Happy Easter 2010

Some of our delicious homemade hot cross buns...

Carrot Cake with Cream Cheese Frosting - Sweet Melissa Sundays

I love Carrot Cake, When you take a piece and hold it up to your nose, you close your eyes and smell sweet, cinnamon, creamy and comforting. You take a small bite, your mouth is filled with moist dense cake crumbs, you taste carrot and cinnamon, and the fluffy, creamy icing thats slightly tangy on your tongue. You open your eyes and see the next wonderful bite ready to be taken...

I really enjoyed this Sweet Melissa Sunday recipe, so much so that I made this at the start of the week, rather then waiting for the weekend. I made a couple of changes with the recipe, I halved the sugar in the cake, and used raw sugar. I also substituted half the flour with wholemeal. I found the cake delicious and the wholemeal flour gave the cake a lovely moist wholesome flavour.

Thank you to Julie at 'A Little Bit of Everything' for hosting this week, please visit Julie for the recipe and also the other SMS bakers to see how they got on.

Caramalised Onion and Chedder Savoury Muffins - Sweet Melissa Sundays

I love savoury muffins, one of my favourite weekend cafe breakfasts is nothing more then a flat white coffee and a freshly baked savoury muffin! This weeks Sweet Melissa recipe was simply delicious, what a better pairing for savoury muffins then a gourmet twist on the old favourite combination of cheese and onion.

The caramalised onions are naturally sweet, but I added a spoonful of treacle to enhance the sweetness and also add a nice earthy flavour. Luckily I had some lovely purple sage growing in the garden I was able to add to the muffins.

I took these tasty treats with me to a friends birthday BBQ and they seemed to go down quickly.

Thanks to Hanaa from Hanaa's Kitchen for picking this weeks recipe, you can find the rest of the bakers at Sweet Melissa Sundays.

Orange Scented Scones - Sweet Melissa Sundays

Gosh I've been so busy with Pies lately that I've neglected my lovely Sweet Melissa Baking group!

Orange Scented Scones sounded like a lovely easy recipe that couldn't go terribly wrong. Now I did want little scones but the mix was a bit wet and these came out looking a bit more like cookies. I should have added more flour, but was sticking to the recipe (for once!)

If you would like the recipe please visit Robin of Lady Craddock's Bakery

These tasted ok with some lovely Seville Orange Marmalade and whipped chocolate cream, but when it comes to scones, I'll be sticking to Lemonade Scones - can't be beaten for simple, delicious, light, flaky scones.

Chocolate, Butterscotch and Rosewater Birthday Cake

A while ago one of my friends from work asked me if I would like to make a cake for her partners 30th Birthday, for about 60 people!! So of course I said I would love to! It took a few weeks to decide which flavours would work.

After a couple of trial runs we eventually decided on a layered chocolate sponge cake. The layers were drizzled with a butterscotch rosewater syrup and filled with a butterscotch mousse filling. The cake was then topped with a generous layer of whipped dark chocolate ganache.