Domestic Goddess in Training: month one - January

As regular readers will know, I’m no stranger to baking having been attached to a wooden spoon before I could barely walk. However, it’s been many years though since I last worked out how many grammes to the ounce and whether I should really weight things or just rely on texture and taste (prefer the latter). Now post-building a career and then running my own company (I don’t much care for either now, I’m happy freelancing and spending every minute I can on writing (my book) instead) I’m back in the kitchen.As soon as my Christmas holiday is over and I’ve booked my next trip (a ritual), Vancouver in May, I go out and buy a tonne of ingredients which are now sitting on top of work spaces as the cupboards in my I-never-cook-anyway sized kitchen are already over-flowing. For a neat–freak like me, I’d rather just have them tidily on display if I can’t fit them smartly in cupboards so I’ve been collecting quirky, retro containers too.My initial plan is to bake anything other than cakes which I always could do although I did have a go at my legendary bite size secret recipe brownies at Christmas. I’ve actually long lost the scribbled recipe that I’d had from pre laptop days as it got lost in the move back from New York three years ago but it was a good first edible attempt.So I start with buying a cookies book – American of course so I have the added challenge of converting all the recipes to UK-speak and the buying of new scales. I used to have scales before I got rid of everything pre-transatlantic move but they mainly sat and looked pretty above my fridge. The cookie book stated accurate scales an absolute necessity so any excuse for me to buy a new gadget.The recipe seemed to be mainly large quantities of a variety of types of sugar so I try to modify it for UK consumption.For the second batch, I added some super expensive chocolate that we picked up last year from Westmorland Farm ShopAll of January’s creations were edible, actually very nice. In fact the cookies were eatern by my friend's four year old which I take as a compliment from a fussy young'un. The plan now is it to make them jaw-dropingly good and make these photos better, which is going to take a few attempts over some time.