baking for friends

I only really started baking because we got a posh looking oven and I thought I ought to do some so I could justify our purchase. I now really, really, really love it and can hardly remember what it was like to think "why would you make it when you can buy it and not have to measure out and wash up?" - although I still do totally resent washing up in all its forms.

Since then, a few people have been kind and said they really like my stuff and I've been allowed to feed hundreds with my cookies and cakes which is really very exciting. I find baking pretty relaxing and satisfying until I'm baking for others. It's fine to be baking a few cookies for school or a couple of dozen muffins for home group or women's bible study but it seems that if it's for an occasion I get a sense of pressure and worry and things go wrong! I still love it though!

Take this weekend for instance. I had been asked to do some stuff for a friend of a friend's baby shower. So I made some cookies, made some blueberry muffins with cream cheese frosting and got down to making some cakepops.

I'd been asked to do blue because this foaf is having a boy. ('Foaf' - Did I just make that up - I kind of love it.) So I made some nice blue ones and took some pictures while I melted more blue chocolate.

Idiot. I burned the chocolate of course!

So I got some more into the microwave and it turned in to a weird chocolate clump that was totally irretrievable.

So on to the back up plan. With confidence I melted white chocolate, smiling as I remembered the cake decorating shop assistant's words as I bought the food colouring powder, "that's what we use, if you just use a little bit it makes a baby blue and then you can just add more to make the colour deeper". So I added a little bit, thinking that although it wouldn't be perfect the next set of pops would look relatively similar to the ones I'd just done. The chocolate turned swamp green. In fact the only way to stop the greenness was to add more colouring. The chocolate turned murky grey. No one wants murky grey at a baby shower tea party, it just doesn't quite create the right joyful ambience. So I added more and more and more until my chocolate was a grainy looking navy blue.

Really, that's all a mother to be wants isn't it? Navy blue cake. Why did I listen to that girl? She had also just told me she had NO formal cake decorating training. She may actually not have worked there.

As I took pictures, one after another was dark and blurry. It was as though the camera was saying, "surely you don't want pictures of those? I'll focus in on the sink unit instead."

In the end when they were all wrapped up they looked pretty sweet and maybe even quite elegant but I've still not heard what the baby showerers thought of them. Perhaps they're all sick from food colouring overdoses.

I'm still not sure about edible glitter. It looks very nice but apparently is just non-toxic rather than really being a food item - which means it's not actually digested, which means that...

Hmmm, I don't think I can type what I'm thinking. Instead I will confess that yes that is a Countdown boardgame in the background of the picture.