Must Try Harder

Today I woke up feeling a bit down, so I made a cake to cheer myself up.

I picked a delicious sounding recipe from The Cranks Bible, ignored the instructions about a 28" by 11" cake tin (I only have 20" by 8") and got to it.

I've been looking forward to delving into my newly formed baking cupboard, which looks lovely, but I was also a little aprehensive, because I'm not very good at baking...


It all started so well. Here I am doing some mixing:

Then it went a bit downhill. The cake tin really was too small. I piled all the mixture in, inadvertently using the baking parchment as a wall to increase the height of the tin (like the Pizza Hut salad method!), and after about 10 mins in the oven, the cake started rising so much that it was spewing over the sides, so I had to take it out, and scoop about 3 inches off the top. Mmh. At least I didn't drop it on the floor.

And, although I made the 'icing' according the recipe (heating 5tbsp of caster sugar with the juice of 2.5 lemons), it was really thin, and really lemoney, and made the cake go a bit soggy where I poured it on the top, rather than all white and crunchy as I'd imagined it would.

Anyway, it still turned out lovely and fluffy. Check it out:

Ben and I both had a slice with a cup of tea, and Ben said he loved it, which makes me happy.

Now I just need to do some more practicing. Oh, and I need to buy a bigger cake tin.

Debs

My first post!

It's good to be home. I've been traveling for a glorious, life changing year with my wondeful husband, Ben, but now I'm back, I'm inspired, and I'm motivated!

I'm hoping to use this blog as an outlet for my more creative side, which I'm usually too lazy to do anything with.

I'm going to attend a pottery class, so I can make stuff like this crazy mouse ceramic I saw in the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico:

I'm also going to do something with these iron on motifs I picked up in Bangkok:

I'll be using these pretty little iron-on D's I bought fom a Y100 store in Tokyo to jazz something up:

And I can't wait to work out how to cross stitch these beautiful little birds from these patterns I found in Chiang Mai, Thailand:

Love them!

Debs