Make: Epic Baking Day

We've been at our new flat for a little over two months now, without any attempts at baking anything. Well, with the help of my sis, today became an Epic Baking Day.

#1. Lemon Meringue Ice Cream Cake

The base is a layer of Madeira cake and on top, goes a mixture of crème fraiche and meringue.

"Swirls" of lemon curd are also intermingled in with the topping. Although my "swirls" look deceptively like "blobs"...

This then goes into the freezer for four hours, so we'll return to the dessert later...

 

#2. Chocolate Chip Cookies

I've made this recipe before, and I know it to be a good one - it's a Millie's cookies one from BBC.

They make really tasty, gooey cookies, stuffed full of choc chips.

The recipe suggests it makes 12, but we managed to get 40 out of it!

Delicious with a glass of milk - there are definitely not 40 left now!

#3. Toad in the Hole

A dish for dinner that we all have enjoyed, but none have cooked before.

It was another BBC recipe for this one, although with a few substitutions, including dijon mustard for mustard powder and marjoram and oregano for thyme.

 

After leaving it in the oven to bubble way for a while... Ta-da! Hom nom nom!

 

 

And now, back to #1 after four hours of freezing...

Oooh yeah! 

 

And inside, swirls of lemon and frozen meringue ice cream

 

All three were very tasty (even if I say so myself!) although I would make a few notes for making them again: -

1. Could be made with other flavours, like pineapple curd or maybe berry compote. The base tended to separate from the topping - I wonder if brushing a layer of lemon curd on the cake layer first would help hold it together?

2. If you were to double the quantities... You'd get double the number of cookies...

3. The batter really stuck to the base of the dish. Maybe buttering the base would help prevent this? And certainly a more linear arrangement of sausages would make it easier to cut up!

All in all, a successful day!

 



Amend: Shortening Curtains

We got some cheap IKEA curtains last week, to hang at the window on the stairs in our flat. The curtains only come in one length, 300cm, which was dragging on the floor - dangerous on a flight of stairs.

This is not necessarily the best guide on how to shorten curtains properly... Ours were cheap and I wanted to get them done in one evening.

The fabric had a clear line detail in the weave, so I was hoping to be able to measure one side, then follow one of those lines across in a straight line to the other side.

Ideally you would measure down from the top of the curtain, to get them the same length. But I didn't have enough space to do that. Instead, I measured up from the bottom by 80cm on one side, and followed the weave across with pins. Unfortunately, what was 80cm on one side, was 82cm on the other. Maybe it was optimistic that cheap IKEA curtains would be sewn squarely along the fabric...

I abandoned this approach, and instead, folded the curtain in half along its length (top left to top right) and then repeated into quarters. I then measured 80cm up each side, pinned a straightish line using a slat from a Venetian blind, and hacked off the bottom of the curtain.

A few pins to hold it in place for a double-fold hem, with the raw edges hidden inside, then I whisked it through the sewing machine. Then they needed a few hand-sewn sections at the ends, to seal the ends at each side.

Here's a trick I use when tying off thread ends. As well as back-stitching the seam, I like to knot the long ends to tie them off tightly. The problem can be, that if you snip the thread ends off, that knot can come undone. My solution is, after tying the knot, to then sew a long stitch, with the thread inside the hem, emerging about 1cm from the original knot, and trim it off there.

Then a quick blast under the iron, hop up the ladder et voilà!