Week eighty three and a mega bake this week. On Friday, I got home from work, all hot and bothered because of the heat and a hectic week and dove into Mary Berry’s Baking Bible for inspiration. On Saturday, hubby and I were going to see some friends who had recently moved house and thought a couple of cakes would make a nice house warming present.

So with that in mind, I chose the double orange cake which was the usual put all the ingredients in a bowl and mix well.When all blended well, pour into a deep round tin and bake for about half an hour until risen and golden.

Once the cake was cooked, Mary asks you to heat some apricot jam and spread over the top then mix some icing sugar with some orange juice and pour over the cake. Then finely grate some orange zest to decorate.

The second recipe for the house warming was Mary’s chocolate sandwich cake. Again Mary asks you to put all the ingredients together and mix well, then divide equally between 2 sandwich tins and bake.

Once the cakes were risen and brown, allow to cool and then make Mary’s white butter cream and use this to make the filling and topping and then sprinkle with chocolate bits.

Once my two house warming cakes were done, I then thought ahead to Sunday, it would be father’s day and as my chief taster is my other dad, i thought he might be upset at missing out on a cake this week so I made him the almond and chocolate chip cake.

Mary asks you to mix the ingredients together and then pour into a deep round tin. This is where i got a little creative. i had recently bought a giant cupcake tin -one of my bargain buys. I decided to use this to make this cake in and divided it equally between the two sections and baked it. Once it was baked, I put the two halves in a tin to decorate on Sunday to give it to my chief taster with his other Father’s day bits.

Off we went to see our friends who had recently moved and we had a tour of the house and garden. We met these friends when we got our first hairy hoolie after losing my old girl and have been good friends since- and we got our second hairy hoolie from them a few years later. We helped our friends to take down a tree in their garden but unfortunately at the end, a rather large branch hit my wrist when it came down and a rather large egg shaped lump came up almost immediately on it and it was painful. Luckily after a trip to the Urgent Care Centre to get it looked at, it isn’t broken, just soft tissue trauma but sore!

Sunday came and I wasn’t sure how I was going to decorate my chief taster’s cake with such a sore wrist and it’s on my left wrist and I am left handed. I managed with the help of my lovely hubby to mix together a vanilla butter cream and put this as the filling and topping, sprinkling flaked almonds and chocolate bits on the top. I then put some coloured cellophane around the base to make it look like a cup cake case. Not quite how I wanted it to be but hopefully it looked ok.

The chief taster was pleased with his cake and we all sat on their patio with the chimnea lit and his other gift of an axe to chop his logs!

Happy father’s day to my other dad and as always, my thoughts are with my Dad who passed away on Father’s day eight years ago, gone but always in my thoughts.

I know I always go on about The Great British Bake off but I was so excited to see the adverts telling me that the series is back this summer- yippee!  Oh, and I really laughed at the World Cup advert that Mary did with the rest of TGBBO team- so so funny! If you haven’t seen it, you can see it here.

Oh and the countdown? 101 left to go……