I found a recipe! (A Hungarian Kuglóf, to be precise)

Well, I didn't quite 'find' this recipe, it's the 'Hungarian Kuglóf' adapted from my Green & Black's cookbook. What I mean is that I made this cake twice for two friend's birthdays, took a load of photos (no really A LOAD, you have been warned) intending to blog about it.

Then I forgot - I probably got distracted by something shiny. Or chocolate. Or better still, shiny chocolate.

So I can blog about it not feeling guilty that I should be working, because I've already made this cake, and the time spent writing this post would probably be the same amount of time I spend procrastinating on youtube.

This pretty pizazz-ey (and slightly podgy) panda topped version was also for a friend's birthday (you can skip to the panda sculpting here). And just for the record, she was turning 20. Not 2, as the cake would suggest.

A slight baking hiatus

It's week 5 in the Cambridge University term, and we all have something commonly known as 'week 5 blues', where you have work crisis after work crisis (and for me, a dance show to rehearse for), thus stranger than normal university sleep patterns. Therefore no time to bake :-( Like my friend at My Final Year, who is graphing his sleep/work/free time, I could do the same, except mine would look something like:

Okay okay, a slight exaggeration, as the total number of hours don't actually add up to 24, and you can't have negative sleep. But it might as well be.

Yes seriously, the only thing I have baked this week is a 5 minute chocolate mug cake (see below), though I promise to do something big and yummy and extravagant soon and take lots of photos and write some kind of poem on it very very soon!

Valentine's Day Biscuits

The biscuits aren't red, 

And the icing isn't blue,
But they are still sweet,
And you can bake them too :)

Though the biscuits can go soggy,
The icing can stick,
I made them fresh today,
So you better eat them quick!

Happy Valentine's Day!

Happy Chinese New Year!

Xin Nian Kuai Le, Gong Xi Fa Cai! Today we begin the year of the rabbit. May lots of luck and happiness and fortune hop your way! In China at the moment everything is a blur; its that time of year where phone lines get jammed and train prices cost a gazillion yuan and everyone eats until they want to pop and then sit down around the tv to watch the Chinese New Year Gala.

And whilst I've got your attention, this is my all time favourite performance of the galas - the deaf troupe's Thousand Hand Buddha's performance.

I do miss being in China around this time of year, as I have never spent Chinese New Year in actual China, but that’s fine, because I celebrated with some Chinese friends at Uni yesterday. We made dumplings, and as they say: Luck is like having a dumpling fly into your mouth.

Although we didn't having any flying dumplings, a group of my Chinese friends got together last night and made dumplings, and I made fortune cookies. Fortune cookies? Yes, the ones they give you at the end of a chicken chow mein meal in restaurants in Chinatown that say stuff like: