Publish and be damned!
I've just read that it takes ten years to become an overnight success.
Mumsnet have been around for nearly thirten years now so I guess that's true.
I'm now lucky enough to be part of Mumsnet's local network and I'm editor of Mumsnet Hertfordshire.
I thought I'd blog about the journey about successes and failures and share some of the fabulous things in the wonderful home county of Herts.

My excuses for not blogging more often have been maternity leave, running a charity fundraiser, eating too much cake and watching too much bad TV.
My eight month old baby is now christened and so I didn't need to be spending so much time piping buttercream roses.

Watching a few youtube videos of icing, I'm starting to think "how hard can it be?"
The answer is of course not that hard.
As long as you have a the right ingredients, the necessary equipment in a large cool kitchen free of children.
My kitchen is quite small, VERY hot (= melting, sweaty icing, nice)
My kitchen also usually features a fleet of small toy diggers and my three year old son who likes to mainline sugar whenever possible.
Hence, generally when I bake during the daytime, I go for the speed-iced rustic look.
I made these teeny tiny fairy cakes alongside some for sports day at Playgroup.
Which got cancelled thanks to the lovely British weather.
So I'll be making them again this Thursday.

Hello and welcome...

This is not my first foray into blogging but I'm hoping I'll be more prolific this time.
Given it's the 30th January and it was my New Year's Resolution to blog more often I'm not holding my breath!

Anyway, today, I made muffins. Not red velvet cupcakes as I'd hoped as the village shop doesn't sell red food colouring (blue, green and yellow but not red) but carrot and raisin muffins, my own recipe based on one of Nigella's.

I also tried my hand at piping for the first time. The cream cheese buttercream didn't really work - possibly because I used fondant sugar in it and also because I was too impatient to use my hand-rolled piping bag (thank you BBC Good Food videos)

I also tried using modelling fondant as I'm a big Cake Boss fan and managed a few passable roses and a couple of okay carrots- which looked a little like dismembered fingers until I put the green leafy "stalks" on them!

Anyway. Here they are. More domestic delights to come.