The Jubilee weekend is finally here and I have put up my bunting.  Most houses in the village are decorated now and it is looking very patriotic.  I am busy planning my canape menu for the concert on Sunday - mini yorkshires with roast beef, tomato and white bean tarts, smoked salmon pate, quails eggs with sumac - yum yum!  Yesterday my palace made a little appearance in the Times as part of their cake competition.  They described it as an "immense buckingham palace made of gingerbread, complete with waving monach and electric lighting" - how lovely is that!  I am looking forward to putting it on display over the weekend for everyone to see and eat!!  Hope you all have lots of fun this weekend!

The icing had set on the Palace and so last night we moved it for the first time and hurrah it stayed in tact!!!!  It looked lovely in the sunshine and I am confident now that we will be able to carry it up to the village church for the concert on Sunday without the roof collapsing.  What good news!

To say that I have spent a few hours this weekend baking would be an understatement!!!! After 10 hours of solid baking and icing, I can now proudly unveil my gingerbread creation - hopefully you can tell that it is meant to be Buckingham Palace!  It is a meter long and is completely edible other than the cardboard Queen and Prince Philip on the balcony.  The windows are made of sheet gelatine which give a very pretty stained glass effect (future church gingerbread house is planned - but that's another story).  The crown decorations were made with ready roll icing and sprayed gold and the bunting is cut from union jack sugarettes.  I am hoping that it will still be OK by the weekend!!!!  My village is fully entering into the spirit of the Juliblee with 3 days of events!!!!  Quite inpressive given the limited number of houses in the village - with a parade, organ recital of Coronation music with Pimms and Canapes, fireworks, dog show, cake decorating competition (I am the judge and no my Buckingham palace is not entered!), hog roast - I can wait!

Lovely Kim from Naturally Gluten Free blog has very kindly published a nice interview with me about my Gluten Free Baker book.  To read it click here

The good thing about the British is that we never let bad weather get in the way of a good old fashioned tradition.  These were the rainy May Day celebrations this morning at 6am in Ampthill Park near where my Mum lives.  Have you ever seen Morris Dancers dancing with Umbrellas?  Priceless!!  They danced as the sun rose (what sun you may ask!!!)  I have to confess that at 6am I was tucked up in bed and it was my Mum and Mike who went but I thought you would like to see the photos all the same!

I have finally joined the modern technology age and am now the proud owner of an Ipad.  I am not sure whether it is right to be in love with a machine but I am utterly besotted!  Peapod - who usually runs I mile when I point a camera at her (unless she is asleep) was completely unphased by the ipad and I managed to snap this cute picture of her on my patchwork quilt.  What a cutie!  I have had a fun weekend trying out the voice recognition and amazingly I can dictate recipe methods with hardly any mistakes at all!  I knew I would be able to justify the purchase somehow - the trick will be however how to avoid the ipad becoming covered in cake batter and other kitchen mess!!   I managed to make another 8 cheesecakes this weekend - baked vanilla, mini blueberry cheesecakes baked in jars, brownie cheesecake, fresh fruit glazed cheesecakes, 2 banana cheesecakes (I really do not like banana so had to outsource the tasting of these two!), popcorn cheesecake and peppermint bark cheesecake (which looked very Christmassy and completely out of season).  All passed the taste testing panel so only 19 recipes left to go now on the book!

The Dutch translation of my popcorn cook book just dropped through the letter box!  It is so cute!  This is my new favourite foreign word!   

I am in full swing of writing my new cheesecake book - 31 recipes done, 29 to go - I am over half way woo hoo!  I am not sure however that I can eat much more cheesecake!  Luckily my work colleagues and neighbours are doing an excellent job of being taste testers!  At the weekend I made honeycomb cheesecake which was great fun as I got to make fresh honeycomb.  Being impatient, I couldn't wait for it to cool down as I needed to put some in the cheesecake filling (coated in whipped egg white - a useful tip from Masterchef winner Mat Follas of the Wild Garlic) so I hung it over the kitchen door to cool.  Strange I know but it honestly seemed like a good idea at the time.  I imagine the passers by wondered what on earth I was doing!  It did cool and very quickly and ended up being an amazing curl of honeycomb (see below).   Obviously I won't be recommending this method in my book!  Luckily with a few bashes of the rolling pin the curl was gone and I had lovely honeycomb ready to stir through the cheesecake.  More cheesecake making this weekend - cheesecake Alaskas are on the menu!!!!  Can't wait!

My brother phoned earlier this week and said he had just seen my milkshake book on sale in the shop opposite his flat in Brooklyn.  That's impossible I say - its not out for another month yet.  But then I checked on Amazon and he was right - it is out a month early!  What an unexpected treat.  So here it is - my new milkshake book.  This was such a lovely project to work on - how could anyone not like drinking loads of milkshakes!  Here are a few of my favourite pictures - don't you just adore the watermelon "telephone" on the recipe page and these are my mini milk milkshakes served in old style school milk bottles.  Too cute for words!  

