Happy Birthday to Me!

Bah, stupid Blogger. I scheduled this post to go at 6.40am so it would post up exactly as my new year began, but for some stupid reason best known only to itself, Blogger decided not to bother.

As you might have guessed, today is my birthday. It's never fun to have a birthday fall on a weekday, especially now I'm all grown up and have to be responsible and go to work. Although.... being in work today does mean there have to be cakes (I often wonder where this tradition started, of bringing in cakes on your birthday). So I broke out the baking equipment yesterday and had a go at some new recipes.

First up, the Chocolate Crispy Cakes. The recipe is from the BBC Food website, and can be found here. It's a bit of a misnomer, since they're not really cake, but as soon as I saw the list of ingredients included 5 Mars Bars, I knew I had to make them!

Only four ingredients? Can't be that tricky.

There's something very satisfying about
slicing up Mars bars with a big knife.

Melting the Mars bars with butter.

In with the "other puffed rice cereal".

Leave to cool.

Finally, decorate with melted chocolate.

This has to be the simplest sweet treat I've ever made. Although I think the recipe is a bit optimistic, expecting you to get 75g of melted chocolate on the top as decoration. As you can see, I only used about half the chocolate that I'd melted, leaving me to eat the rest with a spoon.

I also had a go at making a Chocolate Marble Cake. The recipe I used for this, I found on the BBC Good Food website (not sure why the BBC needs two different food websites, but there you go) and can be found here. I've wanted to make a marble cake since I was very young; my Mum had a load of really old cookbooks, Readers Digest ones I think they were, and one of them was all cakes. There was a marble cake recipe in that, and every time we were going to bake anything, I wanted to do the marble cake. I don't know why we never did, aside from not having a loaf tin I can't think of a reason why not. Sometimes I guess parents decide things without good reason!

So, while I was in the supermarket picking up the ingredients for the Crispy Cakes, I picked up a loaf tin. I failed utterly to take photos of the cake pre-oven, because I was in a bit of a rush to get it done so we could make dinner. But here it is in all its glory afterwards!

I was SO PROUD of myself. Sure, it's a little burned on the outside edge, but my oven is incredibly enthusiastic, so I'm amazed it wasn't even more burned! But the cake itself is so light and airy, it has to rank right up there as one of the best cakes I've ever made. And I've made a lot of cakes. Just need more practice in getting the marble effect to look even prettier.


The rice crispy squares are so far proving extremely popular with my colleagues!