Photos

For whatever reason, I couldn't load the photographs last night but it's working again today. Here are my chocolate goodies. The chocolate spoon mould cost £2.99 and the other mould cost £1 and the chocolate I used cost 60p for two bars so this is a really cheap way of making chocolate spoons and gingerbread men. My dd used one of the spoons in her hot chocolate and she gave it favourable reviews. I think these would be lovely packaged up as presents. Everything is sorted for this year but maybe next year.....

We had pizzas last night and the bases were really good. I used to just add enough water to bring the dough together but I've found if I stick to the three quarters of a pint in the recipe that the dough is much better quality. Here it is rising in its bowl.

It's in my favourite bowl which is part of a set of three and was made by Tupperware when they were still in business and I was hosting my one and only Tupperware party (15 years ago). I love things that stand the test of time and keep on being useful.

The doughnuts I made were really yummy and the recipe was really easy to follow. It came with the ugh nut time that I bought from Lakeland years ago. I really love that shop. Whenever I buy something, they always ask "did you find everything you were looking for" and my reply is always along the lines of I wasn't looking for anything but this was so lovely I couldn't resist. This was one of those times. The pan is a bit of a pain to get clean and the doughnuts don't always come out very easily  (mainly because life is too short to oil the tin) but the end result is always fun. I covered half of them with melted milk chocolate (another 30p value bar) and the other half with glacé icing.

I use the recipe that came with the baking pan. Here it is...

Mix together 225g plain flour, 2tsps baking powder, 1tsp salt and 175g of caster sugar. In a separate bowl, mix together 6 fl oz milk, 2 eggs, 1 tsp vanilla essence and 1 tbsp olive oil. Add the wet ingredients to the dry ingredients and mix well so you end up with a smooth batter. I use a little mini whisk for this. This amount will make 36 mini doughnuts and my baking pan only makes 12 at a time so you can imagine how messy the pan gets by the third batch. Bake in an oven heated at 160 degrees centigrade for 8 minutes. Take out and cool and repeat with the rest of the mixture. I think this would work equally as well in a bun tin but let me know if you try it this way.

To,let the chocolate, I stopped using,me boiling pan of water a long time ago. Now I break the chocolate up into a microwaveable proof bowl and put night he microwave for 5 minutes on defrost. Stir after 5 minutes then it may need another 3 minutes on defrost after that. To coat the doughnuts, you can either spoon on the chocolate or dunk one side into the chocolate (my preferred method as it's fun).

Do you remember the felt dolls I made for my nieces? Here they are before they were wrapped up.

They're