Star Wars Custard Creams

I feel like I haven't baked from properly in ages, so with this week being my brother's 39th birthday - it was time to get back in the kitchen. I couldn't think of a good cake to make as I'd already made his dream one...him being eaten by a shark....yeah, that's what I said. So I thought instead of a cake I would make some treats instead. What treats you ask? Well, Star Wars custard creams of course!
 

I saw these great cookie cutters on Sew White and knew I'd be using them for one of my brothers.  I Tweeted the lady herself earlier and she still has a few packs left! We're not a big fan of iced biscuits in our family so I knew that wasn't the way to go.  I've also always wanted to make custard creams so I thought these would work great.



The recipe comes from BBC Good Food and says it makes 20 biscuits (10 pairs), this was about right. I doubled it although I would say you probably only need half the amount of filling unless you want the filling extra thick.

Ingredients

• 100g butter
• 100g flour
• 50g caster sugar
• 50g custard powder
• few drops of vanilla essence
  
  Filling
• 150g icing sugar
• 75g butter

Method

1. Cream sugar and butter, then fold in flour, custard powder and vanilla essence until a roll-able dough is formed. Alternatively combine all ingredients in a food processor, and then by hand form the dough.
2. Preheat the oven to 200C/fan 180C/gas 6.
3. Flour a surface and roll out dough to roughly 1/2 cm thickness. Then cut out shapes, ensuring there is a duplicate of each shape you cut.  
   
   
   
   
   
   
4. Place shapes on a baking tray covered in baking parchment (or greased and floured), ensuring that one of each pair is put on upside down (i.e. flipped over, rather than rotated). Place in oven for 10 minutes, or until golden brown. Remove and cool on a wire rack.
   
   
5. Blend the icing sugar and margarine, and then use to fill the custard creams once they are cool. Place a bit on the bottom (i.e. non-smooth side) of the first biscuit, then push the bottom of the first biscuit's pair onto this. Don't force together as otherwise the filling will just explode out the sides! Leave to set in a container or eat there and then.
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   I was a bit worried that the patter in the cutters wouldn't come out but they kept their shape and pattern really well which was great. Darth Vader made a great custard cream, Yoda, not so much (which is probably the only time that sentence has every been said.) But he was small so they'd be great for little hands.
   
   Overall the cookies came out great, tasted better than a regular custard cream and my brother loved them. Win!
   

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Zebra Robot Cake....yep - that's what I said

So as some of you know, I always make a cake for my guys at work, we LOVE birthdays so we always make a big deal out of them because work can be hard, everyone needs a nice birthday. It reminds me of The Office (US) when Jim decides to roll all of the office birthdays into one and everyone revolts...because everyone loves their birthday!

This particular cake was for Laura, and Laura has two main loves - robots...and zebras. So of course this is what her cake had to feature. I've seen a few zebra print cakes online and thought they looked brilliant and not too difficult which was a bonus.

I covered the cake in white fondant as a base for the print and I used black fondant for the stripes. To get the look I rolled out the black fondant fairly thinly and cut it up with a pizza slice to get irregular stripes to look more realistic. Layering these on I again used irregular spacing and shapes so it didn't look too manufactured. This process was really easy and effective - has anyone else tried zebra print before? I was worried it would look a little plain but it actually turned out quite funky.

Now for the robots, I picked up a really great robot silicone mould from Sew White - one of my favourite online baking shops. Much easier than attempting to mould them and the detail is brilliant. I melted white chocolate into the mould and left it to cool which didn't take long. Then I painted the chocolate robots with edible silver paint I bought for Christmas baking, these gave them a great metallic look which made them look super cute!

I really wasn't sure how else to decorate the cake, it started to get a very mechanical and quirky feel so I decided on decorating the rest of the cake with liquorice all sorts which went really well with the theme. I really love the robot cake and can't wait to use the mould for more little goodies, robot cake pops perhaps?? Pin It Now!

Silicone Crazy at Sew White!

Now we all know I love online shopping...especially for bakeware. So when I saw that the Christmas range on Sew White was out, well, I got a little carried away. I regret nothing!

Being obsessed with the Great British Bake Off I had kept my beady eye on the site for when the Teacake Moulds came back in stock, my day finally came and I couldn't have been happier to snap up a pink mould. The thought of making them is terrifying, but in a good way you know? I'm thinking I could decorate them like Christmas pudding for the festive season or maybe even edible snowballs? The list is endless to be honest so I know I'll get lots of use out of them.  £6.00.

I'm really into the whole Christmas desserts this year and have so many ideas, so I couldn't resist this Mini Victoria Sponge Cake Mould, "Each cake mould is approximately 7cm in diameter at the larger part and 5.5cm in diameter at the smaller end and is 5cm tall." I love that all of their moulds are oven and freezer safe, I'm thinking maybe some moist chocolate cakes or maybe even some ice cream, what do you think? £8.00.

