Double Baking Today.

The rainy weather has returned bringing warmer air and grey skies.

This morning I set to work making the chocolate cup cakes. Things did not go quite to plan. Mindful of my disaster with the overflowing Red Velvet cakes I put less mixture into each muffin case. Roughly the same amount as I used yesterday for the lemon cakes. I took the first batch out of the oven and they were too low in the cases. So I was more generous with the next batch. But they still were still too low down. I would have to try again once I got home from work as I was running out of time. I was also running out of the brown muffin cases which look better with the chocolate cup cakes. I had factored in a trip to the Co-Op either today or tomorrow to get the cream I need for the ganache so that didn't mess up my schedule. It was only as I began to make the new lot of chocolate cup cakes that I realised I had used double the amount of butter in the morning baking. I had doubled up all the amounts in my recipe but for some reason I imagined the butter was in 4 oz blocks instead of 8 oz blocks. They've only been like that for the whole of my life! No wonder they didn't rise properly. They still taste okay and with some decoration will be fine for Peter to take to work. One thing I was able to do was to paint the roses which had faded from yellow to white since I made them. That saves me from making up a new batch of yellow roses for the lemon cup cakes.

At school I had great fun making salt dough with the reception children so that they could make Christmas tree decorations. I worked with a group of children who sat around a table and took turns measuring out the flour and salt and then mixing in the water before rolling their own portion and cutting out shapes. While we were doing that we were visited by some prospective new parents who were being shown around the school. Usually that means 1 or 2 adults with their children but today there must have been 6 or 8 families which was a bit of a surprise. At least we were all busy. Next to me was another table of children who had decided that the red playdough should be stuck on their noses while they sang Rudolf the red nosed reindeer rather than on the laminated outlines of spaceships the class teacher had provided. I thought that was quite imaginative.