Teachers deserve treats

In Scotland, school finishes for the academic year this week.  The kids get 6 glorious weeks of holidays, as do their hard-working and often under-appreciated teachers.  Whilst many of us Mums spend the preceding weeks trying to organise childcare or activities to stimulate the children and keep them busy, I felt it was high time the teachers were offered some indulgent treats for end-of-year gifts.  So, have you chosen a Becca Bakes treat for your teacher this year???

The Rocky Road melted

We love Rocky Road chez Becca.  It's crisp, crunchy, chocolatey and chewy - as my friend Sheila would say, what's not to love?  Incidentally, Sheila isn't Australian.  Just in case you were wondering.

Normally, you add the marshmallows at the last moment, give them a twirl into the chocolate mixture then pour the whole lot out into the tray to set.  But this time I was using pink and white mini marshmallows and they melted really quickly, whilst I was twirling and swirling them through the mix!  I had no way to rescue them, and thought - what the heck, I may as well go for pretty rather than stylish here...

So I added on pink Smarties, covered the whole lot in the last of our Colourburst Candy Melts and gave it all a good dose of pink fairy dust, oops, I mean edible glitter.  Et viola, treats for us at Becca Towers.  Mmmm...

Cupcake treats for visiting friends

A lady got in touch recently, saying she had some friends visiting shortly from Australia and would love some cupcakes for afternoon tea.  Ooh, lovely, I said.  We decided upon a mix of vanilla, lemon and sticky toffee and summery colours.  I even managed an attempt at the Southern Cross constellation, or Crux, as it is more correctly known.

(I found out afterwards that they absolutely loved them, and even took photos before they tucked in. Awww, that makes this baker a very happy girl indeed)

Giant, sticky, toffee and delicious.

Last year I was lucky enough to make two giant cupcakes for a lady called S.  One was a sticky toffee one, the other vanilla.  Apparently her husband loved the sticky toffee one so much that she got in touch this year to ask me to repeat the magic.  Woo hoo, was I excited!  

I hadn't done a giant cupcake for a while now, and wanted to make this one a bit different for him.  We had some delicious dates in the house, so they got finely chopped and added to the batter.  As the home-made toffee sauce colours the icing a beige shade, I felt teddy bear brown and dark brown would be the best contrast I could offer.  So I got to work with my stars, plaques and gold sparkle spray to create a cupcake worthy of a birthday man.  This time I used chocolate flavoured brown sugarpaste for the base, rather than chocolate itself, and the same toffee buttercream for the middle filling as well as the outer decoration.  A couple of chocolate champagne bottles and we were good to go.

And I believe he loved it!  Happy Birthday Mr S!

Have eggs, will bake...

Every now and then I get to the stage where we've either run out of some particular foodstuff and need to go shopping, or have a glut of a foodstuff and need to use them up quickly before they go out of date.  Past excesses have included, but are not limited to, Maltesers, Crunchie bars, cucumbers (that was a weird one) and so on.  Today's glut was eggs.  My first thought was to make an omlette for the kids for dinner.  Then I came to my senses and remembered that I also had some Reese's Mini Peanut Butter cups to use up.  Fortuitous, no?

The recipe I use calls for cocoa and chopped chocolate, so sometimes I add in different things in place of the chocolate.  Today, I thought I'd try some peanut butter and chopped Reese's.  Another time I'd used white chocolate chips, or Reese's pieces and so on.  (I really should link here to those previous posts, but sadly I can't find them).

As with the Oreo cookie brownies from a few weeks ago, I left some of the pieces out so I could scatter them across the top, thus making sure that each brownie had some filling.

I think some of the chopped mini cups must have melted, because it doesn't look like there was so much throughout the brownie once baked, hmmm...

I'll wait till the girls get home from school, and we'll all try some then.  Then we'll know how much of a peanut butter taste runs through these delicious chocolatey treats, mmm...