Beware the cookie monster

I have been so tardy, I'm really sorry! Lots has happened since my last post, I went on holiday, I finished the mother of all projects at work and I got engaged. So have been trying to plan a wedding in another country. For Feburary. This coming Feburary. No pressure.

Apparently I need a "certificate of no impediment" in order to get married, which basically just says I'm not realated to my OH or married to some other poor unsuspecting person. Once I have my certificate, I need to take it to Germany so OH can prove I'm not related to him and I'm not married to someone else. Then I can send the whole lot to the authorities in Finland who will do exactly the same thing. It's like one of those computer games, where you can't progress to the next level without collecting all of the relevant magic items. What could possibly go wrong?

Well, when I'm stressed out my default response is to bake cookies. People at work like it when I do this and often joke about spiking my coffee with things to keep me even more awake. But as I'm out of sugar in the kitchen, it looks like they are out of luck this time and it's back to the craft table to keep myself distracted.

In my stash of bezels that Angela kindly supplied me with - I have some square ones that look like this:



I have made a map square using one of my other square ones, but I didn't bother to post the make as there is only so much identical resin work that I can pass off as novel. But the thing itself looks like a teeny tiny baking tray to me.

I have hundreds - literally hundreds of these little silicon moulds which I use for making kawaii sugary things. This one makes a cookie about a cm in diameter.



That's too big for what I want to do with it, but you can use the inside in the same way as you would use a texture mat. Tiny ball of clay first...



... then just press it onto the inside of the mould so it picks up the imprint from the inside.



I can repeat this a couple of times to make some teeny cookies. As long as the clay ball is about the same size, the final product should be too.



I've just used one of my sugarcraft cutters to nip a bite out of one of them.



I've used a small snowflake cutter here as I can't seem to find the lily of the valley one I normally use for bite marks, but anything that leaves a small enough imprint will be fine.



Baked in the oven until done and they are ready to glue onto the bezel. I've used E6000 glue here as it's really strong and will bond things to metal, but any craft glue should be fine as the cookies are so tiny and light.



Cookies on the tray! I've added a few tiny tiny crumbs of brown polyemer clay around the bitten one.



3D fabric paint is great for adding mock icing to things. I like this stuff especially as of all the brands I've tried it dries really fast and leaves a nice non-tacky finish. Icing the cookies...



...adding a little bit of fake sugar. This stuff is actually small shards of plastic, but it looks like sugar sprinkles and sticks neatly in the paint.



And we're all done.



Cookies in the absence of real sugar! I guess I better get back to my paperwork!

The one with the wedding cake

I apologise for the intermittent blog service; I think I've just hit my limit when it comes to emergency baking...

This is a 9 inch single tier wedding cake. I made it last week and then spent the two days trying to get it to absorb as much firewater as it will take. Anyone who's ever made a vodka water melon at short notice will understand.



Then I marzipanned it and iced it. I was going to take photos, but I was so wrapped up in the project I couldn't even take a decent shot at the end. It's iced in ivory fondant, dusted with pearl lustre powder and finished with white royal icing and gold and ivory organza ribbons. The spray is made from sugar stars, sugar hearts, real pearls and gold glass beads held onto white florist wire with jewellery making crimps.



I have developed a new love of pearl lustre powder, it's awesome. It hides everything. Okay, so it makes me look like I've been clubbing with a load of underaged kids, but I can live with being shiny for a couple of days.

I think I need a holiday!

The best laid plans of sugarmice

I have been trying to be good and take lunch to work each day rather than defaulting to the sandwich shop or just eating crisps. Sadly, as I couldn't organise an alcohol fuelled party in beer production facility at the moment, these plans have gone a bit astray.

Take today. I packed: three bananas, a can of coke and a box of noodles with stir fried veg and tofu (leftovers from last night). By the time I'd got to work, the box had split, stuff had gone everywhere, the bananas looked like someone had stamped on them and the internal pressure of the can of coke could have razed an atoll in the Pacific. So it was falafel and houmous on olive ciabatta *again*.

Well, I managed to salvage my bag - which is currently in the wash, none of the papers were that important and my cheque book is drying nicely on my desk fan and fluttering about like - well - chequebook shaped bunting soaked in chilli sauce.

I now have these bananas, which I can't eat as they are brown. I only eat bananas when they are green. Green = good. These are not good. Bananas amaze me. I hit traffic lights on my way to work that change colour more slowly than these things. I am assuming they do it to protect themselves from their natural predators.



