bakeation…

I think that I might have just bought the best baking book EVER!  Crochet will have to play second-fiddle to baking for a while, while I bake my way through the book.  The book in questions is the  Hairy Bikers' Big Book of Baking…

It’s the book which accompanies their BBC Two programme Bakeation.  The book, rather like the TV programme, is just brilliant, rather like everything the boys do.  I am bit of a fan. 

The book is arranged by countries, and each country has a selection of recipes.  So far, I think that I have baked my way around Norway, with a few pit-stops in Italy, Germany, Belgium and Hungary.

I think my favourite recipe (so far) is the Norwegian Cardamom and Lemon Stamped Cookies.  I have to confess I was a newbie to cardamom, I think that I might have tasted it in other recipes, but never as the main event.  I am a convert.  I can’t describe the favour, but would encourage you to go out and try it.

I was really pleased with how my cookies turned out…

Only one complaint about my cookies: mine aren’t stamped.  By this I mean, that the Bikers had used these gorgeous little presses to stamp pretty pictures of leaves and flowers on their cookies.  Mine were left unstamped.  This was not for want of trying.  I looked EVRYWHERE in York for cookie stamps but nowhere sold them, not even trusty Lakeland (the shop I thought sold everything you don’t know you need).  I found some on the internet, but they had to be shipped from Canada, this seemed a little extreme and I didn’t like the decoration that much to order them.  So my cookies remained undecorated.  Needless to say the lack of decoration didn’t affect the flavour, they were delicious! 

Go treat yourself, buy the book and bake something amazing.