Some baking

We have morning teas at work every couple of weeks I guess - birthdays, farewell parties and occasionally a charity fundraiser.  I like to take different things each time, and recently I've had a couple of successes.

These are my simple butter cookies (which I will blog about in more detail in the future).  The interesting feature of these really is the decoration.

I rolled out the biscuit dough and cut big circles, then cut little circles from the middle - I think these little holes were made with the big end of piping tips. 

I made thick icing sugar glaze (icing sugar and a little milk + food colouring for pink/+ cocoa for chocolate) and spread it all over then decorated with sprinkles and mini chocolate bits.

I found the idea at a blog called the decorated cookie - have a look at the spectacular biscuits here, way more complicated than mine, and involved piping and then flooding cookies before sprinkles.

More recently I made chocolate caramel cups, which came from Good Taste magazine December 2009.

To start, you need to melt 150 grams of chocolate (I prefer dark) and then paint a thick, even layer on the inside of foil cups.  Leave the foil cups upside down on a cake cooling rack to set for 20 minutes.

Then melt 80 grams of mars bar with 1/3 cup pouring cream in a small saucepan over a low heat.  Once the mars bar has melted in take the pan off the heat and let it cool and set for up to 10 minutes.  Then pour it into each cup and top with more melted chocolate (which you may have to re-melt).

You can see that we don't own the appropriate paint brush to make these chocolates, so we used clean cotton buds - worked perfectly!