The Gingerbread Men

This one is a quick one, and a bit of a cheat (but not really). My lovely manager at my last job got me a Gingerbread Man making kit for my 'secret' Santa, and making Gingerbread Men suddenly seemed a congruous indoor activity to the outdoor making of snowmen. Does that sentence make any sense?? The snow's gone to my head via my ears.

So anyhoo, here are my little lot.

I wish I'd had some different colours of icing, and maybe some brightly coloured, mini Smarties rather than these 'natural' 'normous ones. Yes, several of them have too many buttons, but this was the best way to cram chocolate bits on top.

Inside the cute box, in the image of a Gingerbread Man, was a packet of dry ingredients (flour, dried egg, bicarb, ground ginger...something else I can't remember), a sachet of golden syrup, a tube of black icing and those slightly odd non-Smarties.

All I had to do was tip out the dry ingredients, rub in 30g of butter 'til it resembled breadcrumbs, squeeze in the syrup, add 2tsps of cold water, squidge together, roll out, and voila: Gingerbread men!

Although this gave satisfying results in the form of baked goods, this didn't feel quite like baking for me - I quite enjoy all the measuring out and a certain amount of judging and concocting. But it was therapeutic nonetheless.

Regrettably, after my Menu For A Snowy Day, I couldn't possibly have fit a Gingerbread Man in my gob for dessert, so I'm going to munch one for breakfast and let you know how it tastes....

Report: hmm, quite tasty actually. Maybe could be a tiny bit more gingery, and perhaps have a little more chew. But it's not a bad biscuit!

Delia's iced lemon curd layer cake

Ah cake! This particular one I've made once or twice before, and I recently recreated it as a house-warming gift for two of my lovely friends who have just moved in together for the first time.

It's a great house-warming cake - gooey and filling, yet light and lemony. I can't put my finger on what specifically makes it a cake capable of warming houses and cockles, but ah it does. Maybe it's Delia's magic touch! Except it was my magic touch, because I made it. So there.

I have to say, I never thought it'd be so easy to make lemon curd. I seem to remember that when I made it once before, I accidentally got lumps of egg white in it because the water below the bowl was too hot. So I had to sieve them out and it was a bit of an eggy palaver.

However, it all went smoothly this time...apart from the fact that my all-in-one cakes never seem to rise particularly well. I don't know if it's because of my particular electric whisk or what, but for this cake it doesn't matter too much.

Oh, and in cutting the top layer horizontally in two, I daydreamed a little bit and one side of one layer was very thin, hence the crack across the top (it was too wonky a layer to go precariously in the middle).

This cake is super tasty with the lemon curd freshly spread between the layers, but the next day (or the day after!) the curd will start to absorb into the cake - which is fine. It's still moist, lemony, forgiving cake!

You can find Delia's recipe here - maybe try a lime or lemon and lime version and let me know how it goes!