Getting back into baking

Hello!

how are you?  My day has been very calm as it was a day off from work.  Recently I've started baking again for the first time in ages so I thought I would write a little about it.  The reason I stopped baking was because I saw a nutritionist about a year ago who thought my eczema could be linked to my diet and one of the things I was told to stop eating was wheat.  Of course almost all baking involves wheat flour and I resolved to try to find recipes that were wheat free.  This proved problematic as a lot of alternative ingredients aren't easy to come by where I live and if they are they tended to be expensive.  So I just put off baking anything for the longest time which was sad as I really enjoyed it.  I have to admit that I never really cut wheat out completely although I did reduce the amount I was eating dramatically.  My eczema has since cleared up and I managed to link it to caffeine as being the trigger.  So with the caffeine out of my life I figured if I was eating a little wheat now and then anyway my little bit of it might as well be my own home baked goods!
I started off with making some delicious pancakes for pancake day, you can see them here!  They were so yummy I almost immediately decided that I wanted to make some scones afterwards.  I found a recipe on my favourite baking site and within hardly any time they were done!

You can't buy clotted cream here so I just whipped up some fresh whipped cream myself after looking up the recipe to make clotted cream (8 hours in the oven? no thank you!).  The scones really were delicious, the only thing I wasn't so keen on was the amount of vanilla essence the recipe asked for.  I didn't even add the full teaspoon and I found it very overpowering.  I didn't glaze them either basically because I'm super lazy/couldn't bring myself to waste an egg!  I did read that you can glaze them with milk instead so maybe next time I will try that.  You can find the recipe I used here.

Once these were gone I asked my fiancé what kind of cake he would like me to make and he asked for carrot cake.  I quite like carrot cake so I set about finding a recipe and collecting the ingredients.  I found a lot of the recipes quite fussy.  In the end I sort of followed a few different ones and made a simplified version.  I left out the orange juice and any nuts or raisins that a lot of the recipes called for.  I also didn't have any fancy sugar so just used castor instead of soft brown which some asked for.  Quite a few recipes had a mix of spices in them which I didn't have either so I just went for cinnamon.  It came out really well though, particularly the cream cheese icing which was delicious!  I would definitely make this again though I would be tempted to try adding some fresh orange juice to the mixture next time!  I would say that this is the closest to the recipe that I used.  I should also say that I made half the amount of the icing this recipe calls for and I thought that was plenty!

It was sooo tasty!  Since then I have also made a lemon drizzle cake which my fiancé is enjoying but  I prefer this carrot cake more.  I really fancy baking some little cupcakes next.  I'm really glad to have gotten back in to baking, there's something very satisfying and therapeutic about it!

Till next time

Twilrybirdie :)