Further Additional Extra Adventures in Baking

I feel slightly guilty that Easter involved eating far too much (including copious amounts of chocolate). Aside from taking the focus away from the actual meaning behind the Christian festival it has dented my efforts to try and lose a bit of weight and eat healthily. Darn!

But – I'm not going to get too down about it. The Easter hols gave me an opportunity to get back into some good old-fashioned baking and was quite pleased with the results.

Here are some pics of my efforts:

Mini Cadbury Creme Egg Brownies (recipe from BBC Good Food website)

This was devilishly decadent. The brownie recipe on its own was enough to make a heart surgeon break out into a sweat, but then I went and added a little bit of Easter magic (ie mini Creme Eggs) and it went up to 11. Needless to say, these brownies are goooooonnnne!

Chocolate Orange Hot Cross Bun Bread and Butter Pudding (recipe from Tesco)

It's funny how the thought of chocolate orange anything makes people drool. Look on the internet and you'll find endless recipes for chocolate orange cheesecake, chocolate orange ice cream, chocolate orange cookies, chocolate orange cupcakes etc. etc. It's as if chocolate orange is the magic silver bullet that will transform your food from mediocre to levels of unicorn-riding-a-mechanical-shark awesome. Well, this chocolate orange hot cross bun bread and butter pudding sounds better than it tastes. Sure, it's still a nice pudding, but the chocolate orange aspect feels a little gimmicky (I mean, it's gimmicky to start with so add gimmicky on top of gimmicky and you're heading into ridiculous territory). I'm not rejecting it, but then again I'm not going to rush into making it again. Must try harder, Tesco!

Home made olive bread - made mainly from yeast packet instructions!

Ahh, bread. My old friend. I haven't made bread for ages (probably about a year), so I decided to play it safe and make my usual olive bread. Yes, I kneaded by hand and didn't cheat using a newfangled machine to make the dough. Funnily enough, following the instructions on the yeast packet yielded a far better loaf than when I previously followed a big old book on how to cook almost anything.

It's good to bake, it really is.