Appliances Online – Bangers & Mash

I’ve had the honour of being asked to write guest posts for a number of other food blogs recently. So I thought you might like to see what I’ve been up to and to take a look around their excellent blogs at the same time.

At the end of October, the insanely talented Thinly Spread featured my Thyme for Soup guest post. I shared a car with Chris from Thinly Spread to get to the MAD Blog Awards in September, and I used those hours to pick her poor brain raw on anything and everything about blogging. If there’s anything you want to know about blogging, Chris is your woman!

I love Thinly Spread. It’s a lovely collection of delicious vegetarian recipes the whole family will love, ingenious arts and craft activities, as well as gardening projects and advice, all of which Chris posts when she’s not got her hands full with her four gorgeous children.

Last month my Simple Fish Pie was featured on a fabulous family food blog I’ve only recently discovered called The Good Stuff.

The Good Stuff is written by two dads, Matt and Corpy, who like me live in the wonderful West Country. The blog charts their cooking adventures with their young kids, which they describe as a “swap shop for new parents with a passion for good, healthy food” – the blog that is, not their kids!

And finally, my Cooking with the Kids post was one of the first to feature on the new Appliances Online blog, which aims to build a community of people interested in all things interior, crafty, family orientated, foodie and fun. In this post I give some tips on how to involve your children in the kitchen so that you hopefully don’t lose your mind in the process, as cooking with children can sometimes be a rather stressful affair! Or is that just me and my kids?

So there you go. I’ll be back soon with a recipe on my own blog and in the meantime, if you’re on Facebook, perhaps you might want to head over to my new(ish) page for Bangers & Mash? See you soon!

In my goody bag from the MAD Blog Awards I was intrigued to find a mysterious jar containing, well… exactly what I wasn’t sure. To find out more I had to scan the little QR code on the lid and in an instant I was taken to the new Appliances Online blog, which explained all…

The jar contained all the dry ingredients needed to bake some delicious cakes and take part in their Cakes Win Prizes contest. As you know, I’m a bit of a sucker for a competition, so I just had to enter.

The dry ingredients contained in the jar were:

65g caster sugar
60g light soft brown sugar
125g self raising flour
25g chocolate chips

I simply popped all this in a large mixing bowl and combined with:

1 tsp vanilla extract
2 medium eggs
125g soft butter
2 tbsp milk

And hey presto! There was my cake mixture. This was spooned into a fairy cake tray lined with 12 cases and baked in an oven preheated to 180°C/Gas 4 for about 15 minutes.

Once the cakes were cool, Miss Bangers and Miss Mash helped me to decorate them. Now I know it’s still a little way off, but my girls are already getting into the Halloween mood, so that was the theme for our decorations.

For the white icing, I sifted 150g icing sugar into a small bowl and added a tablespoon of water. This was mixed together, adding a touch more water as necessary, to form a thick smooth paste. We used coloured icing pens to draw on our spooky creations.

A pumpkin by Miss Bangers (the 4-year-old)

A spider and its web by me, the 37-year-old!

And so I’m linking this post to the competition page on the Appliances Online blog. Do pop over there to check out all the other fantastic creations bloggers have been making with the contents of their jars!