Easter Biscuits

Here are some chocolate egg biscuits for Easter...

And some spring tulips....

Honey Cake...thanks Jen!

For my birthday, my friend Jen adopted a beehive for me.  Another hobby of mine is gardening and although I'm pretty new to it I think I am doing OK.  As all gardeners will tell you "the honey bee is our friend" and I am hoping my new hive pack will teach me much more about them.  One of the things I am growing this year is lots of flowers to brighten the place up, attract the bees but mainly edible flowers I can decorate my cakes with!  This gift was in many ways very appropriate! 

So back to honey....In my adoption pack was some lovely honey from the Chain Bridge Honey Farm on the Scottish borders/Northumberland (my parents neck of the woods!).  It tastes divine and needed to be used well so I turned to my trusty River Cottage Cakes book and set about making Gills Honey Cake.  Easy to make and cooked in exactly the 45 minutes it said it would, RC has not failed my yet!  It tasted lovely...the honey forms a sugary crust on the top with the crunchy almonds and the whole things tastes very spring-like somehow.  Handy hint...its a big cake but I reckon it can easily be halved as it has equal amount of eggs and this smaller quantity will fit nicely into a loaf tin. 

PS The hive pack also came with some wild flower seeds that have be duly planted and as soon as I get blooms I will post some pictures!  Thanks Jen x

Happy Mothers Day!

For my lovely Mum and Mother in Law....Lemon Primroses and Daisies. 

I love spring!  New season, the sun comes out, the days a longer and most exciting of all spring flowers!  I am feeling particularly inspired by flowers at the moment, colours flavours, shapes....I shall keep you posted!

Baby Biscuits

Biscuits for a Baby Shower, available in pink or blue or more neutral yellow.

Hearts and Roses

One of my aims for 2012 is to design a little Valentines Biscuit Collection.  I am not a huge fan of the day, mainly as it is so commercial but I think these little biscuits are quite fitting.   Here are my first additions, Heart and Rose tea cup biscuits.  Delicately flavoured with rose water, the colours are natural and each is finished with a sugared rose petal.  Available to order now!

Christmas Biscuits

Well now that they have been handed over as Christmas gifts I can post the pictures on here!  I got a great response to my robins and Christmas pudding tea cup biscuits, so I am now coming up with new designs for the coming year.

All packed up and ready to go!  I took some along to a market with the wonderful Kath's Cakes and received some lovely feedback and sold a few packets!

Coffee Macarons

I recently made these Coffee Macarons for friends and they worked really well and so they should have as I have practiced Macaron making enough times!  The recipe was pretty standard I used one from this beautiful book,  I Love Macarons by Hisako Ogita.  I added some coffee as I was mixing the wet ingredients for a light flavour and colour.

Now it was the filling I was most fond of!  I adore Devine Chocolate, (which you can buy in Oxfam shops along with many other places) so this filling is a ganache made with the milk chocolate and coffee chocolate, the results were great.

 This is what you do....
100ml double/whipping cream brought to the boil in a pan and taken off the heat,  add 100g of chocolate and allow to melt into the cream, mix together on a slow speed until you have a pipe-able consistency.  Pipe onto the macaron half's and sandwich together.