Apologies and a New Start

Hiya all!!

First things first, apologies to all for not being around for around 3 weeks (if not more!!) oops! I've been so busy with sixth form and have not really done any baking apart from last weekend when I made gingerbread biscuits with my nephew.

I'll let you know how I made the biscuits but I thought I'd get things straight and clear things up firstly and call this a fresh start, from now on I will upload every Sunday afternoon with something I have baked or what I wish to bake near Christmas time as yes it is the lead up to Christmas officially now that Halloween is out of the way!! I will also show you some Christmas baked gifts I have been thinking of doing for friends and some family and how I will be packaging them and giving them as nice little home baked gifts.

Ok, that's out the way so now onto the way I made some gingerbread biscuits (which by the way were so lovely) with my nephew, however he didn't really help other than cutting out the biscuits which was what he only really wanted to do! These biscuits had a strange texture for a gingerbread biscuit than what you would normally assume as they had a shortbread texture with the gingerbread taste (I know sounds strange but worked incredibly well!).

The Ingredients:

350g/12oz plain flour, plus extra for rolling out
1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
2 tsp ground ginger
1 tsp ground cinnamon
125g/4½oz butter
175g/6oz light soft brown sugar
1 free-range egg
4 tbsp golden syrup

The Method:

1. Sift together all the dry ingredients and pour into the bowl of a food processor. Add the butter and blend until it looks like breadcrumbs. Then stir in the sugar. 
2. Lightly beat the egg and golden syrup together, add to the food processor and pulse until it all clumps together. Tip the dough out, knead briefly until smooth, wrap in clingfim and leave to chill in the fridge for 15 minutes.
3. Preheat the oven to 180C/350F/Gas 4. Line two baking trays with greaseproof paper. 
4. Roll the dough out to a 0.5cm/¼in thickness on a lightly floured surface. Using cutters, cut out the gingerbread men shapes or when I did it I just used all different shapes that I had in cookie cutters (I used stars, hearts and gingerbread men) and place on the baking tray, leaving a gap between them as they spread a little bit. 
5. Bake for 12-15 minutes, or until lightly golden-brown. The original recipe says to leave on the tray once removed from the oven for around 10 minutes but I left them around 3 minutes and then moved them to a wire rack to finish cooling. When cooled decorate with whatever you want, I used icing sugar and water with different food colourings and also a few chocolate beans (as they were called but in short they were a cheap version of smarties!!).
   
   
   (I would have put a photo here, however I forgot to take photos of them!! Annoying, but no doubt I'll be doing them again so will hopefully take photos then.... if I remember!)

• Hope you enjoyed this post and, if you love Christmas as much as I do, you feel a little bit more Christmassy and hopefully will try these biscuits on your lead up to Christmas. Honestly they didn't take more than an hour to make and bake, the longest part was decorating but that doesn't have to take long if you don't want it too! My next post will be up next Sunday (9/11/14) because this Sunday I will be busy finishing work for school after this half term and getting things ready to go back on Monday! Hope you've enjoyed this read and will continue reading my upcoming posts as they will be more regular and hopefully will become a bit better with more exciting bakes that hopefully work well and maybe you can even try them out yourselves!
  
  
  Thanks for reading!
  Caitlin xxx
  
  
  
  

Galaxy Double Chocolate Cookies!!

Who doesn't love a cookie? Who doesn't love Galaxy chocolate? Well I think if thats the case then why would you not want to combine the two greatest inventions every to create the best unhealthy snack/ desert/ genius idea?!?! Here goes then!!

Ok, so I used Lorraine Pascale's chocolate chip cookie dough as my base of the cookie and then I substituted out my chocolate chips for Galaxy chocolate chips. It's kind of a simple idea to do but its amazing and I've done something like this before when I did Chocolate Orange cookies and they were so tasty that I thought i would experiment with a different chocolate.

The Lorraine Pascale cookie recipe is here:

• 110g of softened butter
• 200g of soft light brown sugar
• 1 egg
• pinch of salt
• 165g plain flour
• 2 drops of vanilla extract
• 1/2tsp of baking powder
• 1/2tsp of bicarbonate soda
• 30g cocoa powder
• 200g of chocolate (however the recipe is 100g of milk and 100g of dark chocolate chips.)

My ingredients.

