Peanut Caramel Slice

The latest thing in the supermarkets is chocolate flavoured like Arnotts biscuits.  I am yet to try these, but I think the Iced VoVo version is a must, as well as the Jatz (salt + chocolate = yum, right?).

In the meantime, I have made a slice that reminds me of a Snickers chocolate bar.  The recipe is for Peanut Caramel Slice from the April 2019 edition of Woolworths Fresh magazine.  It looked delicious in the magazine, and it did not disappoint. A biscuit base is topped with a filling of peanut-butter flavoured Top'n'Fill caramel (or do what I did and make your own dulce de leche from condensed milk), then topped with chocolate studded with chopped peanuts.  It is not one for the school lunch box because of the peanuts, but it sure is scrumptious.

To make this smashing slice for yourself, you will need:

250g packet plain sweet biscuits (I used Marie)
125g melted butter
2 x 380g Top'n'Fill caramel (or an equivalent amount of dulce de leche, home made or otherwise)
1/2 cup smooth peanut butter
250g dark chocolate chips
1/4 cup finely chopped roasted peanuts 
olive oil spray

Preheat your oven to 180 degrees Celsius and line a 30cm x 20cm slice tin with baking paper.

In a food processor, blitz the biscuits into crumbs, then add the melted butter and blitz again.  Press the crumbs over the base of the prepared slice tin, and freeze for 10 minutes.

Put the Top'n'Fill or dulce de leche into a bowl.  Add the peanut butter and stir until well combined.  Scrape the mixture carefully over the top of the biscuit base and spread out evenly, being careful not to disturb the crumbs of the base.  Bake for 20 minutes.

Mix together the chocolate chips and chopped peanuts in a bowl.

Remove the slice from the oven and spray the top of the caramel with olive oil spray.  (I forgot to do this and it didn't seem to hurt the slice.)  While the caramel is still hot, scatter the peanut/chocolate chip mixture over the top of the caramel layer, and return the slice to the oven for another 5 minutes.  Remove the slice form the oven and spread out the chocolate evenly over the top of the slice.

Chill the slice in the fridge for 4 hours to set the chocolate, then cut into bars to serve. Enjoy!

To finish off this post, I am proud to show off a cross stitch table cloth featuring kittens playing with balls of wool that I finished stitching while I was on holidays over Easter.  Isn't it pretty! It will go perfectly on the occasional table in my living room.

Chocolate Mud Cake for Swee's birthday

 

Today is my colleague, Swee's, 40th birthday.  To celebrate this momentous occasion, I have made her a birthday cake.

 

Because I needed to make it a few days in advance, I chose a chocolate mud cake:

 

 

which I then topped with ganache once cool: 

 

and covered with black ready to roll fondant icing:

 

To make the cake pretty, I used some Lucky coloured fondant to make some daisies and put numbers on the cake: 

I then added a sausage of coloured fondant around the bottom edge of the cake to finish it off:

covering the join with a bow:

Voila!  I am very happy with this cake.

The recipe for the chocolate mud cake comes from A Cook's Book of Decadence - Chocolate, Coffee, Caramel, which my friends Elisa and Trudy gave to me for my birthday one year.  It is as follows:

250g butter
250g dark cooking chocolate
2 tablespoons instant coffee powder or granules
150g self-raising flour
150g plain flour
60g cocoa powder
1/2 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
550g sugar
4 eggs
2 tablespoons olive oil
125ml buttermilk

Preheat your oven to 160 degrees Celsius.  Grease a deep 23cm round cake tin, and line the base and sides with baking paper, making sure the paper extends ~ 5cm above the top of the tin.

Dissolve the coffee in 185mls hot water. Put the butter, sugar, chocolate and dissolved coffee and water in a saucepan. Stir over a low heat until smooth, completely melted and blended. Set aside.

Sift the flours, cocoa and bicarbonate of soda into a large bowl. Make a well in the centre.

Add the combined eggs, oil and milk; pour into the well in the dry ingredients, and using a spatula, mix well into the dry ingredients. Add  the cooled melted chocolate mixture, and fold in until there are no lumps.  

Pour the mixture into the prepared cake tin. Place the cake into the preheated oven and bake for 1 hour and 45 minutes or until cooked through when tested with a skewer. Leave the cake in its tin on a wire rack o cool completely before decorating.

For the ganache, I used Poh's ganache from her Totally Unicorn Chocolate Cake recipe, found here.

Here are the birthday girl and I with the cake:

I also cross-stitched Swee a birthday card - after all, it's a milestone birthday:

WWDH - Berry Yoghurt Loaf and Bluey's Boots

For this week's Wednesday with Donna Hay, Chaya has chosen Donna's Blueberry Yoghurt Loaf.  You can find the recipe online here.

