When I was 20, I decided to lovingly craft my then-boyfriend a birthday cake. He loved playing the guitar, and in my head I would make a white cake with a guitar on it and be crowned the best girlfriend ever. Fantastic idea. In reality, my mother came home to me rocking and crying, sobbing at her “I don’t know how you do iiiiiiiiiiiittttttttttt!!!! Yours always look so gooooooooood!” When she investigated the situation, my cake looked like it had been hit by a car at speed and flattened, and the ‘guitar’ icing shape I had made was no more than a hotdog looking disaster with a really long sausage. Turns out that my head is far more creative than my hands. Mum had to sort the cake out, he was amazed, but I couldn’t lie and say that it was my work of art, in case friends and family started commissioning me for cakes. Imagine, me not being able to refuse and a birthday cake for a party looking like this…

“I don’t get it, she used to be so good at cakes!”

Anyway, I got there, bought all the ingredients, including four family packets of KitKats, and danced home, singing a song about baking a cake (It happens, can’t help it) and set to work.

It was awesome.

I sandwiched it together with chocolate spread, feeling very grown up (cake sandwiching?! Normally I just cover cupcakes in frosting so you can’t see how misshapen they are) and stuck the KitKats on the side.

Fuck. There might not be enough KitKats to go round. Not going back to the shop, I thought. Man already thinks I have an eating disorder due to the incorrect correlation between the amount of KitKats I am buying and my body weight. Must fit round!!

Panic over. They fit round. I iced the top with the M&Ms, and then spent 25 mins dancing round my kitchen like Will Smith in the Fresh Prince, marvelling at how amazing I am.

See!!!!!

“And lo, behold the cake that will end all cakes.”

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A Wintery Weekend At Borough Market

1 Nov

It’s a rare occurrence, but this weekend was mine and mine alone. No neatly penned scribbles in the diary, no vague plans with the girls carried away into the air when we previously parted – nothing.

Exciting. I love the thought of a free weekend spanning out across the horizon with nothing interrupting it as it drifts away, and so I went about that brilliant hobby of making last minute plans to fill my day.

On Friday evening we decided, out of the blue, to go out in Camden. There was a bite in the breeze as the season is turning, but we had great fun drinking and dancing and talking with strangers. It just goes to show that when you are with your best friend, time passes too fast and very happily. No fair weather friends, just me and my partner in crime, having fun.

My Weekend In Photos

My Weekend In Photos

On Saturday we went to Borough Market. If you are based in London and haven’t been, or ever get to London, it’s a must. Lane upon lane of food stalls, the hustle and bustle of people browsing butchers and fishmongers, and the delightful smell of food stalls whetting your appetite and tantalising your taste buds. It was so hard not to stop at the first stall and chow down on paella, but luckily we resisted as we eventually came to a hog roast stand with cracking and applesauce. Yum!! We finished wandering the market and found an independent cafe to have some tea and warm our bones before heading out into the sleet to go home.

I woke early on Sunday, as the clocks had changed and took the train home to spend the day with two poorly little girls. We had great fun making pizza faces, watching movies and playing, with the kind of clingy cuddles that only sick kids give you, when they don’t want to be out exploiting and discovering, just having cosy cuddles.

How were your weekend? Seems like an age ago now!!

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We Are Tinkering In The Kitchen!!!

30 Nov

Little Tinkers,

Thank you for all the kind words over the last week or so and I apologise for the dramatic “I bid you adieu” and then no more posts!

I’m sick again, (it doesn’t rain, it pours!!) so I’ve barely raised my head from the pillow this weekend, but I am starting to feel a little more alive.

And I have good news! Jules has taken the helm on the new project and cooked up some great stuff, so we are now operating on our own blog at http://www.tinkeringinthekitchen.com.

It might not stay looking like that as we are deliberating behind the scenes as to turning it into something fabulous! But we would love you to follow us there too. We promise it will be just as amusing :)

In fact, we are running a bit of a competition; if we can get 300 subscribers before Christmas we will give away this fantastic gift.

