January
The month that lasts three times longer than any other month. After all the bright lights and festivities of December it's the month equivalent of the lights coming on at the end of a club night. I took photos, made biscuits and drew things, so not all bad.
The moon!
I occasionally buy Viennese Swirls, either the Mr Kipling or Marks and Spencer ones. They're nice, but a bit sweet and don't keep too well. I've learned from making other biscuits myself that I don't eat as many in one go and one batch keeps for ages (in a ziploc, in the fridge) because I'll have one now and again. Viennese swirls seemed like they'd be difficult to make mainly because they look a bit fancy. I'd have to get a piping bag!
I used this recipe. I changed the ingredients for the buttercream filling though, reducing the sugar by half. Seriously, it doesn't need to be that sweet. It's hard to reduce sugar in the biscuit itself because sugar is structural, but the filling… you could probably remove the sugar entirely and add more vanilla.
The first batch tasted right, but didn't look the part because the 'reusable' silicone piping bag split immediately so I made plain round biscuits. While the biscuits were baking I found a small fabric bag I'd put in a stupid place and thought I'd lost so used that for the filling.
The second batch I bought a bigger fabric piping bag and that worked perfectly. The third batch I tried making chocolate ones and they were good. The third batch I didn't have enough vanilla for the filling so used almond extract and cherry jam so they're kind of bakewell flavoured. All good and it was fun to experiment, but I'll stick to the classic flavours in future.
I got a bellows adapter for my DSLR so that I could take very close-up macro photos. The ones above were taken with a manual 1:1.2 lens in full sunlight. You need a lot of light for these things.
I drew a comic page about the jackdaws in the garden and how they seemingly hate unripe cherries. I put it up as its own post here: Jackdaw Cherry Vendetta.
