Raspberry And Coconut Loaf Cake

Hello! For the eagle eyed of you out there, I have been a little slooow with the blog posts of late. I actually have a backlog of travel posts that I have been meaning to put up for some time, although that time just never seems to come about (although, you are very welcome to check out my Instagram over here!! -----> unless you are viewing this on your phone, in which case, I have no idea where you would find it, nor would you really care, I'm guessing *nervous laugh*).

So this weekend I decided to bake something. Yay! So off I wandered, to the local Co-op (no, they did not sponsor this post) for ingredients. I found their baking magazine, I found eggs, and I found their coconut and raspberry loaf cake.

Nutella Oat Cookies

Hello blog, I am back!

After, wow, 7 months, I decided that I still needed my creative outlet. So here I am, hello :)

I have been travelling a lot and despite staying in Airbnb's most of the time, the closest I've gotten to an oven is one time when I was trying to make baked camembert, and baked it to its slow cheesy death. So I stayed away after that.

But I'm back with some oaty nutella cookies, because a good friend of mine gave me my very own personalised jar of nutella for a housewarming present (see the photo? That's my name! You know when you were on a school trip and everyone bought a key ring or a pencil with their name on it? Well, that was me, like, never). 

So, I didn't want to open it the jar for longest time but in the end, my sugar cravings got the better of me.

I'd like to say that I shared the cookies around the office...but, you know what, somehow it just didn't make it that far :)

So, whilst writing this post I've realised that, whilst very factually correct, I have rather unimaginatively named this post 'Nutella Oat Cookies'. Therefore, other names that I think may be appropriate are:

- Mushy Smushy Chocolatey Goodness Cookies

- Make Friends Instantly Cookies

- Your Dentist Has A Field Day Cookies

- You Know You Want To Give Me That Promotion Cookies*

What do you think?

*may not actually help you with that promotion. 

Happy new year! (and a little belated Christmas post)

Happy new year! Did you all have a nice break over the holidays?

I know, I know, how did it finish so quickly? Why are we back? What is even happening???

All very good questions. Unfortunately never answerable, but still.

So, last December I had the privilege of doing a baking photo shoot with Josephine from Courage & Dash (which you just have to check out), who has the most amazing photography skills. We thought it would be great to team up and photograph some baking! And so, off I went, to see what I could make that would be pretty.

That resulted in a pecan cheesecake, mulled wine cupcakes, baileys cupcakes and cranberry & white chocolate cookies. The butterscotch topping on the pecan pie started melting down the sides of the cheesecake (as you can see), but we decided that this just made it look...er, rustic.

I had intended to post this before Christmas (hence the baubles), but I got distracted (probably by something shiny). So I will make it a glittery new year post :) I promise to post the recipes up soon but in the meantime I recommend you recreating the taste of the Baileys cupcakes by....drinking some Baileys. What better way to spend today's lazy Sunday afternoon? :)

All photography by the very talented Josephine, all baking by me. I hope you like the photos and, of course, all the best for 2016!

Lots of love,
Pudding Pie Lane

Halloween: Of Ghosts and Pumpkins

Boo!

So I'm back (finally!) with a Halloween themed bake that I made for our department charity bake sale this week. The theme was to bake something scary for Halloween, and I was thinking "well... do you mean scary as in boo! scary or scary as in....scary..ly bad?" Because, you know, I can do the latter pretty well.

I just don't put it on my blog... :)

The Ledbury, London

I'm not gonna lie, I was pretty excited about the Ledbury. And this isn't really a review, because who needs a blogger review when you're ranked no. 20 on the top 50 restaurants only in the entire WORLD?? (And number 10 last year, hurray).

So I guess this is more of a photo 'guide' than anything else :)

Eric Lanlard’s Baked Vanilla Cheesecake

This cheesecake recipe calls for 900g of (full fat) cream cheese. So when I was out picking up the ingredients the supermarket only sold them in 200g tubs, so off I went to pick up five.

That's...a lot of cheese.

French cooking class at L'atelier des Chefs

"What do they wax lemons with, chef?"

"Er...wax?"

This was the question I asked the chef at our cooking class this week. In an effort to seem keen and interested (which I was!) I had asked a Stupid Question.

One of the other guys there, bless him, did try and help me out "Don't worry! We were all thinking it". But its ok, I had already died of embarrassment at this point.

So where was I asking this question, you ask?

A group of us found these excellent Groupon deals for a place called L'atelier Des Chefs near Bond Street, which run a bunch of different cooking and baking classes ranging from Japanese to Moroccan to French and Italian.

What did we think of it? And how was the food? I can only say is that I came home with a very content belly full of French delicacies after a great evening chatting with good friends and meeting new people.