This year I really want to make all of my own advent chocolates to put in calendars so this Christmas Shapes Mould would be perfect. I love that there are different shapes so you don't need to make 6 batches of chocolates to get enough different shapes. I especially like the stockings and candy canes...they may not quite reach the calendars... £3.99.

Now for the really Christmassy moulds, just look at them! I bought 1 x reindeer mould, 1 x penguin mould and also a Christmas pudding mould. Again these will make brilliant chocolates, I'm all about the chocolate at the moment I won't lie to you. I'm also going to try out some gingerbread decorations in them which would be great to hang on the tree...or just scoff while watching Love Actually...probably the latter if I'm honest. You can buy them for £4.99 each or £14.99 for a set of four which also includes the angel mould. I bought mine in two stints so should have just waited and bought the whole set but you live and learn, I don't care - they're still cute!

My final item is the Snowflake Plunger Set, I LOVE snowflakes, they might be my favourite symbol of Christmas..I just LOVE them, OK, craziness over. I'd love to decorate a Christmas cake, cupcakes or cake pops with sparkly fondant snowflakes, and I love plungers as it can be ridiculously difficult to cut snowflakes from cutters as they often get stuck. £5.50 for a set of 3.

I will soon be testing these out so keep posted for some reviews!

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Rolo Shortbread and Shortbread Spoons

Sometimes when you need a little 'pick me up' you know you just have to bake something, and is it just me or does shortbread feel more like a wintery treat? I'm one of those people that love winter, I do like summer don't get me wrong but I definitely prefer the cold to the warm, big jumpers, hot chocolate and blankets appeal to me much more! So when it started to get cooler recently I decided it would be a good time to start making shortbread again.

I've got this shortbread mould I got for Christmas last year which I've been meaning to try out, it's a beautiful Mrs Beeton one from Tesco, so that when you flip it over to get the shortbread out, it comes with a pretty pattern - yay! As normal I used my grandmother's Norwegian shortbread recipe, it's just the best in my opinion, but to make it a bit more special I decided to cut up Rolos into it, everyone's a bit obsessed with them at work at the moment so I thought it'd be a good place to try them out.

 Personally I think it could have done with bigger chocolate chunks for when it gets all melty (yes that's a word...ish), also when I turned it out of the mould to fish it out I noticed the mould had a big crack in it, after one use!! I did contact mention this on Twitter and Tesco saw it and got in contact with me, only to then tell me it had been to long since the purchase...even though in my tweet I did mention it was a CHRISTMAS present, I'm not sure how they didn't notice that part before saying it had been too long - of course it had been too long, boo to false hope! Rant over. It's made out of similar stuff to tiles...so I've tried to patch it up with glue and will see if it holds out next time I dare to use it. Also the pattern didn't show up on the shortbread so it was a bit of a fail all around to be honest. I did however some of the Rolo mix left so I made some extra biscuits too.

Anyway,  I had some dough left so decided to make some shortbread spoons with a mould I bought from Sew White. I'd seen on the website that you could make gingerbread spoons so thought this could be a nice idea for coffee and hot chocolate etc. I simply filled the spoons tightly with the mixture, they don't rise a crazy amount so don't have to worry about it all spilling out, and simply take out when golden. try to them let them cool before popping out of the moulds...I couldn't!

Rolo Shortbread

Recipe:
330g plain flour
250g butter
100g icing sugar
1/2 tsp baking powder
1 big pack of sharing Rolos, I didn't use all of them, it's all about preference I guess...and you can't eat the ones you don't use after!

Method:

• Mix flour and baking powder and sift into a mixing bowl.
• Cut up the butter and crumble into mixture as well as you can.
• Add the icing sugar and mix into a smooth dough.

 

• Gease the mould with butter and roll out the dough into a
  big circle about 0.5cm thick and push into the mould.
• With whatever dough you have left, roll it into a 4/5 cm sausage and chill for 30 minutes, then just slice up and bake for 12-20 minutes until golden.

• Chill in the fridge for 30 minutes.
• Preheat oven to 180 degrees (160 fan oven)
• Bake for 30 minutes depending on oven, the normal time for this recipe is about
  12 minutes but as it's in a mould it takes longer, I think mine took up to 40minutes
  in the end, you'll know when it's done as it will smell EPIC and be beautiful and gold.

• Before it cools slice around the edges so it'll be easier to get out, you'll want to get it out of the mould before it fully cools or it'll get stuck.
• Eat. Nom!!!

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Chocolate Pistachio Robots! - A Baking Buys Edition

promotional post

I haven't really done a Baking Buys post in a while, I've been trying not to add too much to my overflowing baking room at the moment, but as soon as I heard about the new silicone moulds at Sew White, I couldn't resist. I've had a few products from them already so knew I was on to a winner with my recent order.

