What could I find to fulfil the challenge but to also fit in to the hectic schedule of Christmas?
Gingerbread of course. It’s very Christmasy!
I added some icing hats and scarves to complete them and make them look more seasonal.
The only thing I would do differently next time is to add more ginger as they have a very subtle flavour.
What ever you are doing this Christmas, I hope your celebrations go well.
Happy Christmas. x
Week seventeen and this week is devoted to the endless task of decorating the Christmas cakes made last week.
These are going to be gifts for friends and family and it’s so close to Christmas that if they read this and see the photos it won’t matter too much.
I would also like to take this opportunity to thank family and friends for the endless support in the last two weeks when I have been to hell and back with a health scare. The news is better than I feared and now I am looking forward to spending the Chriatmas period in the company of those I love and cherish- after all , that is the underlying spirit of christmas.
To all who read this, I wish you a Happy Christmas where ever you are and a peaceful New Year.
As promised, this week is Mary Berry‘s Christmas Cake and I make a few christmas cakes as gifts and usually look for a different recipe each year so this fitted in well. I don’t usually leave making my cakes until the middle of December but I just don’t know where the time has gone!
Anyhow, I wrote a shopping list of all the ingredients that Mary’s recipe calls for and I 
had a good work out carrying all the bags needed for the sizes of cakes I needed to make. I used the chart on the other page of Mary’s Bible to see what size tin I was using and the quantity needed. I had purchased an amazing tin from Lakeland last year ( yes, I just love Lakeland!) which is a massive tin on its own but has dividers so it can make varying size cakes. I used my tin divided into four to make four smaller cakes.
My next workout was weighing out all the ingredients and then mixing them by hand- I found muscles I didn’t know I had! I also had the fun of lining each of the tin sections individually. ( I had left the fruit to soak in the brandy as Mary recommended by the time I did this.)
Finally, after a huge amount of mixing , the cake mix was divided and the cakes went into the oven………for FOUR hours! They have come out a very rich dark brown, and now need to be wrapped in foil and “fed” for the next few days before decorating. As they will be gifts, and some of the people they are intended for read this, I will take photos and post after they are in receipt of their present!
Week fifteen and I have eventually managed to blog about it. It hasn’t been the best of weeks for various reasons ………
Ok, Mary Berry’s Key Lime Pie. Mary makes it in a similar way to her Lemon Meringue Pie and that went well so I made the biscuit base with confidence and put it in the fridge to set. The topping required the juice of four limes mixed with condensed milk and double cream. Well as much as I have been loving Mary’s recipes, they are very much on the rich side and as I have been watching my cholesterol intake and wanted to try some of this, I added the lime juice to “light” condensed milk and half fat creme fraiche and it seemed to work well. This also went into the fridge to set and then I had to remove it from the tin to add the final topping.
Mary asks you to whip the remaining double cream and add it to the pie and sprinkle the rind of a lime over the top. Well, I added the remaining creme fraiche which you can’t whip and mixed the grated lime rind to it. It may not look so spectacular but it’s better for the waistline.
The weekend is approaching fast and the christmas cake recipe is calling, so watch this space…….
It’s been a very busy week and an even busier weekend and I wasn’t sure I was going to get time to bake this week but I managed to find time – at the expense of the ironing…..oh well……(smile).
I thought scones would be fairly quick and easy this week and the recipes for Mary Berry’s special scones and special fruit scones were so similar, I kind of cheated and made the dough, halved it and added the fruit, so covering two recipes in one week. Otherwise, I will still be at this challenge a year from now!
Any way, the mix was straight forward, the dough was sticky, as Mary explains and it turned out very sticky. I found my fluted cutter and cut out my first batch. I placed those on my baking tray and then rolled out the second fruited batch and then into the oven they went.
Mary recommends 10-15 minutes for the bake and having made a few of her recipes, and often had to add a few minutes, I set the timer for 15 minutes…….oh silly me! Well Mary says they should be risen and golden, I think “golden” could loosely describe the colour of them! I think they might be a bit crunchy!
Wow, week thirteen came upon me so quickly and as my thumb was feeling better, I was going to tackle something more savoury, something like one of the bread recipes which can take some time-and kneading!
But come Saturday morning, i was struck with the worst migraine I have ever had, nausea, sickness, banging head, and no tablets would touch it- I was put back to bed and Saturday was a complete washout. I felt a little better on Sunday and went shopping, taking it easy as I could feel the headache still there….sigh.
Anyway, I didn’t want to miss a week, so decided on the oats biscuits recipe and then decided I liked the Dorchester biscuit recipe too so decided to do another ” 2 for 1″ recipe weeks.
The oats biscuits , Mary claims are a relative of the digestive biscuit, kind of but I think they are more along the lines of hob-nobs and Mary, I rolled, and re-rolled, but I couldn’t get 16 biscuits out of my mix! I managed 12 and I think I got a pretty even bake so I was happy with them.
The Dorchester biscuit, I had never heard of but it was a savoury kind of biscuit so I went with it, made the mix and Mary then recommends that you roll “walnut” sized balls, and slightly press them down, sprinkle some crushed nuts on the top and you should get about 30 out of your batch? Really? I think my idea of walnut size and Mary’s are quite different!
Any way, the Dorchester biscuit is a strange entity, it kind of thinks it’s a cheese straw but with added nuts, but I thought although unusual, they were rather scrummy!
