We are the music makers and we are the dreamers of dreams...

I have decided to enter a competition in a homes magazine to launch Becky BakesWell as a proper business. I feel like Charlie Bucket when he nervously asks Grandpa Jo if he stands a chance of finding a golden ticket in his birthday Wonka bar. Grandpa Joe replies 'You've got more chance Charlie, because you want it more.'

I don't think that wishing and hoping is going to give me any more of a chance, but Grandpa Joe's sentiment does make me think that somebody has to win the competition and I do stand a chance, however slim.

I've got to fill in an application form with all sorts of Apprentice-style questions - eek! I need to market Becky BakesWell but I don't want to sound like Stuart 'the brand' Baggs from last year's series of the show, haha!

Will update you on my progress soon. This weekend I will be baking something special as a surprise.. more on that on Monday or Tuesday.

Until then I thought I'd leave you with the moment that my baking fate was sealed...

Pure Imagination

Happy Baking!

Becky BakesWell x

Pete's Perfect Flapjacks

Flapjacks were one of the first things that I baked for Dan - this came about as a result of Dan reminiscing about some flapjacks that his Scottish mate had made years back and a random conversation where Dan tried to get the recipe so that we could make them. This is a copy of the recipe that I hastily scribbled down as the ingredients and method were relayed over the phone by Dan's mate Pete.

It is for this reason that I named them Pete's Perfect Flapjacks, and be warned - these are not the sort of dusty, dessicated flapjacks that you'd find in a health food shop. Instead, they are oaty, chewy oblongs blessed with a resiny depth from the golden syrup. Not good if you're on a diet, but bugger it I say! 

As a guide, you set the amount of oats you will use then half the amount of butter and sugar.

I decided to use a small roasting tin as my flapjack tin. I just tipped the dry oats into the tin until they came about half-way up the sides. I used my hand to roughly level the oats in the tin and  then tipped the oats into the bowl of the scales to give me my set amount - 400g oats.

400g rolled oats

200g butter

200g soft brown sugar

3 tablespoons of golden syrup
optional extra - sprinkle of cinnamon

1) Preheat your oven to 180 degrees centigrade/ 350 degrees farenheit or gas mark 4.

2) Grease and line a small but deep, square tin with baking paper.

3) Melt butter and sugar in pan over a gentle heat.

4) Add the oats and mix thoroughly to coat the oats so that they are slick and glossy.

5) Swirl the golden syrup into the pan along with a sprinkle of cinnamon for a subtle earthy flavour.

6) Stir the mixture to combine and then tip into the prepared tin.

7) Smooth the mixture to create an even layer, with the back of a wooden spoon, then transfer to the centre shelf of the oven for 10-15 mins.

Keep a close eye on the flapjacks in the oven as they are prone to catching and become brittle when left without attention. The flapjacks are ready when the edges are a deep golden brown but the centre just has a pale golden glow from the oven. Slice into squares whilst warm but leave to cool completely before taking out of tin, as the mix is still pliable when warm and is prone to breakages. 

Cookie Love

I am rather excited that I will have some time over Easter to experiment with these babies from NY. I went to New York at Christmas for a very special holiday and as Dan and I were striding through the streets on Christmas Eve near Park Avenue,  I squealed with excitement when I saw a Williams Sonoma store - I know,  I know - squealing should be reserved for the shop with the little blue boxes... not a kitchenware shop eh? Sorry to disappoint, but that's the kinda geeky gal I am! Rather than trying to desperately fit clothes or gadgets into my suitcase as mementos of my stay in the Big Apple, I was dreaming up schemes to bring my baking booty back to Blighty!

I had seen these cookie cutters on the WS website about a year before my trip and was crestfallen to find that the site only sent international deliveries out to certain countries and the UK was not on the list. So to find these cutters in the Park Avenue area store made the wait worthwhile. I have been on the WS site recently though and it seems that they have now added UK to their list of global deliveries. Not before time too!