The don't look that bad once they are all peeled and chopped up though. I was pretty sure they'd be damaged on the inside after all the trauma they've been through.



8 oz of soft margarine, 7 oz of sugar - beaten lightly until sort of homogenous. Not too much, don't have time for all that Delia stuff.



Four eggs.



8 oz of self raising flour, 1 tsp of cinnamon, 1 oz of dark sugar, 1.5 oz of porridge oats, tsp of baking powder.



Add chopped, and somewhat traumatised, bananas.



Muffin cases - this mix makes about 18; fill about 2/3 full and shove into the oven at 180 degrees for about twenty minutes.



Look a bit like this when they are done...



I don't frost these, but a little bit of grated chocolate works fine as a topping



Mmmm... warm damaged banana muffins :)

Tick-tock Clarice

I admit it, I'm procrastinating.

I'm buried under biochemistry questions, chemistry questions, trying to sort out bits of broken equipment that have forced my work to a halt and my quarterly industry report is due on the desk of a guy in the US first thing tomorrow morning.

I have a long running experiment on the go that needs five hours of prodding every day until the virus capitulates and stops being infectious. It's been a week now of 6 am starts and it's still sulking and refusing to give in. I have 23.6 g of impure yellow slime on my desk waiting to be purified and turned into something that has to be pure enough to soak into a protien crystal. I'm racing the crytallographer on this one; and he has protein clean and trays put down so it's looking like a close run thing. I need to chase a chemical company as I'm running out of silica gel and triflic anhydride. I need to pull some data of the HPLC and analyse it before my boss gets back. I'm on autoclave duty. I have been running about like a gazelle on steriods all day; powered by a cocktail of caffiene and sugar. No pressure.

So what am I doing now?

Stalking some craft stuff on Ebay and making cake. I have the concentration span of a slightly mad goldfish at the moment and I can't settle so I need to relax a bit. This is my default "No way am I making your middle tier sponge, I'll make a seperate one and we can hide it in the kitchen" wedding cake - the sponge that noone sees that appears in bits at the end of the night when everyone has had too much to drink.

I have some lemons. I bought them to make cake with last week and forgot about them. I need to use them pretty sharpish as they aren't coping in the heat - normally I just buy fruit, put it in the fruitbowl and watch it decay but today I'm going to be good and make an effort. There are four here, so I'm removing the zest and juicing them. I tend to keep the zest and juice separate as I don't like bits of zest on the top of the cake all that much, but it's a personal thing.



Butter - 140 g butter, warmed gently so it's soft - or just accidently left out on the side all afternoon in this heat!



Sugar - 250 g of sugar. Normally plain white sugar for this cake, but I'm using half-half white and light brown today as that's what I have at the moment. It honestly doesn't matter; the darker the sugar you use, the darker the final cake will be.



Eggs - two plus and two extra yolks, lightly beaten as usual. This receipe came about as a way of using up excess egg yolks after a pavlova fest, so that's why it's an odd number. Add the lemon zest and beat hard until smooth.



280 g of self raising flour with 1 tablespoon of baking powder thrown in.



Add about 3/4 of the lemon juice into the mix and beat really quickly. Once again, the cake mix is a bit sloppy at this point, but don't worry, it's meant to look like this!



Cake form - this mixture seems to work best as a thin layer in a shallow tin - normally I cook it in a swiss roll tin and make up layers. It doesn't rise very much so thicker layers in loaf tins just end up dense; fine for sculptural work and (hiss spit) people who *insist* that middle tier has to be sponge, but not good for light fluffy cupcakes. Today I'm using a square muffin tin, but cupcakes work fine. This mix will make about 24 cupcakes.



This is one cake I don't tend to grease the pan for or use cake release. As much as the stuff is supposed to be tasteless, I can taste it and I'm not going to frost these so there will be no way of hiding fried edges. You might think that life is too short to individually line each well. I would argue that life is too short to wash this tin.



Mixture goes in...



...the oven at 160 degrees, until a skewer comes out clean - about an twenty minutes, but it will vary depending on your oven and your cake tin. Watch it closly as it will catch.



I tend to leave them to cool in the tin a bit, with a cloth over them to keep the moisture in.



These are little sugar crystals. I end up with boxes of these as every time the out-laws descend on us as they always bring them with them. I'm not sure why. I'm assuming they are some Germanic bartering tool I do not understand the value of. We do have sugar in this country last time I checked but these make an okay (totally optional) topping for this particular cake seeing as I haven't got the faintest idea what else to do with them.



Crush lightly, throw a tablespoon of limonochello on them and sprinkle over the cake then drizzle a mix of 20 g of sugar and the juice of the last remaining lemon over them and flick over icing sugar. About a teaspoon per cake works okay, they are quite light, so if you add too much, you will be eating them with a spoon. I prefer this topping to frosting for lemon cake, but this cake works nicely with a light glace if you want it iced instead or with lemon curd.

Woo hoo, work avoidance cake!



Better throw my report together; at least he's six hours behind in the US so I've still got some time left before I get the reminder email. I am an ocean of calm...

And breathe...

Because it's my party and I'll cry if I want to

I'm not a birthday person. I'm not opposed to birthdays generally, but it's my own birthdays I dread. This is mainly because I get "Oh, congratulations you're another year older - you really ought and to be thinking about producing grandchildren for me as you're really not getting any younger" looks from the outlaws. I can see it in their eyes when they coo over photos of my nephew.

What they don't understand I've spent the last ten years working with horrible chemicals. They also don't seem to understand that I actually enjoy working with horrible chemicals. There are probably multiple spelling mistakes in my DNA thanks to a decade of mutagens - and just because you can sort of read text speak doesn't mean you should use it to communicate. I hit snooze on my biological clock a long time ago.

Anyway. Birthdays mean cake. And making cake to bring to work. I've sort of shot myself in the foot over the past year or so with bringing cakes to work as they have become gradually more and more intricate. It's getting to the stage that I just feel like going to the deli, peeling the stickers off and pretending it took me hours; which I admit is slightly more than tempting at the moment. Simple is the way forward today though - it's too hot for chocolate cake and I don't have time to make something elaborate as it's exam time up here and I'm buried under the marking pile. Plus I'm a simple soul, this is my favourite cake in the whole world and it's my birthday so I'm choosing. So there.

Eggs. Four. Lightly beaten apparently - according to my notes; in practice hit with the hand whisk for a bit. 250 g of sugar added and beaten again until it's pretty homogenous.



This is a butter free cake; not intentionally, but one time I went to make it and realised there was no butter and you have to get some lipids from somewhere, so I added an equivalent mass of oil instead and it tasted far far better. I've stuck with that ever since. Add 185 ml of oil. This gets whipped in too. I've tried adding it gradually in a slow and gentle stream, but to be honest, it doesn't make any difference what so ever.



Beat like mad for a bit until it's bubbly.



I use self raising flour here, with a 1/2 a teaspoon of baking powder thrown in. 300 g, stirred in gently.



Carrots. Life is too short to grate carrots, so I tend to throw them in the food processor. You need 400 g of grated carrots. I use a fine grating disc as I don't want it to look like any vegetables came anywhere near this.



Dried fruit. I actually never measure this, it's optional anyway - but normally what I do is plop a handful in a bowl and throw about 15 ml (3 tablespoons) of cointreau on it and let it sit for a bit. You can use orange juice instead if you want. I also throw the zest of one orange, a teaspoon of cinnammon, a pinch of ground cloves and teaspoon of vanilla extract too.

Walnuts too. Carrot cakes contain walnuts. I like walnuts, so there are a lot in here. About 100 grams, corsely chopped.



Stir to combine. It looks like orange snot at this point and it's really runny, but that's okay.



Cake form - this is a silicone ring form 35 cm in diameter. I've coated the inside with cake release as this mixture makes a soft cake that will stick unless the tin is greased. If you are using a normal form lining it will make it easier to remove the final product.



Bake for about an hour at 180 C until a skewer comes out clean. Leave it to cool in the tin with a cloth over it. It will fragment if you try to turn it out when it's warm, so leave it alone until it's cold.



Frosting next. I tend to use a cream cheese frosting for this cake. It's quite sweet, but it seems to work okay. 100 g of softened butter, 100 g soft cheese beaten together.



Add enough icing sugar (it will be a lot of sugar - about 1/3 of a kilo, but it will depend on how wet your cheese is) to make a fluffy paste. I do this with an electric whisk as it's quite soft. I don't add any other liquid to it as I think orange flavoured frosting is very very wrong. Apply to cold cake with the back of a spoon or a palette knife.



I tend to make it sort of fluffy.



Top with more walnuts, a pinch of cinnamon and a pinch of orange zest.



The only bad thing about this cake is that I have to share it :)