h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Cheating again - it's 20 to midnight in Hawaii. Disqualify me, if you dare!

Last night I was slaving away in the kitchen catching up on all the baking I intended to do on Tuesday, but was too ill to do.

I got really organised and weighed out all the ingredients and put them together on trays for each item. Well, that was the idea. Later on, I got a bit confused and wasn't sure which bowl of flour was for which.. I also had to convert the recipes from ounces to grams and then multiply by 2 or 3 because I was making huge batches. Not easy when you're recovering from a cold.

I made shortbread - easy to make, but not so easy to get the baking right. Because I spent a long time kneading it, the oven had plenty of time to heat up, so maybe that's why it worked out quite well. The shortbread was evenly golden and done in the time given in the recipe - normally everything seems to take at least half an hour longer than prescribed in my oven! That takes 3/4 hour to bake, so I put that in first - a whole baking tray. (A whole cowful of butter went into that)

Then I made flapjacks - the recipe said 30-35 mins. That worked out OK, but I spread the mixture a little thin, so especially the ones at the edges were a little hard, dark and crispy rather than the flapjacks you get in cosy cafés. Still, the Germans haven't seen flapjacks so they can't know that.

Then I made a large tray of something my cookbook calls "Date Crunchies" - a shortbread-type mixture, using semolina, with a layer of date mixture in the middle. Very filling!

(Actually, I always use semolina in my shortbread, because the usual rice flour was impossible to get here in Germany. Now I've finally found rice flour, I find this recipe which uses semolina.

Then I made some ginger nuts (I'm not going to go all PC and call them ginger biscuits) which are so easy to do and turn out just like bought ones, except they are not all uniform size.

Didn't even get to bed later for all that work, although I couldn't tidy up as I had to leave everything spread around the kitchen to cool.

*in awe of all the baking*

[Amy P]