Smoothie Bowls - What are they? + How to create one

Ahhh, the smoothie bowl. When I say that you either think of beautiful, pink coloured, fruit adorned, Instagram smoothie bowls that you probably couldn't practically eat. Or you simply have no idea what I'm talking about and putting a smoothie in bowl seems like a crazy idea. You probably have questions, and I'm going to answer them.

Well firstly, what is a smoothie bowl? A smoothie bowl isn't just a smoothie in a bowl. It's a thicker version, created with frozen fruits, especially banana. It's sweet and icy and cold and amazing. This is what you would call the base. So on top goes other yummy food. Toppings! (yay). You can put lots of different food. Some of my favourites are granola (homemade of course), healthy(ish) cereals, oats, fruit, lots more fruit and puffed rice. Play around with different stuff to find the flavours you like.

When you make a smoothie bowl, you have to use frozen fruit. You can use anything you like, but to get a thicker texture, it's really important you use a fruit that blends thick and creamy. The most popular for this seems to be banana. If you don't use this and just use frozen berries, your smoothie bowl won't have the correct texture for eating with a spoon and you'll end up slurping it like soup (not good).

Steps to the perfect smoothie bowl

The first thing to do is to decide your ingredients. Usually I will use frozen banana, frozen mixed berries and almond milk. You need to make sure you have your base ingredient (ie. banana), a liquid (ie. almond milk) and lots of your favourite fruit. If you want you can add other things like chia seeds and yoghurt.
For amounts I would say use the same amount of all your main ingredients. I'm not a very big person so I use about half a cup of the three ingredients I use. I find it makes a great smoothie bowl.
Then chuck it into a blender and blend it all together until there are no lumps of fruit left.
Now put it into a bowl and adorn with toppings (yay)!

Eat the glouriousness (is that a word?).

And that's it. Expect to see some recipes very soon.
Horah for smoothie bowls!

Cornflake cookies

Hello, it's M here and today I'm going to be talking about my family's​ new favourite thing to eat. I have borrowed this recipe from FAVOURITE cook book at the moment: Tanya Bakes. This cookies are just too good not to try. They may sound strange but just give it a go.

Ingredients

• 200g Unsalted Butter, soft
• 300g Golden caster sugar
• 1 Egg
• 300g Self Raising Flour
• 80g Cornflakes
• 200g Chocolate or Chocolate Chips

Method

First of all, you need to preheat your oven to 200°c.

Next you need to make sure your butter is warm. Usually I put mine in the microwave for a minute and even though it turns into a liquid its this way it's easier. Whisk your sugar and butter together in a large bowl. Add the egg.

If you are using actual chocolate now would be a good time to chop it. I normally use milk chocolate but you can use whatever chocolate you like. I chop my chocolate into quarters.

Now you need to add your flour, cornflakes and chocolate to the butter and sugar mixture. Use a spoon to bring it together until it creates a sort of dough. 

Next, on 2 baking trays lined with baking paper, roll lumps of dough into circles and put them on the trays. Put 6 on each tray and the recipe should make 12 quite large cookies. Make sure they have plenty of room to spread in the oven.

Cook them in the oven for around 10 minutes. After 1o minutes, if they are not quite done you can put them back in for a few more minutes at a time until they are golden brown, if you like your cookies crunchy, and pale, if you like them softer.

Leave them to cool on a cooling rack and as they cool they will harden up.

I hope you give this really simple and easy recipe a go and hopefully they will be a hit in your house too!

6 Easter Cake Ideas For the Perfect Celebration

Well I know it's Easter already but there's still time to squeeze in some last minute baking. And who doesn't love making cakes anyway? It's much better than school and work. So, in this post I've got a bunch of quick and easy ideas to take your Easter cakes to the next level.

1. Mini eggs
This just had to be the first idea. I mean, who doesn't love mini eggs? I get so excited when Easter rolls around every year and I get to munch my way through bags and bags of mini eggs. They are my favourite! And, they are a great way to give your cakes a little extra flair. Just put a few on the top and you've got a delicious decoration.

2. Easter basket cakes
Now these are a little more complicated but they are still very achievable for even the complete beginner. You put your normal decorations on the cakes, like mini eggs (!!!) and then take a long sweet like a chewy pencil. Then stick each end of the sweet into the cake so it's like a little basket handle. This one makes your cakes look super professional while still keeping it simple.

3. Fondant decoration
Fondant is amazing. You can get it so many different colours (or colour it yourself) and you can literally make any shape for decoration you want. Take some yellow, black and orange and make a simple chick face to liven up any normal cupcake. Or, take it bigger and cover a full size cake in yellow to make a sweet chick's face.

4. Easter stick decorations
What I mean by this is when you get a cocktail stick and have a little paper decoration on the top. Obviously, you can't eat them, but they are a great decoration. You can make them yourself if you want to be super creative, or you can just buy them from the supermarket if you don't have time to make them.

5. Carrots
Now I'm not saying you go and make full on carrot cakes (that would still be a great take on Easter cakes though) but simply use carrot decorations. They are a slightly nontraditional take on Easter cakes but still super cute. You can make them out of good old fondant icing, or buy the little sugar carrots from lots of shops and simply put on top for an instant beautification.

6. Yellow Yellow Yellow
Whenever I think of Easter I immediately think of that beautiful, soft, pastel yellow colour always associated with the celebration. Like I mentioned earlier, you can use it to make little chicks' faces, but it has so many other great uses. A little bit of yellow food colouring goes a long way in buttercream which can be used to fill up a full size cake or pipe on top of cupcakes. Although plain cakes are already yellow, food colouring can help to really brighten that colour up.

We hope you've liked our ideas to make your Easter cakes a little more interesting and are now inspired to go and do some baking!

