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.

As far as I'm concerned, food is the best thing in the world. Right back in the very beginning it was the ultimate temptation, the fruit of the forbidden tree. And yet we don't just eat fruit anymore, we have come so beautifully far since then. We now have steak and chips, fried chicken, cupcakes and the bacon double cheeseburger. We may have been kicked out of the garden but the world still seems like a pretty fantastic place to me, and food might actually be worth it. Food has become linked with culture, with wealth, with sex and with pretty much everything else good. It's that perfect mixture of sustenance and indulgence, necessity and decadence.

Food is not just food anymore, it is a creative outlet. some people wont just make a meal, they'll make a masterpiece. We share recipes amongst ourselves, altering and perfecting them; handing them down through generations and passing them around communities until there are recipes for an immense number of meals and delicacies available throughout the world to anyone who wants to look for them.

This sharing of recipes used to be something personal, a gift handed from one individual to another. The introduction of more and more cookery books to the world changed all that however and suddenly there was a 'correct' way of making things and at first this seemed to be dictated by women of high society with no real cooking experience at all. That changed of course and cookery books are now a fantastic source of various tips and recipes. I think I could probably amuse myself for hours just looking through a good cookery book, thinking of ways to adapt their culinary marvels to my limited budget. The internet allows me to do this and has brought a personal nature back to the world of recipes. I was absolutely thrilled when I found a recipe for Dublin Coddle that looked absolutely great to begin with but then had also been commented on by dozens of people suggesting variations and adaptations. The recipe itself was written much like any other, with a sort of dispassionate formality, but the comments had all the colloquialisms and exclamation marks you could want.