Pick a Plum, Bake a Plum, Eat a Plum

Morning all!
Yesterday was a horribly grey and wet day. Some days you wonder what to do on those days, curl up in front of the fire, patchwork, read a much loved book or go into the garden with the parentals and a step ladder and pick plums off a very wet plum tree. Yup we did the latter. I was not allowed up the ladder... Humph!
We managed to get most of the plums off the tree and amazingly this year the plums are the most delicious little mouthfuls of purpleness. The past few years if the tree were to be honest with itself its crop has not been a tasty one at all.

So what to do with all the plums... well the Mothership took some home to freeze as our Granny Ivy freezer is too teeny tiny. I on the other hand decided to make a crumble. I don't know why I thought this was a good idea as we had decided to go on a pudding ban after the weekend and you have to have cream with crumble. Shame!

So to the crumble. I like doing crumble. It's something I can do sitting down. You just sit and crumb all the dry ingredients together while the plums soften down in the pan.

For the crumble topping you need:
75g of chilled butter, diced,
175g self-raising flour,
110g Demerara sugar.

Pop the softened plums in your pot. Pop the crumble over the top. Pop the lot in the oven until everything is golden brown and bubbling. Serve with lashings of cream and try to be patient so you don't burn your mouth. We failed... enjoy!

P. S. Any spare crumble can be popped in a bag and popped in the freezer for the next crumble day.

Back again

Ello all, I've been a bit absent from here for a while,  haven't really felt like blogging much but the lovely Mr Lardshow bought me a tablet for my birthday and I thought maybe I should use it for something more worthwhile than just looking at pretty things on t'internet!

So I thought I'd dip my toe back in by showing you a few of the things I've been getting up to in bed recently...we're getting married next month (eep) so I've been saving my spoons and have just been doing little things in bed. My pain management doctor has been working with me to help me have more structure to my day, I have to get up in the morning, have to eat properly and I have to do 'something' every afternoon.  It's helped a lot with my lack of purpose feeling recently. It can be very boring and lonely even with two mad cats.

Here are some of the bits and bobs I've been up to...
I can't work out now to write captions on the pics so hopefully in the order the pics are... making the wedding invites,  cutting out bunting triangles ready for mum to sew,  making confetti cones, baking some very rushed cakes for a comic relief bake off at Mr Lardshow's work (my cakes didn't soon,  competition had some spun sugar on theirs, i was MOST upset!),  making some diamond wedding anniversary cakes that never got delivered because of all the bloomin snow! Turning old clothes into pet beds and cushions and finally a relaxed birthday hot chocolate in Shrewsbury.

I will try to get a bit better at getting back into blogging. It is good medicine for me!  xBx

P.S. the photos haven't come out in the right order...I give up but I'm sure you can all work them out.  X

Boomerang Biscuits

Just a quick post.  I dont think I could feel any rougherer if I tried. My kidney pain has spread up into my ribs and I am not liking it...not at all! 

Anyway,  I think some of my readers don't believe that I actually do bake in bed.  I do...
As much as there are days where my body just wants to hibernate life goes on and I have to keep going.

One of Mr Lardshow' s friends has got a wonderful job down under and so to celebrate and say good luck we made them some boomerang biscuits. 

So back to the bed baking. I made it downstairs and collected all of the ingredients, propped my sore ribs up and used the heat of the electric blanket to help soften the butter.   Genius idea I thought...
So by the time Mr Lardshow got home I was struggling to ice the biscuits but they eventually got done.

Im quite chuffed with how they turned out . Thank you again to Weena Fish for the boomerang idea x ♡ x

Mini Baguettes

Afternoon all, 

Yesterday was a bit of a 'stay in bed' day.  Saying I felt rough would be a bit of an understatement...  However by the afternoon I was going slightly mad from being in bed so I bundled myself into my poorly jumper and headed to the kitchen, pulled up my stool and let the kitchenaid do all the hard work. 

So these were made with the hope that they would be little delicate breadsticks to go with the delicious garlic dip that the delicious Miss Rachel made.  They turned out quite chunkier though...all the more to dip with!

I do like a recipe like this that you dont need to go and fetch special ingredients for, you can just mix and make.

Ingredients.
2 tbsp honey,
1 1/2 cups of warm water,
1 packet fast acting yeast,
4 1/2 cups of bread flour,
1 tbsp salt,
2 tbsp melted butter

Method (could not be simpler!)
*Measure your ingredients using the darling measuring cups that cousin cath bought.
*Melt the butter in the new sospan fach that the parentals bought me for Christmas.
*Pop all the dry ingredients into your mixing bowl and give them a quick stir.
*Add the honey, water and melted butter.
*Start the mixer on a low speed and mix just until the dough comes away from the sides of the bowl...I told you it was easy!
*Plop the dough onto your work surface and squidge it into a rough rectangle shape.
*Divide the dough into 12/18 pieces (this is where I struggled,  division was never my forte)
*Roll each piece into a long sausage and pop it onto a baking tray.
*Cover and leave in a warm place (under the duvet) until you're ready to bake.
*Bake in the oven until they're golden brown at 200ºc 

Toppings
I put a mixture of garlic salt, butter and olive oil on ours last night but I think you could put anything on them...within reason.  Maybe poppy seeds, chilli flakes, sesame seeds,  parmesan. ..