I can't rightfully call mine Blueberry Yoghurt Loaf because I used mixed berries, so I redubbed it Berry Yoghurt Loaf.  This cake is absolutely delicious - it is moist and light and not too sweet.  Even my mother, who is not a cake lover, enjoyed this.

 

Check out the thoughts of the other WWDH team members, Chaya, Kayte, Margaret and Sarah, on this cake at their blogs.

I also wanted to share with you a cross stitch project that I finished for my mother while I was on holidays:  

This work is entitled Bluey's Boots, and it took me eight years (working on and off during vacation) to complete.  It was a birthday present to Mum in 2005, but she didn't like doing it, so I volunteered to do it for her, not realising what an epic project it would turn out to be.  I am especially proud of both the finished product and of actually finishing it!  I framed it for my mother's wall.  The slight puckering of the fabric disappears once you stretch the fabric across a mounting board and secure it in place.

I hope that you had a lovely vacation, and that you are staying safe from the extremes of weather that seem to be in all parts of the world at present.  (At my mother's place, the town experienced its hottest day on record while I was there.)

TWD - Thumbprints for Us Big Guys

Another week, another Tuesday with Dorie recipe. This week, our host is Mike of Ugly Food for an Ugly Dude. Last week, we learned he was a dwarf warrior called Thaddeus from Dungeons and Dragons. This week, we are told to expect a glorious fanfare because it is his TWD pick. And what a good pick it is - Thumbprints for Us Big Guys.

Thumbprints is a US term for these cookies. In Australia, the closest that we have is jam drops, with the same concept, but using a shortbread-style biscuit to drop the jam in, and usually, the jam is put into the cavity before you bake the biscuits. I often got into trouble as a child by being very generous with the jam (the job allocated to me in the jam drop making process), causing it to run over the top of the biscuits and out into the tray.

These particular thumbprints are made with ground hazelnuts - I ground my own, husk and all, hence the flecks in my biscuits. While baking these, I had to remake the "thumbprints", because they tended to disappear as the biscuits rose and spread. These biscuits are very buttery - so buttery that they are a little fragile once fully cooled.

The biscuits are allowed to cool completely before you put the jam in. This makes the biscuits look neater than the jam drops to which I am accustomed. I used dragonberry jam for my thumbprints, made from dragonfruit.

These biscuits were easy enough to make and fuss free - no chilling of dough, just mix and go. They also tasted very nice - melt in the mouth cookies with that sweet spot of jam in the middle.

Thanks to our host, Mike, for this pick. You can check out the recipe on his site. You can also check out the other TWD thumbprint variations by visiting the TWD blogroll.

To close out this post, I am going to show off my two latest cross stitch projects - baby album covers for two friends:




I actually made these over Christmas when I had plenty of time on my hands, as in the hurly burly of every day life, I don't get the time to do projects like this. The stitching has a purple hue, because I didn't know whether the babies would be girls or boys when I made these; as it happens, they are both boys.

Valentine's Cake - White Chocolate Cake with Strawberry Mousseline and Cream Cheese Frosting

Sunday is Valentine's Day. Now, even though Valentine's Day has always been a non-event for me, I like the idea of it. It's an opportunity (even if commercialised) for couples and loved ones to acknowledge their regard for each other amid the hurly burly of every day life.


Also, the pink girly-girl in me loves the hearts and flowers symbols associated with Valentine's Day.


To indulge my fondness for pink hearts, I made a Valentine's Cake - a little early, but as Valentine's Day falls on a Sunday this year and I need to be able to share my baking at work, I made it this week.


I used Rose Levy Beranbaum's white chocolate cake recipe for the Chocolate-Covered Strawberry Cake in Rose's Heavenly Cakes (p91) as my base cake. In keeping with the Valentine's theme, I baked the cake in two heart-shaped tins, and also made 5 mini heart cakes (I ate one before the photo was taken!) with the leftover batter:

The two large cakes were split into 4 layers and filled with strawberry mousseline (a meringue-based buttercream):

I then frosted the cake with cream cheese frosting made from Leila Lindholm's A Piece of Cake (p85). (Originally, I was going to use white chocolate frosting, but I thought that may have been way too sweet.)


The base white chocolate cake was delicious on its own. It's not overly sweet, and I actually liked eating the unadorned cake the best. I am not a buttercream fan, so the mousseline was not my thing, but a lot of people do like it, and the cake disappeared rapidly. Besides, it was in perfect keeping with the theme of my cake. The cream cheese frosting was good in that it added a little tang to a very sweet cake.