Week twelve and I feel like I have settled into this challenge now and look forward to what to make next. This week was a special week for me as I passed my Social Care with Children & Families Diploma, and with a Distinction too! Woohooo! So I was looking for this week’s inspiration with the view of a celebration and this fitted the moment, and I could do it in my mixer, as my thumb is on the road to recovery but not up to any hand mixing yet.
Mary Berry’s recipe called for a ring mould tin and to line this. Not as easy as it sounds so I thought I would look online to see if there any any hints and tips. Unfortunately I found nothing, zip, nada…….so decided to give it a go myself. It didn’t look pretty but it did the job!
The mix was pretty straightforward, just throw pretty much everything in a bowl and mix- my kind of cooking! Then add half this mixture in various places in the tin, add the cocoa/water mix to the rest of the mix , and then add to the tin. This should give it it’s marbled effect. Then into the oven for 40 minutes or so.
40 minutes later and the buzzer pinged, I looked at it but it was a bit underdone so I added another 5 minutes to the timer. Then it was done , time for a little cooling and then to tip it out. The paper lining worked well and came off easily and then the cake was left to cool.
The topping is pretty much dark chocolate, mixed with some butter and melted, then poured on the top. Mine covered the whole cake but didn’t look as smooth as Mary’s photo in the bible. This topping then needed to cool before the final drizzle of milk chocolate to finish it off.
I am pleased with the final result and can’t wait to cut into it to see how well the marbled sponge came out. Oh, and my certificate is in the photo – to prove that I did it and I can now add the following letters after my name – S.A.C. Dip……. very posh so……
signing off for week twelve’s efforts
Kim, S.A.C. Dip.
My hubby actually asked last week if Mary Berry’s Bible had any gingerbread recipes in it as he fancied some gingerbread……well when I looked, there are several gingerbread recipes so I read each one carefully as my thumb is still out of action and I needed a recipe that I could manage with one hand.
So, most of this recipe involved weighing most of the ingredients into a large saucepan, heating gently, to melt them all together, adding the flour and spices and finally beating in four eggs and some milk. The last part was bit tricky but I managed it without needing hubby’s help and only dropped one egg on the floor and the dogs thought their luck had changed!
This recipe calls for quite a lot of each ingredient and I found at the end of the mix that the tray I used, (the size that Mary Berry recommends in her recipe) there was too much to fit in this so I dug out a smaller round tin and lined that and ended up with a tray bake AND a round bake too………
The gingerbread seemed easy enough to make, loads of treacle in it though so it’s going to be very sweet. It baked well and was ready at the recommended time. I took both tins out and let them stand for a while before turning them out onto the cooling rack.
Once they were both totally cool, I made the topping, Mary recommends using icing sugar, a small amount of water and some finely chopped crystallised ginger. This is when my hubby made me laugh, he asked what the topping was made of and when I told him about the crystallised ginger, he said “BLEUGHHHHHH!!” I was highly amused that he asked me to make a GINGERBREAD cake but didn’t want TINY amounts of GINGER on the topping……..MEN!!!!!
Week ten, so what to choose to bake this week? Well, I know one of my previous posts told the tale of the scalded hand……well this week has been influenced by the fact that I have strained the collateral ligaments in my thumb. It doesn’t sound much but I couldn’t even take the plastic screw lid off the milk without excruciating pain so I took myself to get it looked at and it needed to be strapped and I have to take regular ibuprofen and try not to use it.
SO with this in mind, I sat with a cup of tea and Mary Berry’s Bible and looked through to see what I could make where my mixer could do all the work and this is what I came up with. The only bit I needed help with was grating an orange for the rind and that’s where my angel of a hubby came to the rescue – what a star!
So, I (carefully) weighed everything out, stuck it under the mixer and hey presto – one mix with no fuss. I put it into the tin, Mary 
does say it doesn’t look like it will fill the tin and she was right!
Timer on , 40 minutes later, this is what came out. I must say, it rose beautifully, was a great golden colour and the aroma wafting upwards was lovely.
It needed a topping when it was cool, of softened butter, icing sugar and marmalade. I think even Paddington Bear would approve of this recipe!
I am going to start looking now at other recipes i can use the mixer to do all the work as I get the feeling my hand will need to heal for a while yet……..sigh.
Week nine already, and because of work commitments, I only had Sunday to clean shop and cook so decided to go for the muffins recipes as I thought “Oh, they’re easy”…….. but I was wrong………..
I decided to do both the blueberry and the chocolate chip muffins as the mix was pretty much the same at the beginning and thought as I was tired and time was short, to halve the recipe and do half the batch as blueberry and half the batch as chocolate chip. I also found at 5pm that I only had enough muffin cases for half of them and decided (oh silly me) to just use normal cake cases for the others but a few more……
Well, we all have baking disasters and Sunday was mine. The muffins didn’t really rise, they were heavy and all stuck like glue to the cases. I decided that I would make them again, but on Monday after a good night’s sleep and a quick dash around Morrison’s to get more cases…blueberries…chocolate chips…etc, think you might be getting the picture….
SO Monday came and I got home from work, took the hairy hoolies for a quick dash in the rain , dried them and got out Mary Berry’s Bible. I read the recipe instructions more carefully and off I set. I had googled the muffins sticking and came upon this blogger who also had the same issues with Mary Berry’s recipe, so I was pleased I wasn’t the only one.http://risingtotheberry.blogspot.co.uk/2011/03/chocolate-chip-american-muffins.html
Ok, batch one – the blueberry muffins seemed to go well and so did the second……set the timer and into the oven they went. The result?…………………….
Well they look much better than the first batch, but the test will be- do they stick to the case? Well, they need to cool totally so watch this space….
Lewis & Kim 