Pinoy Hubby

    Lewis Hamilton’s victory in Austin, Texas, means he has won the 2015 Formula One World Championships – his second in a row, which he is the first Briton to ever do. But more importantly (to me anyway) the fact that the Grand Prix took place in the US was an excuse to share some great American-inspired recipes.   I had hoped that more people would take part in the challenge but I suspect the name puts people off – it’s not about racing really!   Suelle at Mainly Baking has been great at taking part in this challenge and this time she made peanut butter and jelly brownies (jelly meaning jam to us Brits). It looks great with the peanuts scattered over the top and I bet the flavours are lovely.       I went to the US in September and brought back some goodies including mini Reese’s Pieces cups and Reese’s Pieces chocolate spread, which I used to make this chocolate peanut butter bundt . It was very rich and delicious!         ...

These notebooks are a lovely gift for a mother of the bride or mother of the groom – they can use them for wedding planning notes and ideas.     I’d been thinking about decorating notebooks as gifts for a while but hadn’t gotten around to it, then when I got engaged – and was seeing my mum the following weekend, I thought it would be a really nice thing to do.   I had a small square notebook that was perfect – it had blank pages and a stiff, plain cover. I got it from Tiger for I think only £2 or £3 (I love that shop!).   I wanted the notebook to say ‘mother of the bride’ as I thought my mum might enjoy getting it out of her handbag in shops or at wedding fairs and letting people see the cover. I imagine she’s relieved that at the age of 36 one of her daughters is finally getting married!   I found the perfect die-cut on Ebay that was made of thick cardboard so all I did was stick that on and let the words take centre stage. I decided it did need something else...

It's half past 10 on Sunday night and I'm only just getting around to planning my meals for the coming week - I have about a million other things I needed to get done this weekend as well. I've had a really busy few days with my sister and another friend staying, going out with my uni friends for the first time in months and most importantly wedding dress shopping! So I really do need to step up the weight loss now I've found a dress, unfortunately I ate and drank quite a lot this weekend! Monday: sausage, beans and mash for him, salmon and veg for me Tuesday - out at a blog event Wednesday: chicken kiev and chips for him, stir fry for me Thursday: gammon for him, rest of stir fry for me Friday: homemade chicken curry Saturday Lunch: French toast stuffed with cream cheese (on menu but didn't make last week) Dinner: Chicken Chilaquiles from my Mexican recipe book  (on menu but didn't make last week) Sunday Lunch: bacon sandwich for him, Quorn sausage sandwich for...

With Bonfire Night just around the corner I wanted to find a recipe I could make to use two things I bought on holiday in America: toffee apple (or candy apple) flavour popcorn and caramel apple flavour Oreos.   In the UK we have only ever been able to get chocolate Oreos - with Golden Oreos recently launching over here. But in the US there are a whole host of limited edition flavours at different times of the year, and I've never been able to get hold of any of them before, until now. The caramel apple cookies have a part green, part caramel colour filling and are very sweet and quite different but do taste quite nice! I wanted a recipe that would allow me to use both the cookies and the popcorn and the obvious thing seemed to be a 'fridge cake' - basically melted chocolate mixed with broken biscuits, and often marshmallows like a rocky road, but this time I was going to use popcorn instead. To serve, you can cut or break it into pieces and eat it as it is, or make into a ...

I never particularly liked peanut butter until I discovered Reese’s Pieces. The combination of chocolate and peanut butter is amazing and every time I go to the US I bring back a big bag of the peanut butter cups. This time I found a bag of mini cups, which I thought would be perfect to sprinkle over the top of a cake or dessert (or eat by the handful, of course).    I also bought a plastic tub of Reese’s Pieces peanut butter chocolate spread – which is like Nutella but with peanut butter flavour – which is so yummy! You can get it in the UK as well- I found it in Tesco.   I decided to make a cake with the chocolate and peanut butter flavours and as a filling might make the cake too rich, there was only one thing for it – a bundt.   Here’s the recipe I created Reese’s Pieces chocolate peanut butter bundt – an original recipe by Caroline Makes   200g butter 400g caster sugar 4 eggs 3 tbsp peanut butter 250g self-raising flour 100g cocoa powder Splash of milk (opt...

It was a great honour to be asked to make a wedding cake for a friend - and not just any friend, but a talented baker herself - Ros from The More Than Occasional Baker . She's given me permission to show you all pictures of the cake and to blog about how I made it. I'd never made a wedding cake before, though I had done a short course of evening classes in wedding cake decorating, where we used polystyrene dummy cakes. You can see the two that we finished during the course here: a rose petal cake finished with a wired flower and brush embroidery and this three-tier cake with purple flowers and piping . Ros and her husband had given me a lot of freedom to design the cake, asking me for red and gold accents on a white cake. She also told me that as the cake needed to feed 50 guests I could either make two tiers or three tiers but have the bottom layer as a fake cake. I liked that idea as it meant I could do the bottom layer well in advance, redo it if it went wrong, and not hav...