Raspberry & White Chocolate Cookies

These are so far, my favourite cookies to make. So very quick, and easy, requires no chilling, and best of all, it's an eggless dough which means i can have a cheeky mid-mix nibble ^_^

the secret? Nestle Carnation Condensed Milk. I use the recipe that they have on their website which can be found here.

EVERYTIME.
Everytime, the cookies come out amazing, a super gooey soft middle and a bit of crunch on the outside. And i love how the raspberries flatten and seep into the rest of the cookie so it kind of looks like it has a red line of jam in the centre of the cookie (i really should have taken a picture...)

These take no time at all and they always come out cookie shaped :) (which is a hard thing for me to achieve... Cookies by Chrissi like to spread EVERYWHERE).

I actually made these 2 days in a row because i had extra raspberries and condensed milk leftover... and also in the first batch i had 20 and then i checked the next morning and i had 4 left.

The housemates demand cookies and who am i to deny them?
Especially if i get to whip out the old (actually new) Kmix.

a few of them cooling

Obviously it isn't really the season for raspberries so they were a bit pricier but i'm a summer girl and i needed something to perk me up during this horribly cold and windy weather..

So anyway, if any of you have any time, some random raspberries and condensed milk lying around, i URGE YOU to make these!! Bloody amaze.

Blueberry Muffins

So, i woke up this morning, bright eyed and bushy tailed, nice and early. And the sun was shining?!!
A question mark. That's right.
Because it's England, crappy England where noone knows what sunshine looks like and all the girls happen to get glorious orange skin from the rain water.
So anyway, with this brightening up my mood SIGNIFICANTLY, i grabbed the nearest unfortunate housemate and trotted off the supermarket to buy some blueberries.
Because who doesn't like waking up the smell of freshly baked blueberry muffins for breakfast??

Noone.
That's who.

Everyone knows i'm not the tidiest baker. I get a bit over-excited and i make a mess with my hands shaking with spoonfuls of batter in anticipation whilst i watch through the oven door.
(which by the way, i don't know why i do, since our oven door is totally a mirror. and therefore useless to see how any of your food is cooking. But at least you can check out your hair and see how much of a twat you look like still holding 2 battered spoons and muffin mix on your face.)

everyone likes a diagonal cake photo don't they? well i do. you must all know that by now.

in fact, i like it so much, that i took two!

I love when i'm able to bake in the morning because it's sunny. It means i can take rather attractive photos and i don't need that garish horrible flash. 

Having said that, i don't in the slightest have any eye for photography.

So i apologise for my amateur "look how AHMAYZING my cakes are" photos.

Besides that, my muffins were lurrvly especially when warm. Had a nice crisp top and a gooey centre... this may have been because of a generous blueberry overload (see last picture). 

I also thought they were a little on the small side, maybe that's because i'm greedy.. so i thought with the second batch, i would fill them a little more... maybe just a smidge...

errrr... no. Well the others to be fair, don't look THAT bad... it's just those siamese ones reaching out to all the others... So this is what happens when i get greedy and over-excited. You get explosion cake.

OMG- it looks like something died in my cake!

This was after i took a bite out, it was sooo soft and gooey. I'm sorry about the flash making the cake look anaemic, i was nomming it down, i couldn't be bothered to get a plate and take a lovely picture, so i used the dreaded flash.

As you can see, it was a massive blueberry mess inside. I guess you can say i didn't skimp one bit on the blueberriness of my blueberry muffins... but still..

they should probably be called Blueberry Bombs. I mean, look at them.

What a deliciously gooey purple mess.

Two Chocolate Zebras

These super fancy looking shortbreads were the least stressful things to bake. Honestly. And i think they are the best biscuits i've EVER made, they're not overbaked or hard in the slightest, and has all the richness of white and dark chocolate. Beautiful with a a cuppa.

raw and ready for the oven

Unfortunately it didn't make as many as Mary Berry said it would. 40. It probably would have made 40 if i had a ruler and epic rolling out skills, but there's only so much a student can do with a smirnoff bottle. But it kinda turned out as a blessing in disguise as my housemate got creative and used the off-cuts to make cute little animals, letters and a rather unflattering portrait of what she thought my face looks like. I let her look after these, so her's were left in for a little too long and a bit overdone. But nonetheless, a lot more fun that mine :)

fresh out of the oven

close-up of my babies coolin'

Lizzie's (the housemate)... yep, that burnt face in the top left is meant to be me.. Cheers Lizzie.

looking pretty glam in the tin :)... minus a few *nom nom* :x

Lemon Drizzle Loaf

After Christmas and the lovely event of a fresh new year with a shiny student loan, i decided to splurge my money on two things (well maybe 4...5.. maybe 8):

It took a lot for me to fork out for this kMix but i love it lots!... as a student i can't yet afford a KitchenAid but this beautiful thing will do in the mean time :), a long with the books i also invested in some other bits and pieces, new cake tins, a flan tin... yeah.

Anyway, to test out the books, i thought i'd make something slightly different to what i've done before, something that i've always wanted to make, and that is super damn tasty.

I decided to try out the Lemon Drizzle Loaf recipe from tea with Bea. Unfortunately, i hadn't yet received my kMix so it was still made with the trusty hand mixer.

With the new information and tips i've gathered from these new books, i now had different things to remember to do before i bake i.e. making sure the butter and eggs are room temp., mixing eggs and sugar as soon as they mix etc... So with this recipe, as long as i remembered to zest my lemons and juice them before hand, line my loaf tin, it was pretty simple to follow recipe, as an easy "bung all together and expect beautiful results."

The only thing that went wrong with this for me, was that the loaf tin wasn't quite big enough, so the cake took nearly twice as long to cook, it was a little caught on the outside too. However, the inside of the cake was SOOO MOIST, spongey and lemony. And the extremely sweet drizzle coating helped to lift the slight bitterness of any little burnt bits.

the colour isn't right at all on this picture, apologies. but the cake was really light! ^_^

But besides that, this loaf was perfect with a cup of tea and gone in 2 days! Next time, if someone arrives out of the blue for a cup of tea, i will definitely be whipping this baby out again!