Mmmm.... Brownies!

Chewy, dense and delicous Pecan Nut Brownies with Chocolate Chunks, my first ever bit of dabbling with Brownies. And I tell ya, they were good! Easy too, which is always a bonus when making something so yummy that it'll fix your chocolate craving for the better part of a year ;)

Follow this link to the full post

I've also included June's desktop background download at the end of the Brownie post, hope you like it!

Naughty & Nice this Halloween

Something a little different for Halloween instead of the usual orange and blacks, spiders, creepy crawleys and zombies. 

Angel's Food Cupcakes with marshmallow frosting

Devil's Food Cupcakes with Nutella Filling

I Scream, You Scream...

We all scream for ice-cream!

This month's Daring Baker challenge was fantastic! I didn't quite get it right, purely my fault, lack of planning and loads of procrastination, but it tasted fantastic anyway. I mean, come on. Home-made ice-cream, home baked Swiss Roll, combined to make a cake. Yum!

Swiss Swirl Ice-Cream Cake

Coffee ice-cream, choc fudge sauce, choc chip ice-cream

Vanilla & marshmallow, choc fudge sauce and choc chip ice-cream

First of the New Year's Daring Baker Challenges

The Daring Baker's kicked off 2010 with a fairly simple challenge, so I thought. There's always a twist though!

Make your own Graham Crackers. Ok, easy enough.

Gluten free.

Ah! There's the twist!

It was a good experience and I'm glad to have learnt something about baking gluten free, my neighbour's daughter has just been diagnosed with Celiacs disease so I had her in mind when I made January's challenge.

There was a second part to the challenge, to use the Graham Crackers to make Nanaimo Bars. These seriously sweet bars are absolutely fantastic and there's a lot you can do with flavour variations.

Daring Bakers January '10: GF Graham Crackers & Nanaimo Bars

Huffing & Puffing

The Daring Bakers did puff pastry for the September challenge and fashioned them as Vols-au-Vents.

We were given carte blanche on the fillings and boy did I have fun doing this. I had all sorts of plans for savoury ones as well but ended up using all my playing time doing sweet ones with berries, creme fraiche, whipped cream, peaches & custard.

It didn't go completely without a glitch, but you'll have to read the post to see about my butter blues ;)

I promise you making puff pastry is not as hard as you'd think. I thought it was rather fun and relaxing and will definitely be making my own from now on instead of buying.

Daring Bakers Sept '09: Vols-au-Vents & Puff Pastry

Peaches & Custard