Bake Day

Today the cupboard is bare, so it's a bake day!

This morning as I walked home after taking H2 to school, the quality of light was grey-pink and ghostly, with a Christmas Past kind of feeling.  It was as though nature were holding her breath in anticipation of something to come, but at the same time there was a feeling that something wasn't quite over yet.  There was no wind, which is unusual, and the stillness was palpable.  Some would say this was all a bit creepy, but I like creepy - in this sense anyway!

This inspired me to make icing in these pinky-grey colours.  I'm not sure I got it exactly right, but the thought is there!

So once at home, the dogs settled for the time being, I set to in the kitchen with Classic FM for company.

If we don't move, she won't notice we're here.

The chocolate cake is meant to be made as a two tiered round cake, but I decided to just make it in one large, square tin instead and then put lots of chocolate icing on top.  It turned out a bit thin, but the icing would make up for that...or it would have done had I got enough icing.  Oh noo! Now what?  Did I want to lock up the house, put the dogs away, get coat and boots on and drive a 30 mile round trip for some icing sugar?  Did I heck.  I had just about a table spoon in the bottom of the box, so I sprinkled (very economically) some on the chocolate cake, from a great height, and added a little bit of edible glitter.  There was enough left to make a slightly runny Welsh Dawn coloured icing for the spice biscuits.  Phew!  Crisis over.

The Queen of Hearts jammy dodgers are a recipe I found last year on Cherry Menlove's beautiful blog.  I have made them several times and they always go down very well, and very quickly.  The spice biscuits are my simple adaptation of the fabulous and wonderful Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall's Lavender Shortbread recipe.  I made the original in summer, when we had just about enough lavender flowers to make it.  They were gorgeous, but we can't eat lavender all year round, so the next time, I missed out the flowers and added 2 teaspoons of mixed spice.  I used all flour rather than flour and cornflour, so they turn out more biscuit like.  Probably the affect of me rolling and re-rolling the living daylights out of the dough has more to do with the biscuit texture than anything else.

Guess what Postie just brought?  My fabrics for Row's Christmas Hearts!  Yay!  I love them, so hope she does too.  They are red and white (of course), not particularly Christmassy, but they will be when I've finished with them.  Watch this space!

Have a super day, what ever you do with it and thank you for reading. xxx