The Hummingbird Bakery is quintessentially British; a bakery first set up in Covent Garden and brought the Red Velvet Cupcake into the public eye! I’m pretty terrible at cupcakes but I have this book and I can guarantee they rarely go wrong, so good are the recipes. We are also aiming to get 300 followers on Twitter (@Kitchen_Tinker) in this time too, so if you enter on Twitter and subscribe you will automatically get entered twice. Yay!!

We will announce the winner at random on the 1st of January if we reach the target, and pop the prize in the post there and then, so one of you lucky people will get a lovely prize to blow away the January blues! If you don’t want to be entered please follow us anyway, we need the support!

This is available to everyone, so get following!

And just as an aside, thanks for all the positive comments and great response to our new effort. Jules and I are very touched.

Lots of Love

‘Belle

xxx

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Let The Bake Off Begin ~ Hallowe’en Special

29 Oct

This weekend, I decided to do some baking. I don’t do it very often (you can see the results from last time here) but I thought Hallowe’en might be a fun time to crack out the flour and icing sugar and get cooking! I wanted to make some cupcakes for Lilly and started off with pink to try to pipe some brains onto the top of them. It went wrong.

The icing was too runny and when piped it oozed everywhere, so as Lilly loves pink I made her her very own ones with a spider and a monster, and some mini chocolate finger cakes.

Spooky spiders with googly eyes!

Monsters!

A wicked witch and Jack Skellington.

Vampire Bat

The finished products! What do you guys think?

Don’t forget to enter my fancy dress competition; so far I have had entries from Antony and Cleopatra, Kiss, some punks, a mummy and some other fantastic costumes!

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Sweet and Savoury ~ It Just Ain’t Right.

25 Aug

It’s a minefield out there. I’m talking specifically about food mind, otherwise this would take far too long and bore you all to tears, but food is rich subject. There’s so much of it!

I’m a simple creature so fancy pants food annoys me. Ok it looks pretty positioned there in the middle of the plate for all to see with swirls of pesto round it and a little parmesan crust hat, but WHERE IS THE REST OF IT?! If I wanted minimal eating I would pick the unwanted vegetables out of the food tray in the bottom of the fridge. I mean really.

But what really bothers me (in a slight rain man fashion) is people who mix sweet with savoury. And I know I’m not alone in the world (thank god for Sam) so let the ranting commence.
It’s not right.

Why ever would you put jam in a sandwich?

I will give a certain amount of leeway to people who eat white bread jam sandwiches, but brown bread? That’s like putting a good heap of lemon curd in a jacket potato. It’s just not done! There are so many choices for the common sandwich, like cheese and pickle, or ham and tomato, why do you have to get greedy and start adding in dessert? Pineapple on a pizza? Lemon chicken? A lemon? With chicken?! No thank you very much. Raisins in curry? You can keep them and I’m not even going to start on the whole duck smothered in pieces of orange. You are over complicating it!

Apple. With cheese. I can’t even start on this, it annoys me too much. But the worst one is when you go out for dinner and you get some salad with whatever you ordered, and it comes with a flower in it. thats just taking it too far.

There are, as always, certain exclusions.
• Pork with apple sauce. Allowed. In fact I quite like it.
• Red cabbage with apple. As above.
• Bread and butter pudding. Tolerated as the bread is sweet.
• Lamb tagine. I hate to say it but I like the apricots. Shudder.

I don’t care if it’s the new thing or a ‘taste sensation’ I don’t want it. Quelle fromage!

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Diabetes and Me

31 Mar

I’ve talked around the issue of me being a diabetic, and I thought I would share a little more with you all.

Diabetes mellitus, often simply referred to as diabetes—is a group of metabolic diseases in which a person has high blood sugar, either because the body does not produce enough insulin, or because cells do not respond to the insulin that is produced. This high blood sugar produces the classical symptoms of polyuria (frequent urination), polydipsia (increased thirst) and polyphagia (increased hunger). (Wikipedia)


I was diagnosed as being diabetic in the November I turned seventeen. I was drinking a lot of water and losing a lot of weight (which I thought was great, but looking back I looked in desperate need of a sandwich and a full fat coke!) and my Dad said that I may need to visit the doctor. I went and when my results were returned I had to go straight to the hospital. Unfortunately they didn’t have a bed for me so I spent the night on a casualty ward on a Friday night. You can imagine the horror; drunken people throwing up and people shouting; I was terrified and from then on insisted my dad took me home and brought me back to the hospital twice a day for shots. Continue reading →

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Remember the Diet….

