Smarties cookies

It has taken me years to perfect cookies, whilst they are very simple and only require a few ingredients, everyone knows they need to be gooey on the inside and crunchy on the outside. This BBC Food recipe does exactly that.

First cream together 125g of butter with 100g of light brown sugar and 125g of caster sugar. Once combined, add an egg and 1 tsp of vanilla essence. 

Then add 225g of self raising flour and a pinch of salt. The recipe suggests adding chocolate chips but smarties look and taste a lot better!

Then make walnut-sized balls and place them on a greased baking tray, make sure you leave enough room for them to expand to prevent them from making one giant cookie.

Place in the oven at 180°C for between 7-10 minutes depending on how gooey you want them to be in the middle.

These are definitely best eaten the minute they come out of the oven!

Sugar Mice

This was my first attempt at making real sweets (other than fudge a few years which went spectacularly wrong) and they were really fun to do.

Unfortunately I have a new obsession with a weekly baking magazine (Something Sweet) that is full of recipes and exciting things, including; sugar mice moulds with string tails, a truffle box and mini cupcake cases. This is where the idea to make the mice came from. 

I was surprised at how little is needed to make sugar mice, apart from the mould and tails (which if you purchase the magazine, will come free with it), it only requires fondant icing (200g), pink food colouring (but only if you want to make pink mice), black icing and water. 

To get started chop up the fondant icing by cutting the block into slices, then into strips and finally into cubes. Try to make sure these are all a similar size so that they melt at the same time. Then place them in a pan with 1 and 1/2 tbsp of water. 

Once all the fondant has melted (at this point I separated it into two separate pans to add pink food colouring to one), bring it to a rolling boil and then turn it back down to allow it to simmer for a two minutes before taking it off the heat and pouring it straight into the moulds (you need to be quick to do this to make sure it doesn't start to set first). 

Immediately after pouring it into the moulds, twist each piece of string into the mouse. Allow them to set for about two hours, before lightly pushing the bottom of the mould to pop them out. These then need to rest over night (24 hours) to make sure they have dried out completely.

Once they have, you can draw on their eyes (and nose if you wish). I used a black icing pen for this but you could also use icing sugar and add a tiny bit of black food colouring to it. Then apply it with a very thin point, the only thing I could find (in a house of four girls) was a hair grip. 

A final top tip would be to fill the moulds right up to the top...as you can see on the far right one mouse lost his nose because of it.

And then they're ready to eat!