Method:

1. Weigh out all your ingredients. Pre-heat the oven to 180C Fan oven.
2. Combine the butter (I always cube my butter up as I find it softens faster and it will combine a lot quicker) and sugar into a bowl.
3. Add the egg. It can go really curdled at this stage but keep mixing as it will go smoother.
4. Add the flower, cocoa powder, bicarbonate of soda, baking powder, salt and vanilla extract and mix together.
5. Once you have a dough like mixture, add in the chocolate. I used the whole bar of Galaxy but you can add as much or as little as you want or even do half of this chocolate and half of another chocolate.
6. Grease and line a baking tray. Take some of the mixture and roll into ball shapes. The mixture should make around 9 cookies depending on how big you have decided to make them.
7. Put the cookies into the oven for around 10-12 minutes.
8. Take out the oven and leave to cool slightly before putting them onto a cooling rack as when they are fresh from the oven they are still very very soft and you might think they aren't cooked properly but give ten about 5 minutes on the baking tray and then transfer to a cooling rack to completely cool. 
9. Now you are free to enjoy your cookies whether that be with a cup of tea or with a glass of milk!!

Some photos of my baking experience!

My cubed butter all softened and ready to
mix with the sugar.

All my dry ingredients and an egg.

The butter and sugar ready to go.

The mixture. It makes more than this but
I forgot to take a picture before I had already put
some in the oven

The cookies in the oven! I didn't have any baking paper so
instead I just really greased the tray and they came off fine!!

The finished product!!!!

Thanks for reading this weeks blog!! Sorry its a bit late up, I am in college and the amount of work is unreal so I have barely had time to even think of anything other than my work!! But hopefully I will be getting more up soon!!
Thanks for reading!!
Caitlin xxx

Zachary's 3rd Birthday Party Cake

So I got given the task of making my nephew's birthday cake for his 3rd birthday party. I knew that a Star Wars or Spiderman theme was on the cards for this cake and luckily I had previously seen some Star Wars themed baking items in Lakeland (praise the baking gods for this shop!!) so Star Wars was the theme chosen for his cake!! In Lakeland I found some silicone bakeware in the shape of 4 Star Wars characters however when doing a practice run of the cakes they seemed to get very stuck in the case so I was left with half of a Darth Vader face and half of a Stormtroopers face... not very appealing! I was infact going to do it again for Zach's birthday party but I just ran out of time so I didn't end up using the silicone bakeware. For these cakes I just used a plain sponge found on the internet.

the failed Star Wars cakes with half faces!!

the silicone bakeware of Star Wars characters
£12.99 from Lakeland

Ok, so the actual birthday cake was a Darth Vader cake. I found the tin on Amazon and ordered it straight away! I thought of doing a chocolate cake because I had never used icing before and if the icing didn't work then I knew the cake was already dark like Darth Vader is. 

The Darth Vader tin
£7.20 from Amazon

Luckily, I was able to use the black icing that my mum got me!! I used apricot glaze to stick the icing to the cake and it worked so well!! I was so pleased with the way the icing turned out and it was simpler than I thought it would be trying to put the icing onto the cake. All I had to do was roll it out using a LOT of icing sugar because it did get stuck to the board a couple of times (oops) and then just fold the icing over the rolling pin and gently place it over the cake! (simple!!). I did however try to use white icing and dye it black but it did not work at all! It resulted in me and my phone getting covered in black dye and the icing gradually melting and getting stuck to my hands... not a good look!! So I advise pre-coloured icing at all costs!! 

I did a trial run on the Friday of the cake and that one worked excellently. I filled the chocolate cake with a chocolate buttercream and it looked great so I was praying when I made it on the Saturday ready for the party on Sunday it would work just as well (which it did- HALLELUJAH!) 

The test cake all sliced in the middle and filled with buttercream!

Also the test cake with the icing placed on. I could see where
the icing on this cake had gone a bit wrong
 so I could do it better on the actual cake for the party!!

The actual cake I did I rolled the icing out a bit thinner and smoothed it out a lot more so you can see so many bumps on the icing. I moulded the icing to the cake all by hand as using a smoothing tool was a bit complicated as it's such an awkward cake to shape but I think it worked out well when I did smooth it out by hand. Also on the test cake I realised that I needed to leave a bit more icing for the sides and not stretch the icing over the sides of the helmet of Darth Vader because I found that the icing was cracking a bit. So on the actual cake I left a lot more icing to mould to the cake so it didn't crack any more. 

Just showing you how I moulded the icing onto the cake.

The actual cake for the party.
See it's more smoothed out and not so lumpy!!
(ignore the phone shaped shadow on the cake!!) 

