Baking beauties tag

Hello chaps and chapesses!

You may be aware that I love to bake.  To explain to you exactly how and why I love to bake, I decided to take part in the Baking Beauties tag, after I found it on Laura and Michael's blog.

1. What is the first thing you remember baking?

I can remember making a Teisen Lap in a cookery class in my first year of high school.  I think it's a Welsh thing, it's basically a sponge with sultanas in, so you can't really go wrong.  It was my grandad's favourite, so he was Very Pleased Indeed when I brought it home from school.

2. What was the last thing you baked?

Graeme's birthday cake.  It was a chocolate sponge cake with chocolate buttercream in the middle.  I put buttercream all around the outside and on the top, and decorated it with Kit Kats and peanut butter M&Ms.  It went down a storm - whoever said the way to a man's heart is through his stomach was definitely on to something!

3. Something you've always wanted to bake?

I'd love to master the art of baking bread - I've tried it a few times and it's never been quite right.  I'll keep trying though - I refuse to be defeated by a bit of flour, water, salt and yeast!  Back in my cakey comfort zone, I'd like to try my hand at a Battenburg, as it's one of my all time favourites.

4. Tell us about a time you baked something and it went ridiculously wrong.

I've had a few mishaps in my baking life.  Like the time I made fairy cakes in paper cases but without a tin, and they all expanded outwards so they were more like fairy pebbles than fairy cakes.  Then there was the disastrous chocolate cake I made, that was dry and crumbly and tasteless and generally rubbish.  I blame the recipe for that one (I'm looking at you, Hairy Bikers!)

My most recent baking hiccup was when I was making the afore-mentioned birthday cake for Graeme's birthday.  I was a bit enthusiastic when creaming the butter and sugar, and this happened:

Don't beat your butter straight from the fridge, kids - warm it up a little bit first.  Wooden spoons aren't invincible.

5. Be honest.  Do you lick the spoon?

Not really.  I sometimes have a little bit, but I'd rather scrape every last bit of batter from the bowl and the spoon into the tin, so I get as much cake as possible.  I'm so ladylike.....

6. How often do you bake?

Not often enough.  I go through phases - sometimes it's a couple of times a week, sometimes a whole month goes by baking-free.  Those are sad months - I must make an effort to get my bake on more regularly.

7. What baking successes are you most proud of?

Last year I made a giant French fancy for Graeme's birthday.  It took over 5 hours and a kilo of butter - it was a beast.  That was pretty awesome.

8. Do you tidy up as you go along or leave one big mess until the end?

Tidying up distracts me from the task in hand, so I tend to let the mess build up, then have a quick tidy up while the cake's in the oven.  That's mainly to create space for more mess when I'm making the icing or buttercream later on.

9. Do you use recipe books or get them online?

Both.  I've got a few recipe books that are quite good, but if the baking fancy takes me I tend to look online for inspiration.  Once I've tried a recipe and decided I like it, I write it out in my recipe notebook, so I tend to refer back to that quite a lot, too.

10. Do you stick to the recipe or do you experiment a little?

When it comes to baking I don't have the natural flair some people have, so I always need to follow a recipe.  I experiment with meals and soups and things, but baking is an area where I feel like I need to follow instructions, otherwise very scary things happen.

11. Who are your favourite food bloggers?

I don't tend to read 'food blogs' as such, but the Caked Crusader is a firm favourite.  Her cherry bakewell recipe is to die for, and is so easy.

12. What is your favourite thing to bake?

Cake.  Fairy cakes, cupcakes, sandwich cakes, banana bread - anything that's sweet and calorific.  I just love cake.