That 70's Cookbook

I once had a Cadbury’s Chocolate Cookbook, and although I had made very few of the recipes, each one tasted amazing, then one day the book went missing.  Gutted.

So last Christmas my mum hoping to replace the book with the same or an updated version ordered a Cadbury book online, but what arrived was a million times better than could have been expected.  This version of the Cadbury’s Chocolate Cookbook was first published in 1978 and is so deliciously retro it’s impossible to describe, so I will just leave some of my favourite images for you to pleasurably peruse.

I am yet to try any of the recipes but I feel November is the month.  Piping was clearly very big in the 70’s and I really can't wait any longer to whip out my nozzle for a Paradise Ring.  The names are almost as good as the cakes themselves; I especially like...


 Intriguing Peppermint Cake, Shaggy Dog Cake, Krackolates, Ginger Shorties, Frosted Malted Bars and the Snowy Chocolate Ring.

I HAVE to make the Intriguing Peppermint Cake, to be quite honest; I’m intrigued!

Death by Chocolate Orange

Have I told you lately that I love…HALLOWEEN?!?!?

And who could love it more than the dentist?  Hundred of children gorging themselves on sweet will do wonders, I imagine, to boost business.  On Halloween night, one snack sized Milky Way just isn’t enough, and the importance of flavour combinations goes out the window, Haribo Tangfastics are munched up in mouths still coated with Mars bars and sprinkling the inside of a Snickers bar with Nerds seem like an everyday thing to do.

So for these cakes we have, vanilla sponge with a raspberry centre, cream cheese icing, topped with a slice of Terry’s Chocolate Orange...not forgetting the all important dousing of red food colouring blood, when using this much food colouring it is also a good idea to mix it with flavouring first to mask any taste the colouring might have (or just use a fruit compote like I wish I’d done).

My experiments, Pasta Girl and Tree Boy, were both impressed, and if it’s good enough for them, I am certain it will be good enough for the little brats come OCTOBER 31^st!!

I ♥ Halloween Cupcakes 

This is Halloween: Part 2

Perhaps it's a bit weird that I am listening to Angela Lansbury singing We Need a Little Christmas while I post this, but Halloween is all about the weird so I figure it's perfectly acceptable!.. Right?

I am so proud of my little room, and more so now it's been Halloween-afied..  

The first step of making wonderful cakes is good music.. but when creating Halloween cakes music isn't enough.. you need to dance naked in the moonlight, sleep under a barbie dressed as Lady Gaga with surrounding bats and turn you room into a fire hazard by placing candles anywhere you can think of.

Doll in a wedding dress in essential.. Harry Potter wand.. black lace.. giant spider.. 

My Jewelled Pumpkin Patch!

This is Halloween: Part 1

HALLOWEEN!!!

No one does Halloween better than the Spellman family!  Valery as a duck, HILARIOUS!

Growing up on the British Island of Guernsey I could only dream of Halloween decorations like that had in Sabrina the Teenage Witch.

I'd love to!

The river of Candy Corn!  Dear Americans, us English don't even have Candy Corn!!

There are literally millions of screenshot I want to use, I really want Orange candles and autumnal garlands and a coffin for my talking cat to sit in, oh and endless amounts of dry ice.

Who want to come Halloween carolling with me?  "OHH have a happy happy happy Halloween!!

My Favourite ever Sabrina line "Delilah!  My name's not Delilah it's Fred!  Don't make me turn this car around! BRRRRRLLLLLLLLLRRRRRRRRR!!!!"

Back to Basics

Having entered the month of Halloween, my favourite holiday, I am already stressing about what to wear for the various costume parties, decorating my room, and cupcake ideas.  My next post will be about my love for all things witchy, but right now I want to revel in the idea of simple baking perfection.

If you watched this season of The Great British Bake-off you will know it was won by Jo, due to her simple recipes with exceptional flavours, rather than Holly with her amazing technical abilities or Mary-Ann with her experimental baking.  Who doesn’t love a Classic Victoria Sponge?  The art comes in making something simple taste exceptional, which I have recently learnt to do in my Italian cooking lessons. 

