What I did on my holidays (er, part of them)

So far, my Easter break has largely consisted of baking. Yesterday it was Good Friday so I wanted some hot cross buns. Rather than taking the easy route and buy them from a store, I decided to try my hand at making my own. I make fruit buns earlier in the year and they went well, apart from the bit where my big oven is crap and burned the bottoms while leaving the tops entirely unbrowned and not even slightly golden.

Hot cross buns are the same recipe with some extra spices and flour and water dough cross on the top. Or at least, they are in England. Canadians seem to put icing on top :-(

The construction of the dough went much smoother than last time, I suspect because it's getting familiar, and they proved beautifully. Then I put them in my little toaster oven on the convection baking setting. They came out beautifully browned on top, light and fluffy inside, not burned. I'm so pleased with them!

Today I did a lot of cleaning and baked a simnel cake. It's at least ten years since I last did any kind of fruitcake, but this one seemed to be much easier than I remembered. Perhaps it's just that I'm a better baker than I was? It's got an insane amount of fruit in it (over 1lb of currants plus other fruit) and I was determined that this would be a perfect cake. My crappy oven would have murdered it so I stuck it in my little toaster oven, covered the top with brown paper when it looked to be getting too brown on the top, and it came out beautifully. The bottom doesn't look burned! Tomorrow I'll put on the marzipan and grill the top. I'm so excited about this cake :-)

I've also been finishing a pair of socks so that I have new socks for tomorrow. They're so pretty.

Something else is happening today. Now what was it?

Hmm.

:-D The Confidential is nearly finished downloading, so I shall shortly be retiring to my living room for That Show. It's so exciting!

Doctor Who 5.1: The Eleventh Hour (the squee edition)

So this is my reaction about five minutes after watching the episode plus the Confidential. Tomorrow could be busy (Easter) so I wanted to get something up. There may be a slightly more insightful post later: I suspect this post is going to be high on the squee quotient.

To that end, onwards! Really, don't click if you don't want to be spoiled for the whole darned thing.
( Cut for huge spoilers. I mean it. Don't say I didn't warn you. )