They're silicone moulds are great and really reasonably priced too as you know I love my eBay so it's rare I actually use proper shops but in all honestly Sew White is one of my favourites, everything is so pretty! I use my button moulds all of the time and the 3D ones are super cute and regularly make an appearance in my kitchen :)

So now to the shopping, I got three lovely items - all silicone, a robots mould (£6), chocolate pots mould (£6) and a spoons mould (£3.99)

 The robots were definitely the item I was most excited about, I'm such a consumer I love the fact the mould is green! I knew these would go down a treat with various boy family member and also some work friends so I couldn't resist trying them out with the recipe in this post.

The chocolate pots mould will be really useful for dinner parties, especially around Christmas when I'm trying to show off at dessert time filling them with ice cream or even mousse, nom!

And as for the spoons mould, there are so many ideas, Sew White herself has a brilliant idea about baking gingerbread in them which would be brilliant in coffee or hot chocolate. All of the silicone bakeware can be baked in which I just think is brilliant, robot biscuits next perhaps?

So of course I just HAD to try one of these out, I couldn't wait until I actually had a reason I just wanted to use them! :D So I decided to go for the robots, I will probably use these the most for chocolates, but there's no real recipe or fun to that for this post so thought I would try something different. I found a lovely Nigella recipe for chocolate and pistachio fudge, however I don't think these actually turned out like fudge...more like solid ganache...but still yummy! They looked brilliant as robots, am now thinking most treats should have an interesting shape, shortbread spoons maybe?

Anyway Sew White is offering 10% off at the moment with the Great British Bake Off inspiring us, use the code 'gbbo' at the checkout to snap something up, valid until the end of the series!

Chocolate and Pistachio Robots

Ingredients

• 350g/12oz dark chocolate, at least 70 per cent cocoa solids, chopped
• 1 x 397g/14oz can condensed milk
• 30g/1oz butter
• pinch salt
• 150g/5¼oz unsalted pistachios, shells removed, or spend an hour shelling them like me!

Method

1. Place the chopped chocolate, condensed milk, butter and salt into a heavy-based pan over a low heat and stir until melted and well combined.
   
2. Place the nuts into a freezer bag and bash them with a rolling pin, until broken up into some large and some small pieces.
   
   
   
3. Add the nuts to the melted chocolate mixture and stir well.
   
4. Pour the mixture into a the moulds or cake tin and smooth over.
   
   
   
   
   
   
5. Let the fudge cool, then refrigerate until set.
   
6. Push out the robots and cut fudge in the tin into small pieces approximately 3cm x 2cm/1¼in x ¾in.
   
7. Once cut, the fudge can be kept in the freezer - there's no need to thaw, just eat straight away.
   
   
   
   
   
   
   Recipe adapted from BBC Food.
   

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Baking Buys - Sew White

Now this may seem like a sponsored post, but I assure you that it's not, I just love the products! A little while ago a work friend told me about their website and I instantly fell in love. I could spend so much money on this site I actually had to restrain myself. What I really love is that they're on Twitter, which enabled me to contact them to ask about stock.

All of the products are so reasonably priced I don't have to hunt on eBay to find a good deal. They sell bakeware, homeware, kitchenware, aprons, stationary, crafts and sewing items, candles, bags and lots more. The silicone moulds section is probably my favourite to browse through and I'm gutted there's a few things I forgot to add to my basket, will have to go on the next order :D. I've been after some new cameo moulds for a while and asked if they would be getting some in, lucky for me they had actually inquired about it so it was just to wait for the stock to come and go online. I've been holding back on ordering anything until they came in, I also couldn't help adding some other items to my basket :D

 

I was only expecting the normal classic cameo but was so surprised to see all kinds pop up, flowers, bows, presents and even cupid! I do have the classic cameo at home so thought I'd try something different, I bought; the bow, the lovebirds, cupid and the rose. I can't wait to get these tried and tested onto a post, I think I'll use the rose and the bow the most as they feature the most on my cakes. Along with these I also bought the small chocolate button mould and also the large chocolate tag mould.

 I think buttons always look so cute and along with going on treats they also make great gifts on their own. Here I've made a cute little treat bag, it could have done being a bit fuller, this was one full tray of buttons so I think using two would look really nice, brilliant for wedding favours don't you think?

 I also made some tags, they come with messages like; homemade for you, eat me, with love, happy birthday etc and also some blank ones so you can add your own message. I think these are such a nice touch when you give a baked gift, you'll see some featured on giant cupcakes in the future!

 

 

Some of my other 'to order' products are; the double sided macaroon mat, crown cookie cutter (perfect for the Jubilee) and the vintage style picnic cutlery. Pin It Now!