21st Century Baking.

I've finally taken one step into the 21st century, as I was brought an electric hand mixer by my lovely boyfriend for my birthday last month. I must admit even though I liked the satisfaction of doing everything by hand, it does make it all so much quicker and easier.

My baking gifts! 

I needed a recipe to try out my new toy- so I turned to another of my presents - The Great British Bake Off Cookbook, its great! There are so many recipes in there covering everything from cupcakes to tarts,to biscuits, pies, breads and patisserie - I'd recommend it to any keen baker. As easy as recipes are to find online, there's something special about having an actual book to flick through, and flick through it I did and found recipe after recipe that I wanted to try.

Finally, I settled on a double chocolate marble loaf cake. It  was not too simple and not too complicated, so seemed perfect, and I'd never baked a loaf cake before. The process is more time consuming than something like a Victoria sponge as you need two different cake mixes - one white chocolate and one dark. The mix also includes melted chocolate so time also needs to be taken to melt two lots of chocolate. However the results are worth it.

I wanted to bake something to present to my parents when I saw them last week. I feel that their memories of me, as a young child, making a huge mess in the kitchen just to produce some ropey looking cupcakes has hindered there belief in me actual turning out some good stuff in the kitchen nowadays!

My plan worked, they were suitably impressed. My dad gave it an "8 out of 10" - praise indeed.