The Great Beanie Bake-Off Challenge!!!!! (updated)

Remember those roses we brought back from A Lotment on Monday?  They're opening up now in time for my birthday!  Isn't that brilliant!!

It's really horrid weather today though.  What shall we do?

I KNOW!!!!! Let's have a Bake Off Challenge!!!  Today's challenge is Cake!!!!

I love cayke - and it's the perfect challenge for a birthday!!

Right, first we measure out the self raising flour....

Then it's the same amount of castor sugar

And then sieve it all through.  Easy peasy lemon squeezy.

Butter.  We need to measure out lots of butter....

And then chop it into the flour/sugar mix.  Andrea helped mush it all together......

Until it looked like this!

We decided to squeeze some ginger in because we have some ginger root lying about.

And three eggs.  Then all that got mushed up some more with a wooden spoon.....

Until it looked like that!!!  Then we turned on the oven and greased up a cayke tin.....

And put the cayke mix in the pan.  Which went in the oven for cooking!!!

Later on, when it had cooked, we got it out of the oven!

It came out of the tin - eventually - and there was only a little bit stuck to the tin!

Because it's my birthday cayke, I was allowed to decorate it!  So I chose a fudge topping.....

And squeezed it out over the top of the cayke with a bit of elderberry sugar on top.

Ay Viola.

Baking wiv Beanie.

Cayke.

Mine.

Yum.

Bake-along-a-Beanie

We made Bis Kwits today!  (That's Cookies in America)

The recipe said 100g butter, 50g caster sugar and 150g self raising flour all mixed together.  After that we were supposed to roll bits up into little balls but the mixture was too dry to stick together.  So we added an egg into the mix and a teaspoon of vanilla essence and mixed that in.  Then we rolled bits up into little balls (about 14 of them) and put them on baking trays and cooked them in the oven at Gas mark 5 for about 20 minutes.

They taste alright too!  Which is rather amazing since we've never made them before.....

Bake-along-a-Beanie

We made a cayke yesterday!!!  We used 200g self raising flour, 200g caster sugar and 200g butter and mixed it all together.  Then we added 4 eggs and some chocolate chips and mixed that up too.  Then we put it all in a bundt tin and then put it in the oven on gas mark 5.

Some of the top stuck to the tin though, but it tastes OK...... tastes yummy....!!

Bake-along-a-Beanie

We were supposed to go to London last Thursday, but the Tate Britain museum closed on Tuesday, and it's all getting a bit panicky about this Corona bug thing, so we stayed home.  We lost money on the train ticket there & back but that's all.  Instead, we decided to do the first instalment of a new Cookery Programme.  This is for savoury brioche.  We started off sifting 450g of plain white flour.  That's a lot of flour.....

Then we added in a lot of grated parmesan cheese.  I guess you could use other hard cheese if you wanted to.

Then we added two tablespoons of dried oregano because we had some on the shelf.

and we put in the remnants of powdered Coleman's mustard.  (Usually we put in a teaspoon-worth)

Then added 10g of yeast.

Mix it all together.

We'd left out a pack of butter so it would be softened up - and yes, we used the ENTIRE 250g pack!!

We cut it up into pieces....

And then rubbed it all in bit by bit so it looks a bit like breadcrumbs.

Add four eggs.....

.....and 170ml of milk......

And garlic to taste!

Then mix all of that together!!!

then you need to cover it up and let is rise overnight.

later on we grated up some more parmesan cheese (they didn't have any of the already-grated-parmesan at the supermarket)

then we dolloped a bit of the brioche dough into each section of a 12 pan muffin tin and schlepped some egg over the top of each one....

and sprinkled some parmesan on top!

Then we put that in the oven on gas mark 5 for 30 minutes..... but we put it back in for another 10 minutes because we weren't too sure they were cooked!!!

And TA-DAA!!

Savoury brioche!!!

Who's going to host the next cookery lesson??!!

The Beanie Family Holiday, day three

We had another posh coffee this morning!!

And hung out wiv Milo again!!!  Milo's brill!

After breakfast we went out for a little drive.....

They got lovely views here!!

We parked the car here.....

There's a pretty church up there!

We were meeting up with some people today that Arnty Bev knows - they meet up every Monday for a walk around town and we're going too!  Paddington leads the way!

We set off and went past a toilet planter!!!  Looks like it's been well fertilised!!!

Then we went through a graveyard looking for zombies!!

We also found a gold letterbox for one of our 2012 paralympic athletes!!

See?  It's proper gold!

We left a CD out for someone to find as well!

And then waved hallo to some alpacas!  They're going to have walk-an-alpaca walks too!

OH!  There's the zombie!!

After we got back to the square we started at, everyone else went for coffee but us an Arnty Bev had a lunch booking so we buggered off....

And came here again!

We got a window seat again!!!

The view's brilliant here!!!

First we got our fizzy drinks in - they're elderberry fizzy ones.

Then we got a Portland Crab salad and it was BRILLIANT!!!  It had white and dark crab meat (loads of it!!) buttered bread, potato salad, coleslaw, and green salad wiv onions and bell peppers and boiled eggs and it was splendiferously Yumtastic!!!

after lunch we went for a little drive to get the Best View In Town.

we made a viddy oh of it!

The Olympic rings are down there - we had the sailing competition here in the 2012 Olympics!

You can even see Arnty Bev's house from here!  It's that diagonal row of white houses pointing to the bottom right hand corner!!!

After that, we went home again to hang out.

Arnty Bev wanted to have a go at making pizza dough, so I said I'd help.  I like bake along a-Beanie games!!!

first we got the flour.

then we added salt and then mixed in the water/yeast stuff and then mixed it all together.

It looked very wet and sticky......

It was very stretchy though.

Very, very, VERY stretchy!!!

We had to leave it to prove for a couple of hours before we could cook it though.

But it was still very wet an sticky!!!

anyway, we tried sticking some on a baking tray and put tomato paste, cheese, tomatoes, mushroom and something else on top and then cooked it.  We all ate it too...... and we didn't die or get sick so we figured it was ok!!!

Then we had a go at making a sweet pizza with reeses peanut butter and chocolate orange curd and dark chocolate and marshmallows on top.

That turned out alright too!!!

Later on, we looked at the CDs we'd made this week!  They're fun!

After all that excitement, we decided we were all totally pooped and went to bed!!!