February - Be My Valentine

Wow, we certainly pulled out the stops and showed our sweet side for our Valentine's themed bakes!

Can you believe we forgot to take a "group" photo for the second month running! 

Not a single savoury in sight! We had a really nice mix last night of first time Cake'n'Bakers (new to the club, that is!) and regulars, and the abundance of sugar made the volume in the room quite high at times! This time round Sarah treated us to some Red Velvet Whoopie Pies, Joy made some Blackcurrant Bakewell Tarts, Craig made gooey Chocolate and Maple Syrup Cookies, Sally invented a Cherry Chili Chocolate Cheesecake, Charlie brought her Red Velvet Cupcakes and Stacey made some Cake Pops - it was a labour of love! To introduce our new members and their bakes: Becca made a Bakewell Tart (with homemade jam to boot!), Lorna made a Marmalade Cake with Chocolate Ganache, Oli made an impressive Fruit Cake, and Tom brought some traditional Ginger Bread.

Needless to say we all left feeling slightly nauseous after that lot, but it's an unwritten agreement that we do try at least a little of everything! Kudos to Joy for being the Champion eater on this occasion!

We also had some great news today - we entered this blog into a competition with Baking Mad, and we were one of 15 selected to receive a sample of  Silver Spoon and Neilson Massey products to use to create, photograph and blog about our ultimate Valentines bake. The prize for winning the comp is a bit bounty of cutters, silicone bake-ware and posh flavourings, which we'd share amongst the group at our March meeting.

Once we've received the samples and know what we have to work with we'll all be pitching in ideas and voting for the one we'd like to take forward, which we will then get-together to bake! The closing date for publishing our competition entry blog-post is Tuesday 14th February, so watch this space! In the meantime, we'll be sharing our recipes from this month's meeting.

Happy baking!