December 2013 - Baking

The irony of this is that my foray into baking started because I decided I needed to start a diet. I found a recipe for some "healthy" flapjacks that needed some desiccated coconut. The flapjacks were ok (and not to many calories if you had one bite), but there was quite a lot of coconut left, which resulted in my mom commenting that it would never get used. This sounded like an interesting challenge and so I set about finding a recipe for some coconut cakes (something we have fond childhood memories of). I ended up making plain coconut and some raspberry and coconut cupcakes:

Coconut and raspberry cupcakes

I was surprised at how easy there were to make and how enjoyable I found it so decided to keep baking! Next on my list were some lemon meringue cakes that I'd thought were amazing when a friend made them earlier in the year (recipe from the Hummingbird Bakery app). I even managed to make the meringue and not set the house on fire when using the blow torch:

Lemon meringue cakes

Next I decided to try out some Christmas related recipes/designs. This included gingerbread cupcakes, Christmas cake flavoured cupcakes (decorated as Christmas puddings and trees), chocolate orange reindeer cupcakes and pistachio cupcakes:

I was feeling a bit cupcaked out at this point, so decided to diversify and try a proper cake for a friend's birthday. I went with chocolate/coffee and white chocolate layers topped with a white chocolate ganache and some "interesting" Heston Blumenthal chocolates. 

Inspired by a Lorraine Pascale recipe and after taking some advice from Mary Berry my final bake before Christmas were some stained glass gingerbread biscuits: