The July 2010 Daring Cooks’ Challenge was hosted by Margie of More Please and Natashya of Living in the Kitchen with Puppies. They chose to challenge Daring Cooks to make their own nut butter from scratch, and use the nut butter in a recipe. Their sources include Better with Nut Butter by Cooking Light Magazine, Asian Noodles by Nina Simonds, and Food Network online.
This was so easy to make and soo yummy!
Definitely making this again!
I make my own nut butters anyway so was not any extra work and so nice to have made something that was from scratch the whole way through!
Please excuse the photos.. my kitchen is not conducive to night time photography and I took a photo of one of my kids meal's!

June Daring Cooks challenge

Our hostesses this month, Evelyne of Cheap Ethnic Eatz, and Valerie of a The Chocolate Bunny, chose delicious pate with freshly baked bread as their June Daring Cook’s challenge! They’ve provided us with 4 different pate recipes to choose from and are allowing us to go wild with our homemade bread choice.
M pate colours arent very evenly balanced but this is the tri colour vegetarian pate and my first attempt at baguettes. They rose a bit too long so they're rather flat and smooshed.

May Daring Bakers challenge

The May 2010 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Cat of Little Miss Cupcake. Cat challenged everyone to make a piece montée, or croquembouche, based on recipes from Peter Kump’s Baking School in Manhattan and Nick Malgieri.

This was my first attempt at making pate a choux and at working with cooked sugar.. I had a blast and was so glad I joined Daring Bakers! This was something I had always wanted to make as well!

Where have I been?

Wow.. I'm really not much of a blogger am I? But I keep joining these things that need me to have a blogspot so I guess I better actually put stuff on here.. and maybe one day I'll have a tribe of followers like my favourite blogs "How to eat a cupcake" and "Love and Olive Oil"
See.. there's probably some fancy way i can link to their blogs just then.. but I dont know what that fancy way is...

Ok, so on the weekend I made 72 cucpakes for my friend's 30th party.. they turned out pretty good and rather uneventful.. once again with the help of my right hand man to run and get me more icing sugar and think up the idea of using a spritzer bottle to spray the glitter shimmer on the frosting..where would I be without him ay?

I've also recently made my own english muffins which was great... heaps of fun and I served them with blackbean and mushroom patties which were scrummy too.

What else have I been up to?
Oh, I made a brownie mosaic cheesecake for my friend's birthday (a different friend - I'm not just trying to chunk up one friend!) and that was apparently really good.. I'm being real good with my eating so didnt try any (a hard task!) It was cheesecake (which was my first venture into the cheesecake world) with chunks of brownie in it and a chocolate ganache.
I must say.. cheesecake is really easy to make! Though they sound like words I'll regret one day...
OK... so I"ll post what photos I have... once I can remember how to do that...

OK so did some baking in the weekend.. just a few things.. did the cupcakes with the baby hand molds for my friends Anna and Toby, but forgot to take photos!
Did get photos of the ones I made for my cousin's funeral on Sunday, and also the birthday cake I made for Zekiah's party.
Cupcakes were banana and cinnamon with caramel buttercream which... wait for it.. Dave made for me! I even let him try piping on a burnt cupcake!
The cake is red velvet chocolate cake with chocolate buttercream. was fun to make and rather simple too.
Wishing I had a proper spatula for icing though, avoid all the knife marks.
But both went down well and I didnt eat any :(

Mmmm.. been baking my butt off today as it's Relay for Life tomorrow and a good opportunity to do some baking and not be left with guilty treats lying around the house begging me to eat them.
Made hot cross buns which is a first for me.. really just wanted to try the recipe and also meant I could eat one of the things I made as I'm on 30 days without sugar and the sugar content in them is minimal.
Also did Orange poppy seed biscuits but had no oranges so they became lemon poppy seed.. and some chocolate cupcakes whihc I think I will ice with either white chocolate butter cream or white chocolate ganache.. still undecided..
Got a pressie in the post this morning! The fondant mould I ordered off trade me for baby hands so I can do cupcakes for my sister's baby shower and also friends of ours Anna and Toby just had a baby, and my Aunty just had a baby.. so will get to give it a good testing!
Also on an excursion this morning without the children I decided to visit BJ Cake Decor.. other than havinga good chat about how useless the cupcakes were on last night's episode of Nestle's Hottest Home Baker.. I bought some sugar paste paints for painting my newly made sugar paste hands.. when the relay is over I will get to make them!

My intro to the world of blogging...

Ok.. so I've been a blog addict for a while but from afar only.. and mostly just to find good recipes!
But now I have joined Iron cupcake which means I must have a blog of my own and so .. voila... it's a blog!
I call myself a secret domestic goddess cos I have a passion for cupcakes and baking and cooking in general that kinda clashes with my job as a personal trainer... and my wellness consultancy I am starting up..
So if you know who I am.. we'll just keep this blog our little secret.. ok?