The worst brownies ever!

The title says it all! Me and Sarah attempted to make smoothies and brownies last week and i'm not even joking the brownies were bloody terrible, in fact the whole thing went straight in the bin!!

We followed the same recipe as i posted about recently, when they turned out amazingly except this time, for some reason, the mixture was really runny but we just went for it anyway and baked it at the temperature and for the period they say. When we took them out the oven the mixture was wobbly but had a firm film over the top which is when the recipe said to take them out, we left them to cool for a bit and then tried to get the mixture out of the tin, for a start it didn't seem to be getting any firmer and then when we got it out and turned it over the chocolate had all sunken to the bottom of the tin. It didn't look particularly appealing. 

When we cut into the cake itself the centre was completely uncooked and the sides where rubbery and not very nice at all. 

Doesn't even look like a brownie!

Me and Sarah sent the rest of the evening trying to work out what we did so wrong and still can't work it out. The only thing that we did differently was using milk chocolate instead of dark chocolate but that should only change the taste and not the consistency. 

Literally can't think what we did wrong, if anyone has any suggestions as to what we did please comment! 

We tried making smoothies as well but couldn't find a recipe we liked so we ended up making milkshakes instead. We followed this recipe that we found on Pinterest, that used Milk, Ice Cream, Peanut Butter, Chocolate Chips and Caramel Sauce. They actually turned out alright but were so sweet it was ridiculous. The first couple of sips were alright and then after a while they just started tasting disgustingly sweet. Neither me or Sarah managed half of the glass we each had. 

We didn't have any normal glasses!

So i guess it wasn't a very successful night in terms of attempting new recipes. It won't stop us trying again though! 

Bank holiday baking challenge no.2 - Mini Victoria Sandwiches

Mum and I were inspired by the Lakeland catalogue to bake some mini sandwich cakes, there was a picture of some next to a special tray you need. We ordered the tray along with the Savarin mould and a 2lb loaf tin (look out for the loaf tin next weekend!) and then found a recipe to bake the cakes.

We used a 8 8 8 4 recipe. 8oz of flour, 8oz of caster sugar, 8oz of butter and 4 large eggs. It made a beautiful sponge that cooked lovely in the new tray. We didn't know whether the tray would need greasing or not - it was a non-stick tray so we just went for it and didn't grease it and they didn't stick! Result!

We put butter cream icing in the middle of the cakes along with raspberry jam. The recipe said to put milk in the butter cream which we haven't done before but will definitely be doing again. It makes a much thicker consistency which would be great for piping the icing on to the cakes, we didn't pipe them this time because they were just for us and we weren't giving them to any one else or taking them to a party or anything like that.

The cakes were delicious and looked really cute when we'd done. We will definitely be making them instead of cupcakes from now on!

So cute!

Mary Berrys Cherry Cake

Another weekend, another baking challenge. It's become a thing recently that me and mum will set ourselves a baking challenge every weekend, this week was Mary Berrys Cherry Cake. It's our way of making sure we are always trying new things and not baking the same old cupcakes again and again. (Don't get me wrong, they are lush!)

We followed BBC Foods recipe which was pretty simple to follow and has a picture of the desired look, ours wasn't quite as successful!

The recipe was easy to follow and we did that bit fine, filled the savarin mould with the mixture and put it in the over for 30 minutes rather than the 35-40 they suggest. (mums oven is notoriously quick and a lot hotter than you set it to) Up until this point it was going swimmingly, baking cakes has become like second nature to us so it wasn't anything out of the ordinary to add a few cherries and almonds to the mixture.

Then came to taking the cake out of the tin, which went fine again - a few whacks to the bottom and the cake slid out. That's when we were presented with a burnt bottom. Unfortunately the oven was set too hot (even though we put it lower than it suggested) and the outside of the cake burnt.

Just a tad burnt...

Mum wasn't happy with my idea of just hiding it with the icing and too a knife to the poor thing in an attempt to scrape off the burn bits. We had a right laugh - it looked a state!

By the time it had cooled and we'd decorate it though it looked absolutely fine and tasted really good.

As we've both been watching GBBO (that's where our inspiration to make this cake came from) the first thing we both wanted to know was wether the cherries were throughout the cake or whether they had sunk to the bottom, much to our excitement they were evenly scattered throughout the cake. Success!

So all in all i think it was pretty successful, if it wasn't for the burnt edges it definitely would have been a 9/10!

The end result!