With chocolate cake just having the chocolate flavour guarantees most people will like it no matter what your baking abilities are, however I have found it to be one of the most difficult cakes to get right, and it’s something I am always trying to improve.  Not to play around with flavours but just to do simple well. 

These chocolate cakes are the best I have produced for a long time and achieve a blog post because of a new accidently method.  When I tasted the mixture just before putting it into the cases it tasted horrible, I was gutted and couldn’t understand why.  Then I realised I never added the sugar, “SHH-UGAR!” I exclaimed, so I added it there and then, and the end, I can’t say I had much faith in them but they were amazing, lighter and better risen then ever before.  Curiouser and curiouser.

This was supposed to be a short post like the old days…but when your passionate about something, simple isn’t always easy to achieve, as my Halloween costume will undoubtedly prove.

Anna's Cupcakes

This week I was asked by my Italian housemate, Anna to teach her how to bake cupcakes.  I agreed on the condition that she in turn teaches me to cook Italian food, and so a beautiful friendship was formed.

Group decorating is one of my favourite things to do, for some reason the pressure is removed and the motivation becomes fitting as many sugary decorations on top of the cakes as possible. 

With the Meadham Kirchhoff S/S12 show as my last post, timing couldn’t be better.  Their show was all protesting the ways women get coloured with an expectation to be pretty and girly and with all the random decorations I had I felt we could do the same about cakes.   They are always marketed toward women, whenever you see them in stores and cafes they are topped with flowers or glitter, and if you go into the supermarket with the intention of making your our the supermarkets limited decorations are always in pastel colours, and so various influences force cupcakes to be a girl confection.

p.s. my male housemate was the one that ate most of them

There were further accidental coincidences with the MK12 show during the baking lesson.  I put on one of Tavi Gevinson’s playlist from 8tracks, as is becoming a tradition of my baking, and the first song that played?  Miss World by Hole, the same song that opened the runway show!  Then when the baking was finished, we both sat down with big mugs of tea to enjoy our creations, here my Italian co-baker explained; that she felt strange because while decorating and taking photo’s of the cakes she had been very serious but now eating the cupcakes with all their sugar toppings she felt like doing the can-can.  Without knowing she had just related her first cupcake experience with the opening to MK12 show.  Perfect!

Thank you Anna for helping my fill these cakes and picture with happy memories xxx

And Miss London Fashion Week is…

"I'm not a very good picture taken on Ollie's Blackberry."

You could be forgiven for thinking you had just arrived at an American High School Prom, thrown by Madonna circa Desperately Seeking Susan, when arriving at the Meadham Kirchhoff show in London’s Old Eurostar terminal at Waterloo Station.  Garlands of pastel balloons and streamer hung over our heads as we seated for possibly the most exciting show of the season. 

The amalgamation of American prom and pageantry was executed with a juxtaposition of innocence and vanity.  A gaggle of girls in pastel satin dresses, which indecently matched the colours of the balloon, walked into the centre of the runway blank faced as they powdering themselves and mimed applying lipstick, then broke out into the can-can which marked the entrance for the first looks.

Each look was beautifully cute and kitsch.  Smiling clouds and hearts donned pastel cardigans and frilled pinafores, there were feathered bloomers, sparkling bodices and checkered teddy bear prints, all paired with giant glittering wedges trimmed with gold ruffles and topped with pom-poms.  The baby-doll makeup and enormous blonde wigs all creating this wonderful spectacle of dress-up and marked the fourth act, in what the two designers have named their “Cosmology of Women.”

Cue act two:  After of brief interlude of fairy winged children dancing in tutus to the music score of Edward Scissorhands, the curtain dropped at the back of the performance space to reveal models on raised pedestals like Miss World contestants.  The flocked tailoring, frilled seventeenth century bathing suits and rhinestoned costumes had all the drama of the Folies Bergère while still maintaining a sense of childlike innocence.

Meadham Kirchhoff S/S 2012 was the epitome of fun, the person sat next to me even gave me a little nudge to point out, “look at Anna Wintour smiling.” The attention to detail in every aspect was outstanding, even the goody bags housed of all things bubbles!  The colourful and kitschy girlyness displayed created an unnerving atmosphere of child pageants, a longing for experience and the destruction of innocence, but this is still only scratching the surface.  Burberry may have had a purpose built tent in Hyde Park and a show streamed live all over the world, but the tiara this year definitely falls in the hands of the uniquely talented design duo of Ed Meadham and Benjamin Kirchhoff.

