another string to my bow...

I am not much of a baker. In fact I rarely bake (unlike my mother who baked at each week).

I don't have a particularly sweet tooth. I enjoy the odd sample of chocolate or caramel something-a-rather, love a creme brulee, inhale mum's profiteroles, and don't mind lemon tart either. However, eating sweet foods is something I rarely seek out and when I do, it rarely has the goodness of my mother's love. Consequently, the urge to prepare sweet things seldom strikes.

Without much natural inclination to do so, I have another good reason to avoid baking and that's my "oven on steroids". I have a stock standard apartment issue fan forced smeg. the writing on the dials has come away with cleaning (within the first year). The manual assures me that the seal on the smeg ovens is one of their great features and I can only concur. My oven goes on and if anything needs to be cooked on low heat, the oven is turned off when the subject is posted in it. the latent heat is just amazing, and at other times it's a fine balance switching the heat and fan on and off (not necessarily together).

Anyhow, over the past two weeks I have seen two blogs that got me intrigued and motivated to give something new a shot. The first was over at the stone soup by jules clancy - someone who I admire from afar, who's musings on dulce de leche got my mouth watering. From the comments left on her site afterwards, I am guessing that retailers had a rush on sweetened condensed milk!

Then by coincidence I stumbled across a divine picture on tastespotting.com which led me to the blogspot of "muffin" and in particular "so the dog didn't eat my homework..."

the result: me baking on a saturday afternoon... check it out!