I think I'll need to experiment with a few cookie recipes beforehand to get a good balance between a fine crumb texture to make sure that lettering is clear on the cooked cookies and to make sure that the finished cookies taste good. All too often, cookies are a case of style over substance, resembling mini works of art rather than the tasty treats that they deserve to be.

Easter Cake - Update

 The Easter cake is very nearly finished. All I need to do is add a piece of co-ordinating ribbon to the edge of the cake board and we are done!

 Looking at the cake as a finished piece, I have a soft-spot for the marzipan duck and chicks - they make me cheerful when I see them guarding the fake cake (the cake is a dummy cake for my assessment). There are some imperfections that do niggle me a bit - I can't help it, it's the perfectionist diva in me. However, I know what I would need to do to put these things right to improve the finish for future cakes, which I guess is the important thing.

In more news, we take delivery of our new oven on Saturday! I feel a bit of a traitor to the sisterhood doing a  little kitchen dance at this exciting news especially as it's International Women's Day and I'm cooing over pictures of the oven like a proud parent! However, like a baby, this oven is long over-due and presents a new chapter in my life as Becky BakesWell. Living without an oven for seven months has been torturous - no homemade roasties in all this time (cue sniffling and sob). My family have been kind enough to let me use their ovens to bake cakes for friends, and without them, my mission to start delivering cake happiness would have been impossible indeed!

This weekend, roasties and cake baking are on my agenda - will post more recipes and cake related adventures soon!

Happy Baking,
Becky B x

Easter Cake Project

Hey there!

For readers that don't know me, I travel quite a distance to work from where I live and in Winter, my morning commute to Yorkshire across the Pennines in the fog and murky light can be grim. However, with the light mornings and warmer weather here, it's nice to see the landscape changing along with the seasons. This morning I noticed that the snowdrops are also shooting up in the gardens that I pass - a sure fire sign that Spring is on its way and Easter is around the corner. So, with this in mind, I thought I'd add a post about my Easter cake project. I have been inspired by Peggy Porschen's simple and kitsch duck motif cake below.

I started off with a plain white sugar paste covered dummy cake as the basis of the design, which I have then embossed with butterflies and a flower design which looks a bit like Broderie Anglaise. I also added a crimped border around the top edge of the cake, in the shape of bows. 

The second stage of the design consisted of painting the embossed decorations with powdered pigments. It's best to use vodka as the liquid to mix with the powders as this dries much quicker than water and therefore is less likely to bleed. 

I've also modelled a duck and chicks out of marzipan which I have tinted yellow, adding beaks from orange tinted marzipan. These models will sit on top of the cake, inside the circle of flowers. To unify the different aspects of the design, I've started to make a border for the bottom of the cake out of balls of pink and yellow sugarpaste, in a graduated design, which will pull the colours together. 

Here are the pics of the work in progress:

Can't wait to finish the decoration and post the finished results!

Until then,
Happy Baking x

Becky BakesWell Promo

Royal Icing Celebration Cake - Update

In my last post about this assessment cake, I said I would post some photos of the work in progress, so here they are! The cake still needs its finishing touches, but the piped 'S' and 'C' scroll boarders are now in place. These borders are quite difficult to pipe in a consistent way, ensuring that the size of each scroll is uniform around the cake and that the borders meet up in a neat way.

Spring Makeover

Despite the festive snow and cold weather, I felt it was time for the BakesWell blog to have a bit of a makeover, ready for the spring! I've had a busy week baking a birthday cake in the shape of a leopard for a friend's daughter. I have also progressed on to the next stage of decoration for my assessment cake on my cake decoration course. More photos to follow on that...

More good news also comes in the form of the oven we have finally ordered! I have been baking at my mum's as my lovely range has been broken since the summer, but I have found it difficult to choose a replacement. We have (after looking at every major oven company that produces ranges) decided to go for the Rangemaster Elan in Latte. http://www.rangemaster.co.uk/range-cooking/elan-90

I'm so excited that I will be able to bake cakes in my kitchen again and I'm looking forward to roast potatoes again on Sundays - yum!

