Categories
Tutorial

Weekend baking- Oreo Wonderfuls

“What shall I call those things I just made?” I asked my husband. “Oreo Wonderfuls” said he. Ok then. Since I can’t think of anything to call them, Oreo Wonderfuls it is.

I started thinking about making these after watching Lorraine Pascale make her cheaty cake pops, where she combined Oreos and chocolate spread. After a quick browse on the internet, I found lots of similar “recipes” that used cream cheese instead of the chocolate spread. This seemed like a far better idea, as we use the light version cream cheese in our house and can thus pretend that these aren’t actually that bad for you.

Basically, all you need is:

  • Oreo cookies
  • Cream cheese
  • Chocolate

And you’re good to go. You’ll need roughly twice the weight of Oreos as you do cream cheese. I used 8 oz Oreos and 4 oz cream cheese, which made 20 bite sized balls.

Ready? Go:

Put your Oreos in a food processor, blender, or bag if you don’t have either of those. It helps if you take the cookies apart first. Pulse (or bash with a rolling-pin, if you have them in a bag!) until you have fine crumbs.

And the cream cheese and blend together until you have a nice even gooey lump of deliciousness.

Put a sheet of baking paper on a baking tray or similar. Roll the mixture into little balls the size of your choosing and place them on the tray, then pop this in the freezer for a while to firm up.

While they’re in there, you can start melting your chocolate- I find it easiest to do in the microwave, but a double-boiler works too of course. You need to get it as runny as you can, but keep heating in small amounts and stirring, so you don’t over heat the chocolate.

Once it’s ready, you can start dipping! I just used a spoon and dropped the cookie ball into the chocolate, rolled it a bit then took it out- they’ll need to go back on the baking paper covered tray, by the way, so keep it handy.

When they’re all coated, you’ll need to stick them in the fridge for a while to set. If you’re feeling fancy, once they’ve been dipped you can cover them in nuts/sprinkles etc. to make them look even more exciting. Personally, I quite like the rough-coating look, so I left mine be:

These are so easy and so delicious, I think I’ll be making them quite a lot.

Categories
Craft Origami Paper

Now on Folksy- Christmas origami gift tags

Get yours here.

Categories
General

Birthday Weekend Baking- chocolate frosted cupcakes.

The husband chose cupcakes for me to make for his birthday, with chocolate frosting.

I made a simple sponge recipe, like the one I used for the reindeer cupcakes earlier this year. As my boy likes Bailey’s, I tried replacing the 2-3 tbsp of milk with Bailey’s- which tasted YUM in uncooked batter form, but sadly by the time they were baked it couldn’t be tasted at all. Sad face 🙁

After covering with chocolate butter icing, I decorated using some cupcake stencils- using icing sugar to stand out against the chocolately topping:

Cute, huh?

Categories
Craft Lunchtime Lusting

Lunchtime Lusting- Things with keys

I do not think there’ll ever be a time when I don’t want most key-related things I see. I think I can trace my love affair with keys back to Clarks Princess shoes. I would totally still wear them now. Remember the advert?

Clarks Magic Steps

Currently lusting after these cute key earrings:

This oh-so-cute key ribbon:

This lock & key necklace:

All available from the wonderful crafters of Folksy.

Categories
Craft

Button-Eyed Owl

Pinned it:

Sewed it:

Buttoned it:

Categories
General

It was the cover that caught my eye… #8

The Penguin Great Journeys series is a fabulous collection to own. Not only do the covers make for an extremely pleasing shelf display, but the titles are excellent to boot; not to mention the fact that they are great reads!

Travel back to the time when there were Snakes With Wings And Gold-Digging Ants:

Read about William Dampier’s sea adventures in Piracy, Turtles And Flying Foxes:

Learn how Ernest Shackleton faired in his Escape From The Antarctic:

Or tour Europe with Mark Twain in Can-cans, Cats And Cities Of Ash:

Great Journeys allows readers to travel both around the planet and back through the centuries – but also back into ideas and worlds frightening, ruthless and cruel in different ways from our own.  Few reading experiences can begin to match that of engaging with writers who saw astounding things:  Great civilisations, walls of ice, violent and implacable jungles, deserts and mountains, multitudes of birds and flowers new to science.  Reading these books is to see the world afresh, to rediscover a time when many cultures were quite strange to each other, where legends and stories were treated as facts and in which so much was still to be discovered.”

