Hummingbird Happiness

For my birthday a few months ago, my friend bought me a Hummingbird Bakery recipe book.

Almost 300 pages of yummy treats; cupcakes, cheesecakes, cookies, pies...

But the section that has captured my attention the most (so far!) is home to the huge, 3 layer mountains of goodness.

They are deeeeelicious, and have got me so many compliments from people! I've always loved baking, but had previously stuck mainly to the traditional Victoria Sponge and simple, iced cupcakes.

These are on a whole other level!

If I'm honest, they use far more ingredients (and therefore money) and take up much more time than I should probably have been spending on a lot of these, particularly since they were mostly made throughout revision time (oops!)

 But they are certainly worth it!

This is their Lemon Cake with Lemon Cream Cheese Frosting, probably my favourite

Chocolate Malt Cake with yummy fudge sauce in between the layers (as well as the cream cheese frosting, they don't do anything by halves!)

Cookies & Cream Cake

Mississippi Mud Cake, a little sickly I thought but others didn't think so!

I'm looking forward to my next baking day so I can try out another of their great recipes! Has anyone got any cake or biscuit recipes they think shouldn't be missed?!

N x

Procrastibaking

Wow, again, I've certainly been neglecting this blog for a while! It seems something happens each April to get me wanting to blog again... Well this time I'm starting out with the very best intentions so fingers crossed I'll stick to it this year!

In 44 days I finish University and enter the unknown with (at least for the moment) very few plans. I'm pretty nervous about that, and pretty upset to be leaving uni and most of what goes with it! I can't say I'll miss all the work that third year has brought with it though. I'm currently going through some sort of dissertation denial stage which unfortunately isn't too conducive to getting much of that done...

This term, then, has been very hectic. There's been a lot of work, obviously bringing with it the "need" for a lot of procrastinating. This has meant there's been a lot of baking going on. Because cake makes everything better, doesn't it?

I've even branched out and started baking bread too. Kneading is just a great way of destressing. Throw a bit of dough around the kitchen and any bad vibes from work or money or hangovers or just a general bad day (we all have those!) are banished. And you get a lovely smelling kitchen and a yummy loaf at the end of it!

So I just thought I'd add some photos of what I've been baking this term...particularly as I'm back on that pre-summer diet everyone seems to go on once April's here.

Vanilla sponge cupcakes with milk chocolate icing and white chocolate shavings

Very first pizzas from scratch! With tomato sauce, mozzerella, prosciutto ham,
sundried tomatoes, olive tapernade and topped with rocket.

Chocolate Malteaser cupcakes

First loaf of bread. Slightly mis-shaped but nice and fluffy!

Loaf number two!

Pineapple upside down cake

Sorry about the quality of the photos, I'm a bit of an instagram lover (you can follow me at niobe93), and I've currently only got my iPhone available. Hopefully going to get a nice new camera soon though! Any suggestions?

I'm going to Copenhagen tomorrow with my family for a nice break away from all this horrible work and to celebrate my Dad's birthday, which should be lovely! I'll blog about it once I'm back, I'm determined to keep this up this year!

Niobe xx