Scottish Tablet

Scottish Tablet

This is a sugary treat! It's a harder form of fudge that crumbles in the mouth. I've made it a couple of times for my English friends and it is usually well received! It is incredibly tricky to make and mine often comes out like fudge. But it's still great to eat if it is soft.

Ingredients

• 4oz salted butter
• 1kg granulated sugar
• 1 cup of full cream milk
• 1 tin of condensed milk

Melt the butter in a heavy based pan. Add all of the rest of the ingredients and slowly bring to the boil, stirring frequently.

When it comes to the boil, turn the heat down and let it simmer for about 45 minutes until the mixture is a caramel brown colour.

Take it off the heat and beat it with an electric hand mixer until the mixture is really thick and coming away from the sides. This should take about 10 minutes. Have a taste of it, if it tastes grainy then it's right.

Pour it into a 20cm/30cm tin. Score it after 5 minutes. Then once it's hard cut it into squares.

I made these for the Easter Coffee Morning at Rebecca's Pre School. I took Rebecca into school especially for the end of term festivities, she doesn't usually go on a Friday. They had an Easter Egg Hunt, face painting, biscuit decorating, crispy cake making, crafts and loads more things going on.

This is all the food she came away with from one session:

Is it just me or is that a little bit too much for one 3 year old?

If you tried the tablet, let me know what you think. Leave a comment below.
Also, I'm always looking for new ideas for baking/cooking, if you have any suggestions, leave a comment!

Reindeer Doughnuts

Reindeer Doughnuts

The girls made some special Christmas Treats today. We made Nerdy Nummies Reindeer Doughnuts. These are so easy to make, the girls made them on their own.

What you need:

• Chocolate covered mini doughnuts
• Red smarties or m&ms - we used some brown ones too for the non-Rudolph reindeer.
• Pretzels
• White pearl sprinkles - I got Cake Angels Tuxedo sprinkles from Tesco and separated the white and black pearls.

Method

• Break the pretzels into stick shapes for the antlers and push them into the doughnuts
• Press the red smartie into the doughnut hole
• Press the pearl sprinkles where the eyes should be, and you're done!

Rebecca's Teddy Bear Doughnut

Om, Nom, Nom!

Scooby Doo Mystery Machine

Scooby Doo Mystery Machine Cake

This year the girls have both really been into Scooby Doo. So when thinking about Rebecca's birthday cake, I came up with the idea of making a Mystery Machine cake. It seemed like the easiest Scooby Doo design to make.

I had pictures of the van which I drew and used to cut out templates for the decorations on the side of the cake.

I used two loaf tins to bake the cake, using the same sponge recipe as I used for the Candy Cake.

While that was baking and cooling, I started cutting out the designs for the sides of the cake using my templates and ready rolled and coloured fondant icing.

I sandwiched the cakes together with buttercream and covered all the cake with buttercream. Again I used the recipe used to make the Candy Cake.

I then covered the cake with a blue fondant icing, and used water and a pastry brush to add on all of the decorations.

It wasn't as neat as I would have liked, but I was pleased with the final results. More importantly, Rebecca loved it!

A couple of points that I had issues with.

* I don't know how to smooth down the sides of fondant icing. When you put it over the cake, there are always flaps and they end up making the cake look messy. I will research this more next time.

* Next time I will make the designs to stick onto the cake after the cake had it's main layer of fondant icing on it and add them as soon as they are ready. Because I made them in advance they were hard and some of them broke when I picked them up.

Quick and Easy Cupcakes

A quick and easy cupcake recipe. It's the sort of thing I always have the ingredients for if the girls want to do baking. This one was passed on to me, but I believe that it is Nigella's recipe:

Cake ingredients

• 125g unsalted butter
• 125g caster sugar
• 2 eggs
• 125g SR flour
• 1/2 tsp vanilla extract
• 2-3 tbsp milk

Method

• Preheat oven to 180 degrees (fan).
• Blitz all the ingredients until smooth, except the milk, with electric mixer or in a food processor.
• Add milk slowly until the mixture is a soft droopy consistency.
• Spoon into cupcake cases until they are a third full.
• Cook till risen, golden, bouncy and if you put a skewer in it comes out clean. (about 15 minutes)

Butter cream icing

• 150g icing sugar
• 75g creamed butter
• A little vanilla extract
• A little milk if it's too firm

Method

• Blitz all ingredients together with your food mixer until it's smooth.
• Add colouring if you like.
• Spread over your cakes.
• Add toppings etc.

Fudge Slices - Traybake

When I was about 17 my after school job was looking after two early teenage girls. I would go to their house everyday after school until either their mum or step dad got home.

My little sister, Janis would also come to their house so that I could look after her too when my mum was working.

On Wednesdays we had half days at school, finishing before lunch. I got into the habit of buying Janis and I some lunch from a deli that was up the road from my school. We would have a roll each and a fudge slice. Their fudge slices were lovely. I don't think I had ever had them before and I don't really remember seeing them since until I was working in a school in Aberdeenshire.

At Mintlaw Academy, Aberdeenshire, the Business Studies classes would have to come up with an Enterprise Initiative every year. One year they came up with the idea of creating and publishing a recipe book. They invited all the members of staff to contribute a favourite recipe or two. I was very much into savoury cooking then, and  I added a Chinese recipe that I loved.

What was great about the book was that the recipes were tried and tested by home cooks. A lot of the recipes were family favourites, probably passed down from previous generations. Included amongst them was a recipe for fudge slices.

It had probably been 15 years since I had a fudge slice from the Deli in Currie, just up the road from the High School. But I thought these ones were a pretty good likeness. Regardless of whether or not they were the same, they were bloody delicious!

I've made this recipe A LOT, my mum now makes it and I've passed it on to Janis and my sister in law. I don't know anyone who doesn't like these. Elizabeth and Rebecca got one in her their lunches this week, and Jeff took some in to his work for his birthday.

I've made my own tweaks to get them just right.

Ingredients

• 4oz soft margarine
• 2tbsp sugar
• 2tbsp golden syrup
• 1 small tin of condensed milk
• 9oz biscuits blitzed in the food processor
• 1 pack of milk chocolate, melted to spread on top

Method

• Melt the marg, sugar, golden syrup and condensed milk in a pan over a low heat.
• Bring it to a gentle boil.
• Let it boil for at least 5 minutes, until the colour has darkened to a caramel colour.
• Take it off the heat and beat it with the electric beaters until it has thickened - when it's coming away from the sides of the pan. This will probably take about 5 minutes.
• Add in the biscuits and mix well. The mixture should all come together like a dough.
• Press and spread the mixture into a baking tray. I use a 30cm/20cm deep tray. I also line it in advance with clingfilm so that the edges are nice and smooth and it's easy to lift out of the tray to chop up when it's set.
• Spread the melted chocolate evenly over the top.
• Put it in the fridge to set.
• Cut it into squares or rectangles, whatever takes your fancy. Small might be best because they are very morish!