Pinoy Hubby

We've almost come to the end of our second run through the alphabet with only two letters remaining. Ros at The More Than Occasional Baker chose a very topical letter last month - we had C, and given it was Easter there were lots of chocolate entries! This month I wonder if some of you will be entering savoury bakes or trying to find lighter options... the letter that we are baking with this month is..... T. The deadline is the 25th of the month as usual; if you tweet us @Caroline_makes and @bakingaddict we will retweet all the ones that we see. Please add your recipes to the linkup here: '); Here's a reminder of the rules: 1. Post your recipe on your blog and link it to The More than Occasional Baker  and  Caroline Makes , stating the relevant month's host. If you do not have a blog, email us a picture and a brief description of your entry which we will include in the round-up at the end of the month. 2. You can use your own recipe or someone else's recipe. Th

This is more of an idea than a recipe as you can include almost anything you want - but until recently it hadn't even occurred to me to make one of these before. They make a nice change for a breakfast/ brunch/ even lunch - a different way of serving a full English that means you need to cook less food (one sausage per person is enough for instance) so a little goes a long way - good perhaps if you are cooking for crowds. I cooked some hash browns in the oven plus a couple of sausages, several rashers of streaky bacon and some scrambled eggs. I used Mission Deli wraps as they are really big. Spread a little hot sauce on the wrap if desired, and sprinkle over grated cheese. Pile in the cooked breakfast.... .. wrap, and enjoy! I didn't take any photos of the finished dish but I still can't get the hang of how to fold burritos anyway! These made a nice change for lunch as my fiancé pretty much always wants a bacon sandwich at the weekend and I'm trying to find ways to do d

If you want a frill or ruffle on your cake the most consistent and professional way to do that is with a Garrett frill cutter. It’s a plastic circle with a ruffled edge, that comes with three interchangeable centres – each one gives a different width to your frill. You just pop one out and the other in.   I’d used a Garrett frill cutter before on this Princess doll cake , but didn’t quite know how to do it properly – you can see from the picture that I used the balling tool wrongly (well, this was 2013 and I was still learning!). I was finally shown how to do it properly in my wedding cake decorating class.   The cutter is pretty simple to use – select the width of frill you want and insert the centre into the cutter. The smaller the centrepiece, the wider your frill.     It’s best to use modelling paste for the frill – sugarpaste is a bit too soft and can’t be rolled thinly enough and flowerpaste is probably too thin and dries too hard. Modelling paste or Mexican paste retains a softe

This review is rather overdue as I ate at Tayyabs around Christmas time for a team meal – as some time has elapsed I will keep this brief but essentially wanted to recommend it to anyone who hasn’t been there!   An award-winning restaurant, it’s near but not on Brick Lane – I’ve found in the past that some Brick Lane restaurants are more geared up for tourists but it is a short walk away in Whitechapel where you find the really good, authentic curry houses frequented by locals – such as Needoo Grill and Tayyabs.   Tayyabs is a family-run business that has been around since the 70s and once consisted of various premises – a restaurant, café, a sweet shop – that have since been knocked through into one. So the restaurant is big – one reason perhaps why it is popular with groups, though to say that is the only reason would be a huge disservice to the food.   Another reason for its popularity with groups, be they birthday parties, work colleagues on a Christmas meal (I fought for turkey a

I was so tied up with making Easter treats and planning for a busy weekend while my parents were visiting that I completely forgot to plan a menu for this week! In a way that's a good thing as I need to get back on my diet so I'm going to do some pretty simple meals this week. Monday - bank holiday Lunch: crumpet pizzas (lots of crumpets left from weekend) Dinner: sweet and sour chicken for me, chicken wrapped in bacon for him Tuesday: Lunch: homemade Thai chicken patties Dinner: leftovers from Sunday's roast for me, frozen pizza for him (as it's the quickest thing to cook as mine only needs reheating) Wednesday: Lunch: protein drink with houmous and carrot sticks for snack tuna and vegetables for me, chicken chargrills and mashed potatoes for him Thursday - working from home Lunch: Quinoa shrimp paella based on this recipe Dinner: fish en papilotte with spiralized butternut squash for me (Inspiralized p174), chicken en papilotte for him, based on this recipe Friday Lun

I was really pleased with this Easter cake apart from one thing - I ran out of Mini Eggs! I had this cake in mind for a long time after I got Lakeland's pouring cake kit for Christmas. I made a white chocolate and lemon cake, filled it with buttercream and lemon curd, and stuck Cadbury's white chocolate fingers around the outside. I used the Lakeland kit to make it look as if a packet of Cadbury Mini Eggs was pouring onto the cake, and I filled the top of the cake with buttercream and Mini Eggs - or tried to until I ran out, and added a few Cadbury's Oreo mini eggs to fill in some gaps. It would have looked better with more Mini Eggs - I bought a couple of packets in the run-up to Easter and hid them in the garage (last year my boyfriend kept finding them in the larder and eating them!) but right before the Easter weekend wondered if I might actually need some more Mini Eggs. I ordered some from Tesco along with my online grocery delivery but they ran out, and when my dad

I made my own Easter eggs for the first time this year! They did take a bit longer than I thought and I didn't exactly plan elaborate designs for decorating them but I was still quite pleased with them. I made some small Easter eggs last year using a silicon mould, which I filled with soft fondant. For a long time now I've wanted to make full-size Easter eggs so recently bought myself a mould from Hobbycraft, as it was only £1. I was a bit worried as it was rigid plastic rather than silicone so it was a bit difficult to get the chocolate out of the moulds but I did manage it - and I will explain how further down! I made three eggs, two milk chocolate and one white. To begin, I melted 250g milk chocolate in a bowl in the microwave and poured about half of it into both parts of the Easter egg mould. You don't need to spread it with a spoon - instead, tip the mould to swirl the chocolate around, making sure it goes right up to the edges. Put in the fridge for 10-15 minutes. A

These are from the same recipe as these chocolate Easter cupcakes which I blogged about yesterday, but I couldn't resist decorating a few as Easter chicks. Ages ago I was given a set of Easter silicon cupcake cases from Lakeland - they look like the bottom half of Easter chicks with legs and everything! I made the cupcakes according to the recipe in the link above and baked them in the silicon moulds, which I stood in a baking tray in case they fell over. When they were cool, I cut out circles of yellow Renshaw roll-out icing and put them over the cupcake. I cut out thicker triangles to use as wings, and coloured a little bit orange to shape a beak. I also had some Renshaw black icing that I'd opened and used for something else, so used a tiny amount of that plus a tiny amount of white fondant icing (which I also had open already) to make the eyes. Do you think they look cute? I'm sharing these with Alphabakes, hosted by myself and Ros of The More Than Occasional Baker , a