Bake, Bake, Bake!

Hello everyone! Yesterday I had a whole day of cooking and baking - I literally did nothing else!! Some of the things I have made look really complicated, but actually they are super easy - and they turn out looking professional too! I have made pasta (a few different types), some little tiny baby meringues, some custard (unfortunately I forgot to take any pictures of that, oops!) and a very special Mother's Day cupcake bouquet for my mum (she loved it and we have actually just eaten some of the cupcakes - they are delicious 😋)!

Bow-tie pasta

I made a few different types of pasta - my favourite ones have got to be the bow tie pasta! Their proper Italian name is farfalle, which interestingly translates to 'butterfly' in English - I always assumed it meant bow tie or something like that! The bow ties - or should I say butterflies - are super easy to make, even though they look complicated. All I did was make a normal pasta dough (if you don't know how to do this then go to one of my other posts abut pasta - Click here if you want to have a look) and roll it out. Then I used a 2 and a quarter inch/ 59mm sized circle cutter (you can use the scalloped edge if you want, but the straight-edged one is fine as well) and cut out as many circles as you can from the sheet of pasta. Once you have cut out as many as possible, then roll the leftover pasta through the pasta machine again and cut out more circles. This won't change the consistency of the pasta dough, but make sure you keep putting flour onto the machine or the rolling pin to make sure it doesn't stick - it can be really frustrating if it sticks and gets a hole, as I learnt the hard way!!  

Spaghetti, tagliatelle and linguine
pasta drying on coat hangers (yes,
 this actually works!)

After you have cut a out as many circles as possible (I managed to do lots and only have a tiny weeny bit of dough left at the end), make sure they are all laid flat on a worktop and then pinch down the middle with your thumb and finger - it should squish together and... TA DAAA! Hopefully it will make a bow shape! After you have made all of them, put them onto a cooling rack or baking tray to leave overnight or cook fresh.

I also made some spaghetti, some tagliatelle and some linguine which you can see in the picture on the left, drying on the coat hangers. If you do want to dry your pasta on coat hangers, make sure you cover them in clingfilm first so they are food-safe.

 

These are my baby meringues - I just made up  a batch of meringue mix (the normal version with caster sugar, not the one with brown/demerara sugar) then fit a piping bag with a star nozzle. If you want to get the striped effect with the food colouring, then you have to use the piping bag otherwise it won't work. Anyway, put the star nozzle into the piping bag and then get a clean paint brush and some food colouring. Paint a few stripes down the sides of the piping bag - I did three - and then carefully spoon in the meringue mix and try not to smudge the food colouring. Line a baking tray with greaseproof paper and pipe little stars or splodges onto the tray. Put them in the oven (preheated to 110°) for about 45mins, possibly longer - this seems like an insanely long time, I know, but I kept checking and checking them for almost an hour until they were ready! They are good to eat as an (un)healthy snack, but really you can have them at any time!





Right, now onto the custard! I got this recipe from the Good Housekeeping cookbook, and technically this is crème anglaise, but it is a little thicker because I added a tiny bit of cornflour. I had egg yolks left over from the meringues, so I decided to make some custard to go with the pudding we were having that night (my dad made it), which was Tarte Tatin. The custard is surprisingly easy to do, but at the same time quite hard because you have to keep stirring it all the time. First, pour 300ml milk and 1 vanilla pod/2.5ml vanilla essence into a pan and heat it until it is almost boiling. Meanwhile, whisk together 3 egg yolks, 1 tsp cornflour and 1 tbsp caster sugar until they are thick and creamy. Once the milk is ready, pour it into the bowl containing the eggs and sugar through a sieve, to get rid of any lumps. Whisk it until it is a light yellow colour, then sieve it back into the saucepan to make sure there are definitely no lumps. Cook it over a low heat, stirring ALL THE TIME until it is thicker. Whatever you do, do not let it boil because it will get lumpy. I definitely did not let it boil 😳. If it does boil, then I found out an interesting tip that actually works - sieve it back into the bowl and whisk two ice cubes in. The ice cubes will melt because of how hot the custard is, and it will cool down the temperature of the custard so that when you whisk it, the lumps should disappear and the custard should go smooth again. You can serve this custard hot or cold, but it will taste really good with anything! It is thinner than normal, shop-bought custard, but I think it tastes a lot nicer, more vanilla-ery. It think it's definitely worth the effort!

                                                                                    This is the 'Cupcake Bouquet' that I made for my mum on Mother's Day. I made it with the help of my aunty (she is very good at decorating cakes - she made my parents wedding cake)! I know, it looks professional and shop-bought, but it is soooo much simpler than it looks! The whole bouquet as big as mine is 19 cupcakes, but you can always make smaller ones of 6 if you want to - they will still look amazing! The first thing you need to do is make the cupcakes and let them cool. Then make up a batch of buttercream in whatever colour you like. You can do whatever pattern you like on the cakes - I have put a close up photo of all the ones I did down below - but I chose roses, and smaller flowers, which are a bit like hydrangeas really! After you have decorated all the cupcakes, set them aside for a bit. Now is the time when you need to assemble the plastic cups. You can kind of see them in the photo, each of the cupcakes is sitting in one, and you just need to staple them all together until you have nineteen cups. Lay it onto a couple of sheets of pretty tissue paper and tape it or tie it with ribbon around the sides, so it looks like the coverings on a bouquet of flowers. Now pop in all the cakes - carefully, because you can't really take them out again - and arrange them nicely. If you want, you can make some leaves out of green tissue paper and tuck them into the gaps. If you want to put it into a box, then you may want to dis-assemble (is that even a word?!) the box and slide the bouquet in before reassembling it. In the end they turned out amazing, and my mum loved them!!





So, that was my whole day of baking! I spent a lot of time on these bakes (and the blog post actually), and I hope you enjoyed reading my blog!