chocolate and fudge baked doughnuts | a recipe

I've wanted to make doughnuts for quite some time but have always been put off by the fact that they require deep frying. I don't own a deep fat fryer, and haven't had access to one since I lived in Holland and they were everywhere. I'm also not the kind of person to be trusted near a massive saucepan of oil, I think my neighbours would never forgive me if I tried and burned down the block. I didn't realise you could bake doughnuts until I stumbled across a recipe for one, and as I didn't fancy taking part in this week's bakealong because I'm not a fan of making bread, this seemed like a relatively good alternative. The next best thing about this recipe is that you can make them without a doughnut pan too - you don't need any specialist equipment at all. It's all really easy.

They can be a little unnerving when they come out of the oven because they look like bread rolls and I was really quite worried that they would taste like them too. Luckily looks are quite deceiving and they do taste like doughnuts! Getting the jam in was a little tricky too, but I managed to find a pumpkin cutter tool which was quite handy as a small knife for making a hole big enough to poke jam inside. 

I used this recipe here, but didn't use the glaze and also didn't go through the pain of making my ring doughnuts. Instead, I iced mine for two reasons. One, I thought it was a good idea to make doughnuts past midnight on a Monday morning and two, I have a tendency to make things taste like the sea when something is "salted". This was all so much easier than I thought it would be, and they haven't turned out too badly, I definitely recommend giving them a go. 

trying out all the gins at london gin festival 2016

I found myself at London's Gin Festival a few weeks ago, on a relatively chilly day in August and headed to Tobacco Dock for their afternoon session. Realistically, I wasn't the Gin Festival's target market for this event for one quite important reason - I don't like gin. In fact, I do quite a lot to actively avoid it. Plus, my favourite "spirit" is a Malibu. My biggest choice when getting a Malibu and Coke is whether I want the Pineapple version or not (the answer, by the way, is always no). But, I have a fear of missing out and so I spent my Sunday afternoon drinking (lots of) gin. 

And it was pretty good actually. When you arrive, you buy a number of tokens (we chose four each) and you get a free glass to carry around with you so when you choose a gin, you just hand them the glass to fill up for you, which I really liked because I've been to these festival events before and they always run out of glasses and make you wait for ages while they run around finding clean ones for you. You also get a little booklet to pick which gin you want, and it corresponds to a bar. There were four bars to help organise the gins. Once you've picked, they recommend a tonic, which are all free and easy to pick up from a different table. You can also get gin cocktails, but they were double the price at two tokens.

Would I usually have drunk four gin and tonic's in the space of an hour and a half? Nope. Did I actually enjoy doing so? Yep. I got myself into a bit of a fluster ordering my first gin and blurted out to the woman behind the bar that I had no idea what to get. She asked me what gin I usually get, and I said I usually didn't. Weirdly, she then asked me if I liked Malibu and recommended me a gin based on that (Hoxton Gin, apparently). It was pretty impressive that the people behind the bars could remember which tonic was supposed to go with which gin, and could also make recommendations based on those gins - there were literally hundreds there. 

I also managed to find a gin which I loved - even though it was unsurprisingly a gin liqueur more than a proper gin. I've already plastered this gin all over my social media, but I have genuinely fallen in love with it and will probably be regularly buying it. Zymurgorium make a "sweetly crafted violet gin liqueur" - basically it's a gin that tastes like parma violets. Reliving your childhood while drinking gin - perfect. 

I also found out my colleague didn't know what parma violets were. I hope she's the only one. 

If I had any complaints, it would be that the cocktails were too expensive. At £10 a throw, I never quite managed to get around to buying one. Although I live in London, and know how expensive cocktails can be, I did think this was a bit steep for an event. My friend was a little annoyed at how the only tonics available were Fever Tree, as he finds them quite overpowering. And, to be honest, we thought there maybe too many gins there? It was a little overwhelming. 

To be fair though, we really enjoyed the event, and it's nice to see that the Festival takes place all round the country, not just in London. Plus, the tickets at £12.50 were pretty good value for a four hour time slot, and for the amount of choice, plus the master classes you could have joined. I think we'll look into going back next year, to scratch a few more gins off the list. 

rose & pistachio drizzle cake | a recipe.

Can I just start with a recognition of how bad my food photography is. I can't do it. I have tried. It doesn't help that I live in the darkest flat in London - I used to live in a basement flat and even that had more natural light. It also doesn't help that I make ugly food. Usually edible, but incredibly ugly. 

But moving on, I am so excited that Bake Off is back. I'm not sure why I like it so much, it has none of the components of a TV show I like but every Wednesday evening I'm there. I find the first episode pretty irritating each time it comes on, I hate not being able to work out everyone's names because they don't get enough time on screen - not that I'll end up picking a favourite as I'm usually always wrong and anyway, who could beat this guy? This week for Bake Along, we had the choice between a drizzle cake, jaffa cakes or a mirror glaze cake.

Jaffa cakes were straight out for me, the thought of a homemade jaffa cake makes me want to gag - they are something that should only be made in factory, otherwise there is just too much orange and too much jelly and bleugh. Do I have the patience to make a mirror glaze cake? I very much doubt it. But do I love a drizzle cake? Yep. A lemon drizzle is one of my go to bakes, something I probably make once a month. So why not mix it up a little for Bake Along? 

So this week I made a rose and pistachio drizzle cake. Was it my best? No. Does it look drizzley enough? No. Did I go over the top with the icing? Yep. Does it taste pretty awesome? Yep. So that'll have to do, along with a memo to myself to try harder next week!

I used this recipe here for the cake, but replaced the orange zest with vanilla. When the cake was cooling, I mixed together some icing sugar and water over heat with a bit of rosewater and then spooned the mixture over the cake. Once it was cool, I spooned over some pink rose icing and topped with crushed pistachios. 

a little visit to stowe | england.

I drove past Stowe House in Buckinghamshire not too long ago, and had to stop to have a look. We didn't visit the House, the school was in session and there were lots of children in school uniform (even though it was a Saturday, not sure I envy boarding school life). But we did visit the Grecian Valley designed by Capability Brown, and sat at the Temple of Concord and Victory to have a cup of coffee - served, in true National Trust style - in mismatched cups and saucers. I was tempted to buy one of the teaspoons but held back - I still regret it. Imagine being so rich you could just build a Temple instead of a garden shed?