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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This Is Halloween!

It's no secret that I love holidays which involve baking....which to be fair, in our house..is most of them. But with Halloween you get to be really creative, I love making treats for the kids that come to our door - and I'm quite competitive as you know...I like my treats to be the best! This year was no exception, while I was happy with the ones I made last year, this time I wanted to go even further. We even made an effort with the pumpkin carving this year - Jack Skellington and Mr. Oogie Boogie!

There's going to be a lot of photos just to warn you. I made glittery chocolate skulls, bones and pumpkins, sparkly spooky toffee apples and cake pops.

The chocolates were made from moulds bought from Poundland, the skulls and bones were brilliant as they were silicone ones, the plastic pumpkin ones however were a total nightmare and I may have ended up smashing them in frustration when trying to get the chocolates out.  I made them from white, milk and also orange chocolate. The orange chocolate buttons I bought in Tesco and melted easily, had the perfect colour and tasted lovely to boot. I dusted the moulds with cake glitter before pouring in the chocolate which means it stuck to the chocolate rather than everything else it touched.

For the sparkly spooky toffee apples I used the same recipe as last year and decided to make half with a dark green/black colouring to make them like poison apples. Half way through the poison looking ones the sugar crystalised and made the last 4 apples look absolutely horrific!! One was so bad I actually put it in our window on Halloween to scare people! I managed to get 4 apples stage by stage leading up to the scariest of them all.

 From right to left
starting to get scary, getting a bit scarier, not really wanting the eat the next one and the last...
well...there are no words for that monstrosity really.

Below - in all its scary glory!

 Now for some nicer looking toffee apples, no colouring, just sprinkles and some glitter.

Once set I attempted to add some sprinkles and the drenched them in cake glitter to make them look a bit special - to finish I wrapped them in cellophane bags and tied them with curling ribbon, just like from the carnival. I have to say I think the dark colouring was a mistake - they looked burnt even though they weren't but I managed to palm them off on some poor unexpecting boys.

Now for cake pops, possibly my favourite things to make at the moment. For the cake I used some left over red velvet and purple sponge rolled with vanilla buttercream. I decided on four designs - pumpkins, eyeballs, ghosts and Jack Skellingtons. I got a brilliant Halloween theme cake pops set from eBay with orange and black sticks with orange and black twist ties for the bags. They were all dipped in white chocolate, the pumpkins - dyed with orange colouring. The ghosts were easy to decorate with black royal icing as it was only the face but it was hard to keep a ghost shape when inserting the stick...ended up looking like those things in Pac Man but still worked out well.

The pumpkins as I said were dipped in orange coloured chocolate and decorated with black icing and a green fondant stalk - it was quite fun actually giving the all different faces. Next came the eyeballs, these again were fairly easy, using green fondant and red and black royal icing -  a lot of people weren't sure about these for some reason...it's not like they're real eyes or anything! I have the say, the Jack Skellington ones were my personal favourites, the only issue was that I couldn't find my tiniest piping nozzle - my baking room is a mess! So I had to use a bigger one so it's not as fine as it should have been.

I did buy a couple of bags of regular Halloween sweets to go with everything else, I made little goody bags containing one cake pop, a couple of chocolates and a few of the bought sweets. All in all, with the toffee apples I had about 40 items to give away. I ran out in 40 minutes last year so I doubled my loot! What was really nice was that my niece came to help me share them out, dressed in her best cat costume she even got a few goodies to herself!

 

Had a go with face paint for a two-faced effect, my niece wasn't quite sure if she liked it or not!

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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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