Pizza party!

Last weekend we had our family and friends around and had an utterly awesome pizza party! Yes, we've finally got THE pizza oven in our garden! (we talked about this even before we had the house...)

As a baker I couldn't have been more excited to have everyone around for something floury and includes a lot of dough and baking. ;D

I was so looking forward to this that the day before and the morning before everyone arrived I was most of the time in the kitchen preparing the pizza dough, cakes, buns, pastries... I loved it.. I love doing multiple bakes and preps. It makes my blood go 'Boom Boom!';)

After all the preps, it was time to light the oven, which was Andy's job, and before I knew the first pizza was ready even though there were only few guests... Then, more people arrived. More pizzas were made... While I was busy chasing Lana, chatting to friends, everyone got involved making their own pizzas (some with unique toppings, others with classic stuff). In the end I didn't need to do any rolling or anything! I was just tasting every one's pizza. Yum yum yum...

I also made plenty of other nibbles...

I made mini buns for mini sliders. These are, of course, made from my trusted guy, Banana yeast starter, and they went down very well. I honestly believe a good bun makes all the difference...

There were some mini cakes. Jam donut muffins, chocolate cake, and carrot cake, chestnut cake. And an all time classic, very popular cream puffs, which were filled with custard and fresh cream. :)

Then there were macarons again... This time I made green tea ones and filled with sweet chustnuts cream. This macarons were probably my favourite of all the things I made for that day...

I was so busy enjoying myself that I forgot to take pictures of other stuff but, there were other food like vegetarian sausage rolls, another sourdough bread (milk and honey loaf), and palmier biscuits (they were addictive too...)

And also special thanks to Esther, who brought a lovely chocolate. ;) (I forgot to take a photo;(...)

Big thanks to everyone who came around and made our pizza party such a fun time. It was simply awesome. xxx ;D

Gluten-free Bakewell tart

I've made gluten-free cakes and biscuits before but I'd never used what-so called gluten-free flour until now... However, the other week Andy bought me a bag of gluten-free flour (I got Doves Farm plain white flour), and said to me that one of his colleagues was gluten intolerant and hadn't been tasting my cakes that I bake for him to bring in almost every Monday...

So, that's how I came to try gluten-free flour for the first time. I made a sweet pastry with it for my Bakewell tart. I used the gluten-free flour the same way as I do with usual plain flour. When I was preparing the pastry, I felt it was a little wetter than normal, and it was a bit too soft to roll it out so instead I flattened it by pressing on to the prepared tart tin directly, which indeed worked very well. ;D

As the filling of Bakewell tart doesn't have any flour in it, I didn't need to worry about that part.

The result of my first gluten-free tart? It was a great success! The gluten-free pastry was really nice. The more crumbly texture reminded me of shortbread. (Maybe it's because the Doves Farm flour has rice flour in it...) The almond filling was sweet and moist, went really well with the pastry.

I got a good feedback from Andy's colleagues too, and most importantly everyone in the office could have a piece. ;) I can definitely see this gluten-free flour appearing more often in my cakes and pastries. ;D