Spinach and Cheese Savory Muffins

On Friday night I decided to whip up these savory muffins for lunch the next day. They are from the Hummingbird Bakery cookbook.

They had cheddar, spinach, red onion and some cayenne pepper which gave them a bit of spice.

We ate them today again for lunch with some plum tomato and basil soup, they went down well as a side instead of bread.


Happy Baking x

Edit: I baked these again the following weekend to take as snacks to V Festival. This time I used fresh spinach instead of frozen. It was a bit harder to mix into the mixture but I got my little sister as a helper and got her muscles working.

There were once again well received...

The Cupcake Cookie Monster

This week I wanted to put some of my cake decorating skills to practice. Marco has been pestering me to make Cookie Monster Cupcakes for awhile now so I thought I would surprise him.

LauraK made the simple vanilla cupcakes, with a teaspoon of peanut butter in the middle. And for the topping we had run out of cocoa powder so we improvised and used a mixture of nutella and peanut butter.
To made the fur for the cookie monster I mixed some blue food colouring in with desiccated coconut. I wasn't sure if this would work at all, however it turned out surprisingly well and gave the coconut real texture as there was different shades of blue.

For the eyes I tried using white chocolate drops and black icing pen, however the eyes were a little small, a little to Howard Moon like.

"You haven't seen my mate Howard, have you? Kinda tall, scruffy hair, small eyes like a crab? "
―Vince Noir on Howard

So I just drew them on with white icing pen. Next time I think I will use smarties. They taste better too...


Happy Baking x

Triple Layer Madness

Its been too long since I last posted, yet I have been baking a lot. Its hard to keep up sometimes with all the baking I do. Recently I seem to have a lot of Birthdays that I have been baking for. Or its just that I’ve been using peoples birthdays an excuse to bake. Regardless of the reason, I’ve been having loads of fun doing it and have been experimenting with new recipes, however there has been a few baking fails as well - but always learning.

For my friend James’s birthday I made a selection of treats including Chocolate Truffles, Coconut Balls from the 2nd Edition Frankie Magazine cookbook. I also whipped up some meringues from the left over egg whites I had. I must say the meringues were delicious and just melted in your mouth - I was surprised how much I remembered about baking them from the days I did them with my Nana Peg. Unfortunately I did not take any photos of these treats so I have none to post, but I will be doing the Truffles again for sure as they were so easy to make and a great hit of chocolate for a chocoholic like myself.

What I am going to post about today is the cake/slice I made for my housemate Sabrina’s 30th Birthday. Who knew this girl is 30th.. I still think she is lying about her age and the fact she is German :)

Ever since I got the Hummingbird Bakery Cookbook she has been drooling over the three layer slice. It starts off with a chocolate brownie bottom as seen here:

The next stage is the cheesecake which is put straight over the top:

You then cook these two together in the oven, I was a bit worried when it started to look a bit like the Himalaya mountains rather than cheesecake, however these went down after they came out of the oven.

The last to go on top was the cream topping which was mixed with fresh raspberries to give it the pink colour and more littered all over the top of the slice. I had one happy birthday girl, doing her standard cake pose.

Happy Baking x