Pinoy Hubby

    It's my turn to host Alphabakes again this month as Ros has slightly better things to do like get married.... congratulations Ros! Though my baking experiments have been somewhat curtailed of late as I'm on a pre-wedding diet - not for her big day but for my own, which is next June! Which is a good opportunity for me to remind you all that you don't have to make a cake to enter Alphabakes -the recipe can be sweet or savoury.     The letter I've chosen this month isn't too difficult I hope.... W is the one this time and as we head into winter there should be plenty of good recipes and ingredients coming to mind.     Please add your entries to the Linky by the 25 th of the month and if you tweet @Caroline_Makes and @bakingaddict we will retweet all the ones that we see. '); 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 ...

Butterflies appear in my card making time and again. I’m not sure why – they are pretty and colourful and seem quite feminine, but younger somehow that flowers. I think a lot of people these days only send floral cards to their grandmothers! This card was a bit of a cheat as it uses elements from a shop-bought birthday card (one I received)- but I do like to recycle! I used a tall thin card blank and covered it with a pretty yellow paper patterned with little flowers. I cut the butterflies and the flower off the other card – they are made of foam backed onto cardboard so were easy to cut out and look really nice as they are raised off the card. The ‘happy birthday’ banner is also recycled from another card! I think to papercrafting purists this would be unacceptable but using pieces from shop-bought cards doesn’t mean you haven’t made an effort; the design is still your own idea, you can still be creative and you can still say you spent the time and effort making something yourself.

  Vittoria on the Bridge is in Edinburgh’s Old Town, on the George IV bridge not far from the university and many of the tourist attractions. I was in Edinburgh on business however, part of the team that was organising a conference. The night before the conference I went out to dinner with the team; it was a cold and rainy evening and we hopped straight out of a taxi into the restaurant, which had been booked by someone who had been there before.   The restaurant has an extensive menu of Italian dishes with a huge number of starters, various cuts of steak, some not particularly Italian main courses like liver and bacon and brie wellington but plenty of Italian specialities like vitello alla parmigiana and vitello alla Milanese (veral medallions in a parmesan sauce, or with spaghetti). There are separate sections for pasta, risotto and pizza – the pizza section is helpfully divided into meat, seafood, vegetarian, deluxe and calzone. There are 22 pizzas on the menu which is pro...

My post-holiday diet started well but then was slightly derailed by two days away for work, a client conference the next day and a hen night at the weekend! Still, Rome wasn't built in a day... I'm feeling rather uninspired for breakfasts I can eat at my desk at work (we have a microwave, but no toaster) so if you have any ideas please let me know!   Monday Breakfast: yogurt and pear Lunch:  salmon with salad Dinner:  ready meal as we have our residents association at 8am when we are usually still eating dinner   Tuesday Breakfast: muesli with fat free yogurt Lunch: chicken, salad and homemade houmous and carrot sticks Dinner:  curry to use up rest of sauce we had last week   Wednesday   Breakfast: muesli with fat free yogurt Lunch: chicken, salad and homemade houmous and carrot sticks Dinner:  mackerel with soy and ginger from Wagamama cookery book p.115 for me, chicken goujons for him   Thursday   Breakfast:  yogurt Lun...

This weekend was the Japanese Grand Prix but I have to admit I didn't watch it - as I've said before, it's my fiancé who is the F1 fan anyway, though I've definitely gotten into it since living with him! I was busy today making the flowers to go on top of Ros's wedding cake (which has made me realise I won't have time to make my own wedding cake, a shame but it could be a lot of last minute stress!). I did make a Japanese meal for dinner though in the spirit of my blog challenge Formula 1 Foods . I've had the Wagamama recipe book for several years but hardly ever used it; when I was thinking about making a Japanese meal I immediately took it from my bookshelf and was pleasantly surprised at the number of recipes in it I liked - I don't know why I never really used this book before!   I chose a dish called roasted honey pork ramen - ramen are a type of Japanese noodle. It was really easy to make though I adapted the recipe slightly to use up some vegetabl...

For the finishing touch on a celebration cake, a row of beads or pearls is a great idea.   I recently posted detailed instructions for how to make a wired sugar flower. I will soon be posting the full wedding cake that I used the flower on, but first want to show you another element of that cake.   You can roll individual balls of fondant and stick them in a row around the edge of your cake; if you do this the way to make sure they are all the same size is to weigh your icing. This whole process takes a long time though so I thought I would introduce those of you who haven’t come across it before to a bead maker.   I’ve tried a rigid plastic one from Lakeland and a soft silicon one that belonged to a tutor in a cake decorating class and I found the latter much easier to use.     It’s best to use a mixture of fondant and flower paste as I found fondant alone too soft, but it can work.   Open the bead maker and rub the inside with a little Trex (shortening). ...

