Love... the rustic baker & Father's Day

Happy Father's Day to all you excellent Dads out there. In our house baking is always in order for those celebration days. So Oldest One and I created a ginormous cake of many colours and loads of sugar! It's your basic sponge dyed 2 different colours. Admittedly the top half was meant to be blue but the red came out well. I have since discovered that I should have used a white cake recipe to get the true colours I wanted but hey ho it looks great and the Husband loved it. Just a note for the future don't decorate near Youngest One, she is a food machine and couldn't understand why she couldn't eat the sweets, cake, icing, in fact the whole shebang. 

Love.......the rustic baker

Just occassionally, ok mostly every day, the urge to bake takes over my brain. I decided today to try something I have never done before, using some ingredients we had left over from Easter lunch. I made a quiche.  Bring on the band....... It was an adaptation from Tom Kerridge's recipe for new potato, spring onion and Montgomery cheddar quiche. I had the potatoes and used one bunch of spring onions and some cheap cheese. I added a leek to the mix and read the reviews and followed some advice there.

I have never made a savoury shortcrust pastry and it's as fiddly as everyone says. Top tip #1, I noticed on the GBBO was that you could flatten the pastry in a disc before chilling but perhaps everyone knew that already. Top tip #2, use a ball of pastry dough to gently push the pastry to corners of case.  I bought baking beans ages ago and have finally used them. Once blind baked my pastry was a little cracked but hey ho in with the filling. Top tip #3 put quiche tin into a bigger tin to help contain leakage.

So although I know there are cracks in the pastry and I dread a soggy bottom this is my leek, potato and cheese quiche.

Love........the rustic baker

This is a new addition to my posts. I decided to add photos of cake, bakes and breads I have made.  Not all the time and not necessarily in order. Baking is my second love next to my family.

 

Today's delight is carrot cake with orange cream cheese topping - only it's not real cream cheese because my friend atnumber29 is allergic to milk. The topping to which I added the juice and zest from a small orange came from a well known American baking person available in most good supermarkets. This recipe is adapted from Jo Wheatley's book (the lady who won TGBBO) A Passion for Baking.