in pursuit of organised-ness

In June of last year at a friend's daughters christening, I had a chance conversation about how great it would be to sell cakes in my very own cake shop. Another friend's partner is a chartered surveyor and so we were joking about location and where would be best suited, and he happened to mention a little unit that had recently come on the market. No more was said, but I couldn't stop thinking about it. So I mentioned it to Helen (we had had many conversations about running a cake shop) and decided it wouldn't do any harm to take a look. It was perfect for us, small, quaint, in a good little location, and reasonably priced. We got so excited and started doing cash flow forecasts and business plans....and it looked manageable! It looked like we COULD do it. However on closer inspection the unit needed a lot of work doing and we really didn't have the capital for that. We were really gutted but, having done the work, excited about the prospect. So we decided we w...

Number 38 on my 101 Things list is to cook every recipe in one book. That book is Home Cooking by Rachel Allen. It's a great book and everything I have tried has been great. One of the recipes in it is marshmallows. Here is my first attempt. Just some plain ol' vanilla marshmallows. Marshmallow attempt 1 I wasn't really sure what I expected, but they were much easier to make than I thought. You do need a sugar thermometer to be sure, but they were pretty straightforward. The first batch I made were a little soft-set for what I wanted, more 'Tunnock's tea cake' than your shop bought marshmallow. I'm not sure if this is down to not using enough gelatine or not enough beating. They did taste great though! Then I found this recipe for Coconut Ice marshmallows by Sarah Cook in the BBC Good Food magazine. And it was amazing. A touch of Malibu in the mallow and tossed in toasted coconut - delish. This recipe used leaf gelatine rather than powdered (th...