Cinnamon Sugar Bread

With all the unseasonable cold and rain at the moment, I've started to crave cold weather foods. One of my favourites of these is anything cinnamon. My boyfriend and I decided to take a rainy day to do some baking, and a look on pinterest led me to this recipe for Cinnamon and Sugar Pull-Apart Bread. 

To start with, butter is melted in a saucepan with milk. Then water and vanilla extract is added.

Then mix flour, sugar, yeast and salt in a bowl.

Add the butter mixture to the flour mixture and mix well.

Beat eggs and add to the mixture, mix well. Add the remaining flour.

Cover and leave the dough until it's doubled in size. (We used this time to watch another episode of Game of Thrones season 2, which we've been saving until summer to watch!)

Knead in two tablespoons of flour and cover again for 5-10 minutes.

Meanwhile, make the filling. Mix sugar, cinnamon and nutmeg in a bowl. Melt some butter.

Then roll out the dough and cover with butter and the sugar mix.

Cut into squares and stack in a dish.

Bake!

And eat!

It's delicious. Reminds me a lot of Danish pastries (or cinnamon rolls, as I've heard them called). Perfect dessert to cheer us up from the horrible weather. Hopefully now the sun will come out and I can blog about some more summery treats!

Jubilee Cookies

For those of you not in the UK (or those living in the UK in a cave for the past few months), this weekend is the Queen's Diamond Jubliee. She will have been on the throne for 60 years, and the UK seems to have suddenly become very patriotic! Those flags that usually only come out for major football fixtures are in windows and on cars, and bunting is everywhere.

I've been seeing Jubilee cookies everywhere recently. These were some of my favourite.

[Credit: The Good Life Mum.]

I'd been seeing these crown cookie cutters from Lakeland everywhere recently, but these sealed the deal. I went into town especially yesterday to get these cookie cutters, but when I got there, the sales assistant at Lakeland said they'd sold out that day! I was so disappointed! The rest of the selection of cookie cutters wasn't great (although they did have flag cutters), so I went to John Lewis where I found a very cute teapot cutter, which is relatively patriotic, I suppose. Tea drinking is a national pastime.

Unfortunately, the rest of the country seems to have joined in the baking frenzy. Everywhere I looked had sold out of red and blue colouring. There were bottles and bottles of yellow, green and even black on the shelves, but no red or blue. I managed to get one of the very last bottles of red food colouring in Sainsbury's, but no blue was to be found. I really consider myself British, rather than English, so please, Scotland and Northern Ireland, don't be offended by my lack of blue icing (I guess red and white could be Welsh too)!

To make the sugar cookies, I used this recipe from bakeat350. I struggled somewhat to find a recipe for royal icing that didn't have meringue powder in, but eventually found one at the Telegraph. If you're a bit more worried about raw eggs than me, there's a royal icing recipe on bakeat350 too.

Here are the ingredients. Plain flour, baking powder, an egg, butter (or margarine), caster sugar and vanilla essence. The recipe had almond extract too, but I didn't have any. My cookies still taste good without it.

Sugar and butter creamed together.

My teapots before cooking. (Seriously, how cute is this cutter?)

And after!

Outlining the cookies wasn't as hard as I was expecting, although it's not nearly so neat as everyone else's seem to be. This may possibly be because I was making do with a parchment paper cone, as I don't have piping bags and nozzles for royal icing (I only have ones suitable for buttercream).  

Flooding the cookies with icing takes forever. I really didn't expect it to take as long as it did, and I didn't end up flooding all of them, as I'd made a lot of cookies. I'm quite happy with the ones I did flood though! 

I'd love to hear what everybody else is doing over the Jubilee weekend! I'm meeting up with some friends for lunch tomorrow, and am going to have a look at the festivities in town on Tuesday. Enjoy the long weekend!

Christmas Cake

Christmas cake is great, and even better when I don't have to make it myself! My mum had made Jamie Oliver's Christmas cake, and since I'm home for Christmas, wanted me to help her ice and decorate it.

It was incredibly easy to do:

• Warm up 2 tbsp apricot jam and sieve. Brush the cake with it on the top and along the sides
• Cover with marzipan and moisten slightly with a little water brushed on using your fingertips
• Cover with fondant
• Add decorations

It was made even easier by the fact that my mum had bought ready-rolled marzipan and icing, so all we had to do was place it on and cut to shape.

Now I just have to wait until Christmas day so I can try it!