Bakeoff this week was audience choice week, so I let my mother have full responsability on choosing the bake for Saturday. Of course she landed on apple crumble, one small issue though. I don't like fruit. Everytime I have eaten or baked an apple crumble in the past, I only ate the crumble. This time, I wanted to change that.

Oh my goodness crumble so yummy. Before we put it in the oven, ma and I kept joking about wanting to eat the raw crumble...but I mean my god was it tasty, and I couldn't guarrentee my enjoyment of it once baked. This crumble recipe was different from our usual one, but we're probably going to stick with it after those reactions. My mum's partner said it was the best crumble he'd ever had, multiple times. Doesn't mean anything to me though because he's irrelevant. But I mean, I ate it ALL. I even wanted MORE. I don't think I have ever enjoyed eating apple so much in my life. It was the perfect punch of flavour to the delicious crumble. I love it so much I might make it more.

So these were a hot mess. The idea was something I had for a few weeks by this point. A vanilla cupcake with a swirl of buttercream on top, decorated with colourful sprinkles and a flake. The flake was the part that had my mother raise her eyebrow at me, but my idea was that it'd be like ice cream...but cake. Yum!

So the first hiccup was there was no flakes in the Co-Op. No biggie, I just substituted in a Twirl. The second hiccup...WHERE THE FRESH FISH DID MY PIPING TIPS GO BROOOOOOOOTHER. Yeah so I actually lost my mind searching my entire house multiple times for these tips, to no success. Ok, no biggie, they'll just look a little more basic. Yeah so my homemade icing bag actually wanted me dead. Turns out I'm STUPID and forgot you have to twist the top of icing bags oh my god I'm actually so mad at myself for that one. I genuinely think if I remembered that it would have gone fine. Oh yeah, and the final hiccup? My sprinkles expired. They tasted like straight soap. Genuinely gave me a headache.

But guess what, after I genuinely humiliated myself with the decorating of these cupcakes, and making the grandest mess of buttercream over my kitchen island, my mum was a massive fan? Okay, she didn't like the Twirl, but she would not stop letting me know how delicious the cake recipe was. Like, every single time we were eating the cupcakes or even talking about them, she would not stop telling me how tasty the cake was. Top ten biggest ego boosts.

I WAS CRAVING FOX'S CRUNCH CREAMS SO BAD FOR LIKE A MONTH STRAIGHT IT WAS DRIVING ME UP THE BLOODY WALL OH MY GOD. So I took it upon myself to try and bake them, duh. This was also my first time making oat biscuits, and oh my golly I'm glad I have that recipe now they are GOOD.

These were. not meant to be so big. I don't know why they spread so much but next time I will try and prevent them from doing so. Anyways so these tasted exactly like crunch creams. What is up with that. Why did they taste perfect. Why were they so good, huh? I can still taste them now...

Next time I will definately find out how to prevent this spreading, because I believe it messed up the biscuit to buttercream ratio. I doubled up the filling and yet I still feel like there could have been more. Oh my...imagine how divine they would have been perfectly sized...ohmy...

Whoops...Got influenced by Pinterest. These are chocolate chunk cookies (using my personal chocolate chip cookie recipe) but with marshmallows melted in. Off the bat, things I would have changed about this bake would be using more chocolate and cutting it into smaller chunks, as well as using one or two more marshmallows (as I used small marshmallows rather than big marshmallows because I wanted them in my hot chocolate LOL!).

My god were these a HIT. Like...I have never been complimented so much in my life. This particular cookie recipe of mine is PERFECT. The most insane crunch to chew ratio that makes Subway cookies look mediocre, as well as such a biblically accurate taste. I can't wait to make so many cookies gosh I love cookies.

I remember a time I didn't like marshmallows........... :,)

This was the result of bakeoff. This will become a theme with my bakes. Long story short, they made coffee and walnut cake on bakeoff, which not only sounds cozy and autumnal but also sent my mother into excitement because she LOVES coffee and walnut cake. Since I wanted to bake with my mother on this weekend, I decided we should do something walnut flavoured. No coffee though, I hate coffee. I landed on muffins because mmmmmmmmmmmmm muffins, and after a lot of research I came across a recipe for a walnut and cinnamon muffin.

The muffins themself had a lovely savoury hint, I guess this is because some people eat muffins for breakfast... They were a little dry, but I can imagine them going SO hard with a hot chocolate.

This was actually my first time eating walnuts, so that's new. I sprinkles some walnuts on top of the muffins once they were baked since we had some left over, although in hindsight I probably should have done that before baking... Lol. These were tasty!! The chud stepbrother didn't really want them but that's because he's a chud who only likes things if they're drowned in sugar. Cool.

I have a story behind this particular brownie recipe. Throwback to when I was in year 10 of secondary school, my form tutor just so happened to be a food tech teacher, so every now and then she'd present us with freshly baked treats for form! One of the first treats we were met with was...brownies. When I tell you my eyes widenned when I took that first bite. They were warm and gooey on the inside, and still perfectly crisp and crackley on the outside. I genuinely, to this day, think those are the best brownies I have ever eaten in my life. Obviously my form made this known, and the more we were gifted these brownies the bigger the obsession became. At the end of the year, our tutor was leaving to work at another school, and as a parting gift...she emailed us the recipe for the brownies. To this day, I have this recipe lovingly written down in my recipe book, and whenever I bake brownies it will always be those brownies.

These brownies in particular were quite scrumptious! Maybe like an extra minute in the oven, but in all fairness they were still rather perfect. Unfortunately, I cut them a bit small, which led to us having too many. It's okay though I volunteered to eat the last two that weren't as tasty as they had been earlier in the week.

It all started with the cinnamon cookies. Long story short, I have a tradition of putting on 'halloween/fall tiktok compilations' in the background during autumn. This helps me not dwell on the fact that autumn is a blinkin miserable season in England, which also happens to mark the end of my all time favourite season, summer. These tiktok compilations seemed to have some kind of chokehold on me this year, as I immediately went into mania over baking. What better to represent the start of autumn than some cinnamon cookies?

I remember a time I thought I didn't like cinnamon. That's because my first impression of the flavour was in some awful pancakes I made over a fire in the woods when I was like 6. Well times have changed and I am OBSESSED with cinnamon, especially cinnamon rolls OOOOOOOH MY GOSH. Anyways, believe it or not but I don't find myself ever making cookies? I make biscuits ALL THE TIME but never traditional cookies, so I was excited to see how these would turn out. They were a nice consistency, although I think they could have done with an extra minute or two in the oven. I tend to accidentally underbake things because I'm impatient and anxious lol.

Overall, these were incredibly soft and chewy, with a little crunch on the outside. The cinnamon was delicious, however I did want to cover the cookies in cinnamon sugar, which was...flawed. I rolled the dough balls in a mixture of ground cinnamon and icing sugar before baking, which was a mistake as I should have used granulated sugar (which in my defense I didn't even know was a thing until recently). I also probably should have sprinkled more on after baking, as it didn't really get the effect I wanted in the end.