KUMPULAN MASTER BLOG

This week I have made a Chocolate Orange Drizzle Cake in honour of the Great British Bake Off and as part of the #GBBOTwitterBakeAlong. The new series started this week with a whole set of new bakers and new challenges for us baking addicts to soak up. The first episode had the bakers taking on drizzle cakes, jaffa cakes and mirror cakes. I was pleased to see that they were going back to some basics that we might at least have heard of! One of the things that I love about Bake Off is how it manages to have me on the edge of my seat gasping about buttercream disasters and unrisen cakes, and there was plenty of that in the first episode! Given the choice of the three rounds from week 1, I decided against making a mirror cake (too scary) and thought I would combine the other two rounds of drizzle cake and jaffa cakes into one. So I made a Chocolate Orange Drizzle cake. It's a moist chocolate orange cake with orange curd running through it and orange sugar drizzle poured over the top...

Chocolate Banana Caramel Cupcakes- indulgent chocolate banana cupcakes with a caramel centre and chocolate icing. They are perfect for children's parties and they also use up any ripe bananas that you have. Jump to Recipe Chocolate Banana Caramel Cupcakes are exactly what they say on the tin- chocolate and banana cupcakes with caramel hidden inside and a rich, fudgy, chocolate ganache topping. For the caramel, you can make your own if you're a caramel whizz, but to save time I used a tin of Carnation Caramel, which is available in all the big supermarkets (home baking aisle). I decorated my cupcakes with mini smarties for a party feel, but you could use sprinkles, chopped nuts, white chocolate chips or anything else that takes your fancy. The fudgy topping is so rich and delicious that I would advise limiting how much you use on each cupcake to avoid overwhelming the cake, especially if you are adding other toppings as well. For young children, you might want to leave the topp...

Bacon Spaghetti Bake- a comforting family meal. Spaghetti baked in a tomato sauce with bacon and topped off with cheese. Jump to recipe Tonight for dinner we had Bacon Spaghetti Bake, which was yummy but not what we were originally hoping to have... The weather ended our BBQ hopes pretty quickly! So, at short notice, the only thing in the freezer that would defrost in time was bacon. I wanted a quick, easy dinner, because I had planned not be slaving in the kitchen! So I made Bacon Spaghetti Bake. It's simple and delicious, plus all you need is red pepper, garlic, onion, tomatoes, bacon, spaghetti and some cheese and away you go. If you don't have spaghetti, any other pasta would work, and if you are veggie, skip the bacon and add extra veg like mushrooms and it will be just as delicious. Add a little side salad and you've got yourself a yummy dinner in less than 45 minutes. Bacon Spaghetti Bake makes great leftovers for lunch. In fact, I think it was even nicer the next d...

This week I made some salmon fillets marinated in a beautifully simple sweet chilli sauce. I got the salmon fillets out for dinner because I had discovered that I seem to have built up a stockpile of salmon fillets in my freezer this month! This prompted me to go for a total reorganisation of my freezer. I absolutely hate food waste and I didn't want to find anything with freezer burn, or beyond the 3 month rule in a few weeks time. I decided to just get everything out and see what was what. Note to self- stop putting things in the freezer with the semi-clear plastic bags still wrapped round them, because you can't see what's in there! There was only one thing that needed throwing away; some tortilla wraps that were past their best.

Coconut Oat Cookies- soft chewy cookies filled with coconut and oats. Quick and easy recipe to make. Jump to Recipe I have been going through a bit of a coconut phase the last few months. Having not eaten it for a very long time, I am back into it and absolutely loving it now. The Coconut Oat Cookies should be that perfect combo of crunchy on the outside and soft in the middle. The key to that is in how long you bake them; too little and they will be a bit floppy and cakey, too long and they will be hard. If you can, it helps to spoon out fairly uniform sizes of cookie dough onto the baking sheet. It's a fairly firm dough, due to the inclusion of the additional dry ingredients of oats and coconut, so it doesn't spread an enormous amount unlike most American style cookies. That means that it's better not to leave the dough as golf-ball shaped lumps on the cookie sheet when you put them in the oven. Instead, try to flatten the dough down with the back of the spoon so you get...

If you're a regular Twitter user you have probably seen the #Teacher5aday tweets that trend regularly. It was borne out of this blog post by Martyn Reah- #teacher5aday which was a call to action to teachers to take better care of themselves and each other, so that they don't burn out, give up the job that they love and contribute to a predicted recruitment crisis. Sadly, the crisis is upon us 18 months later, so it's more important than ever that we look after each other. The hashtag has spawned further related hashtags that you might have seen: #teacher5adayread (encouraging reading for pleasure, not work) #teacher5adaysew, #teacher5adaycook and so on. Then Vicki Vincent (@MissVicki_V) wrote a great blog post about #teacher5adaybreakfast . It was about the importance of us 1) actually making time to have breakfast and 2) trying to make it a healthy one, instead of the usual teacher practice of racing round on an empty stomach and grabbing a biscuit as you fly past the sta...

Cheese and Jalapeno scones- a classic cheese scone with a kick of spice from the jalapenos. Perfect for afternoon tea, a snack or a buffet. Jump to recipe Scones are such a British thing aren't they? And so easy to make too. I love them- traditional scones, fruit scones, cheese scones, all the scones! Cheese scones are possibly my favourite type of scone. I like them so much because they are versatile; they work for breakfast, a snack or afternoon tea and all you need to have handy is a knife and some butter. I made some mini cheese scones for my nephew's first birthday party recently and they went down very well with the parents and the children. This time I wanted a bit more kick with the cheese. A lot of spicy cheese scone recipes use cayenne pepper, but I find that to be a bit forceful, a bit sharp and I wanted something a bit more subtle against the cheddar, so I made Cheese and Jalapeno Scones. Jalapenos are spicy, but they also have a touch of sweetness to them, which I ...

So you've started your food blog, and you're whipping up delicious recipes and posting them for the world to read and make at home. You've got a Facebook page, you're tweeting and starting to get some followers and page views from both. You know that Pinterest is the place for foodies but you just don't know how to get started. Maybe you have a personal account that you use a little, or even a lot, but you're wondering how to you use it for promoting your blog? Well if that sounds like you, then I may be able to help a little. I have been where you are, when I started a year ago, and it took me a while to get to grips with Pinterest for my blog, even though I was very confident in using it personally. I learnt a lot about Pinterest from other bloggers, getting some good advice and some bad, as well as learning from trial and error along the way. There are a lot of guides out there for Pinterest, but I could have done with one that was directed at food blogging s...