Honey almond flower cookies

Back home, I usually bake using a kenwood mixer as long as the recipe involved butter. Well, I can justify using the mixer as creaming the butter by hand takes a lot of effort. Actually, I've actually never creamed butter by hand since I arrived in the UK, which was about 3 weeks ago. It's actually a workout!

I'm not a fan of almonds, especially when there's almond extract in a recipe but Hot Polka Dot's honey almond flower cookies looked so pretty and I couldn't resist not making them. I halved the recipe and took pictures this time! It's actually quite fun taking pictures whilst baking.

The first batch were smaller cookies, then I got lazy and made much bigger ones for the second batch. I actually baked mine for 12 minutes cause I forgot about the first batch whilst making the second batch and I forgot about the second batch because I was washing up. They turned out pretty good though. These cookies need to be spaced out as the spread/expand a fair bit.

Honey almond flower cookies
makes 40 cookies

1/2 cup butter
1/2 cup caster sugar

1/2 egg (keep the remaining half for egg wash)
2 Tbsp honey
1 tsp almond extract

1 1/2 cup flour
3/4 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp salt

slivered almonds for garnish
add 1/2 tsp water to remaining egg

1. Cream butter and sugar.
2. Add the egg, honey and almond extract and mix well.
3. Sift in the dry ingredients.
4. Mix till dough is formed.
5. Preheat oven to 180 C and line baking sheets with parchment paper.
6. Scoop a heaped tablespoon of dough and roll them into balls.
7. Flatten slightly.
8. Press almonds into each cookie in a flower arrangement.
9. Brush with egg wash.
10. Bake for 10 minutes.

Sausage bun

The weather in the UK has been lovely; sunny and basically not wet. Well actually, I still found it a bit cold despite it being sunny but it's only because of the wind. And the flowers are just everywhere and they're so pretty and photogenic!




This is one of the bf's favourite baked goodies of mine. The last time I made this, I overbaked them and the bread ended up being chewy after a couple hours.

I've always had a phobia of baking with yeast and well egg white, but I shall save the egg white phobia for another day. It's the anticipation and waiting to see if the dough grows and whilst you're waiting, you kinda regret not kneading it for longer or maybe the temperature of the liquid wasn't warm enough.

I stumbled upon the fresh loaf and the phrase pigs in the blanket still seems to amuse me. I have always wanted to try using milk instead of water to make bread but having come from Malaysia, the idea of letting milk sit out on the counter in the usual hot and humid climate didn't appeal to me.

The buns came out soft and fluffy and stayed that way the next day. The entire batch was finished by day two so don't really know if it would've remained fluffy on day three. I used slightly more yeast than the original recipe as it was prepacked yeast and the sachet so happened to be 7g. I also added about 2 extra tablespoons of flour whilst kneading the dough as it was a bit sticky to handle. Sorry for the lack of pictures as I only decided to start blogging yesterday! Will have to get use to taking pictures during the making process.

I got tired or rolling out the dough and used the remaining dough to make a mini loaf bread. I rolled out the dough into a rectangle and evenly spread peanut butter and mashed up banana, rolled it up like a jelly roll and baked it. I preferred this to the sausage buns but it's only cause I'd choose peanut butter over frankfurters anyday!


Sausage bun (makes about 20)

300g strong white bread flour
7g instant yeast
10g or 2 tsp caster sugar
6g or 1 tsp salt

1 egg plus warm milk to weigh 220g (my egg weighed about 50g so I used 170g of milk)

30g melted butter

10 frankfurters (cut in half)
1 lightly beaten egg as egg wash

1. Mix together dry ingredients.
2. Stir in egg and milk mixture with wooden spoon (dough will be quite dry and crumbly).
3. Stir in melted butter.
4. Knead till smooth (this is the part where I added about 2 extra tablespoons of flour).
5. Place dough back in mixing bowl and leave in warm place to rise till doubled (mine took 1 1/2 hours).
6. Divide dough into 20 pieces.


7. Prepare parchment paper. Roll into long worms, stretch it a bit and wrap around frankfurter. Try to leave both ends at the bottom.


8. Leave to rise for about half an hour.
9. Bake in a preheated 190 C oven for about 13-15 minutes or till golden brown.

Apple cake

Welcome to my first post.

This is my second time using this apple cake recipe from smitten kitchen. I have a really bad habit of not reading recipes before I begin. I usually only make sure that I have all the ingredients before beginning. Though I do assume that there's always sufficient flour or sugar in the house only to realise that there's none left when I've actually started the recipe and are halfway through the steps of adding the ingredients. Oh, and I usually jumble up the steps too. My bad.

The first time I made the cake, I didn't read the part about adding the batter, apples, batter then apples. I just did batter and apples. I thought it was odd that I had too much apples at the top of the cake and that 50% of the apples fell off after the cake was removed from its tin. Mind you, this was 2 years ago. I did keep the recipe as the cake was a big hit at the party I made it for.

Last week, I bought a bag of apples (about 10 of them) for a pound and I thought to myself, money well spent. I had one and it was one of the sour-est bunch of apples I had ever eaten! Ok, I might be exaggerating a tiny bit but I wasn't going to torture myself by eating another one.

I whipped out smitten kitchen's recipe, halved the recipe and voila. The smell of cinnamon in the air whilst the cake is baking, yum yum. Ooh, and the cake is moist on its own and goes perfectly with a scoop or two of vanilla ice cream.


Sorry for the lack of pictures as I forgot to whip out the camera whilst making it.

I made a few changes to the recipe. I used 4 apples though when I realised that there should be 2 apple layers and I reduced the amount of sugar.


Apple cake recipe

4 apples
2 Tbsp brown sugar
1 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp lemon juice

1 1/2 cups plain flour
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt

2 eggs
1/2 cup oil
1/4 cup caster sugar
1/4 cup milk
zest of an orange
1/2 tsp vanilla

1. Preheat the oven to 170 C.
2. Grease a 7 inch bundt tin and line with parchment paper.
3. Remove apple cores and cut into chunks. Toss with brown sugar, cinnamon and lemon juice.
4. Sift together dry ingredients.
5. Whisk together wet ingredients.
6. Mix wet ingredients into dry ingredients.
7. Pour and spread half the batter into the tin, half the apples, the remaining half of batter and then apples.
8. Bake for 40-50 minutes, or until a tester comes out clean.