Baking

Yes, we like baking! Here are a couple of projects we've embarked on during the summer. First up, a date night lemon meringue pie.

Making meringue is considerably easier now we have an electric mixer/whisk.

This is quite an efficient recipe as the egg whites go into the meringue and the yolks go in to the lemony stuff.

Cook until it's satisfyingly brown.

Eat. Splendid.

The girls wanted to make fairy cakes - they mixed, assembled, and decorated them with only a little bit of help from me! Lydia's ones are the two at the top, Naomi's on the left, and Miriam's on the right.

The first week of Bake Off this year involved making Jaffa Cakes, so we thought we'd give them a go. Mary Berry's recipe is here.

The sponges came out pretty well.

No particular jelly is specified in the recipe, except "orange", so that seems easy enough.

Though the jelly took ages to set. We thought it could have done with some extra gelatin to stiffen it up.

However, it cut out nicely enough, so on to the chocolate stage.

As suspected, the jelly wasn't stiff enough. As soon as the hot chocolate was added the jelly melted and started to flow off.

A couple turned out pretty well, but the others looked a bit messy.

By the end, they didn't look great but they, and the orange chocolate lumps under the cooling rack, tasted just great. Definitely one to try again!