Cake Decorating-Marbled Honey & Chocolate Cake

I´ve always loved baking ever since I used to help my Gran, who´s a great cook, when I was a little girl. Although my passion for baking has increased, I still have a lot to learn especially when it comes to the decorating part!! I usually make cakes for my boyfriend´s birthday and my friend´s birthday but usually either I haven´t made enough icing or it doesn´t turn out very smooth so I am particularly proud of my latest cake as it´s the prettiest cake I´ve ever decorated!

I chose to make a Marbled Honey & Chocolate cake but I haven´t included the recipe as it was from one of my recipe books "Chocolate Cakes & Slices" and I followed the recipe to the letter. The resulting cake though was very tasty and really moist. Armed with my new gigantic sized spatula, I set to work icing the cake with a chocolate honey flavoured icing, which as you can see turned out pretty smooth for once!

This is the before picture. I found some sugar stars and a pink icing pen (I think I would rethink the pink icing on chocolate next time-alhough the icing pens only came in the choice of two colours: pink or chocolate!)in the supermarket, which I thought would jazz up the cake and make it look prettier. I placed the stars around the outer edge of the cake alternately, white, yellow, white, yellow, then using the icing pen wrote the message, which was a little splotchy but not too bad for a beginner!Here´s the cake after I´d finished decorating it! It was a belated cake for my friend´s 30th birthday!

Pork Stroganoff

(Just added a photo to this post after making this dish again!)

I´d taken a pork fillet/escalope out which had been left over and was at a bit of a loss as to what to do with it seeing as I was only cooking for myself. In the end, I decided to use up some of my leftovers and although I wouldn´t say that I´m a very creative cook, I came up with this pork stroganoff dish without using a recipe,which turned out to be rather delish, even if I do say so myself! Unfortunately, I didn´t get a photo of it as I was so hungry that it hardly lasted two minutes on the plate before I had wolfed it down! This is roughly what I did!

Ingredients (Serves 1)

1 small pork fillet/escalope (it was so small I actually added the green pepper to bulk out the meal and add more veggies to the meal)

1 small onion or 1/2 a medium onion, chopped

1/4 green pepper, chopped

3 small mushrooms, sliced

1 tbsp plain flour

1/4 cup cream ( the remainder in my case)

salt & pepper to taste

1/4 cup of cider (also left over from other pork recipes)

olive oil or butter

Method

1. Chop pork fillet into thin slices.

2. Fry onion, mushrooms and green pepper till tender.

3. Add pork & season with salt & pepper and fry till browned.

4. Mix flour and cream together.

5. Add cream and the cider and cook till sauce thickens and pork is cooked through, about 5-10mins.

6. Serve with pasta or rice.

If the sauce reduces too much, add a little more cream (or milk in my case as I didn´t have any more cream). If anyone decides to make this recipe, I´d love to hear your feedback and any suggestions of how to improve it & make it even more tasty!