Gingerbread shapes

As its nearly Christmas, I decided to get in the Christmas spirit by baking some tasty gingerbread. These are really quite simple and the only thing you can mess up is how long you bake them for.

Ingredients:

• 350g plain flour
• 2 tsp ground ginger
• 1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
• 175g chopped cold butter
• 175g soft light brown sugar
• 90g honey or golden syrup
• 1 large egg
• extra flour for icing
• icing sugar 
• Any colouring for your icing

Method

1. Preheat your oven to 170 degrees Celsius.
2. Weigh out all your ingredients.
3. In a bowl, put the flour, ginger, bicarbonate of soda and butter.
4. Empty that all into a food processor and whiz it together until it looks like small grains of sand.
5. Take that out of the food processor and back into the bowl.
6. Gently mix together the flour mixture and your sugar (You don't want to work the flour too hard so mixing it separately will help prevent tough biscuits).
7. Empty it all back into the food processor.
8. In a jug, whisk together the egg and honey.
9. Slowly pour the egg mix into the processor while pulsing at the same time. 
10. When the mix starts to clump together, put it onto a floured surface.
11. Gently kneed the dough to make it come together fully.
12. Wrap the dough in tin foil and chill in the fridge for 15 mins. You can cut your dough in half so you don't have so much to work with. 
13. Take your dough out of the fridge and roll it out it a thickness of about 3mm.
14. Using a cookie cutter, cut out your shapes and put them onto a baking tray.
15. Bake your biscuits for around 20 mins.
16. If you want, you could make some icing to decorate and if you are making ginger bread men then you could use colouring to provide colour for eyes and mouth etc.

My tips:

• Make sure to use baking paper or tin foil on your baking tray so the biscuits don't stick
• When cooking, put them in for 15 mins then check them and put them in for longer if they need it

Although this recipe seems quite long, it does make some great gingerbread. I hope you enjoy
making some yummy festive treats! 

Easy Halloween treats

So as its Halloween soon I thought I would make some spooky and yummy treats.

Melting pumpkin and ghost biscuits

So theses are really quick and simple biscuits that look like ghosts or pumpkins. They are super delicious
and a good size so you still have room for all those sweets!

Ingredients

• 1 Pack of digestive biscuits
• 1 Pack of large marshmallows
• Icing suger
• Food colouring
• A glass of water
• Gell icing tubes

Method

1. Make the icing using 4 parts icing to 1/2 part water. Try not to put too much water in because you want it to be quite thick so it dosent run all down the biscuits. For the pumpkins add a little orange food colouring.
2. Get out all your biscuits and marshmallows 
3. Use a little icing to stick the marshmallow to the biscuit
4. Cover the rest of the marshmallow with icing and let it dry
5. When they are dry use some icing tubes to add extra details

My tips

• Make sure the icing is completely dry before adding extra details because otherwise it will all run together.
• Make sure you make your icing quite thick because otherwise it will run all over the biscuit and look more like a dead pumpkin or ghost rather than a slightly melted one. 

Theses biscuits took me 20 minutes to make and I made loads. You could serve them at a party or give them out to little trickle treaters. They are too tasty to not make.

Have fun and happy Halloween. 

The Summer Smoothie

Ok, so it's not exactly summer anymore but we can dream right? Me and M invented this delicious smoothie together and it is amazing. So amazing that M was so eager to drink it she spilt it down herself and my front room carpet...

Anyways, the recipe is pretty simple and you only need a blender, a knife and the fruit in the recipe (don't worry, no vegetables).

Ingredients: (Makes two glasses)

• 85g/3oz strawberries
• 120g/4oz raspberries
• 85g/3oz pineapple
• Half an orange, juiced
• 60ml chilled water (1/4)
• A handful of ice (1/4)

Method:

1. Firstly, chop the strawberries in half, then put them in the blender with the orange juice and blend until the strawberries won't whiz round anymore.
2. Chop the pineapple into small chunks and add into the blender along with the raspberries and chilled water.
3. Blend for a few minutes until smooth.
4. Add the crushed ice and blend until the ice is crushed.
5. Serve in a glass
6. Take some artsy photos to boast about to your instagram followers (come on, you deserve it).

I hope you guys enjoy this recipe, we certainly loved it!

Rock Cakes

Hiya! Sorry I haven't posted for a while. I've been really busy with stuff. So quite a while ago, in my cooking class, I made some rock buns. They turned out really nicely and I can't tell you how nice they were. It's a simple and easy recipe that anyone could throw together. You might want to double it as it only makes about 6.

Ingredients:

• 150g Self raising flour
• 75g Margarine
• 75g Sugar
• 1 Egg
• 50 Dried fruit (like raisins or cranberries)

Method:

1. Preheat the oven to gas mark 7 or 210 electric.
2. Grease the baking tray with oil or margarine.
3. Sieve the flour into a mixing bowl and the sugar.
4. Add the margarine. Rub it in until the mixture resembles breadcrumbs.
5. Add the fruit.
6. Beat the egg, and add to the mixture. Stir with a fork. (I like to use a wooden spoon)
7. Put small heaps onto the baking tray.
8. Cook for about 15 minutes.

My tips:

• Try not to round the balls of the mixture. Keep them rough so they look like rocks.
• Add a range of dried fruits, not just one. Shops usually sell 'Dried Mixed Fruit'.

My review:

This was a relatively easy recipe and I always make things like this so I didn't find hard. I did practise this one at home and they turned out better at school than they did at home. The taste of them was absolutely amazing! They were really soft and sweet but they probably could have been a bit more crumbly than they were. If I were to make this again, I would double the recipe so the pleasure of eating them could last for longer!