*insert first six lines of last weeks post* – unfortunately they are still relevant.

This fudge, unlike the time I made white chocolate and vanilla oreo fudge, is super super easy. And it only requires 3 store cupboard essential ingredients! (not including vanilla)

It’s very chocolatey and rich, but the consistency is creamy and melt in the mouth. There’s no crystallisation of sugar here as with traditional fudge, but I’ll take a 10 minute cheats version over bubbling sugar and thermometers any day!

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Essays. Essays alllll around. For the foreseeable future and then some. It’s this kinda time of the year when exam stress kicks in and the library becomes the closest thing you have to a social life and talking about your individual work load becomes the new gossip. It’s this kinda time of the year when no one has time to faff around with fancy flavour combinations and hours of hands-on baking time because there’s always more pressing stuff to be done. It is with complete honesty that I present to you the easiest and fastest little treats in the baking sphere at the minute. Trendier than a cupcake, quicker than a cupcake and cuter than a cupcake – a baked doughnut.Yes, you need a special doughnut tin for this particular recipe but don’t worry – they’re super easy to come by and it’s probably the best way you could spend a tenner this year. So much potential for doughnut fun! This is a cake doughnut so there’s no need for any yeast, rising time or kneading… (regular readers will remember that time I broke my mixer trying to knead doughnut dough – disaster)

You can have these done and dusted within the hour.

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… Take two. I first made cookie dough brownies months and months ago but I decided to recreate them this week and share the recipe. It’s been a busy week for birthdays and I’m currently -1 cake in debt (sorry Mummy). This week’s bake doubled as a birthday bake and charity bake – two birds, one stone.. I’ll take it! My college (at uni) were having some sort of bake sale and I was asked to contribute. I was more than happy to participate, everyone loves a good charity bake! I hope the highest bidder is happy with their BBH goods! (It was a box of assorted baked doughnuts and cookie dough brownies).

Everyone loves cookie dough. BakedByH loves cookie dough and you’ve seen it featured on here many times before. I think my personal favourite was that time I baked cookie dough in to a cake. These are super sweet. Not a bit sweet, or even moderately sweet. Super. Sweet. I knew this from the last time I made them, so I set about making some not-so-sweet changes. I mean, how much can you fiddle with cookie dough brownies?! The answer is, not much if you don’t have 3000 hours. Last time I made them, I noticed that the cookie dough layer (my usual eggless and edible cookie dough) detached from the brownie layer when it was cut in to pieces. This time, I used some salted caramel sauce (that stuff again) to glaze the top of the brownie and stick the cookie dough frosting to the brownie. Yes, you read correctly. Cookie dough frosting. It’s essentially an american buttercream with brown sugar and a bit of flour in and it tastes exactly like cookie dough – except smooth! Perfect for frosting cakes and probably cookies with, though that seems slightly cannibalistic (…cookiebalistic?) Anyway, more on that later. The brownie itself complements the cookie dough nicely, but I wouldn’t say it’s the star of the show, the whole thing in its entirety is what it’s all about, my friends.

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What are my favourite things in life? Ummm let me think… Salted caramel, brown butter, Biscoff, caramelised white chocolate and cheesecake. Yep, that’s pretty much it. And that’s exactly the logic I followed when deciding what to make for my own birthday cake. It’s a big year, I was feeling the pressure from all angles. Nevertheless, I had the most wonderful weekend with my family and friends and I could not have asked for a better time. I spent the weekend with my parents and my brother in London. Although familiar, it was very lovely and we went for Afternoon Tea at Fortnum & Mason, dinner in Mayfair and wondered around central London shopping, stopping every so often for regular ‘tea breaks’. The day ended last night when I invited my closest friends round to eat cake spend some ‘quality time’ together.

Back to the cake, it’s layers of brown butter biscoff cake, sandwiched with salted caramel cheesecake filling and topped with caramelised white chocolate bark. The design is somewhat Katherine Sabbath/art deco inspired but I winged it and hoped for the best. This cake was actually an experiment, after all there’s no time like your own birthday to experiment and hope for the best! As I knew I was going to be in London from Friday, I baked the cakes on Tuesday and froze them the same day. I hoped that in the couple of hours I gave myself between returning to Lancaster from London and my friends coming round on Sunday, I would be able to put together this rather large cake. It was my first time freezing cakes and I just wanted to see if they would turn out the same. I know a lot of people do it and real bakers rave about how useful the freezer is in their day to day life but I really just wanted to test it for myself and see if the results were the same as a freshly baked cake. Well, to be honest… For a layer cake, they were better. The cakes retained their moisture and flavour but there were no messy crumbs cutting in to the cake and the slices were much cleaner – success.

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