I have been living my lady of the house fantasy lately and gotten into baking and confectionery again. I enjoy making sweet stuff on my days off and I am a huge fan of chocolate, so most of the cakes I make have chocolate in them. Recently, I discovered a group on Facebook where two professional bakers/confectioners do live bake-alongs (which you can obviously also watch later).
The most recent FB live was on making chocolate truffles:
I had quite a bit of chocolate left, as well as lots of dried berries, so I used a recipe that was shared by one of the ladies in the group over Christmas and baked this chocolate cake:
And in the lead-up to Christmas, they had a paid webinar on making orange-flavoured gingerbread cookies and decorating them. I have made my own gingerbread dough for the past several years (using a recipe that my Southern memaw got from the memaw next door (fun fact: I actually found out over New Year's when I got my hands on memaw's notebook that she had like five or six recipes and was always looking for the best one)), but I hadn't tried using orange paste in the dough before, and I also hadn't found the perfect way to make royal icing for decorating, so I was pretty intrigued and decided to go for it. I made one batch to take to work and the other batch for my family just before Christmas. Both got eaten very quickly :-)
Here's how they turned out:
One of the ladies also wrote a book on making eclairs and macarons, which was voted the best cookbook of the year last year. My plan for this weekend is to make chocolate-glazed eclairs with creme patissiere :-)
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