Baking Bonanza and the Pudding Flavoured Lip Balm!

As you may, or may not know from my many Tweets, I have a little daughter who has just turned six months old. I returned to work last week, and my goodness, what a shock to the system it was! I think I fell asleep at half eight in the evening after my first day back! However, I had great fun in making some baked goods for my friends at work, all of which went down well!

Have you seen advertised on television the new serial magazine 'Cake Decorating'? It is AMAZING. As soon as I saw it advertised, I just knew I would end up subscribing. It's a weekly publication, and every week there are new techniques to learn and recipes to try. The best of it is, is that the tools required come with the magazine! Part one came with some pink butterfly cookie cutters, so I made these:

'Butter'fly Cookies!

These were truly delicious, lovely and crispy. They didn't last very long....

I then made this cake for my lovely gals at work, following another recipe in the Cake Decorating magazine:

'Bad Boy' Chocolate Sponge Cake

Again, this was a simple to follow recipe with great results! The best thing happened too: Cadbury UK retweeted this picture of my cake, so all their 14,000+ followers could have seen MY cake! Scary! The girls at work loved it too, which is always good :)

And finally, I cooked a lovely dessert for me and Mr Claw the other week:



A lovely potted Creme Brulee. Although I will come clean, this was bought from M&S and only cooked with my fair hands! Tee hee. It was still gorgeous though- vanilla-ry and sugary sweet heaven.

Unlike this!:

A friend of mine asked me if I'd seen any of these floating around in my local high street. Apparently they were a Limited Edition last year and that there were increasingly difficult to find (the phrase 'Hen's Teeth' cropped up.) I walked into my local Sainsurys on the hunt of these elusive Lip Therapies, and there was about four left. So I picked one up for my friend and one for me. Now, looking at the packaging, you're probably thinking the same as what I did. It's cute. The font and the cracked sugar gives the tin a vintage feel, and the words 'Limited Edition' bring out my collector frenzy.

What's inside is just the normal Vaseline lip therapy with... a digusting chemical smell. It smells absolutely NOTHING like my gorgeous vanilla creme brulee! A serious disappointment. My friend them told me that these tins were being sold on eBay for double their RRP! Right Royal Ripoff, say I!

Have you tried this, or any of the other Vaseline lip therapies?