Pie, princess pony and hot cross buns

The week started with a pie. I'm not much of a pastry maker really (I'm more of a bread person) but I occasionally have the whim to make a pie. The pastry recipe I use is Delia Smith's cheese pastry from the turkey flan with leeks and cheese recipe in the first of her Christmas books. That pie is known as Boxing Day pie in this house and the pastry is for the underneath crust but it works just as well as a lid too. The inside of this pie was Sunday's leftover roast chicken dinner and gravy. H10, R8 and I ate the exclamation mark and the right hand end. Brian ate the P, the I and the E and everything around it. Men love pies.

The postman arrived with a big surprise this week too. H10 avidly enters all of the competitions in her Pony magazine and this time she won. She had to complete a tie-breaker which was to say what she would call a book about Exmoor ponies. Her answer was 'Exmoor the merrier' and her prize was this bright pink Katie Price Equestrian rug for Itsy.

These two spend lots of time together and are best friends. Now they are even starting to dress alike. Neither has heard of Katie Price but both think the rug is very lovely.

It's definitely a rug fit for a pony princess.

Itsy looks very glamorous in it.

I think she likes the monogram!

It's hot itchy work being a pony princess.

That's better!

Today is Good Friday so I made some hot cross buns in honour of the day (and to continue my slow but sure progress in baking all of the recipes in the River Cottage Bread book). R8 doesn't like dried fruit so instead I added 100g of dark chocolate chips and orange (in the form of a tablespoon of my recently made marmalade) to the mixture, forgetting that the warm milk I added at the same time would melt the chocolate.

What we had instead was dark chocolate and orange hot cross buns. Delicious hot from the oven spread with butter and homemade marmalade. Happy Easter!

Still baking

I'm still baking. I haven't mentioned it for a while but my bakeathon through the River Cottage bread book is ongoing.

Okay, I'll admit I cheated a bit. My self-imposed rule at the beginning was to make EVERYTHING, one by one. That was fine in the chapters on normal bread, but then there were vetkoek (yuk) and a whole chapter on Bread Made with Wild Yeast.

I lovingly made and tended my sourdough starter. I made a loaf with it. My family tried it. Hated it. I think sourdough is the Marmite of the bread world; it's either love or loathe. They, my eaters, loathed. Me, I loved it, especially toasted with Marmite on, but even I'm not woman enough to eat my way through an entire chapter on sour dough breads single-handed. I may go back one day and make pumpernickel, but not yet.

So I skipped on to the Bread Made Without Yeast chapter. I baked, we ate and I forgot to take pictures. Here, in a nutshell, is what we had and the verdict (in brackets): Soda bread (a regular anyway, we love it and make it often); Walnut and honey bread (how much honey???!!!! Sweet, chewy, delish with strong cheese, probably won't make it again though); roti (another regularly-made already recipe, we adore it); tortillas (number one favourite from this book until I made the flatbreads which are even better. Still love these though, great for lunch); then Bannocks:

The Bannocks were more delicious than they looked.

Bannocks are thick, hot oatcakes, lovely eaten while still warm from the pan with thick vegetable soup. They looked uninspiring but were quick, easy and delicious. Just the sort of thing to knock up while you make the soup (actually they're so quick the soup wouldn't even have to be home made you could make these while opening a tin).

Yummy baked doughnuts

Next it was straight on into the fun stuff: Buns, Biscuits and Batter Breads (the chapter my children have been looking forward to most). First off was doughnuts but NOT, definitely NOT deep fried (the vetkoek put me off that for life). So I baked them, 10 minutes at the oven's hottest temperature then about seven minutes at gas mark 4, dabbed them with a bit of melted butter and tossed them in a bowl of cinnamon-spiked sugar. They were a big hit, little doughnutty-flavoured fluffy buns without the stink and palaver of deep frying. Perfect.

Meanwhile Brian finished a bit of DIY. We have a dresser but it's too tall for our low ceilings and too wide for our narrow railway carriage-shaped kitchen. In disgust I chucked it out into a barn a while ago (having tried and failed to live with it in various rooms). Instead I longed for a plate rack but funds didn't allow and the big white empty wall in my kitchen sulked plate rackless. Then, brainwave. Hang the TOP part on the wall, plate rack-stylee. Bingo! I rescued it from the barn, scrubbed it and bleached it, waxed it and Brian used coach bolts and mirror brackets (belt and braces) to hang it on the wall.

Dresser with dog in catalogue pose.

The box underneath is an ex-toy box Brian picked up for a song (he got three - one for each of his girls). I'm going to wax mine to match the dresser and then keep my toys cake tins and baking trays in it. I might even make it a comfy cushion for the top (no, not for the dog though!)

How to make a marzipan pony

My youngest daughter always asks for a pony-shaped chocolate birthday cake. This year I decided that a simpler option would be to make a chocolate cake and sit a pony on top of it.

I don't like fondant - it's completely inedible - and at least marzipan has almonds in it. So this was the solution I came up with for my marzipan-loving pony-mad eight-year-old.

A quick Google search brought up this charming YouTube tutorial and my efforts in marzipan are pictured above. I coloured the chocolate marzipan by kneading it in cocoa powder until the desired colour was achieved. For other colours use paste food colours as the liquid type make the marzipan too wet to model. I stuck to a two tone au naturel palette.

The ponies were a huge hit and I sat them on a chocolate cake (basic choccy sponge recipe) on a bed of custard-based buttercream (less sugary than the icing sugar sort) fenced in with chocolate fingers.