  This is a bright, fun card that has touches of blue for a boy, but to me the feeling it creates is one of joy of celebrating a birth. There is quite a lot going on in this card but I think the new parents will find there is quite a lot going on in their lives now!   I cut off the corners of a square card blank to give a curved effect and covered the card with a jazzy star-print backing paper. I did want some element of blue though and had a cloud-shaped blue card die cut which I stuck in the middle.   I had a pack of wooden card toppers for a new baby that I had used most of, but I still had the word ‘baby’, a safety pin and a baby bottle left, which were all the right colour for this card. From another pack of baby card toppers I had some pram die cuts, which were pink. I covered the body of the pram with blue paper, but thought there was nothing wrong with leaving the other parts pink!   I also wanted a couple of other elements that jumped out to create the feeli...

Either because the linky was only open for a very short time, because I didn't really publicise it as I was away on holiday then travelling for work or simply because nobody was inspired by Singapore to cook any dish, the only entry for this round of Formula 1 Foods was my own. Still, it gives me a chance to direct you again to my Singapore Sling bundt cake if you didn't already see it. This weekend it's the Japanese Grand Prix which may be another difficult one for some of you - though it doesn't have to be baking; you can make rice and noodle dishes too, or anything inspired by a Japanese cartoon character (Hello Kitty cake, anyone?). This time you've got until Sunday October 4 to send in any Japanese-inspired recipes using the linky below! ');

    I’ve already described how I used up some soft bananas from a fruit box we were sent at work in this banoffee pie with a chocolate cornflake base. There were actually more bananas left over and I’ve always wanted to make banana bread but never got round to it (the fact that I don’t like banana also puts me off!). As I have mentioned before, once a month I spend a day in the office of a design agency that we work with to produce a particular internal project and it’s usually a very long day.   As I spend so much time with them, and a couple of them end up having to work late due to this project, I’ve gotten into the habit of taking cake. It seemed a good idea because I have a small team at work and people don’t want to eat cake all the time, so this way I had a new audience – one who wasn’t bored of cake. They were very appreciative so I’ve now made cake every time I’ve been to their office. This time was great fun – not long after I had arrived, I overheard a convers...

Not to be confused with Jansson's Temptation, which is something different entirely - this dessert is inspired by my favourite 80s movie. Labyrinth came out when I was seven years old and a friend of mine had it on VHS - my family didn't even have a video recorder at that time. I absolutely loved the film, mainly for the songs - the animated characters were on the whole a bit irritating for my liking (anyone else find Hoggle really annoying?) but the idea of the quest to find the baby brother was the sort of thing I couldn't get enough of. Best of all though were the two leads, Jennifer Connelly and David Bowie. I don't think I even knew who David Bowie was at that point but he was mesmerising (and looking back now, very overtly sexual though I was blissfully ignorant of that sort of thing at the time!). Connelly was only 16 when she played the role and she was breathtakingly beautiful in her ball gown in the scene where Hoggle has given Sarah (Connelly) a peach, enchan...

I've just got back from over 2 weeks on holiday in America - and am lauching into full-on wedding planning mode. My fiancé proposed just before we went away so now as well as shifting the weight I inevitably put on during our holiday I also want to lose weight before I start wedding dress shopping! And did you know that wedding dress boutiques advise you choose your dress 6-9 months in advance to allow enough time for alterations? If we are able to have a summer wedding next year that means I need to start dress shopping right away, but I'm not doing that until I've shifted at least the weight I put on on holiday! It does mean that my meal planning is more important than ever and I will go back to planning breakfasts as well as lunches and dinners, as I used to do. I won't be specifically following Slimming World as I found various parts of the diet (e.g the 'syn free' foods) don't always work that well for me, but I will be using a lot of SW recipes and mea...

Royal icing run-outs are a lovely way to decorate a cake, and also are a great help to the busy or novice cake decorator, as you make them in advance. This helps save time when you bake and decorate the cake; also (and perhaps more importantly for some people) you create these on a cake board, and place them on the cake when they are set – so if they go wrong you can start again without messing up the cake!   I’d never really done this before (though I had flooded biscuits with royal icing which is a similar technique) so it was an interesting thing to cover in my cake decorating class at South Thames College last term.   To start you need a template; this can be something you’ve drawn yourself or printed out from the internet but it’s much easier with a pattern to follow. Ideally one with strong black lines and spaces in between; some of the class used a Hello Kitty picture while I did this butterfly.   The first question is how to make royal icing for piping and floodin...