My mincemeat is marinating...

Well I’m having a great weekend so far! The weather here in Sowerby Bridge has been fantastic – clear blue skies and the smell of autumn!

As promised, I have tried out the Red Onion Marmalade recipe. I used the Pickles and Preserves recipe, as it looked very simple. The recipe says it makes 2 jars, but they must have used very tiny ones as I’m struggling to fill 1 small jar!! I tried a little bit, to see if I needed to season and it does have a nice flavour. I can’t wait to try it with some cheese and biscuits. I might even make my own savoury biscuits – anyone have any suggestions for a good recipe?

I was also reading some other baking blogs last night and saw a lot of people have made a batch of mincemeat in preparation for mince pie season. I’ve never made my own, so I thought I’d have a go. A couple of years ago I bought Delia’s Christmas cook book and have used a few of recipes every year (great Stollen bread recipe – I always get good feedback on this one!) and I remembered seeing a mincemeat recipe when browsing through. I haven’t put the almonds in (not a big nut fan) and I have only used 200g of veggie suet – the recipe says 225g but as it comes in 200g packets I really didn’t want to buy 2! I hope Delia forgives me!

Marinating mincemeat - smells like Christmas

Its sat in the kitchen marinating overnight and I have to say the smell is making feel kind of festive… Only another 70 days to go I saw on Twitter! Where has this year gone?

Also baked a batch of sticky toffee cupcakes – in Halloween cupcake cases! We love Halloween in our house, so I’m making the most of it and kicking off early! They’re ready to ice tomorrow, so I’ll be upload some photos to show you how it goes…

My First Blog...

Sorry for the very unoriginal title, but hopefully I'll get better with more practice...

I've been thinking about starting a blog for a little while now and home baking is something I've enjoyed for years - trying out this and that in the kitchen at the weekend, some recipes with more success than others! However it was my day job as a Resourcing Consultant for a large financial organisation which actually made me go ahead this evening and take the plunge! I was at the Royal Armouries in Leeds listening to a very inspiring man called Frank from TMP talk about 'Digital Media' and all the crazy cool options there are out there for marketing roles to candidates and he said 'if you haven't set up a blog on blogger, I can show you how to do it in 10 minutes, it's that easy!' so I thought why not give it a try!

Anyway, that's a lot of time and space writing about something that's not baking specific - sorry, I'll try and keep to topic!

I have loads of baking books on the go at the moment - I think my favourites are Mary Berry's Ultimate Baking Bible and having being obsessed with the Great British Bake Off on BBC2, the book that accompanies the series. I do love the Hummingbird bakery Cake Days book too. I have found a lovely autumn recipe in Cake Days for Sticky Toffee Cupcakes which I'm going to try out this weekend. I'll let you know how it goes and hopefully post some pictures of the results!

A couple of weeks ago I had some fantastic red onion marmalade from Betty's in York and I've been doing some research on the web to get hold of a recipe. There are loads! Some with huge lists of ingredients and varying reviews! I've finally settled on this version from the Pickles and Preserves website (very cute website) and I'm going to give it a try this weekend. If it all goes well I'm hoping to make some up to give away as Christmas presents - I'll be trying the hand-drawn labels too, but don't think my artistic skills are up to this standard!