 Yay - my popcorn book is on sale now!  It was featured a few weeks ago in the Washington Post Express magazine in an article on popcorn to eat for the Oscars with a couple of my recipes - click here if you want to read the full article on their website.  I was also made to do a popcorn video by my publishers to promote the book.  Eeek!  Have not dared to watch it back but if anyone you want a peek at my making popcorn in my kitchen - here it is!!!  Try not to laugh too much                                          

It was my Step Mum's birthday at the weekend and this is the cake I baked for her - billowing roses (including some unusual  orange and yellow stripped ones), pink tuile fabric and pretty pink beads and ribbons.  I finally got the chance to use the copper food colouring with my airbrush kit and it looked quite fine indeed!  It is the second cake in a week that I have made that looks a bit "hat" like! I am wondering if that might perhaps be a future topic.  Actually my next book - I am sure you will be pleased to here - is Cheesecakes - 60 recipes!  My word - what a lot of cheesecake.  I have done 8 recipes - 52 to go.  Anyway Happy Birthday Liz - hope you had a lovely day xxx

 Here are the latest pictures of my beautiful niece Hunter - isn't she a peach!  What a happy smiley baby.  I can't wait to meet her soon xxx

Three translations of my gluten free book have arrived - if I had to guess I think they are Italian, Dutch and Swedish (or Norwegian).  Linguistic blog readers - feel free to correct me!  Very cool to see my recipes in words I can't even read!

 I have two new books out at the moment - this is the first which has been published by Cico.  Technically speaking it is not "my" book as I only wrote the cake pop chapter but I am proud of my contribution all the same.  It is such a cute book and has lots of other recipes by people I admire such as Annie Rigg and Suzannah Blake so my little recipes are honoured to be in such esteemed company.  Below are a few pictures of some of the pops - aliens and sheep - the sheep are my favourite!   The book is very child friendly and has great step by step methods with illustrations and also uber cute cartoons - don't you just love the sheep with the mixing bowl!!!!  It is available to buy on Amazon and in good book shops - click here for a link

I have a lovely afternoon on Saturday baking this cake for my friend Tena's birthday - it was such a pretty project to work on and my baking Mojo seems to have returned.  The cake itself was lemon drizzle with lemon curd and vanilla buttercream and it was sprayed pale turquoise with my airbrush kit -  I do love my new toy so much - I even sprayed small sugar flowers the same colour to match and covered the top of the cake with them.  The end result was quite pretty indeed (even if it does look a bit like a large wedding hat!)  Tena loved the cake and I didn't stay long enough to see it being cut (which would have been just too sad) - instead I went and took part in a 2 hour Zumbathon (I must be mad) to raise money for charity.  I think I might have been better off staying to eat cake as I am very stiff today!  Hope you all had a lovely weekend.

Given my Dad's recently interest in stain glass windows after our birthday present to him, we decided to take a slight detour on the way back to Hamburg to visit the Minster at Bad Doberan - just breath takingly beautiful and so very old -  I think it was built in the 1300's.  The swan sculpture outside the entrance, may have eluded to the potential inside the building but I don't think anything prepared us for the sheet beauty of the glass and ceiling paintings.  Hopefully the pictures of the glass will be a nice inspiration for my Dad who may, if I ask nicely, one day make me a little piece of stained glass for my cottage!  If you ever find yourself on the North German coast - not too far from Rostock -  I definitely recommend a visit to this very special and beautiful place.

The positive when life deals you a bit of a rough patch is that it makes you realise how lucky you are have lovely friends and family to pick you up and dust you down.  The last few months have not been particularly good ones (as you may have gathered from the complete lack of blog posting on any form of regular basis - so sorry to all your lovely blog readers).  I have however just returned from a wonderful trip to Germany with my lovely friend Maren who took me for a rest and some much needed TLC at the most amazing spa I have ever stayed in (actually I have stayed there once before so a return trip makes me doubly lucky!)  There was something about swimming in a mother of pearl lined pool and luxuriating in the 35 degree whirlpool bath that made problems just melt away and I am feeling soooo much better.  There were many highlights of the trip but my buttermilk pancake breakfast was the best bit (not a brilliant photo as I was trying to be discrete in such a posh dining room) - so light and fluffy and I so wished that they would have given me the recipe (sadly not an option!).  My room had a perfect view over the sea with a desk at the window and if I ever needed somewhere to sit and write a novel, this would be the place!  Thank you Maren for a lovely weekend - I am now ready to get back to blogging again!

 This weekend's baking project was a 70th birthday cake for my friend's Aunt Kath.  I had a new edible ink airbrush kit for Christmas and I finally plucked up the courage to try and understand the instructions for using it!!!  They are in 4 books!!!!  I shouldn't have worried as, despite the many instructions, it was actually very easy to use and it meant that making the requested green and white cake was easy.  I made sugar butterflies and topped the cake with a few butterflies on wires and overall the cake looked quite pretty indeed!  Now I can't wait for my next opportunities to use the copper colour ink which looks amazing and I think would make very spectacular cupcakes!!!!

 Wilfred the peacock has been majestically enjoying the snow - his feathers looked even more vibrant than usual against the crisp white snow.