Happy baking!
Becky x

Royal Icing Celebration Cake

Hope you had a great Christmas and a happy New Year! Sorry for the break between posts - I had a particularly special Christmas as my lovely boyfriend proposed whilst we were in New York, so I have had a busy but exciting few weeks looking at wedding venues!

So, back to cake related talk! I am in the initial stages of decorating my assessment piece for a a cake decoration course that I am taking. I am pleased with how it's going and thought I'd post some photos.

I have flat iced the cake with a few thin layers of royal icing and then I piped a central border using a number three nozzle in white. I then over-piped this with a number two nozzle in white and then the final layer of over-piping was done in the finest nozzle - number 1. This top layer of over-piping was tinted cerise. Once the central border was dry, I decided to use some icing flowers that I had made a few weeks previously and arranged them inside the border, along with a piped greeting in pink for my mum.

Covering the board was fun but quite messy! I diluted the royal icing with Renwhite to make the icing for the board more resilient, so that it can withstand minor knocks. I would say that the consistency would be the same used for icing run-outs - about the same consistency as unwhipped double cream.

The final stages of decoration will be piping a rope border along the top edge and then a scroll border around the bottom edge. I'll also decorate the sides of the cake with the remaining icing flowers that I have. This dummy cake has taken quite a while to complete but I'm happy with it so far!

Will post pictures of the finished cake next week.
Becky Bakeswell x

Christmas Cupcakes

This week has passed by in a flurry of cupcake activity! At the beginning of the week I made several batches of cupcakes for colleagues at work and then a batch for Lesley, my auntie, who wanted a dozen cakes using a red, white and green theme. I'm really happy at the way the snowflakes have turned out - particularly when they were misted with edible pearlescent spray. Courtesy of the spray, the snowflakes took on a glittering, frosty quality faster than you could say "Winter Wonderland!"

For the red, white and green Christmas cupcakes, I couldn't resist blitzing up a candy cane with my hand blender to create candy cane rubble to sprinkle over the top of the blankets of vanilla butter cream. I also found amazing edible glitter sprinkles which were in the shape of shiny, tiny green fir trees.

Merry Christmas,
Becky Bakeswell x

Royal Icing Snowflakes

These delicate snowflakes are for a batch of Christmas cupcakes for my work mates and are definitely a labour of love. So far, I have piped 50 snowflakes, but I want to create more to compensate for the inevitable breakages once they are lifted from the baking parchment. I'll post pics of the finished cupcakes later this week. Until then, happy baking!

Royal icing gingerbread men

I go to a cake decorating class on a Wednesday night and these little sweethearts are part of a Christmas cake design I am working on. More photos of the finished cake will appear on here soon...

Christmas Puddings

A lot of people claim to dislike Christmas puddings, but I think that this is due to the mean and cheap little puddings sold in plastic containers that you can get in the supermarket. They already look dried up and wrinkled before you've cooked them, never mind afterwards! Consider trying this recipe - it might just change your mind... The pudding is first and foremost, light and moist. It is also fruity and naughty as it is quite boozy. It is perfect warmed through and served alongside cold, softly whipped cream. Trust me - this recipe has converted many pudding haters! 


A quick note: The recipe below creates a ridiculously large amount of pudding mix - even halving these quantities gave me three decent sized puddings - one for me and two to give as presents. If you only want to make one or two, I would scale this recipe down to ensure that you don't spend lots of money on ingredients and end up with too many puddings! 


Wet Ingredients
230g unsalted butter
175ml brandy
2 tablespoons treacle
Juice and zest of 2 lemons
Juice and zest of 2 oranges
4 medium eggs


Dry Ingredients
230g wholewheat breadcrumbs
690g mixed dried fruit
230g dark brown sugar
85g  wholewheat flour
85g chopped almonds
85g chopped hazelnuts
85g crystallized ginger
1 large cooking apple chopped
1 teaspoon each of ground allspice, cinnamon and nutmeg
1/2 teaspoon of ground cloves


Melt the butter and treacle in a saucepan over a low heat. When cool, add the brandy, zest and juice of the lemons and oranges. Then, beat in the eggs. 


