Easter Nest Cupcakes

You can tell I am home for the weekend, as the baking begins. I have decided to take the weekend off from Uni and writing my dissertation to enjoy being with my family, and of course doing lots of baking!

Yesterday I make Easter Nest Cupcakes for the family to enjoy.

I used to basic classic sponge recipe as I have explained earlier in this blog. You weigh the eggs, then whatever the eggs weigh, everything except the baking powder and vanilla essence should weigh this too. So my 2 eggs weighed 120g, so my flour, butter and sugar was also 120g - very easy to make cakes this way!!

I divided the mixture between 12 cake cases, not filling them too much as wanted to be able to decorate them!

Once cooled, I made glace icing, iced the cakes and covered them in hundreds and thousands.
I then made butter icing and piped a little nest on top of the cake and placed mini eggs on top.

They looked so cute and tasted good too. I got a little snap happy taking pictures!
Happy Easter! xoxo

Waitrose No Bake Raspberry Cheesecakes

I love going to Waitrose and picking out the recipe cards and getting some inspiration from them, so when I popped into my local Waitrose with my mum we saw these and decided to bake them as soon as we got home.

They are the most simple and quick desserts to make, but taste delicious. Most of the ingredients are from the essential range as well, which makes them relatively cheap too!

The recipe can be found here, however I will give a quick summary below:

The recipe says to crush 6 essential Waitrose Rich Highland Shortie Biscuits, however I wanted to be generous with the biscuits so ended up crushing about 20!! I then crushed the biscuits and divided between 5 tumblers (there are 5 people in my family, the recipe serves 4!). Then you mix 250g of Waitrose Lighter Soft Cheese, with 100g essential Waitrose Greek Style Yoghurt (I did about 150g in the end) and 2tbsp pure clear honey. These go in the fridge whilst the 200g frozen essential Waitrose Raspberries thaw with 2tbsp cordial (I used summer fruits cordial as that was in the cupboard but the recipe recommends blackcurrant cordial or squash). Once ready to eat, divide the thawed raspberries between the beakers and layer on top.

I really loved this as a dessert and will most definitely be serving it in the summer as it is a very summery pudding!

Ile de Re - post 1

For the Easter break my family and I are visiting the Ile de Re. The Ile de Re is an island off the coast of France, and is simply beautiful.

You can only get to the island by boat or bridge, and it's costs €8 off peak to cross the bridge and €16 at peak times. 

We have been here since Saturday and I thought I would do my first blog post about it! 

The Ile de Re is a very flat island, therefore most people own bikes and travel everywhere by bike, we have hired bikes for the whole week, and have not driven anywhere! 

We are staying in the town called St Martin de Re and it is beautiful, it is right on the coast, has a stunning harbour, lots of cute shops, restaurant and ice cram parlours and also a sandy beach - Plenty of opportunity to take some gorgeous photographs.

Today we cycled from our town to a place called Loix (see map), a village along the coast from us, the whole cycle was 24km in total. Despite the strong winds battling against us it was a beautiful sunny day and a lovely bike ride. We took a picnic with us and ate it sheltering away from the wind and also had a drink in a cafe in Loix. The views on route we gorgeous, with views of the choppy sea, pretty villages and oyster farms too. We even passed a trendy oyster bar where you could eat your oysters whilst looking out to sea!

In the evening we went out for dinner at a typical French restaurant. The restaurant was called Cote Jardin, and we sat outside in the covered, heated garden. In the summer the garden is not covered and you can enjoy sitting under the vines and trees. For starter I ate pork terrine with French bread, this is my favourite kind of starter as I adore terrine and pate. For main my sister and I both enjoyed the steak (medium). This was severed with potatoes, salad and a delicious sauce. The steak was cooked to perfection and utterly divine! For dessert I enjoyed melt in the middle chocolate pudding (moelleux au chocolat), again this is one of my favourite puddings. I even cook a superb version myself (recipe to follow when I return to England!). The chocolate pudding was served with cream and creme anglaise. 

See you tomorrow xoxo