YUM! A/W 2011

In honour of London Fashion Week.. cakes inspired by shoes (inspired by, not cakes that look like shoes, cause.. well it's best I don't say how I feel about those sorts of cakes).  Vanilla bottomed, chocolate cupcakes, with a white chocolate fudge icing, topped with tassels and sold in pairs.  Definitely not for the faint hearted.  To eat this cakes, as well as fabulous style, you will need a strong will and a sweet tooth.  Ok, so the flavours may need reining in a little but the recipe was only invented this morning.

It doesn't matter if you're black AND white!

..especially when you are a pair of shoes.


I recently fell head over heals in love with a pair of shoes.  Well in fact, it was with pretty much everything that Burberry has produced for this season.  As I roamed the streets of London all I could think about was how I could raise the £395 to buy the shoes, I walked into Topman filled with the same dread I have every time I walk into the store, but was somewhat distracted by the various customer eyeing over my outfit for a second when I thought they were selling the very shoes I had been dreaming of.. as I got closer I realised they weren't Burberry but pretty damn close..


10 minutes later


..I walked out with the shoes.  I can't describe how happy I am to have them (even if every now and again they whisper "we're not Burberry") especially as they seem to be trending in S/S 2012 collections.  I'm not great with advertising, in that if I see an advert for Lemonade I can't rest until until I've downed a bottle or two, and so as I slowly became surrounded with black and white on the street, I would most likely come to resent the lack on monochromatic style in my other pairs of shoes.  But that's not gonna happen.. and so here we are the inspiration for my next cakes..

Above; My Shoes, Burberry, DKNY SS12, Y-3 SS12.

Sailing Home Cupcakes

London is my home.  But so is Guernsey in the Channel Islands... The downside of living in a great city like London is that I miss my family and friends terribly.. So these cakes are inspired by that feeling of longing I get whenever I look at the Thames.. The feeling I wish I could just jump in a boat and sail home.

The cakes are made of my favourite things, vanilla sponge, blueberry centre and strawberry icing..

I have always been obsessed with origami, I think it's cause whenever I am bored there is always paper around and as I can't draw, I fold.. This paper was part of the inspiration for the cakes, only I loved some of the designs so much I couldn't fold them.. so they are now stuck on my bedroom wall...

Sound Test 1: Sad Cakes

I love sad music, and making people happy with cakes.. So I want to create sad cakes that make people happy.. how do you make a sad cake?.. I have no idea but this image and playlist illustrates where my head is at the moment.. I'm just going to start and see what happens..

Cupcake Fruit Basket

So the previous post became part of a leaving gift for someone I've been working with, by adding  Blueberry Cupcakes and Zesty Lemon Cakes I created this alternative fruit basket.  The lemons are made with icing sugar, but if anyone knows where I could get lemons that size... well I would be very excited!

Strawberry Cheesecakes

I love Strawberry Cheesecake..!  But for reason making a cheescake never seems like something I want to do.. So Strawberry Cheesecake Cupcakes?!  I know they are not overly original but I have given them my own stamp and own recipe.. so of course better then anything that has come before..!!

Britney Spears Hold it Against Me Cake!!

A bit of an odd post for me, but there is a reason for this Britney Spears Cake... One of my best friends 24th Birthday.  He is a massive Britney Spears fan and while I'm not usually a fan of bespoke cakes I will always make an exception for a friend.  As it's Britney, the cake is vanilla of course!  Six layers of vanilla sponge with vanilla icing.  Based on The Hold it Against Me video above.. it turned out.. well pretty darn good!

Twilight CupCakes!!

OK I'm not happy with the grey icing (was meant to be black) but these cakes are as sexy as Edward Cullen himself!  The forbidden fruit sits atop a bed of diamond encrusted icing.  Bite into them, and they ooze delicious fresh raspberry.  Perfect for any Twilight inspired celebration.