Freckled Kirsty

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 ...

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...