Can I offer you some excuses?

It's been so long!

It's been so so sooo long. And that's my fault and I'm very sorry. My reasonings range from "I couldn't be bothered" right up to "I was attending a five-day horror film festival so didn't have my laptop".

Yeah.

So this isn't going to have a recipe in it as such. I have a couple of things that I've done and I need to make up my mind about what I post here...BUT! In the meantime, here are some things that I made but didn't take pictures of along the way. 

Normal blogging will resume soon, I promise.

 So these beauties were made for a job interview! At a cake shop! They asked me to make a couple of bits so I made these Peppermint Chocolate Cupcakes and my Norwegian Apple Cake. The cakes themselves were just flavoured with cocoa. I made normal buttercream icing and split it in two. One half was flavoured with peppermint extract and dyed green, and the other I added cocoa powder to. I spooned each flavour vertically into my icing syringe and then iced them! Oh, and I made peppermint creams. By hand.
I didn't get that job, but the cupcakes were lovely!

I made these as a snack for a girly weekend away in Taunton. It's just flapjack really, but I used the recipe from a Katie Morag book that we had when we were kids. Here's the recipe.

In other news, my friend Morgan packed her little suitcase and flew to bloomin' China for the year. She threw another girly-weekend-type party so I made this! For the cake I used a Victoria sponge mixture in an oven-proof bowl. The icing idea came from various books/internet sources.

Aaaand finally, there might be another reason why I haven't been blogging. My favourite programme, The Great British Bake Off has started again. It's awesome. And the week before last they had their bread episode, in which the technical bake was an 8-strand plait loaf of bread. I haven't made bread in a long long time but was inspired and so the next morning I made this, slightly-dodgy but pretty-tasty 8-strand plait loaf. Paul Hollywood, eat your heart out.

I'm completely smitten with bread making at the minute so, be warned, there could be an awful lot of dough-porn hitting your screens...