14 Mar

I’ve been trying really hard to stick to my healthy eating and cutting sugar out of my diet, to prevent the sugar hangover that I get, and my blood sugar levels rocketing out of control. And also, to lose some of my tummy! I’ve been doing well, swapping bread out and snacking on cottage cheese and fruit rather than crisps and biscuits (and my old friend the hula hoop). I got a bit sensitive after being told by a boy that I ate way too much. I don’t think it came out as it was intended, but it still struck me. I eat a lot, but upon reflection he eats like an old lady. Anyway..

The boys in the office are determined to scupper my plans. They keep buying cookies and then offering them about, making me feel bad because “if you don’t eat them they will go stale!!! I couldn’t possibly eat another!!!” etc etc. I politely decline.

So when I went to the toilet the other day, I came back to find half a cookie on my desk. Apparently the thought was that I would have forgotten it wasn’t mine, think I had eaten the first half, and polish it off.

Nice work lads, but you will simply have to try harder!!!

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Cookie Catastrophe

1 Mar

So this weekend Emma and I thought we would venture into the world of cooking. It was hesitant, sort of like when you get to the beach and you dip your toe in the cold water, pull it out and then tentatively stick it back in again to see if it got any warmer while you were deliberating.

We went to the shops and got all the ingredients for Nigella’s triple choc chip double dip fancy pants cookies, which should be marketed as a baked heart attack. We hit the baking aisle with aplomb, selecting raisins, chocolate chips and a big slab of cooking chocolate, plus eggs and vanilla essence, and took them home to prepare. (we did make a detour to the ice-cream aisle, after all, we needed something to go with them, didn’t we!!)

We went home, and realised that the oven wasn’t working. We fiddled about with it, utterly bemused as I had roasted a chicken that morning ( I can cook people, just not sweet delights) and after ten minutes of turning it on and off at the wall and nothing happening, we called a grown up.

Apparently it couldn’t be fixed, so we braved on, made the mixture and took it round to the mother ships to see if we could use her oven.  We laid the cookies out on the tray, and put them in, hardly being able to wait for our culinary delights to cook.

When we went down again, there was an unfamiliar smell of cheese on toast. What had happened?

The short answer is…. there was a small fire.

Basically what had happened was the baking paper had been hanging over the edge of the tray, and had set alight on the gas fire (so used to using electric ovens, I had not thought this through). I do have a confession to make though, I think that I had perhaps forgotten to turn the gas down when I had been lighting the flame. The cookies were black as night, and the windows had to be opened to assuage the smell of burning through the downstairs rooms of the house.

Maybe we will try again next week.

(Cartoon from Natalie Dee , where some of the funniest cartoons are born)

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Dinner To Die For

22 Feb

If you are looking for a great Sunday lunch in London then look no further than The Hawksmoor in Covent Garden.

I went there last weekend as a Valentine’s Day treat, being promised the greatest roast dinner of my life. “Better than a granddad roast” I asked, and was informed that yes, it was indeed.

Sceptical!

I went along with an open mind and was greeted by a doorway that led into a dark room with a very gentleman’s club feel. We were led down the stairs into a beautiful room that had exposed brick walls and wine racks from floor to ceiling; the dim light giving it an intimate feel and despite the size of it, a very personal feel.

The menu was magical, stopping to explain the history behind the place, the cocktails and the food on offer. They weren’t ordinary cocktails either; just a plethora of interesting sounding thirst quenchers like the perfect lady (Gin shaken with Peach Brandy, Lemon Juice & a dash of Egg White) I perused the menu to see what culinary delights were offered, but of course had to sample the roast dinner as this was serious business.

And it was nothing short of brilliant. The meat was cooked to perfection and it came with quite literally, the world’s best roasties. The gravy was delicious and the roasted bulb of garlic just finished off an exquisite meal.

Being the world’s worst diabetic, my insulin had run out at the Geordies house the night before, so I was sadly unable to sample the puddings. I did steal a quick look at the table next to me and got total pudding envy, so next time im working my way down that list too!

So Adam, well done on picking another amazing restaurant.

http://www.thehawksmoor.co.uk/

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