Baking

Lately I seem to be in constant need of snacks, so on Sunday I thought I'd make a couple of things to make a (healthier??) change from crisps and shop-bought cookies. Aided by my trusty assistant, I make some oatmeal raisin cookies and a carrot cake.

K enjoyed smelling the cinnamon. When we were staying with Mum and Dad in August, he would line up all the spice jars on the kitchen floor and walk round with the Mixed Spice, offering it to everyone to smell.

He did a good job mixing. The recipe for the oatmeal cookies is here, but I found it originally on Salt and Chocolate, one of my favourite blogs. The only thing I did differently was to use baking powder instead of baking soda (no-one seemed to notice) and to leave out the nuts.

The carrot cake recipe is this one. As I was making it the amount of sugar seemed huge; I even went back to the website to check that I'd copied it down correctly. I cut it down to just over 300g but could have reduced it even more I think. Other than that I followed the recipe as it is, oh, except that I left out the bicarb. Notice a pattern here? Didn't bother with the topping either. I'm sure it would have been lovely but this was supposed to be a somewhat healthy snack, remember?

One of the great things about both of these recipes is that they only use very basic ingredients, easy to find here in Japan (apart from the baking soda and bicarb...). I'm always on the lookout for simple recipes that don't use golden syrup, or treacle, or crushed pineapple or any of those things which are so hard to come by here. Let me know if you have any, especially if the measurements are in grams or ounces. Why do American recipes always list things by the cup? How exactly do you measure a cup of butter??

And in other baking (?) news, and to see if people really bother to read to the bottom of my posts, I have a bun in the oven myself. Yes, K will be getting a little brother or sister next spring. That helps to explain the urge for snacks, and the lack of energy and enthusiasm for doing anything earlier this month. I'm feeling much better now though, and the cooler weather helps too, so I'm hoping I'll be able to Get More Things Done from now on.