Christmas Party Treats

Gingerbread

Hello again everyone! I hope you are all getting into the Christmas spirit! Not long to go now until the big day. For those of you who don't know, my contract at the Science Museum ended a month ago :( 

Thankfully I was invited to the Christmas party! The beautiful people I used to work with always appreciated my baked goods, so I thought I would bake some Christmas treats to bring along to the party. 

Gingerbread is so easy to make and has such a lovely winter warmth to it! You can find plenty of recipes online for gingerbread. These gingerbread biscuits have ground cloves and ground ginger in them, but you can also use cinnamon or nutmeg. I also used light brown sugar, but if you prefer your gingerbread a darker colour then you can use dark brown sugar. 

I decorated these with some royal icing using a very fine writing nozzle, perfect for little details and writing.

Ginger and Salted Caramel Cupcakes

I also wanted to bake some cupcakes for everyone and I always struggle to find a Christmas cupcake recipe that really works. I've made chocolate and orange cupcakes before which also remind me of Christmas, but I wanted to try something different.

The cupcake batter contains two whole eggs and two egg yolks. I've never used a recipe like this before, but it made the ginger cake itself really soft and moist! Delicious!

The salted caramel icing is a bit tricky to make if you haven't made a caramel sauce before. But basically its a normal buttercream but using salted butter and mixing in homemade caramel sauce.

I decorated my cupcakes using edible glitter (I cant live without it!) and a small gingerbread biscuit decorated with royal icing. I love adding small biscuits to cupcakes, it makes you feel like you are getting two treats in one!

Overall I'm really happy with how they turned out and everyone seemed to enjoy eating them!

 Thanks for reading!

Christmas Treats

 42 Shortbread Biscuits Later...

Hello everyone! I hope you all had a great Christmas and are looking forwards to the new year! For Christmas this year I made everyone some shortbread biscuits which I decorated in white royal icing. 

 

I made a set of six biscuits for each couple in my own and my boyfriends close family. This meant I had to bake and decorate 42 biscuits! It was a real challenge, but I actually really enjoyed doing it! I managed to bake them and decorate them all in one day.

I then wrapped them all up in little parcels, ready to be scoffed on Christmas day!

 

For the younger ones in my boyfriends family, I made 5 melting snowmen shortbread biscuits.

These were just as fun to make as last time!

 

Christmas Cupcakes

I also made 12 orange cupcakes for Christmas day, decorated in varying degrees of buttercream, to suit everyone's different tastes. 

Chocolate Log

And finally, I made me and my boyfriend a chocolate log for our Christmas on Christmas Eve. I used Mary Berry's Chocolate Log recipe, which was very easy to follow. 

I made all these treats over the period of just two days and I was quite impressed that I managed to do so much! Hopefully all the recipients of the goodies enjoyed them!

I got a few baking gifts for Christmas, so I am hoping to do some baking before I go to London next year (very soon), so stay tuned!

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Thanks for reading!

 

Melting Snowmen Shortbread

Yummy Snowmen Puddles!

So as Christmas nears I am going to be increasingly busy with baking treats! This might be my last blog before Christmas, but stay tuned for more blogs in the new year! I have a new job starting in January, so the blogs wont be as frequent, but I am hoping I will get some time to bake during the weekends!

These little chaps were made using this tutorial here LINK.

I used the BBC GoodFood Shortbread recipe to make the base of these snowmen, then drizzled on the royal 'snow' icing. I don't have a microwave and was concerned how to melt the marshmallows. I ended up using the oven and putting them in for about 20 seconds, which worked fine! The marshmallows make great melting heads!

I thought the original designs made the snowmen look a little too happy, so mine are in different states of distress!
 

These three are my favourites! They look like they are getting progressively more melted! These were really fun to make and taste great! Some special people are getting some of these today (lucky!).

If I don't manage to blog before Christmas...

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Thanks for reading!

 

Beautiful Christmas Shortbread Biscuits

Easy to make, even easier to eat! 

So I've never made shortbread before and its quite a nice Christmas biscuit to make so I thought I would give it go. When I found a recipe online, I couldnt believe how little goes into these biscuits and how easy they are to make! You only need caster sugar, butter and plain flour!

So I baked a batch of different Christmas shapes again, but this time decorated them with royal icing.

Instead of spending loads of time making up different colours of royal icing, I thought I would just stick with a nice plain wintery white.

I think it gives a nice clean finish to the biscuits!

I didnt use any patterns for the decoration, I just used my imagination (which is probably why I had so much fun decorating them!). I would definently make these again, they are SO tasty and so easy to make! I cant really believe how much shops charge for shortbread when there is hardly anything to them!

Thanks for reading!