You may remember that I made profiteroles for New Year’s Eve dinner, and to be honest it was so simple I wondered what all the fuss was about.

So for my lovely friend Alex’s hen party I decided to make chocolate éclairs – yum. We had a full on high tea so it was the ideal situation to show off.

I made the crème patissière the day before, all lovely and yellow and vanilla-y, and decided I would get up early on the day to make the pastry so the éclairs would be nice and fresh.

I used this recipe by Raymond Blanc as he’s supposed to be the king of all things pastry, the creme patissière was delicious but the éclairs were a total disaster, the paste looked good but they came out the oven completely flat and were unusable. At this point I had my usual tantrum and decided to make the scones to calm myself down.

After that I went back to trusty Delia for the choux pastry, you know where you are with Delia.

The second batch of pastry was the wrong consistency so I binned that without even cooking it but the third batch was perfect, they rose and came out of the oven a perfect golden brown (well, nearly – the oven doesn’t cook evenly!). The shape wasn’t bad either given that I had to use a sandwich bag to pipe them.

Unfortunately not having the correct piping equipment meant I had to make a slit in the side to fill them but you couldn’t tell and I made the glaze from a Rachel Allen recipe as it looked easier (and I had run out of time remaking the sodding pastry!).

Anyway in the end they were bloody amazing and everyone loved them – especially our beautiful hen, and that’s the main thing!

Obviously I had a shit load of egg whites left so I also made some meringues, we had some small, dainty ones for the afternoon tea and then my mother made the leftovers into this monster of a dessert for a dinner party.

It has a meringue base, then crème patissière, then fruit, cream, more fruit, mini meringues cemented with more crème patissière topped with a chocolate strawberry. Crazy I tell you.

You might have seen these on the first episode of The Great British Menu, a pretentious programme but I’m enjoying the variety of celebrity chefs and there are some good recipes to be had too.

This is one of them (this link may expire after a while, I know they are limiting how long the recipes are up for, presumably so they can flog you a book of the series), I made this for dessert after Sunday lunch and it was amazing, unfortunately it didn’t quite set like Michel’s and I had to make it in cups as my ramekins were too small but they taste so good, I can’t describe to you how good, you should just make them. Really easy to do too and you don’t have to do the brioche/bread mix, just use what you’ve got knocking around, the flavour is all from the vanilla and the rum, delicious!

On Sunday I visited the Creative Stitch and Craft show in Brighton, I have to say it was better than we (my sister and I) thought it was going to be. We have previously attended the Knitting and Stitching show at Alexandra Palace which was far to big, busy and crowded for us, it also had a lot of repetition in what was available with the smaller more specialist stalls getting lost amongst the hundreds of card making and magazine stands.

The Brighton centre was rather more civilised (it probably helped that we went on a Sunday), it was smaller and there were less knitting stalls but there was still lots to see and buy and, to my sisters delight, there were ‘bargains to be had!’ which is really what you want when you’ve paid to go into a show. We also got some good ideas of things to make and had a nice picnic in the bar, annoyingly they had massively overpriced the wine (and couldn’t sell me a whole bottle, ‘we only do it by the glass’ – why?) meaning they had only sold one glass all day, idiots. But overall it was really good and we will certainly go next year.

We went with the Denmead Knit and Bitch Group who all got very excited at the mountain of discount yarn on one stall, they were diving into the pile and pulling out half price cashmerino by the bag, much cash was parted with and we all went home happy. However, I would still recommend the Iknit Weekender as the best show I’ve been to so far.

Anyway I arrived home, wet, bedraggled with aching feet and needed a nice cup of tea and a slice of cake. Fortunately I had made this delicious lemon drizzle cake on Saturday which provided the perfect accompaniment to tea and rummaging through my new acquisitions.

It’s a very simple recipe from Tana Ramsey on the BBC website, I used the zest of two lemons rather than one to make it really zingy, delicious!

I have been a bit lax on the cooking of late, just knocking meals out without really putting any thought into it, which is bad given that I am supposed to be being the perfect housewife whilst I’m job hunting!

