19 August 2010, Thursday

Who says things have to start at the beginning of a month or week. I’m going to start this blog series today.  I may not actually make anything today, but it’s a start.

Grand plans to bake/cook something every day, but I have no doubt that life will take over and I will end up doing it every other day, but hey, that’ll work too. The point of this is to get me out of my hidey hole and trying new things in the kitchen and maybe inspire someone else to take a step out of their comfort zone and give things a try.

Baking is easy for me, cooking is not. I’m not going to try to make wedding cakes or debone chickens, I just want to keep it simple and expand my repertoire. I have no doubt that some things will be disasters and I’ll try to suck up my pride and put up photos of these as well as the masterpieces.

I’m going to take recipes from all over the show; the key is to keep them simple and easy. I only have a small kitchen and I don’t have 300 fancy tools nor do I have space for every ingredient under the sun.  My motto: simple experimentation without fear of failure…well not a lot of fear anyway.

One of things that I am going to be doing is practising my icing skills. On Tuesday evening I started a Cake Decorating course at Silwood Cookery School. It’s a part time course over a few weeks and so far so good.

We started on Tuesday evening with Royal Icing (egg whites and sifted icing sugar). After a good half an hour of beating in the air and icing sugar until the mixture was stiff enough for peaks to remain standing on their own we gave our hands and arms a much needed rest.

Due to the size of my kitchen and the nature of my baking I mostly do things by hand, so I thought that the months of creaming butter and sugar with a wooden spoon and made my hands and arms sufficiently strong (I even have calluses to prove it). This, however, put me to the test. I’m glad to say that I made it through without any stiffness the next day, but it’s a good way to build up a glow (women don’t sweat, or so I’m told).

We proceeded to make our own icing bags out of baking paper. Much better than buying icing bags, which invariably split after two uses. The first technique that we learnt was the basic shell piping. Not as easy as it looks and much more practice required before I get a photo on here.

The shells were easy compare to the roses. Did you know that you can make roses out of Royal Icing or Buttercream icing? Here’s me thinking that you could only use plastic icing or the like. Well, with the right tools, anything is possible. Many of my roses ended up back in the icing bowl and again, much more practice is required. However I did manage to salvage 3 decentish looking ones to keep.

Royal Icing roses and the beginning of Plastic icing roses

And thus began my quest to improve my icing skills. I can’t wait for next week! We are making plastic icing roses which I am hoping will be slightly easy then the royal icing roses. Really need to practice those.

To my dear husband, I’m sorry in advance for the chaos in the kitchen, the sometimes bad smells and tears that may well happen with major disasters. I hope that most of this adventure will be happy and fun and most of all yummy. To the rest of my friends and family that end up with numerous tastings and trials, thank you in advance for being guinea pigs.

If I managed to get to the top of Mount Kilimanjaro with only minor side effects, I can do anything. Here goes the anything!