Sweet treats and paying debts

Ok, so I'm nearly done for today.  I swear I don't usually make this much in one day; this is the effect that Christmas has on me.

So, I'm planning on making biscotti for part of the Christmas packages.  I found a rather excellent recipe on the BBC good food website which I planned on adapting slightly.  I am excited about this for two reasons.  The first is that I love biscotti, the second is that you can freeze this recipe half way through baking.  This means that I can freeze half and fully bake the rest to take to work and test on the boys there.  Win.

If it turns out ok, I'll need to make some more before Christmas, and then re-bake the frozen half, but it wasn't a particularly taxing recipe and I think looks fairly impressive.

I actually stuck fairly strictly to the recipe, except I cheated slightly by flinging everything in the food processor rather than rubbing it in by hand.  I also switched out the cherries for some cranberries.


Then comes the paying debt part of the post.  I have a big conference coming up at work next week, it's been thrown together at fairly short notice and further complicated by my boss being off work last week.  Finance have pulled me out of a hole by doing an extra payment run to get all my suppliers paid in time.  So to say thank you, I've knocked together some caramel cupcakes for them.

I've used a Hummingbird bakery recipe. I love the Hummingbird bakery cookbooks, I wish I was better at making up recipes rather than following other peoples.  Again, I cheated slightly by flinging everything in the food processor.

No laughing at my ancient food processor.  My Grandpa gave it to my Granny many years ago, it's been around longer than I have and I can't bear to throw it out however much I would like a brightly coloured Kitchenaid mixer.

Things were going swimmingly well, until it transpired that I had run out of icing sugar.  Something is always going to go wrong at this time in the day for me.  A quick trip the shop later and I'm all done.  I particularly enjoyed decorating these with the *ahem* artistic squiggles of caramel.  I couldn't find my piping bag, so I used a plastic freezer bag with the corner snipped off.  It shows.