My first coffee and walnut cake

I've been meaning to get around to making coffee and walnut cake for years, and what better excuse to make a big decorated cake than a party! So, today, I made one, finally! Taking inspiration from Darina (did I mention how much I love the Ballymalloe Cookery Course book?), I added walnuts to the basic coffee cake recipe and doubled the buttercream quantity so there'd be some to go on the top.

Experimentation - peanut butter

I am told that there are "people" out there who don't like peanut butter, not because they're allergic and their face will swell up, but because they just don't /like/ it. Well, this is not for those "people", this is for us normal folk who enjoy smushed nuts smeared on toast.

We like peanuts in this house, they're tasty, very tasty, and go great with beer, cider or just a big mug of milk. Every once in a while, we end up picking up a bag of peanuts that aren't nice and crisp and seem to be under roasted. One day himself decided we should figure out how to make peanut butter to use up these less nice nuts.

Microwave experiments - chocolate sauce

After rearranging the freezer to fit stuff in properly, I (re)discovered a tub of Aldi Strawberry flavour frozen yoghurt. This stuff is actually really nice, more fake strawberry sweets flavour than Wexford's finest, but that suits me down to the ground. On its own it can be a little dull, and I'm all out of chocolate or otherwise sauces, so I decided to have a bash off making a quick chocolate sauce.

Many of the nice chocolatey sauces I'd come across before contained golden syrup to make them sticky, so I figured I'd bung some of that in (well, honey, as there was a squeezy bottle to hand, and the tin of golden syrup is a bit of a pain). I also threw in some butter, to give that nice buttery flavour and also to stop the chocolate being so firm (just in case the syrup didn't do it's thing). The chocolate came from Lidl and was very nice. "Bellarom creamy milk chocolate" is what the packet tells me.

Lemon shortbread (for dipping in lemon curd)

Obsession with lemons you say? Who? Me? Surely not....

Intending to make lemon cake during the week, I bought a net of six unwaxed lemons in the supermarket. Sadly, I didn't get around to it in time for my final day in my most recent lab rotation. So there were six lemons staring up at me for the past few days. Now, much and all as I love lemons, using all six at a go was going to be quite the feat, so I've done an experiment in lemon preservation (details to come shortly) and also made some curd. The curd used up two lemons. I used the zest of these two lemons to make the shortbread that follows (I decided I dont much like the bits of zest in curd, as my zester makes them too big).

Chocolate biscuit cake experimentation

I've had half a pack of digestives staring at me for the last week and a bit. Shocking stuff I know, but as a caffeine half-intolerant (none after lunch) coffee drinker and someone who doesnt like tea, I don't have much opportunity for chowing on digestives in the evenings. The other half of the packet was sacrificed to the noble cause of being a cheesecake base (I'll write it up soon, honest). I've never made chocolate biscuit cake before and got the idea into my head earlier that that's how I'll use up the biscuits.