Vegan Gingerbread Christmas Tree

For Christmas I thought I should make some kind of contribution towards the spread and, finding a set of star cookie cutters in graduating sizes, decided to take an edible Christmas tree. 

 

I wanted to go with the festive flavours of ginger, cloves, and cinnamon and found a gingerbread recipe from theppk.com. 

I followed the recipe almost to the letter.  I was a little concerned about using black molasses as I thought the taste might come out too strong, so for half the molassess I substituted golden syrup,

I spent ages trying to get enough starts cut out.  Initially the dough was too sticky and kept breaking when I tried to move my cut-out shapes onto the baking sheets, so I worked in some more flour.

I decorated them with a simple icing made of icing sugar mixed with a couple of teaspoons of cool water to produce a thick fluid that could be piped from a bag.

Result: pretty good cookies.  For my own taste, they could have done with more spice so next time I'll put another teaspoon of ginger in and maybe some more cinnamon.  I'll probabably be brave with the molasses next time too.

Carrot Cake

I decided to use up the carrots I'd had sitting in my salad drawer for some time, and what better way than to make cupcakes?


I used the Carrot Cake recipe from VCTOTW with no substitutions.  


This recipe also has raisins and walnuts, and is flavoured with cinnamon, so isn't quite what I'd call a carrot cake.   It's more of a spice, fruit and nut cake.  They turned out tasty but slightly confusing texture-wise.  I might omit the walnuts next time.







I was recently given a flower nail and a rose petal nozzle as an early Christmas gift by Sour Cherry , so I excitedly tried making flowers using orange butter cream.  However, I again failed to make icing of the right consistency for piping so my flowers quickly sank.  One day I will get this licked.  It may take me several more batches of cupcakes to get there...