Howdy folks! 

Hope you all had a great Christmas & a smashing New Year!

I've been a busy baking bee this last week or so, & it hasn't stopped yet!  As a poor student I was a little restricted money-wise, on what I could get people for Christmas gifts this year, so I decided foodie hampers were the way forward.

I'd already decided on making panettones, & had mentioned this to Wayne, our tutor at School, with the purpose of getting suggestions for alternatives to osmotolerent yeast, which is tricky to get hold of over here.  Luckily, Wayne was generous enough to let me have 6.3 grammes of the stuff, so my dilemma was solved!

And they did come up a treat =)  I was really quite pleased with them.

Along with the panettones, I decided on Yuletide Cookies!  They're made with mincemeat & some lovely spices, so they're really quite festive.  As nice as they looked on their own, I felt they needed a little decoration, so out came the icing sugar & edible glitter! =D

Next up; biscotti!  I'd never made biscotti before, but thought I'd give it a whirl, & actually, they're quite simple to make  =)

There they are, awaiting their second bake.  I made them with figs, almonds & cherries, so again they were quite festive.  I also made Florentines, but foolishly forgot to take a photo!  They went down a treat though, some with dark chocolate, some with white chocolate, all of them with cherries, almonds & pistachios =D

All packaged up in cellophane & tissue paper, they looked quite pretty =)  (But again, forgot to take a picture!)  I used brown luggage tags for the gift tags, with a gold snowflake stamp; just finishes the whole thing off nicely =)

After Christmas, there was still more baking to be done!  My grandparents were coming for dinner on the Sunday after Christmas, & my Dad was quite convinced I could replicate a cheesecake we'd had for dessert at Wagamama's the day before; a white chocolate & ginger cheesecake to be precise.

So I scoured the Internet to see if there was a recipe I could work from, & I found quite a few.  Turns out that particular dessert is remarkably popular, & there are more than a few people out there who've made their own versions, most of them fridge set cheesecakes.  The one we had at the restaurant was a baked cheesecake, & I must admit I prefer a baked cheesecake anyway.

I couldn't find a recipe for a white chocolate & ginger cheesecake I liked, but I did fine one for a white chocolate cheesecake, here.  I used ginger nut biscuits in the base instead of oatcakes, & threw 35g of finely chopped stem ginger into the filling mix instead.  I skipped the rhubarb compote & made up a ginger caramel sauce instead, from caster sugar, double cream, butter & some of the syrup from the stem ginger.

It came out a treat!

Even then I wasn't done!  We had some folks over for New Years Eve, & I wanted to make something sweet to nibble on.  So I thought I'd try my hand at macaroons!


I went for three different flavours; Pina Colada, Mojito & Cranberry Cooler, all non alcoholic of course =)  I'd wanted to make macaroons for a long while, but had always put it off as they're supposed to be quite tricky to make.  But actually, they weren't too bad, just quite time consuming really =)

I wasn't really sure about piping methods, so I tried a couple of techniques & they all came out quite nicely =D

From left to right, we have Mojito, Pina Colada, & Cranberry Cooler =)  I made quite a mountain of macaroons...

See? =D

They were mostly gone by this morning too, just a couple of each left over =)

So all in all it's been a busy last week for 2012; plenty of baking done & all of it fairly successful =)  I'll be back at School as of the7th January, so they'll be plenty more baking to be done, & I'm really quite looking forward to getting back to it  =)