been travelling: Milan

been baking: Cupcakes

My sister Stacey makes just about the best cupcakes ever.  She has spent far too much time perfecting the method and by now she's a seasoned pro.  Apparently it's all in the weighing.

The Cake
150g caster sugar 
150g butter
150g eggs (yes, she weighs them)
150g self-raising flour 
2 tsp vanilla extract
3 tsp milk

Cream the butter and the sugar, then beat in the eggs one at a time.  Add the vanilla and give the mixture an extra blitz until smooth.  Finally sift in the flour and gently fold in with a spatula.  Now weigh out 50g into each cupcake case and put into a pre-heated oven for about 20 minutes.  

The Icing
200g icing sugar
100g unsalted butter
1 tsp vanilla extract
optional food colouring

Cream the butter and vanilla until thick but spreadable and pipe over the cooled cakes.  

been drinking: Mulled Wine at Kaffibarinn

Kaffibarinn

been craving: tassels

Tassels make everything better

1. Necklace. 2. Tassel Cake Topper 3. Tassel Garland. 4. Tasseled Card Holder. 5.Confetti Balloon. 6. Tasseled Bracelet

been travelling: Reykjavik

been baking: Plain Scones

There are hundreds of different flavoured scones to experiment with; chocolate orange, cheese, apple and my usual fail-safe buttermilk, but sometimes like yesterday, when the rain poured down non-stop and the sky never quite lightened, only a big butter scone smothered in clotted cream and strawberry jam will do.

The Scone
225g self-raising flour
1 1/2 tbsp caster sugar
50g softened salty butter
120ml milk
pinch of salt

Sift the flour into a bowl and mix in the sugar and salt before adding the butter. With your hands rub the mixture together until it looks like breadcrumbs. Using a butter knife gradually mix in the milk to make a dough, you might not need to use all of the milk but if the mixture is looking dry don't worry about adding extra milk. It's worth using a knife to mix the dough to give the scone a crumbly texture when it's baked.

Lightly dust a rolling pin and baking surface with flour and roll out a wedge of dough to roughly 2cm thick. Cut out the scone shapes, you should get about six scones out of the dough. Brush a little milk over the top of the scones and bake for 10-15 minutes. Scones harden quickly when cooled so it's best to eat them while they are warm.

been seeing: Mojo

Two performances really stand out in Mojo (Harold Pinter, 3rd February); Daniel Mays as smart, cocksure cockney Potts, juggling bravado and twitchy fear and Ben Whishaw's strange, fidgety and increasingly pained Baby.  Mojo skittle-skattles with Jez Butterworth's now signature lyrical dialogue and Ian Rickson's direction has echoes of Jerusalem with the loud, sudden opening and closing of acts that invoke a seedy and violent 1950s Soho.  The language is its strength; hypnotic, it sings, bouncing around the stage, passed on from one person to the next in a non-stop rally of bickering, blame and outright fights.