So I decided to make a proper brunch today, welsh rarebit from the Canteen cookbook. I love this book, it’s got a war time, brown paper bag cover and the most wonderful whimsical photography (as seen above), accompanied by solid recipes for British classics like this one.

Oh my it’s good, not enough for four people though (1 slice of bread per person?!) but slightly too much for a chubby Kimberly.

As you may be aware if you are a long time reader we have a bit of a tradition of Beef Wellington on NYE, courtesy of Mr Ramsey, however, this year I have knocked it up a notch (bam!) by the addition of a starter and dessert, which, to be honest, we didn’t need at all…

So pretend this is ‘Come Dine with Me’ and you’re reading the menu on the morning of the dinner party:

Starter
Twice baked cheese soufflé with beetroot salad

Main Course
Beef Wellington, Sauteed Potatoes, Sugar Snap Peas and Salad with Mustard Vinagrette

Dessert
Profiteroles

Not bad eh?! Ad now the photos:

Twice Baked Cheese Soufflé

Baked Once

Baked Twice

Beef Wellington

A thick slice - there was enough for at least 6 people!

Profiteroles

Choux buns cooling

A short stack of profiteroles (we had a plate each - so chubby...)

I can strongly recommend this menu, but only if you’re a real fatty, thus it was perfect for us.

Someone at work brought some of these back with her as an office treat after a trip to Australia and they were so good we demolished them in seconds. So I discovered, like all the best things, they are really simple to make. We were going to stay with Simon’s cousin for the weekend and I took these with us as a ‘hostess gift’ – HA! They literally took about 20 mins to make, so perfect for impressing guests last minute. I used this recipe from Channel 4.

Disappointingly it turns out our hostess doesn’t really do biscuits, but her boyfriend, Simon and I made a decent dent in them without her. Taking one for the team!

Well you can’t watch the whole series of The Great British Bake off and NOT want to eat scones but the reason I had to do this was after watching Valentine Warner’s ‘What to Eat Now’ Summer edition, (his book btw is still on my Amazon wish list…), he just makes food irresistible!

Anyway these were made, as ever, from my trusty Dairy Book of Home Cookery, it has never let me down yet. All uniform in size and colour – Mary would be proud.

Simon’s parents came round to see our new kittens and we ate them (the scones, not the kittens) with homemade apricot jam, Bonne Maman four fruits jam and (of course) devon clotted cream, my mouth is watering just thinking about them! And for teh kitteh fans amongst you, here are the little ones:

I often get overexcited in supermarkets abroad, especially in France, so many speciality ingredients… This time I got sucked in by the brioche/patisserie flour, who wouldn’t want to make french pastries on holiday in France? (It’s worth noting that the local bakery was closed for their holiday the week we were there or this would not have been necessary).

Lizzy had categorically refused to make croissants with me as it’s too complicated so I decided we would make brioche instead, it’s just bread right?

Wrong, it is not just bread, not in any way. I first of all thought I would use the recipe on the bag of flour but my french wasn’t up to that sadly and then all the recipes I looked up contained about 8 eggs which we didn’t have so I found a ‘simplest’ recipe and thought that would be a good starting point.

So making the bread was a nightmare, the quantities of flour to egg were unbelieveably bad leaivng me with a disgusting paste rather than a dough, we had to add nearly twice as much flour as given to form the soft elastic dough needed.

After many hours rising/kneading, you know the drill I brushed it with an egg yolk (i used all of it, why wouldn’t you?) and whacked it in the oven.

The top burnt fairly quickly as I seems I used too much of the egg yolk but fortunately thsi didn’t affect the rest of the bread, it just looks shit.

The finished product was okay, it had the right consistency, just about, but it was tasteless and colourless (probably due to the severely reduced amount of egg compared to other recipes) and to be honest a massive disappointment.

I will be making Brioche again (I have a whole bag of brioche flour after all) but not THIS brioche. I’ll use a proper recipe from a French chef, the lesson here is to NOT cut corners in baking, it never works!

I haven’t included a link to the recipe here because it was shit and there is no way I would want anyone to use it or even be able to find it.