Please stop baking Mum

My family are fed up.  Literally 'fed' up.  They are full of cake, biscuits and pies.

They were stupid enough to buy me the Great British Bake Off cookbook for my birthday and then go on diets. I would be quite happy if they said they were only going to eat cake but they seem to think that fruit and vegetables  are the way to go.  What am I going to do with my weekends if I can't do a little bit of baking?

Today I tried the Chocolate Chilli Cake. It was quite an odd recipe because the mix looked like mousse and there seemed to be too much of it.  I'm not sure if I used a tin that was too small, didn't follow the recipe properly or if it wasn't quite right, as it burst over the top and burnt onto the bottom of the oven leaving a sunken top.

One day, I will bake a beautiful looking cake but not today.  It was much darker than the picture in the book but it tastes really nice.

The family can cut very thin slices too. I will be eating thicker slices and probably quite frequently.

The picture in the book must be wrong though.  How can a cake with 100g of 70% cocoa solid chocolate, 2 tablespoons of cocoa powder, a tablespoon of black treacle and muscavado sugar in it be so light?

Stars

'Lets not reach for the moon, when we have the stars'

Don't you just love old films on a cold miserable rainy day.  I can't remember what film it's from but I can see Bette Davies saying it with her huge eyes.  I watched 2 films today, although they were both modern.  The first was Dear John, which is known for making people cry and I hated it.  I didn't find the characters very convincing and once I noticed how far apart Amanda Seyfried's eyes were I struggled to even think of her as human.  Stupidly, I watched Letters from Juliet next, which made me want to go back to Italy but the leading actress was Amanda Seyfried and I kept wondering if she is able to see around corners without moving her head.  These girls in films are so stupid.  Why on earth do they reject a perfectly nice, hard-working Italian man who is passionate and can cook for a foppish, repressed Brit., with a nice grandmother?

I made some star biscuits today.  It was the first recipe I've tried from my new Great British Bake Off book.  Lemon Iced Biscuits.  They have full fat soft cheese in and I'm sure are really fattening - especially if you eat 18 of them as I have today.  It was a nice easy recipe that you can make into any shape.

My Star Royal Albert Hall soloists came round for a rehearsal today and so I wanted some star shaped biscuits to give them after their hard work.

With the left over biscuit dough I made a special shape to remind myself not to eat too many.

It didn't work!