So that's the end of this blog!! I hope you enjoyed how I made Zach's birthday cake! It was a struggle but I would definitely enjoy making more cakes for peoples birthdays or whatever (anyones birthday coming up? Let me know!) I really want to widen my cake making and really try to improve on making bigger cakes as I think I've nearly mastered cupcakes so I really want to move onto bigger cakes!! Let me know about anybody's birthdays coming up if you want a cake made perhaps???

Anyway thanks for reading!!!

Caitlin xxx

Failed Attempt at Chocolate Caramels

Well, it's been a while! Sorry about the late post but I've been away to Belgium for a few days and haven't really had much time to put up a post whilst unpacking and getting my GCSE results (4Cs 3Bs and 2As, but whose boasting?). Anyway, today I am putting up this blog post about a very failed attempt at a recipe I found online (Melskitchencafe.com to be exact) and basically I thought you might like to see how hard this was and how not everyone can do a recipe right the first time!!

Ok, so the recipe was from Mel's Kitchen Cafe and the lady who makes the recipe's, obviously Mel, must be American as all the ingredients were American or at least in an American measurement. So before even starting the making process I had to find alternatives for measurements and ingredients which wasn't too much of a struggle seems as we have Google *thanks the Google creators* so I was easily guided to simple British alternatives!!!

CHANGES!!
Golden syrup instead of corn syrup
Measure the temperature up to 118C instead of 245F 

If you want to do the recipe here is the link to it:  http://www.melskitchencafe.com/soft-chocolate-caramels-sugar-rush-6/

I would have written out the recipe but it would take so much time and I'm not sure whether it's copyright so... anyway I'm going to write out the alternatives to the measurements of the ingredients because they are written in cups rather than grams or ml so this could be easier if you can't find any measuring cups. The alternative measurements might not be fully accurate but they are as close as I could find.

MEASUREMENT CHANGES!!
1/2 cup of water = 118 ml
2 cups of sugar = 400g (it is actually a lot when you put it in so this sounds right)
1 cup of golden sugar = 225 ml
1 1/2 butter sticks = 170g
1 cup of dark chocolate = 168g (I put in about 1 1/2 bars of the dark cooking chocolate so about that)
there are other ingredients to add in but they didn't need channg into British measurements.

So what went wrong, I hear you ask?!
Well, the end product was stuck to the baking tray, the mixture was super super grainy. However I think it could have been because I was so impatient that I didn't wait for the mixture to bubble away to the correct temperature so it probably wasn't cooked correctly. In my defence the mixture was stuck between 107C and 108C for a good 5 minutes so I felt like it really wasn't going to get any hotter and so I thought lets just go and set this! After the recommended 2 hours of waiting for it to set, it was still runny and when touched it would remain on your finger when pulling away, so I thought lets put it in the fridge... yeah didn't set their either even after a whole night in the fridge!!

I gave up with the setting process and so I decided to try and get them out of the tray. Yeah didn't quite happen that way!! They were stuck to my greased tray and so remained on the tray. I used a spatula in the end to try and remove the debris which ended up straight in the bin!

Ok, so that is what happened when I attempted to make the caramel. I will most definitely try again as it didn't work the first time but this time I have a few different ideas I would do to try and make this work again. I have a few photos of the making process and they sort of match up to what Mel was doing in her making process so I think the end of making was where I went wrong.

The mixing of all the ingredients together over the heat.

The end product before time to set so it does look like I've not done too badly but yeah they most definitely didn't look like this when I had to scrape it straight into the bin!!

Well, that's the end of this blog! I hope you enjoyed and will even consider making these caramels. Anyway next blog I think will be about how I am making my nephew's birthday cake! It's hopefully a Star Wars (Darth Vader)/ Spiderman theme *crosses fingers* 

Thanks for reading!!
Caitlin xxx 

Baking Influences

Ok so in this blog post I thought I would talk about my baking influences and basically the reason why I love baking and why I want to become a baker one day. However I firstly wanted to thank you all for the lovely words you all had to say about my first post on here as I was very worried many of you would not like it but it has had such an amazing reception that I feel so excited and less worried to continue posting blogs every week!! So yeah THANK YOU ALL!!!!

So cracking on with the post. 

I have had so many influences to start baking but I think that my main, most poignant influence would be my Gran. She has always been the one in the family to buy the birthday cakes, make cakes and all manner of amazing desserts for as long as I can remember. So I feel she has really influenced me to start baking and enjoy seeing the happiness the things I make can bring to people. 

