Mini Christmas Puds 


You Will Need:

• 175g plain flour
• 150g butter or margarine
• 150g Soft Brown Sugar
• ½ teaspoon mixed spice
• ½ teaspoon ground nutmeg
• 1 grated lemon rind
• 1 tablespoon black treacle
• 3 large eggs
• 40g ground almonds (optional)
• 50gm blanched almonds (optional)
• 250g currants
• 150g sultanas
• 75g raisins
• 50g glaced cherries
• 50g mixed peel









•   Grease a 7" tin and set oven at gas mark 1 or 140C.
•   Cream butter and sugar.

•   Add all dry ingredients and the black treacle.

•   Mix in the eggs and flour. Put mixture into the greased tin.

•   Cook for 3 hours on the middle shelf of the oven.

•   You need to wash your hands now. Break off a piece of the fruit cake and roll and squeeze it into a ball using your hands.

•   Keep going until you've used up all of your cake and made quite a few balls!
•   Now make up some icing by mixing icing sugar and water. Add the water gradually so that the icing doesn't become too runny.
•   Spoon a little icing onto the top of each of the balls of cake. Neaten and smooth with another (clean) spoon.

•   Now you can decorate your mini Christmas puds with berries and holly. You can cut these from coloured marzipan. Look at that! Realistic, eh!

•   If you don't like fruit cake you could use chocolate instead!
         

Edible Hedgehog

You Will Need:

• mashed potatoe
• spaghetti
• sausages
• cherry tomatoes









•   So - start off with some mash. You can use the instant kind, or the real stuff - it's up to you. The amount you need depends on the size of the hedgehog that you want to make. Carefully spoon about a third of the mash onto a baking tray.
•   Mould it into an oval with a fork, and add a nose shape at one end. With the back of a spoon, make a well in the mash.

•   Into the well, add some tinned spaghetti. Drain off most of the tomato sauce first, and take care not to overfill.

•   Take the rest of the mash and cover up the spaghetti, building up the rest of the shape.

•   The eyes and nose of the hedgehog are made from cherry tomatoes chopped in half. Or, if you're making a baby hedgehog, use peas instead!
•   When you've finished shaping the mash into the hedgehog's body, just give it a bit of a spiky texture with a fork.
•   Add on the eyes and nose and the legs. These are just small sausages.

•   Pop the hedgehog into the oven on Gas Mark 4 (180 degrees celsius) for about 25 minutes, or until the spikes brown nicely.

•   Plus, why not add some grated cheese for extra flavour or for an extra spiky hedgehog, stick in some savoury sticks after it's been baked.

•   And there's no reason not to experiment with different fillings. If you're not keen on spaghetti, how about baked beans?

Double Shape Cake

You Will Need:

• 200g butter
• 200g caster sugar
• 200g self raising flour 
• 4 eggs









•   In a bowl, cream together the butter and caster sugar.
•   Then into the butter and sugar, mix 4 lightly beaten eggs and the flour.

•   Give it all a good mix until it looks like this!

•   Divide the mixture equally into two.

•   This will be for the two different cake colours.

•   Choose any colours you like. Use a teaspoon of food colouring paste - this will give the cake a good strong colour.
•   You can buy food colouring paste in any catering or cake decorating shop.

•   Mix it well so that the colour spreads evenly.

•   Next, grease and flour two 20cm cake tins.

•   Do this by wiping some butter around them and then sprinkling some flour into them.

•   Dollop the mixture into the tins.

•   Cook the cakes at 180c or Gas Mark 4 for about 20 minutes - until they're springy to the touch!
•   Once the cakes are cooked and cooled down you can cut out the circles.
•   To make the circles, the best things to use are different size pastry cutters.

•   If you don't have any pastry cutters, you can make some card circle templates.

•   Simply put a template onto the cake and cut round.

•   The first cutter Stephen used is 15cm wide.

•   Put it on the cake and make sure there's an even space all the way around the cutter and the edge of the cake.

•   Then cut the cake with a smaller circle - this one is 10cm.
•   Use a final cutter of 5cm to cut a small circle in the middle.
•   Then do the exact same on the other cake.

•   Slot the circles of cake together like this alternating the colours as you go.

•   Spread some butter icing made from butter and icing sugar over one layer of the cake.
•   You could use jam if you want to.

•   Then carefully sandwich the other cake on top.

•   Use your favorite colour to make the cake.

•   Enjoy!

Chocolate Salami

You Will Need:

. chocolate
• apricots
• glace cherries
• raisins
• mini white marshmallows
• icing sugar.









•   Get started by breaking up the 200g of chocolate. You can either do this by hand, or by putting it into a polythene bag and giving it a good whack with a rolling pin!
•   Once you've broken up the chocolate, you need to melt it. Do this by carefully pouring some recently-boiled water into a bowl. Fill it to about a quarter full.