Categories
Craft Notebooks Paper

Miniature Notebook

There are so many things I should be making right now, but I just couldn’t resist making this teeny tiny notebook.

See how small!

Categories
Art Craft Inspiration Notebooks Paper

Weekly Inspiration- Books and art

I’ve been thinking recently about what kind of books to make and decided that maybe it would be a good idea to figure out what kind of book I would want for myself. What is about a book that makes me want it when I see it? It’s most definitely the look of the thing, initially – it will always be the cover that caught my eye – but also the overall look and feel of a book, including the insides and how it’s been put together.

After that all important Google research, I discovered a wonderful world of artist’s books – and a concept that I was familiar with but that for some reason hadn’t registered fully.

Having started to become familiar with bookbinding techniques and thus able to start putting things together by myself, I think I may be almost ready to try my hand at something a bit more… well, a bit more.

Categories
Tutorial

Weekend baking- Honey & Walnut Cake

This cake is not as faffy as it seems and it is de-licious.

Ingredients:

  • 175g butter
  • 100g castor sugar
  • 100g clear honey
  • 100g walnuts
  • 3 large eggs
  • 225g self raising flour

The recipe calls for a 20cm square shallow tin, but I used a round one!

Firstly, preheat your oven to 180ºC. While it’s heating up, line your tin with baking paper and measure out your ingredients.

Next, toast walnuts in the oven for 5-6 mins; cool a bit, then roughly chop and set to one side.

Meanwhile, melt the butter in a pan over a low-ish heat. And the sugar and honey and stir until dissolved. Once it’s nice and smooth, bring it to the boil, then pour into a large mixing bowl and allow to cool to about room temperature.

Meanwhile, beat the eggs lightly. Add to the cooled honey mixture and whisk until evenly blended.

Finally, gently mix in the flour and chopped walnuts. You should now have something that resembles a cake mix! Pour it into the tin, level out, then bake in the oven for 30-40 mins. I was using a fan oven and it was pretty much done after about 25 mins; just keep an eye on it, once it’s a lovely deep golden brown and springy on top, it’s ready!

Allow to cool on a wire rack, then slice it up and eat it- makes a great accompaniment to coffee or Bailey’s. Or indeed coffee and Bailey’s.

Categories
Inspiration

The Rock ‘N’ Roll Guide To Wedding Music

This. Book. Is. Awesome. Ok, yes, I’m slightly biased as it’s my book, but still- you have to admit, it’s pretty damn awesome.

When preparing for my (I mean ‘our’, of course) wedding last year freezer_girl got me hooked on the Rock ‘n Roll Bride site. I found it endlessly inspiring and thoroughly refreshing, in a “Oh! Of course, it’s our day, we can do what we want” kind of a way.

Working as I do for a sheet music publisher, I got to thinking how yawn-worthy all the wedding music books we print are- in fact, all wedding music books. They’re full of stiff, traditional music, hymn suggestions and a few token utterly puke-some pop songs.

Ho hum, thought I. What the world needs is a wedding music book that ROCKS. What the world needs is a wedding music book version of the Rock ‘n Roll Bride site; something that people can look through and feel inspired and go “Oh!” at and then go off and plan their own wedding, their own way.

And here it is!

I emailed the lovely Kat, AKA The Rock ‘N Roll Bride, who wrote me a kick-ass intro and was generally great with input and advice. I filled the book with as wide a variety of musical styles as I could- Missy Higgins, The Buzzcocks, Portishead, The Beach Boys, Muse, Alice Cooper… It also contains some fab photos (oh, is that me?! How did that get in there…) and some casual but informative… um… information.

Go check it out: The Rock ‘N’ Roll Guide To Wedding Music– a big chunk of alternative wedding-ness for anyone who isn’t enthused by the idea of walking down the ideal to The Wedding March!