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Friday 23 September 2011

Friday Recipe - Peanut Butter Cookies

Hi all!

In my last post I told you that I was going to try out some peanut butter cookies so here's the recipe if you fancy having a go yourself. They aren't lookers as they don't look pretty but so very moreish and I can't stop eating them (bang goes the diet!). This recipe is also fab as you hardly have to weigh anything, just use your trusty tablespoon...

Ingredients:

8 tbsp Plain Flour
2 Egg yolks
3 tbsp Crunchy Peanut Butter
3 tbsp Dark Brown Soft Sugar
Approx 75g softened Butter or Margarine

Preheat your oven to 180 degrees / Gas mark 4. Spoon out 8 tbsp of plain flour into your mixing bowl


Add 3 tbsp of soft dark brown sugar ( plus 1tbsp of caster sugar if you have a sweet tooth )


 Give it a good stir and break up any clumps of sugar


 Next add your peanut butter, I love peanut butter so I added 3 heaped tbsp but feel free to play about with quantities!


Add 2 egg yolks to the bowl


 Now add approx 75g of softened butter or margarine, you may need to add a bit more later.


Now the fun part! Stir it first if you like or just get your hands in if you don't mind getting a bit messy and work the mixture into a soft dough. If your mixture is a bit dry add some more butter, likewise if it's too sticky then add some more flour.


 This is the kind of consistency you want, it just needs to be sticky enough to roll with your hands into little ball shapes.


 Now shape balls of dough and place them on a lined baking sheet


 My batch made twenty but it depends on how big your balls are, so to speak!


Once you're done, just lightly flatten the cookies with the back of a fork. Don't worry if they crumble!

Once you're finished, pop them in the oven for around 10-15 minutes, they're ready when they're slightly browned.


This is how they look when they're finished, leave to cool on a baking sheet or transfer to a cooling rack.


If you want to pretty the cookies up a bit, dust with icing sugar or drizzle with melted chocolate.


Right, I'm off to eat another one! Happy Baking xx BakerLou Website

Thursday 22 September 2011

Latest Cakes

It's been pretty busy here since the BakerLou website opened it's virtual doors, so now I have five minutes I thought I'd show you some of our recent cakes.

Firstly, I was designing some new fondant topped cupcakes and decided to send the children round our street to raise a bit of cash for the charity we are supporting - Clic Sargent who do wonderful work helping children with cancer. I arranged a few cupcakes on a tray decorated with some National Cupcake Week bunting, doesn't it look pretty?


The children must have looked fairly angelic as they managed to raise £21.84!
Don't forget that there is a 10% discount on all orders until 30th September plus a further 10% will be donated to Clic Sargent.
Today's order is for a little boy having his first birthday - Happy Birthday Cayman! The cake is sponge filled with jam and buttercream and the cupcakes are a selection of vanilla, chocolate and lemon. Yummy!

I'll post some more pics soon, but right now I'm off to try out a recipe for peanut butter cookies xx

Friday 16 September 2011

Today's the Day! Win Stuff!

Today sees the launch of my new website BakerLou and as I'm so excited I want to celebrate!!

So there are four fab reasons to check out the BakerLou store today....


1) From today until 30th September, 10% of all sales will be donated to Clic Sargent - a charity that helps children with cancer - you can eat cake and help a good cause at the same time!

2) As a welcome gift, all orders placed until 30th September will receive a 10% discount!

3) If you are on Twitter, look out for our competition tweet (@baker_lou) to win this gorgeous set of silicone cake cases from John Lewis:


All you have to do is find our competition tweet and retweet (RT) it to your followers, how easy is that?!  The name of everyone who enters will be put in a glamorous hat and the lucky winner picked at random. Good luck! You can also "like" our facebook page and leave a comment to enter

4) Because I really want you to! Go on, you know you want to make me happy!

Thursday 15 September 2011

Nearly time!

Well, it's National Cupcake Week so what better time could it be to launch the new sparkly BakerLou website?

That's right, the new BakerLou site will be launched this week and to celebrate we will have some wonderful offers and goodies to be won so keep checking our facebook and Twitter feeds for more details tomorrow.

One of our promotional offers will be to donate 10% of all sales to charity*. This money will be going to the very worthy Clic Sargent who do wonderful work for children with cancer and their families.
*for any orders placed from Friday 16th September to Friday 30th September. Orders can be placed through the website, by phone (07905 161645) or by email (bakerloucakes@hotmail.com)

Click here to find out how you can help or for more information about the charity.

Also, I can't resist showing off my gorgeous new logo for BakerLou. This was designed by Claire Keay from jellypark. Isn't it fabulous?!


Claire does designs for all kinds of occasions and sells original paintings, prints, digital stamps, colouring posters and much, much more. Visit the jellypark store and take a look :)

Sunday 11 September 2011

Recipe Time! - Gingerbread

I actually had a break from cakes the other day but still couldn't resist baking! As my daughter had an inset day from school, we decided to have some fun with gingerbread and cutters.


This is the recipe I use:

3oz (75g) Butter
5oz (125g) Soft Brown Sugar
3oz (75g) Golden Syrup
15oz (375g) Plain Flour
1tsp Baking Powder
2tsp Ground Ginger
1tsp Mixed Spice
1 medium Egg, beaten

Method:

Gently heat the butter, sugar and syrup in a saucepan until the sugar has dissolved, then leave to cool.

Once the liquid is around room temperature, mix in the dry ingredients and the beaten egg to form a soft dough. (If you find it's too sticky at this point it's fine to add more flour)

Knead your dough a little so it's nice and pliable and roll out on a lightly floured work surface to about 5mm thick. 

Use your favourite cutters and place onto a greased baking sheet.

Bake at 180 degrees / Gas mark 4 for approx 10-15 minutes.

The gingerbread is ready when it's slightly golden, they will still be soft when you remove them from the oven but will harden as they cool. They can easily burn so keep checking!

Decorate as you wish! You could use royal icing, ready made writing icing tubes, sweets or you could add raisin eyes and buttons before you bake, have fun :)

We had some royal icing left over so we played about with the piping bag...






Friday 2 September 2011

Lego!

This week has been a busy one for celebration cakes and I'm not finished yet. One of the orders this week was quite an unusual request but hopefully I've pulled it off ok. A ten year old boy wanted me to put two of his favourite lego figures onto his cake and i was a bit apprehensive as I've not had much practice at modelling, thought I'd give it a go though.
These are the figures I was given as inspiration:

Not exactly easy for the novice modeller but this is how they turned out...

I was quite pleased with my R2-D2 but the lego man I found really hard, especially the head as you can probably tell from the picture!! Hopefully he'll like it though :)

Another cake this week was for a lovely neighbour of mine whose family have ordered it as a surprise for her, I hope she loves it as she's a wonderful lady - Happy Birthday Wendy!



So, still a few more cakes to go, a Percy Pig cake and this rather scary logo from a heavy metal band:

Did you guess that this one is for a teenager???!!!