Combine the dry ingredients in a large bowl. Stir in the treacly, buttery egg mixture into the dry ingredients - you will need a very large bowl to do this, or split the mixture between two bowls.

Grease your pudding bowls and ladle the mixture into them. Cover with a double layer of tinfoil - fold a pleat along the length of the foil to leave enough room for the foil to puff up and expand in the heat. 

Steam pudding(s) for 4-6 hours in a steamer depending on the size. If you don't have a steamer, you can put the pudding in a roomy pan with a lid on, but you will have to top up the water more often, or the pan will boil dry.  


I have added a picture below to show you what a finished pudding should look like and one that still has an hour or so to go until it is cooked. The unfinished pudding is on the left, and the finished pudding is on the right. 

Once steamed and cooled, replace with a new double layer of tinfoil and store in a cool but dry place. I feed my puddings every 5-7 days with a dribble of good whisky, but this is because I'm partial to it. If you like, you can feed the puddings with a bit of the brandy you had to make the puddings earlier. 


To feed a Christmas pudding, skewer the pudding all over with a cocktail stick and spoon over a tablespoon of brandy or whisky. Replace with fresh foil. 


Hints and Tips

• Make your puddings at the weekend - making puddings is a long but leisurely process. Take the chance to wallow in the Christmassy feeling and put Christmas songs on while you make the mix. Then when they are steaming, you can wrap Christmas pressies. 

• Having made puddings for a long time, I find that making the puddings and steaming them in one day is far too much to do - unless you want to be steaming puddings into the small hours! I tend to make the mix on a Saturday, excluding the eggs. I cover the bowl with clingfilm and leave it somewhere cool. Then on Sunday morning, I add the eggs, stir the mix round and adjust the consistency if needed, then put the mix in the bowls and steam them. I make sure that I have started to steam the puddings by mid-day to ensure that they will be done by six or seven o'clock that evening.
• I tend to add half a small bottle of ale to the pudding mix as I think it adds a nice background tang - Theakston's 'Old Peculiar' or Guinness work particularly well. If you decide to do this, you will need to add a little extra flour to thicken the mix up a bit after - just enough to maintain a slightly sloppy consistency. It is traditional to make a wish when you stir the pudding. Ask someone special to stir the mix and make a wish too. 

• Steaming puddings makes your house resemble a sauna! Open the windows at the start of the steaming and put on a t-shirt. Make sure that you top up the steamer or pan regularly with water to avoid pans boiling dry. 

• A pudding always looks impressive when flambeed - use vodka to set it alight as it has a pure blue flame and burns for longer. Heat a small amount of vodka in a pan ensuring that you don't do this for too long, then pour over the pudding and set it alight with a cook's match, as these are longer than ordinary matches. 

• It is traditional to steam the pudding for an hour before serving it, but I don't think it's necessary. You can microwave pudding if you cut into servings first and check it every 30 seconds - be careful as it can be unpredictable. Do not put a whole pudding in the microwave as it can explode!

Launch of the Becky BakesWell blog!

I have been busy in the kitchen today making Christmas puddings - a tradition that started accidentally really, when I was thirteen. When I made my first pudding, the recipe created a comical amount of pudding mix, so I decided to make smaller puddings for my grandparents. Rather impressed, they handed back the pudding bowls in hope of receiving one the following year and a tradition was born.

One year, I made Christmas puddings for people I work with as a Christmas present and now they hand back their pudding bowls hopeful that they will receive another the following year. Last Summer, my boss bought me some beautiful Fortnum and Mason pudding bowls, as a not-so-subtle hint that she would love a Christmas pudding in return!

Tomorrow, I'll post the Christmas pudding recipe and some photos.

Pop back soon!

Becky x