Skip to main content

The arrival of Matilda

So following on from my 'Year off of blogging' post, we now have a baby. Matilda Ann arrived on the 29th March via c-section as she was stubbornly breech throughout the pregnancy, weighing in at 7lb9.

Having a daughter has definitely been the most incredible but challenging time of my life. They say you don't know tired until you have a baby and this is so true - apart from the waking every couple of hours for feeding, which is exhausting in itself, you have the staggering amounts of washing to fit in, as well as looking after yourself and family. We are now at 6 weeks and I feel like last night was the first good night we have had - fingers crossed this continues and I start to feel more human and less zombie.

In terms of blogging I am undecided on how to continue. There is so much to be said relating to the joys and challenges of parenthood, but this is primarily a baking blog so therein lays my dilema. I don't have much spare time to fit baking in, as I am on mummy duty almoat 24/7 so we shall have to play this by ear a little.

Here are some of my favourite photos from our first 6 weeks:







Comments

Popular posts from this blog

After Eight minis by Fantasy Cakes

Father Christmas clearly knows me well, as under the tree I had a new cake recipe book waiting; Fantasy Cakes by Angela Romeo and it is such a treat for the eyes to browse, and stomach for the wonderful cakes you could bake. It is a very clever book in that it has the standard cake recipes at the start which are used throughout the book. These so far have been so simple to throw together, which is very handy as I can leave the baby playing for 10 minutes to whip the cake up. You can order the book here , and I highly recommend it if you want to try some beautiful centre pieces or show stoppers. The first cake I tried is the After Eight minis, great as all the family were round to gobble up the end result.  This After Eight recipe took a while to assemble and create the individual elements however they can all be done in advance and individually rather than sitting down for a good couple of hours stretch. I had to alter the recipe slightly as I ran out of self raising fl...

Pasteils de nata - custard tarts

Pastry week on the Great British Bake Off saw Paull Hollywood set custard tarts as the technical challenge and I thought I would give them a go, seeing as I have never attempted them before! I own Paul's cookbook which has the recipe in, and it can also be found on the GBBO website. These two recipes vary slightly - in the book Paul doesn't make the rough puff pastry but uses shop bought (which I would normally do.) This being a Bake Off challenge though I decided to use the recipe they followed in the tent. The result - delicious buttery pastry filled with golden creamy custard. I ate 3 in one sitting! The tarts are quite fiddly and leaving the pastry to cool between rolling is essential to get the decent lamination and signature swirl on the bottom, so you will need to set aside a good couple of hours in total. As a side note, I found that I had a lot of left over custard - either I didn't make my tarts big enough or the recipe is rather generous with the por...

Bourbon Chocolate Brownies

There seems to be a bit of a trend at the moment for brownies with all kinds of sweets and biscuits added to the top to give an extra dimension to these absolute classic bakes. Doing the rounds on Instagram which caught my eye were Bourbon brownies, in particular Frances Quinn's version (Former GBBO winner). Her food imagination and photography is always beautiful and well worth checking out. I have used my own brownie recipe which combines cocoa and melted dark chocolate topped with neat rows of Bourbons, making a brownie which perfectly compliments a good cup of tea. Time to get dunking! Ingredients: 220g butter 180g caster sugar 150g light muscovado sugar 50g cocoa powder 50g dark chocolate (70%) 1 tsp vanilla extract 2 eggs 120g plain flour 1 packet of Bourbons - I used 13 ontop of my batter, but you can add more or less depending on how you want your brownies to look. Method: Preheat your oven to 180C/ 160C fan assisted and line a brownie tin. In ...