Baking Day

On Tuesday I spent the day with my friend, Becky, having a bake fest at her place.  ;o)  It's such a long time since we've done this and it was great fun.  Cooking can be a solitary occupation and generally I don't have any problem with that at all, in fact I probably prefer it alot of the time to be honest, but it was good to bake and catch up with all the news at the same time.

So, first up was my previously mentioned mission to make oatcakes!  I found a Rose Eliott recipe using just oatmeal and we tried that.  It didn't work splendidly well as I had to add extra melted butter and water to make a dough but they did pan out ok and do taste delicious.  So, I will look for more recipes to try, I'd quite like to find one that uses oil as opposed to butter.  They look a trifle rustic but then I'm a rustic loving girl so that's fine by me!

Next up and still on the savoury biscuit line was digestives.  They're not at all like bought digestives but are yummy.  They're not crisp like a biscuit, more bready in a way, but they are delicious with a dollop of cashew butter.  ;o)  Our local Julian Graves became a Holland & Barratt recently and I popped in for a peep yesterday and found cashew butter which I adore but which hasn't been readily available until now.  This offset my disappointment at the fact that they don't sell carob bars as their larger shops do.  Boo!  Interestingly they also had pumpkin seed butter which I've never seen before and will be trying soon me thinks!

Then I moved on to a mini muffin making session!  Two dozen banana cinnamon and two dozen bacon rolled off the production line quite swiftly!  The banana ones are lovely with their sprinkle of demerara, cinnamon and oatmeal.

The bacon ones are a little bland and in my opinion could do with pepping up, maybe with some cheese.  That could of course be due to the fact that they were supposed to have cornmeal in but Becky didn't have any cornmeal so we improvised and used oatmeal!  They're still disappearing from the tin quite rapidly though!  ;oD

Reverting to biscuits, but this time sweet instead of savoury, we made Raspberry Almond Jumbles.  I think that's what they were called anyway but I seem to have temporarily misplaced my scribbled version of the recipe so I stand corrected if I've got that wrong!  I love almondy things and these biscuits hit the spot, a good whack of almond and a nice sweet dimple of jam although we used strawberry instead of raspberry!

All in all it was a great session, lots of laughs and baked goodies to boot!  ;o)