Party preparations!

Good morning my lovelies!   Another early one after another late one, I'm going to be in bed come 2pm, mark my words!   Yesterday was spent in the kitchen making the sweets for tonight, this is how I got on.

First of all - the Reese's dessert.   How did that one go?  Well... it was a bit hit and miss to be honest.  

They look pretty good!

I am a good cook.  Or so I am told anyway.  But I always have to follow a recipe.  The recipes that I have seen for these have all been US recipes, and the dreaded 'cup' measurement.   So I had to Google how much in weight a cup of butter was, a cup of icing sugar was etc.   Mr G, Denise and I sampled one square between us.  There was definitely too much butter in them, this made the peanut butter layer very greasy.  Not inedible, but not perfect either.  Next time I would lower the butter.  But they taste really nice anyway :-)  The recipe(s) I used can be found here at Your Cup of Cake  and Michelle's Tasty Creations.  (No it's not me!). 

Mr G wanted a Lemon Drizzle cake.  I use a Mary Berry recipe for this, but I had put my written copy in a safe place (ahem!), so safe I couldn't find it.  After searching online I found a recipe of hers, I don't think it's exactly the same as the one I normally use, but it will have to do.  It was for a traybake but I used a loaf tin.

Lemon Drizzle

Made some chocolate cupcakes for the children to have tonight.  This is also a Mary Berry recipe, I doubled the amount of cake mixture and it made over 40 cupcakes.   

The plasterers came... one of them was laughing at me as he came into the kitchen to get some water.   He looked at my icing sugar coated work surfaces and I asked him who was making the most mess.  The look on his face told me it wasn't him.   Has anyone got any tips for the mess icing sugar makes?  I've tried putting the extractor fan on.  I even bought a mixing bowl guard from Betterware, you stick your electric whisk through a hole and it supposedly stops splatters, but there isn't that much mobility to be able to work around the bowl, your beaters tend to stay in the centre?  I think I'm going to have to hook it up to an extension and go outside with it in future ;-)  

It's getting there slowly, isn't it?  They'll be back on Monday, and it's looking like a bigger job than they anticipated.  Although they've been very tidy and kept the mess to a minimum, oh my God - the dust?   Mr G has been an absolute little starlet getting it all cleaned up as best he can.  Ah well, it is what it is, everyone will just have to take me as they find me today.   And on that note, I had better go and get my oven switched on!