For years I have seen my Gran make cakes, different pies and most definitely her famous Welsh cakes (people in my family will understand how fantastic those are!!). Everything my Gran makes she always shares with everybody; her neighbours, family, the nurses she used to work with and even her hairdresser (she's bonkers, we know!!) however we obviously don't hesitate to accept any free cake going around! 

Another influence or couple of influences were from TV. I love (as many do) watching The Great British Bake Off, what a show! Anyway, I basically love watching the show and many people have said to me to go on it but right now I'm not to sure... So getting to the point, I love watching and learning from Mary Berry and Paul Hollywood and learning what the correct way to do things is because obviously baking isn't just cakes and pastries it does involve breads as well so learning form Paul and Mary (first term basis as it should be) is such an amazing way to improve as a baker.

Lorraine Pascal has really taught me so many different ways in which to rethink and re-look at baking and in a way change the way I bake different cakes and pastries. She really takes the ordinary and makes it ten times more amazing! I really look up to her because, like her, I would really like to live in France and learn the art of patisserie because it all looks so amazing, especially over in Paris where it is so popular and so brilliantly made. 

So overall I have had some amazing influences to begin baking and they are really the main reasons why I want to do baking when I am older because they make people realise how much joy baking can bring to people and also I find it is a way to freely show off your creative side which is so great! I love baking as I find it's a way to relax and free myself from any stress I might have. I usually kick my family out of the kitchen and put the TV on and just get to it. I find myself zoning out and just getting lost in the cake or whatever I might be making. I think that's why I want to become a baker as I find it so thrilling giving people my freshly baked things and seeing the happiness on their faces (especially Zach who ends up with it all over his face!!).

Anyway, so that concludes this blog post about my baking influences. My next post will most likely be a baking recipe post, I would have baked something and then done this post on that but I didn't really have time so anyway keep your eyes peeled for my new post on something chocolately!!

Thanks everyone again!!
Caitlin xxx

Introduction

Hey Guys,

I thought that I would start a blog about my life, family and my future plans of becoming a baker. I hope you enjoy this post and all my future posts. 

I think that most of my posts will consist of baking ideas, things that I have baked and things I want to bake in the future. However I will be doing posts on hauls for beauty and general things that I buy and also posts about family events such as parties and or gatherings that my family have, although they can sometimes be very rare as my family don't really have that many gatherings as everyone is super busy with work and family. Anyway off on a bit of a tangent there but oh well!

Right, onward with the first ever post for a Day Dreaming Baker!!

I feel like this post should be more about me and what the title of the blog really means, so here goes!

Ok so, I'm Caitlin and I'm about to start Sixth Form (that sounds so daunting OH WOW) but I'm looking forward to it as it should be good because I'll be with four of my best friends and I'll finally be doing subjects that I really enjoy! I'm doing Art, D.T and Business Studies, I am only taking three for over the two year course compared to the recommended four in the first year of sixth form and then dropping one subject to do three for your final year. I felt that it made more sense to only do three for both years as all three have sooo much course work and work to do for them so now I will have enough time to get the majority of my work done for them and put all my effort and hard work into the three so that my final pieces and exams  will be better and more focussed on rather than not enough work being put into them because I have one more subject to focus on.

Anyway so that's school, so on about me and my family. I grew up in Cardiff with Mum, Dad and my two brothers, James and Stuart. However as of 2011 there was another piece added to our family, my brother James and his Girlfriend had a baby boy called Zachary. I love having Zach live with us however sometimes I think the house can end in a state of chaos so they are looking for their own home. Stuart is now travelling the world so I haven't seen him properly for just over a month which has gone super fast and I miss him so much but I know that Zach misses him even more. 

The title for my blog is pretty random because I honestly couldn't think of anything (oops haha!!) but I think it's quite apt because I constantly day dream about my future of one day going to University to do baking then hopefully becoming a baker and owning my very own bakery. So yeah basically that is the title explained, it's not too great but I thought it fitted in well.

I've wanted to start this blog for absolutely ages but I felt that it would probably not be very good or I would not have enough to put in but I think that now is the right time to start because soon Summer will be ending and college will be beginning. So I will hopefully (finger crossed) be doing a bit more baking and more fun things as all my friends will finally be back from their numerous holidays so I felt that I could put blog posts up about all my baking creations, my college adventures and anything family related. 

I really hope that you all enjoyed a little insight into what I want to do with this blog and hopefully you will enjoy and read future posts mainly about my baking creations and hopefully some other fun things that I will be getting up to soon!!

Thanks again!!
Caitlin xxx