•   Put the broken chocolate into a smaller bowl and place it in the larger bowl. The heat from the water will melt the chocolate, you just have to give it an occasional stir.

•   While the chocolate is melting, you can prepare the rest of the ingredients. You need 50g of apricots, 50g of raisins, 50g of glace cherries and 50g of mini white marshmallows.When the chocolate has melted, take it out of the bowl with the water and add in the rest of the ingredients.

•   Give the whole thing a thorough stir until everything has been covered by the chocolate!
•   Now take some cling film or clear wrap and lie it flat on a chopping board. Now, spoon out the chocolate-covered mixture into a sausage shape on the cling film or clear wrap.

•   Fold the cling film or clear wrap up. This will help you to mould the mixture into a sausage shape. Twist the ends and tuck them underneath, then transfer the wrapped mixture into the fridge for about half an hour, until it's cool to the touch.

•   When it comes out of the fridge it'll be very firm. Peel off the clear wrap, then dust the sausage in icing sugar to make it look more like salami. Then put it back into the fridge for another four hours.
•   All you have to do then is slice and serve!

•   For a different - or more realistic - salami, why not try using white chocolate and adding some red food colouring?

Flower Pot Cookery 


You Will Need:

  
• terracotta flower pot
• 175g butter
• 175g caster sugar
• 225g flour
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1 tablespoon cocoa powder
• 3 eggs
• 2 tablespoons milk
• cocoa powder
• sweets






   


•   First of all you need to make the cake, so here's the recipe to follow. It will produce enough mix to fill a 15cm flower pot:
•   Add the sugar and butter to a mixing bowl and cream the two together as smoothly as you can.

•   Add the 225g flour, teaspoon of baking powder and the big tablespoon of cocoa powder. The cocoa powder will give a soil-like colour to the cake mix!

•   Then add three eggs and the two tablespoons of milk. Once everything's in the mixing bowl, get stirring!

•   When the mix has become a nice chocolate colour, it's ready! Make sure your flowerpot is clean, then grease it well, and put loads of flour on the inside.


  
•   Most flower pots have a hole in the bottom. You'll need to cover this up to stop the mixture escaping! A small piece of foil will do the trick!
•   Carefully add the mixture to the flower pot. When done, it's time to put it in the oven. Get someone to help you with this. It needs to go in on 170 degrees or gas mark 3 for about 90 minutes.

•   While the cake is cooking you could be making some of the flower decorations for it. You'll need some lollies, some jelly sweets, writing icing and some fondant sweets!

•   Take a lolly and put a ring of writing icing around the edge. Diamond shaped jelly sweets stuck onto the icing make great petals!

  
•   Turn the lolly over and add some blobs of icing in the shape of two eyes and a mouth. Stick some fondant sweets onto the blobs to make a happy face!
•   Because you've made a flower pot cake, why not make some garden creatures out of icing or marzipan? How about these snails, worms, spiders and slugs!

•   When the cake has cooked and cooled, turn it upside down. If you greased it enough it should come out quite easily!

•   Now you need to make an edible flower pot - one that you can wrap around your cake. Make this from marzipan, but before you prepare it, dab jam around the edges of the cake to help it stick.

•   Wrap the marzipan around the cake and base. Cut off any excess to leave a nice flat top. Add another thin strip of marzipan around the top. This will look like a rim and add to the realistic look of your flower pot cake. Add your flowers to complete your flower pot cake!

Ball In A Bowl 

You Will Need:


• two one litre over proof bowls
• 250g butter
• 250g caster sugar
• 250g self raising flour
• five eggs
• bakeing powder
• vanilla essence
• strawberry jam
• white ready made iceing
• black ready made iceing









•   In a bigger mixing bowl, mix 250g of butter with 250g of caster sugar. Add to this 250g of self raising flour, five eggs and two and half teaspoons of baking powder. Drop in a dash of vanilla essence too, then mix thoroughly.
•   Lightly grease your oven-proof bowl(s) and lightly cover the inside with flour.

•   Divide the mixture evenly between the two bowls. If you haven't got two bowls, the mixture will keep perfectly well in the fridge whilst the first cake cooks.

•   Cook for 45 minutes on 150 degrees celsius (gas mask 3) until they're well risen and firm to the touch.


•   Strawberry jam makes a great filling. Just add a generous amount to the flat part of one cake, then spread it out to the edges using a back of the spoon.
•   When done, add the second cake on the top, like this.

•   Next comes the icing. You need some white, ready-made icing for this. Roll it out into a circle.

•   The easiest way to pick it up is to lay it over a rolling pin, Lay it over the cake.

•   Tuck in the icing, all the way round the base, as neatly as you can. If there's any excess, just trim it off.
•   The hexagon shapes for the icing are made from black ready-made icing.

•   Stick on the hexagons by dabbing on water with a pastry brush. That completes the cake!