Sunday 15 April 2012

The Sunday Salon - Baking






It's been a very do nothingy kind of day here. The weather doesn't seem able to make up its' mind, so my grand plans for going on a long walk ended up as a walk to Tesco and back, which wasn't quite as exciting as I'd anticipated as I quite wanted to go for a walk by the sea, but oh well. Instead, I've spent the day with Mary Berry and The Great British Bake Off: How to Bake cookbook. I feel that my adoration of and obsession with cookbooks is something that I often glance over on this blog without really devoting proper time to it.  As with all my I have a LOT of cookbooks, and I always want more. That said, I do suffer from only using one or two of them and just looking through the pictures in the rest, exclaiming over all the things I'd really like to make that I somehow never quite get around to.

My husband gave me The Great British Bake Off cookbook for Christmas and it's so beautiful. It has in it all the things I always thought were waaaaaaaaaay too complicated to bake; macaroons, croissants, chocolate orange mousse cake... My mum used to bake with us when we were little and when I got to being a teenager I developed a bit of an obsession with it, but I don't do anywhere near as much as I'd like to considering how much money I spend on muffins and cookies! So today I decided to bake a fruit loaf cake from the book, and then I decided to go totally nuts and bake a couple of loaves of bread too, as it's been ages since I baked bread and I love the way it makes the house smell! The bread is still in progress (forgot how much rising time it needs!), but here is a picture of the cake:
As usual when I bake fruit cake, the raisins got a bit burnt on top and made the rest of the cake smell fabulously burned (why do raisins always do this?!) but it isn't and I'm excited about having baked a cake for the first time in a while!

Anyway, that's my Sunday, and my return to baking is pretty much just another form of preparing for the baby (along with knitting and buying it books) that helps distract me from the aspects of baby having that totally freak me out beyond all reason. Like the physical having of the baby - that part I am so not excited about. So, until I really have to think about it, I have fruit cake :-)

Happy Sunday!

2 comments:

  1. I love baking too, but for some reason I never seem to be able to dredge up the effort or inclination.

    It's just irritating sometimes how expensive baking usually ends up, especially when you can buy a pack of cookies from ASDA for 99p.

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  2. Yeah the expense is a good point - I tend to forget about it/ignore it as I usually have a lot of the bulk ingredients to hand so normally end up just having to buy a couple of bits and then ranting about how cheap it is to everyone when if I'd had to buy everything for a recipe it would have been ridiculously expensive! Decided to make cookies today actually, so I think I've got the bug at the moment!

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