Miserable Monday

It's a horrible, wet day here today, I'm off work so I thought I would do some baking.

First though, here's two bakes from last  week.  Banana Bread with rum and raisins from Rachel Allen's Bake.

Followed by chocolate fairy cakes from Mary Berry's Baking Bible.  I baked these with Abigail, they are quite tastefully decorated, a change from her usual effort of throwing as much on as possible.

Calendar Cakes

At the eleventh hour I decided to enter the Calendar Cakes  run by Dollybakes and Lauralovescake. 

This month's challenge is Fruity Bakes.  The banana cake I made yesterday met the challenge, but I thought something with summer fruits would be more appropriate.

I used another recipe from Rachel Allen - Coconut Meringue Roulade, although I didn't have any lemon curd, and used strawberries instead of raspberries.

We found this a bit too sweet and sickly, and the meringue was too soft.  More practice at meringues needed I think. It would be great for a summer barbecue.

Alphabakes challenge

Another challenge that interested me is the Alphabakes challenge run by Caroline of Caroline Makes and Ros of The More Than Occasional Baker.  This month's challenge is hosted by Caroline and the letter is F.  To meet the challenge, you have to make something where either the name of the bake, or one of the main ingredients starts with the chosen letter.  Basic ingredients like flour, sugar and eggs don't count!  As I already had Rachel Allen's Bake out, I had a look through and found Florence's Orange Cake.

The sponge, the buttercream and the icing all contain orange.  The decoration is a packet of Fruit Flakes I found in Tesco.   My work colleagues gave this one a thumbs up and it made a lovely change to the usual Lemon Drizzle I make.

I finally got round to actually doing a challenge

Over a year later, I finally decided to start entering a few challenges.  First up is the Belleau Kitchen random recipe challenge.

The July challenge was to count across your books, pick the thirtieth, then turn to page thirty.  It took me ages to gather all my books together and rearrange the bookshelves.  The random book was Rachel Allen's Bake.  The recipe on page 30 is Carrot and Pecan Squares.  I can't find the exact recipe online, but this is very similar, although mine had a lot less icing and no orange.

The cake went down very well at my mum's barbecue yesterday.

Having spent a very wet and windy week off work baking and reading baking blogs I decided to set up my own so I could join in with a couple of challenges I have read about.

I borrowed the Hummingbird Bakery Cake Days book from a friend and Abi and I baked two batches of cupcakes from it.  Vanilla cupcakes with strawberry frosting - these were heavily decorated with silver balls, sugar flowers, jelly sweets and hundreds and thousands

and chocolate cupcakes with vanilla frosting - decorated with sugar paste shapes and silver balls

I also made Chocolate Whoopee Pies but unfortunately the camera battery had died and by the time it had recharged I had given a lot away and eaten the good ones.  The only ones left were a bit squashed.  They were very lovely though and I will definitely make them again, if only to get my moneys worth out of the two tins I bought over a year ago and have only just used.  I managed to find the Marshmallow Fluff needed for the topping on Amazon and it was delivered extremely quickly considering the long bank holiday.