Daring Baker's Chocolate Covered Marshmallows

I've wanted to make these for such a long time after seeing them on Tartelette . They were also one of the Daring Baker's challenges, but I'm always up for a challenge! It took me a bit of researching before-hand though. The marshmallows require corn syrup, which you don't seem to be able to buy in England (although I did recently see they sell it in the American food section at Selfridges for a ridiculous price!) After a while of trawling through the internet, it turns out you can substitute light corn syrup for liquid glucose, like for like, so I used that instead and it worked perfectly. Like Helene, I also made some square ones with peanut butter which turned out to be a big hit with my non-peanut butter eating boyfriend!

I'm so pleased with the way they turned out, I'm going to try making regular marshmallows next to go with some home-made hot chocolate, yum! I'm also going to try out a recipe which doesn't call for egg whites and compare the consistensy.

Lemon and White Chocolate Cupcakes

If you haven't had the pleasure of getting to know the god of all zesters; the microplane zester, I urge you to rectify that when you next need to strip a citrus fruit! Before I found out about the microplane, I used to do everything on the zesting section of the cheese grater. Not only does doing this take up far too much time of your life which could be spent eating cake, but half of the zest gets stuck in the grater and refuses to move no matter how much scraping and banging on the side of a bowl. It gets pretty tedious, let me tell you.

However with the microplane, you can zest a whole lemon in 10 seconds flat. No scraping, no banging. It will change your life...sort of.

Cranberry and Clementine Oaties

This recipe is so versatile, the dough is a great base for adding whatever ingredients you may have in the cupboard (in my case I had half a packet of cranberries that needed finishing!) I love cranberry and orange together. What ever happened to those cranberry and orange ice lollies?? They were so good! I think they were from delmonte....anyone? No? Ahhh well I will have to make some when it starts to warm up.

I digress! I decided to add clementine zest to these instead of orange, just to mix things up a bit, and it worked nicely. I wanted to carry the citrus-y flavour through the icing aswell, so I just made a simple 'drizzle' icing of powdered/icing sugar mixed with fresh lemon juice.

There are unlimited variations of flavours you could use in this dough. You could add other spices like ground cardamon, nutmeg or allspice, dried fruits, peanut butter, chocolate, nuts and seeds, the list goes on. Happy Experimenting!

Adapted from Food Network's Oatmeal Cranberry Cookies

Ingredients (makes 25)

Dough
1/2 cup softened butter
3/8 cup granulated sugar
3/8 cup light muscavado sugar
1 egg
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 cup plain flour
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon cinnamon (optional)
1 1/2 cups rolled oats
1/2 cup cranberries
zest of 1 clementine (2 if you want to up the flavour)

Icing
Juice of one small lemon
about 6 heaped tablespoons of icing sugar

Method
Preheat oven to 180c. and line two baking sheets. Cream together the butter and sugars until fluffy. Add the egg and vanilla extract and beat well. In a separate bowl mix together the dry ingredients, then add to wet mix and beat to combine. Add the cranberries and clementine zest and mix until evenly dispersed. Drop tablespoons of dough onto the lined baking sheets, slightly apart. Bake for 10- 12mins until just golden brown on top. Cool on a wire rack. While biscuits are cooling, mix together the lemon juice and icing sugar to make a 'drizzly' icing. If the icing is too wet, add more sugar a tablepoon at a time. If too thick, add more lemon juice until you get the right consistency.