Oh Christmas Tree

Oh Christmas Tree

Over the past few years I've experimented with making baked gifts for people. It started when I was pregnant with Elizabeth and trying to save a bit of money, so I made Scottish Tablet and Macaroons for Jeff's family. And more recently it's been making gifts for the girl's teachers and childminder.

Last year I made gingerbread Christmas trees for Elizabeth's teachers. I decided to go one step further this year, and make 3D edible Christmas trees.

Gingerbread Ingredients - I got this recipe from the cookbook that came with my Andrew James food mixer

• 1 medium egg
• 305g plain flour
• 1tsp bicarb of soda
• 3tsp ground ginger
• 115g soft butter
• 175g soft brown sugar
• 4tbsp golden syrup

Method

• Preheat the oven to 165 (fan)
• Break the egg into a cup and lightly whisk it
• Add flour, bicarb, ginger to a bowl. Add the butter and mix it until it looks like breadcrumbs.
• Add the sugar and mix.
• Add the egg and syrup and mix. The recipe says to mix it until it becomes a soft dough, but I find it works better doing this part by hand.
• Turn the dough out onto a lightly floured surface and roll it out to a thickness of about 5mm. Cut out the shapes you need. I made my own template for the Christmas Trees.

• Lift onto a lightly oiled/greased baking sheet. I use a silicon sheet and I don't need to grease it, they come off really easily.
• Bake for about 12-15 minutes until pale golden brown.
• Leave them to cool for a minute or two on the baking sheet. Then transfer onto a wire rack to cool completely. When cold, decorate as you like.

• I had to do a bit of trimming because the mixture spread a little in the oven. When I did this when they were fresh, it was difficult to do, because they were crunchy and some parts just snapped off. When I completed the job the next day it was much easier as the biscuits had softened a little.

• The 3D trees were covered in green icing and I added small colourful sprinkles to look like Christmas lights. I then "potted" them in a chocolate cupcake and covered the cake in white chocolate buttercream icing.

Chocolate cupcakes ingredients - Cupcakes from the Primrose Bakery

• 115g dark chocolate (70% cocoa or more)
• 85g unsalted butter, at room temp
• 175g soft brown sugar
• 2 large eggs separated
• 185g plain flour
• 3/4 tsp baking powder
• 3/4 tsp bicarb of soda
• Pinch of salt
• 250ml semi skimmed milk
• 1 tsp vanilla extract

Method

• Preheat the oven to 170 (fan) and line a muffin tray with cupcake cases
• Melt the chocolate - I do it in the microwave, 30 seconds at a time and stirring between. Leave it to cool slightly.
• In a large bowl cream the butter and sugar until the mixture is pale and smooth (a few minutes with an electric mixer).
• In a separate bowl beat the egg yolks until they are paler in colour and creamy. Add the eggs to the large bow and mix. Then add the melted chocolate and mix.
• Combine the flour, bicarb, baking powder and salt in a separate bowl.
• Put the milk in a jug and add the vanilla extract.
• Add one third of the flour to the chocolate mixture, mix. Pour in one third of the milk mixture and mix. Repeat these steps until all the flour and milk have been added.
• In a clean bowl whisk the egg whites until soft peaks start to form.
• Carefully fold the egg whites into the batter using a metal spoon.
• Spoon the mixture into the cupcake cases, filling them to about two thirds full.
• Bake for about 20-25 minutes.
• To check they are cooked, insert  a skewer into the centre of one of the cakes - it should come out clean.
• Remove from the oven. Leave to cool in the tin for about 10 minutes. Then remove and place on a wire rack to cool.

White Chocolate Buttercream icing ingredients

• 55g unsalted butter at room temp
• 30ml semi-skimmed milk at room temp
• 1/2 tsp canilla extract
• 250g icing sugar
• 100g white chocolate melted
• 3tbsp double cream

Method

• In a large mixing bowl, beat the butter, milk, vanilla and half of the icing sugar until smooth.
• Gradually aff the remainder of the icing sugar and beat until smooth and creamy.
• Add the cooled melted chocolate and cream to the buttercream mixture and beat until again smooth and creamy.

For the finishing touches I put the Christmas trees into small potting pots that I bought off amazon.

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.

Minnie's Empire

Elizabeth suggested making some Minnie Mouse biscuits to take to the childminder's house for their snack.

I made them the same way as I made the Strawberry Empires, using melted chocolate for the ears and face.

I have some black fondant icing and I know they would have looked better if I had used that instead of the chocolate, but I want the biscuits to taste nice, and I think too much fondant icing is just too sweet. Plus I know chocolate and plain icing go really well with this biscuit.

Do you want to build a snowman?

Another creation inspired by Nerdy Nummies. This time it's Olaf Ice Creams from the movie Frozen.

Elizabeth was desperate for me to try this creation. I took a look at the video and thought it looked do-able.

What you need:

• A suitable glass
• Ice cream
• Milk or plain chocolate (depending on preference really, I used milk), melted and in a piping bag
• Empire Biscuits (75g butter, 25g sugar, 100g SR flour) shaped into Olaf heads - I found a picture online to make a template to cut around
• Plain white icing for the top of the biscuit
• Orange jelly tots cut in half for the nose
• Matchsticks for the arms. I got the mini matchsticks, which were a perfect size.

Method:

I made a few biscuit heads - in case any didn't work out. Coat the top of the biscuit in white icing, add the half orange jelly tot for Olaf's nose. Once the icing is set, use your melted chocolate in a piping bag to draw the rest of the features. Meanwhile the girls got busy with cookie cutters making and decoraging their own biscuits (and eating the decorations).

To make the snowman, first pipe 3 circles of chocolate inside the glass to make the buttons and let them set.

Add your ice cream, matchsticks and lastly the biscuits and voila!

Strawberry Empires

The end of term was coming for Elizabeth at Nursery. It suddenly occurred to me that I should probably sort out a gift for her teachers. I had a brief look at the suggested gifts in Tesco, they were mostly chocolates and mugs etc. For Christmas we made them gingerbread biscuits in the shape of Christmas trees and they had gone down well, so I thought we could bake them a gift again.

I asked Elizabeth what she thought we should do, and she suggested the Christmas tree gingerbread biscuits. So I asked her if there was a more summer appropriate theme. So we went through a few ideas like suns, or sunflowers and settled on strawberries!

I Googled some pictures of strawberries and drew my own templates:

I made Empire Biscuits this time, instead of the gingerbread biscuits.

Ingredients:
150g butter
50g sugar
200g self raising flour
Strawberry jam to sandwich in the middle of 2 biscuits
Icing sugar, water with lots and lots of red food colouring for the top of the biscuits
Chocolate sprinkles for the strawberry seeds
Green fondant icing for the stalk

Method:
Cream the butter and sugar together.
Add the flour and mix into a dough.
Flour the surface before rolling the dough out to about 3 or 4 mm thick.
Cut into shapes.
Cook in the oven for about 12 minutes at 160 degrees (fan) until a light golden brown colour.
Once cooled, assemble and decorate!

I made about 10 biscuits, there are so many helpers in the nursery that I was unsure how many people I was catering for. I wrapped them up in tissue paper and bought a nice box to present them in.
They were a big hit! Almost all of the other gifts had been boxes of chocolates and they were getting a bit fed up with them, so this was a nice change.
I think if I did them again I would make them smaller, they were a bit big.

Empire Biscuits are such easy and fun biscuits to make with children. I made these strawberry ones mostly by myself because they were a gift. But usually the girls get to roll out the dough and use whatever biscuit cutters they want to cut the biscuits out. Then they love spreading the jam and decorating the finished biscuits.