Wireless Festival

Monday, 15 July 2013


My second year at Wireless festival in London... Will.i.am, Katy B, Jessie Ware, eating pizza and dancing to Justin Timberlake and Jay Z.

An amazing but hot day!

Chocolate Lover Cake

Friday, 12 July 2013


It was my sister Jodie's birthday yesterday (hopefully the cake tells you that) and I wanted to bake her a chocolate cake with extra chocolate as us girls in the house are chocoholics. Using an BBC Food chocolate cake recipe with added chocolate treats, the Chocolate Lover Cake was created.

For the cake you will need:
225g plain flour
350g caster sugar
85g cocoa powder
1 1/2 tsp baking power
1 1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
2 eggs
250ml milk
125ml vegetable oil
250ml boiling water

For the chocolate icing you will need:
200g plain chocolate
250ml double cream

Decorations are up to you, but I used:
Smarties
Milk chocolate Buttons
Maltesers

Pre-heat the oven to 180C/fan 160C/Gas 4 and grease two 20cm sandwich tins (you may need to line the tins if you don't have non-stick tins). Mix all of the cake ingredients, except the boiling water, together until smooth. Then slowly add the boiling water to the mixture, a little at a time, until smooth again. Your mixture will end up being very liquid.


Pour the cake mixture into the cake tins, making sure that they are even, and bake for roughly 25-30 minutes or until the top of the cakes are firm or do the skewer trick. My tins were slightly bigger than 20cm so the cakes took longer to bake, although I like my cakes to be moist. 


Whilst the cakes are baking you can make your chocolate icing which is very simple and easy to prepare. You literally heat the chocolate and double cream together in a saucepan over a low heat until the chocolate has melted. Take the saucepan off the heat and stir the mixture, then set aside to cool for 1-2 hours. Once my mixture had cooled down, I put it in the fridge to thicken as it was a warm sunny day I didn't want it to melt again.


Once your cakes are ready, leave them in the tins to cool down properly before icing.


Carefully take your cakes out of the tins, it's very easy when you have non-stick tins with removable sides. Spread chocolate icing over the top of one cake and decorate if you wish. I put maltesers around the edge of the bottom cake to create the illusion that there was a full inner layer of maltesers, cheeky.


Place the second cake on top being careful not to break the cake, it's tricky. Then spread more chocolate icing on the top of this cake, you can go crazy as there will be plenty of leftover chocolate icing. I decided not to cover the entire cake with icing so that you could see the maltesers and decorated the top with buttons and spelt out my sister's name in smarties. I may have ended up eating a few that 'went wrong'.


A super chocolately cake for a chocolate lover!

Cake cake cake cake cake cake cake (Had to be done thanks to Rihanna).

Summer Cream Tea

Thursday, 11 July 2013


With the Wimbledon men's final last weekend, my boyfriend and I decided to be very British and have homemade cream tea at home with our freshly picked strawberries. We baked our scones using a quick and easy traditional scones recipe, the preparation and cooking time was only under an hour.

You will need:
225g self raising flour
25g caster sugar
150ml milk
1 egg, beaten, to glaze (or you can use a little milk)
55g butter
(a pinch of salt if you forgot to buy unsalted butter like we did)

After pre-heating the oven to 220C/fan 200C/Gas 7 and greasing a baking tray or sheet, mix together the flour and salt and rub in the butter, then stir in the sugar and milk. You will get flour everywhere and think that most of the mix is on your hands but it will eventually form into a soft dough.


Knead the dough lightly on a floured work surface, don't be shy with the flour as I've learnt you can never have enough flour. Pat the dough out so that it's roughly 2cm thick and use a cutter to stamp out circles or completely guess and use a muffin tray like we did. Brush the tops of the scones with beaten egg and bake for 12-15 minutes until well risen and golden. The time it takes will depend on how many scones you've made.


Don't forget the jam and clotted cream (bought unless you're feeling adventurous).


An easy English treat, perfect with strawberries on a sunny afternoon and made even sweeter by Murray winning Wimbledon!

Strawberry Picking

Wednesday, 10 July 2013


Strawberry picking in the sunshine!

Strawberry picking has always been a cute little dream of mine and the beautiful weather we've been having made this come true. I took a trip to the countryside with my boyfriend to Wotton Farm Shop where we were soon searching for ripe red strawberries.



We soon had enough strawberries and had a stroll around the shop which was full of flowers, fresh fruit, vegetables and other goodies.


The strawberries were much better than the ones we purchase in supermarkets as you could find big ones and freshly picked strawberries are delicious and juicy (so juicy that one spilt down my white top, oops). We had picked our strawberries just in time to have homemade cream tea and watch the Wimbledon final.