To start off, we all put our aprons on and moved into the kitchen, where our expert chef (she used to work in fine dining all over the world) told us how to properly prepare the ingredients we were using.

In our French class, we cooked (see pictures below!)

Crisp confit duck leg with salad paysanne and fried quail's egg

Roasted fillet of pollock with samphire, shellfish velouté and girolle mushrooms

Creme brulee with mini madeleines

Elderflower and lemon cake

I thought about starting this post with "Hello! I'm alive!! I'm still here!" as it has been over four months (that's like 5 cat years) since I last blogged.

I would like to say that I've been deprived of any baking equipment and flour and butter and sugar and an oven and I just really wanted to bake but simply couldn't. But um, I think I've just been busy eating cake rather than making it. 

So when the email came round at work for an Easter themed bake sale I jumped at the opportunity to get off my chair (which was proving difficult after all of said cake eating) and make something (ahhhhh).

I settled on an elderflower and lemon cake with almonds, decorated with pink and yellow butterflies and sparkly things and flowers. 'Cos you know, Spring.

All in all, our department bake sale managed to raise just over £520 for Great Ormond Street Hospital which is great news! Somebody bought the whole elderflower and lemon cake and shared it around her desk (well, I presume she shared it around her desk.. but I'm not judging if you eat it all by yourself, hehe).

But just to let you know (although it probably doesn't affect over over that side of the electronic screen you're looking at this from) that THIS CAKE CONTAINS NUTS. 

ALMONDS. NUTTY ALMONDS. NUTILICIOUS ALMONDS. So don't eat it if you have a nut allergy, folks. 

Cherry Bakewell Slices

At school, I was part of a group of friends, whom I love to bits, but where just the most picky eaters. One didn't eat pork, one didn't eat beef, one didn't like vegetables and the other was allergic to nuts. So every time we had a sleepover, we had margarita pizza. 

And a massive box of celebrations, of course :)

But I do feel sorry for the nut allergy sufferers, because ground almonds make the best cake. That sort of dense, fudgy texture with that smell of slightly toasted almond....coupled with cherry jam and drizzled with icing sugar....served with a cup of tea and a scoop of vanilla ice cream.

Aka.... cherry bakewell! (Tea and ice cream optional but encouraged).

Dinner by Heston Blumenthal

As a restaurant named one of the top 10 restaurants in the world, as well as having a celebrity chef renowned for this quirky inventions and scientific experiments with food, I was so looking forward to Dinner. It’s actually easier to book than you think, and with some three or four months of advance planning (for the OCD like me), some furious mouse action, and the help of Opentable, you can get an 8pm Saturday reservation.

Despicable Me Minions Bento Box

The best part of Despicable Me? Definitely the minions.

And as I was googling around to find out some more about them, I found out that...

...there's going to a Minions film! 

Coming in summer 2015.

Exciting!

For those of you who have read my blog for a while, you may know that I used to love making bento boxes (you can see some on the right). For those of you that are new (hello!), they are a popular Japanese lunch box, and often parents prepare children's ones with rice shaped like cartoon characters, with vegetables and fruit to decorate.

Champagne Heart Cake

So this is my attempt at one of The Great British Bake Off's Showstopper Cakes! It's a vanilla sponge cake, with champagne flavoured icing which are iced to look like roses, with a "secret" pink marzipan centre.

Now try saying that with your mouth full of cake :)

I have to admit, this is probably one of the most difficult and most technical cakes I've ever made. It took me forever, but it was worth it!

Oh, and its finished with a sprinkling of edible pink glitter, of course.

Restaurant 360, Dubrovnik, Croatia

When we arrived in Dubrovnik, we asked our taxi driver about the more famous Restaurant Nautika what he thought of it and his reply was "oh, it's for old people and politicians", but when we asked about Restaurant 360 the reply came "ah, that's a lovely restaurant, it's cooler and for young people!" 

And because, you know, we're hip and kosher (at least I think that's what the cool kids say these days) we decided on Restaurant 360. Thanks Mr Taxi Driver!

So the entire restaurant is literally inside the city walls, you eat on top of the walls with a panoramic view of Dubrovnik (hence the name...). It's all very cosy and romantic and posh without being stuffy, which we really liked.

Would we come back? Definitely! Think worth a flight to Croatia just for this restaurant :)

Dubrovnik. The city of blue skies, clear seas, and a whole lot of seafood.

This is the view from our hotel room balcony. It was beautiful. We literally got there, ran on to the balcony, and took a deep breath of lovely fresh sea air. 

And I thought...

Hey, I could get used to this.

Dubrovnik is a coastal town (and one of the most visited detonations) in Croatia, where you're right on the coast of the Adriatic. 

And you know what this means? 

Seafood!

I did wonder if at some point I was starting to grow gills from all of this seafood. Even if I did, it would have been so worth it.