Eat and Enjoy

xBx

Autumnal birthday biscuits

These delicious little morsels were made for my wonderful friend Jill. She's one of the strongest, awe inspiring women I've been lucky to meet.

Creating these biscuits is quite hard work. My hands ache afterwards. I think they're worth it though. The effects are brilliant. I love the little spots on the leaves.

You can almost hear the rustle of the leaves.

Happy 60th Jill! X

Bubba's Bisqwits

A dear friend of ours had a birthday yesterday so bisqwits had to be made!
Now Mr Bubba Long Shanks is a bit of a handy man so the only thing to do was make him his own tool set!
I picked up some tool cookie cutters years ago but I've never used them. There was a digger in the set but icing a digger seemed a bit too advanced for me.
So in the toolbox there's some hammers, spanners, hard hats, saws and even some drills.
Mr Lardshow and I were trying to work out how to package the bisqwits up and it dawned on us that we could pop them in a real toolbox! Two presents in one!
I'm really pleased with how they turned out, especially the writing. Proper joined up letters!
Now who's birthday is it next?
Love Love xBx

Allo. Allo. Allo.

Listen very carefully, I shall say zis only once...

For those of you that are follicaly challenged, or needing to have a handy disguise to confuse the Gestapo in an old BBC sitcom or if you just fancy a change to what you see when you look in the mirror, I have the perfect solution.
Moustache biscuits!

Aren't they fabulous? The cutter for these is actually supposed to be used to do fried eggs but I thought I'd use them for biscuits instead.

You make your biscuits as normal and then you make a thick paste using icing sugar, water and your choice of moustache colouring. You use this paste to make a line outline around the biscuit. Make sure to join the line up well. If there's a hole you'll end up with a leak and no one wants a leaky moustache!

I used one of my small icing bottles for the outline and a new squeezy bottle that Mr Lardshow's mummy got for me for the next part.

Once the outline is completely dry you make a slightly thinner icing. It needs to be the consistency of custard. Now I don't like custard so I like to say it needs to be the consistency of cheese sauce. Use this icing to flood the biscuit, I use a cocktail stick to gently push the icing into the corners.

Leave to dry, package up and send them off to work with Mr Lardshow for the official cake club tasters to try. Enjoy boys!

Wedding Wishes

Hello All,

Every weekend seems to have been so busy recently. I love the fact that I'm getting out of the house so much more but boy it's tiring! It's been worth it though. We've had some beautiful weekends in the company of beautiful people. It's strange, while some parts of my life have effectively 'died' some parts are coming alive again.

So this weekend was spent at the wedding of our beautiful friends Simon & Rowena. They had a lovely, small, intimate wedding that was just perfect. Mr Lardshow and I spent the day taking notes and thinking about what we want for our wedding.

I think we enjoyed the wedding so much because we paced really well. I let Mr Lardshow sort everything in the morning so I wasn't already exhausted by the time I got in the car. After the ceremony we took some time out and went for a relaxing picnic by the river. By the time the evening do started we felt relaxed and revived. Perfect!

A few years ago I made the decision to try to make presents for people if I could rather than buying something people don't want. So for Simon & Rowena's wedding I decided to make them some Mr & Mrs biscuits and a lovely, tiny wedding date cushion. Hope they liked them.

My lovely mummy helped me to get the cushion finished & Mr Lardshow was an outstanding biscuit tester! What can I say, its just a gift he has! Have a look at the pics of them and let me know what you think... Hoping everyone has a beautiful day! xBx

Thank You Biscuits

Just a quick post to show you all the biscuits I made today with the brilliant letter cutters that we got from Portmeirion.

 I think they may be one of my favourite baking gadgets I've ever bought. Such a simple, effective idea. You use the 'open' end of the cutter to cut the basic shape then push the letter imprint into the dough. 

When the biscuits are baked you're left with these fabulous letter shapes that are just begging to be filled with icing. I love the fact that the letters are all different.

I use little squeezy bottles that we got from hobbycraft to do the very precise icing. I start off with the lightest shade and then darken the icing each time i start a new set of letters.

The finished biscuits. I did three different shades of blue this time. I think they look really effective.

So these biscuits are for the ladies at Pain Management. It's the last day of the course tomorrow and I just wanted to say thank you to them for all the amazing things they've taught me. Most importantly they've made me realise that life can go on, you can have a wonderful life with pain. Your life won't be easy but you are entitled to a beautiful life and you can get there with a bit of pacing...They are the best medicine I've ever been prescribed. xBx