Well, here goes

I love baking.  I love everything about baking.  I am fond of baking trays, I get excited by cute measuring spoons, I crave cake tins in every shape and size.  I don't know much about science but I know what I like, and what I like is to take simple ingredients, mess them about a bit, wang them in the oven and have some miraculous baked item appear.  My idea of heaven is good stuff on the radio, nobody in the house and a whole afternoon to work through different recipes.  Baking relaxes me and the only downside is that the moment I have finished one recipe I want to start the next.  

I don't have a particularly sweet tooth and once I have had a quick taste of what I have baked to see if it worked I have little interest in eating more.  I have no doubt that some killjoy psychologist would have a field day with that but I can live with it.

At Christmas 2007 I wanted to make cup cakes for friends as gifts.  I looked in all my recipe books, I haunted bookshops, but found little to inspire me.  Through the joy of Google I found a little site with a simple vanilla cup cake recipe on it.  Something about the way it was written, the context it was in, made it clear that this was the recipe of a home baker with heart.  And so it proved - the best cup cake recipe I have ever tried, which also makes a wonderful Victoria sponge.  This was particularly pleasing as Victoria sponge has been one of my recurring failures.  I know all the theory for why a sponge cake would be too thin, would crack, would shrink away from the sides, would sink in the middle, would cook unevenly.  Knowing the theory and adjusting accordingly did not stop any of these things happening, occasionally and memorably all at the same time.

Having cracked the sponge, my other two problem areas are also kitchen classics.  Scones and shortbread.  I suck at both.  I keep coming back to them and trying different recipes, different techniques, different everythings but to no avail.  I am determined to master them both, but along the way to just carry on trying new recipes for all sorts of other things and to keep baking for the love of it.

I'm not a decorator and I'm too clumsy to be great at detail.  Straightforward classic baking of cookies and tarts, fruit cakes and tea breads, cheesecakes and brownies, tray bakes and shortcakes.

Last weekend, on a whim, I made a pineapple upside down cake as a last minute pudding for my father-in-law.  The last time I made one of those I must have been 13 and in home economics class.  This has got me on a nostalgia trip and after a similar time lag of 20+ years I'm going to make a Swiss roll.  This is a bigger deal than it may sound given my traditional problems with sponge cakes and of course the terrors of rolling the thing up.  So I'm off for a happy hour of looking at the various recipes I have before plunging once more into the mix.

At this moment in time I have no idea whether this blog is going to be something I stick to or not.  My intention is to keep a record for myself of which recipes I have tried, which I have loved, what has gone hideously wrong and what has been fixed.  I am unlikely to record everything I bake and may not get any further than this first post.  Either way, I'll be baking, so I for one will be happy.