Christmas, Gingerbread, and Lemon Curd

IT'S ALMOST CHRISTMAS! ONLY 2 SLEEPS TO GO!

I've been getting into the Christmassy mood by doing lots of baking. Last week I made Stollen for a Christmas party (it had its fair share of mishaps and I forgot to take any pictures); it didn't all get eaten so I ended up having stollen for breakfast for the whole of the last week of my uni term (living the life :p ). Then the other day I decided to have an experiment: I needed to make lemon curd as part of my Grandma's Christmas present, I wanted to make some biscuits so that I could play with icing, and I wanted to make some thing nice to take for dinner at my friends house. The result of these things ended up with the creation of gingerbread and lemon curd tarts (as well as some star shaped biscuits and a jar of lemon curd)! Then last night I iced the lovely gingerbread biscuits.

The Gingerbread:

I used a BBC Food recipe with a few tweeks: 4tsps ginger not just 2, 1tsp mixed spice added, a little bit of water added (as I didn't have enough golden syrup). These additions were largely personal taste: I'm a big fan of ginger, so I always add more to things :)

I managed to make 12 tarts (round) and a lot (I haven't counted, although I probably should in case they get eaten by one of my brothers) of star shaped biscuits.

If I use the recipe as a pastry again (for the tarts) I'll probably not include the bicarb as the biscuits rose a little bit and had to be squished before putting the lemon curd in.

The Lemon Curd:

I used a Delia Smith recipe for my lemon curd (but used half quantities). It made enough for a largish jam jar full, all the tarts, plus plenty of scrapings for my brothers to steal.

The Tarts:

On the Great British Bake Off, one of the contestants made Key Lime Pie with ginger pastry. Because of my love of ginger and knowing that shortbread can be used instead of pastry for some tarts, I decided to attempt to marry two of my favourite foods in little jam tarts.

They turned out amazingly. They might not look much, but they were delicious :-) and really easy to make too!

1. Roll out the gingerbread as thinly as possible. Cut into circles and place into a floured jam tart tin.
2. Bake for around 3 minutes at 180 degrees.
3. Put around a teaspoon of lemon curd in each tart.
4. Bake for a further 5-8 minutes until the lemon curd is bubbling and the gingerbread is crisp and golden

Icing:

At some point at uni, I'd bought a bag of royal icing sugar, which has dried egg in the powder already, which made making the icing stupidly easy: just add water, like normal runny icing. But make sure that it's stiff enough to pipe. I then had a good play around with my (barely used) piping set and decorated all the biscuits.

HAVE A VERY MERRY CHRISTMAS!!

V x

Miniature Victoria Sponge Cakes

I made miniature Victoria Sponge cakes as a present for my friend's Birthday! They were filled with butter icing and cherry jam, then dusted with icing sugar. Aren't they cute!

Recipe:

For the cakes -

4oz (100g) Self Raising Flour

4oz (100g) Granulated Sugar

4oz (100g) Butter or Margarine

2 medium eggs

For the filling - 

2oz (50g) Butter or Margarine

4oz (100g) Icing Sugar

1.  Preheat the oven to 190ºC, 375ºF, Gas Mark 5. Place silicon cases in tin ready.

2.  Cream the butter and sugar until light and fluffy.

3.  Beat in the eggs adding a little bit of flour each time.

4.  Sift the flour into the bowl and fold in.

5.  Half fill each case with the mixture.

6.  Bake for around 15 minutes.

7.  Whilst the cakes are cooling, cream the icing sugar and butter together (you can add flavourings like vanilla at this point).

7.  Once cool (unless you have asbestos hands) pop each cake out of their cases and cut in half.

8.  Spread a little bit of jam on the bottom half and a little bit of butter cream on the top.
9.  Sandwich the halves together. Once all of the cakes are finished, add a sprinkling of icing sugar.

I ended up with a bit extra butter icing, so made another batch of cakes which I turned into butterfly cakes. They're really easy to do: just chop a circle off the top of each cake, put a dollop of butter icing in the hole, then cut the top in half before putting back on top like wings.

V x