Ok, so on my internet wanderings I saw a picture of some cupcakes that someone had made for her daughter's birthday party. She called them Princess Cupcakes, a perfect name for these girly, girly treats. Ever since I saw them I have been desperate to recreate these wonders and add them to my repitoire. A couple of weeks ago I made a wonderful discovery that finally made this possible, Fluff marshmallow spread is now available in ASDA! I whipped up some simple chocolate cupcakes from one of the recipes drifting around my head, and I filled them with fluff using the filling attachment of my icing set. I then made pink and lilac vanilla frosting and piped it on in pretty swirls. A fantastic cake, though really really sweet!

What I really liked about making these was that I didn't follow a recipe. I just sort of muddled through and figured it out as i went along.

So, here you can see a picture of the chocolate and hazelnut biscotti I made. It's something I've made with my um before and it turned out great. She helped less this time, foolishly assuming that I could make it myself, and so of course it went inexplicably wrong.
The recipe is from Joyofbaking.com, a great website for baked good recipes. Loads of my favourite things to make are fro this site. It's a long recipe so I wont include it here but it's a really good one for taking you through the process step by step. It is clear and broken down into separate actions, each one with its own paragraph for easy reading. it does, irritatingly, assume that you will own a food processor and an electric mixer (which personally I've always kind of thought is cheating) but apart from that, this recipe is so well written and clearly laid out that it seems to be fool proof. This does make the fact I did it wrong more difficult to understand, but at least I didn't do it so wrong that it didn't still taste great, it was just oddly flat. I could have refrigerated the dough for a while before baking to firm it up a little but I wanted to stick to the recipe and see what happened. This is one of many little tips picked from my mum and my grandma who have both been baking a lot longer than me. Some recipes include advice like this but not joyofbaking, maybe because they just don't take into account that people like me will always find a way to get it wrong.