If you'd like to make your own Valentine's Cake, you will need:

Cake

227g chopped white chocolate
6 large egg whites (I had heaps of egg whites in my freezer from TWD)
1 1/3 cups milk (divided into 1 cup and 1/3 cup)
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
3 1/2 cups plain flour
1 1/2 cups sugar
5 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
170g butter, at room temperature

Strawberry Mousseline

284g softened butter
3 large egg whites
2/3 cup sugar less 3 tablespoons
3 tablespoons sugar, extra
3 tablespoons water
1/4 + 1/8 teaspoons cream of tartar
2/3 cup strawberry butter (I used strained strawberry jam)
1/2 cup strawberry butter, extra
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
red food colouring

Cream Cheese Frosting

60g softened butter
300g icing sugar
100g cream cheese
1 tablespoon lemon juice
red food colouring

Heart shaped sprinkles to decorate

Cake

Line your cake tins (Rose used 2 x 9 inch round tins and 2 cupcake papers) with baking paper, then spray the baking paper with baking spray and dust the inside of the tins with a fine coating of plain flour.

Preheat your oven to 175 degrees Celsius.

Melt the white chocolate by placing it in a heat proof bowl over a saucepan of simmering water, and stir until just melted. Allow the chocolate to cool slightly.

In a bowl, whisk together the egg whites, the 1/3 cup of milk and the vanilla until just combined.

Using an electric mixer, mix the flour, sugar, baking powder and salt on low speed for 30 seconds. Add the butter and the 1 cup milk to the bowl, and mix on low speed to just moisten the ingredients, then increase the speed to medium and beat the mixture for 1 1/2 minutes, scraping down the sides of the bowl as necessary.

On medium low speed, add the egg white mixture to the batter in 3 lots, beating after each addition. Add the melted white chocolate to the batter and beat the mixture just until the chocolate is incorporated.

Fill each of your cake tins 1/2 full of batter and the cupcake papers 2/3 full of batter. (The hearts were just a guessing game!) Bake the cakes for 30-40minutes or until cooked through, and the cupcakes for 25-30 minutes.

Remove the cooked cakes from the oven, and allow them to cool in the tins for 10 minutes before unmoulding them onto an oiled wire rack to cool.

Strawberry mousseline

Using an electric mixer, beat the butter on high speed until creamy, and set aside.

Put the egg whites into a bowl with an electric mixer set up nearby, ready to go.

In a small saucepan, stir together the water and the 2/3 cup less 3 tablespoons of sugar until the sugar is moistened, then heat the mixture over low heat on the stove, stirring constantly, until the sugar melts and the mixture bubbles. Stop stirring, and reduce the heat to low.

Beat the egg whites until foamy, add the cream of tartar, then continue to beat the egg whites until soft peaks form. Gradually add the 3 tablespoons of sugar to the mixture, beating in until stiff peaks form.

Increase the heat and bring the sugar syrup to the boil, and allow it to boil (without stirring) until it reaches 120 degrees Celsius (firm ball).

With the mixer running on low speed, add the sugar syrup to the egg whites in a steady stream, being careful to ensure that it doesn't hit the sides of the bowl or bounce off the beaters onto the bowl. Once the syrup has been incorporated, decrease the mixer speed to medium and beat the mixture for 2 minutes. Stop beating the mixture, then refrigerate it for 5-10 minutes or until it cools to 21 degrees Celsius. (Rose recommends whisking after the first 5 minutes to test and equalise temperature - I didn't.)

Put the creamed butter reserved from earlier back into the stand mixer, this time with the whisk attachment in place, and beat on medium-high for 3 minutes or until the butter lightens in colour. (It should also be no warmer than 21 degrees Celsius - try that in a kitchen that is 29 degrees Celsius!)

Scoop the meringue into the butter and beat on medium speed until smooth, then beat for a further 2 minutes. Remove the mousseline from the mixture and stir in 2/3 cup of strawberry butter (or jam or preserves), the vanilla and enough red food colouring to tint the mousseline the desired shade of pink.

Assembly

Split each of the large cakes into two layers with a serrated knife, and cut off the rounded tops so the layers are level. Stick one layer of cake onto a cake plate or cardboard round with a dab of mousseline. Spread one cup of mousseline and some of the reserved 1/2 cup of strawberry butter evenly over the top of that layer:

Repeat until all layers have been used:

Frosting

Put all of the ingredients except the colouring into the bowl of a stand mixer, and beat until smooth. Tint the frosting the desired shade of pink using food colouring.

Spread the frosting over the top of the cake, and decorate with heart sprinkles (or as desired).

Inside, your sliced cake will surprise you with lots of lovely layers:

This cake is my entry to Nina's Bake-A-Cake Event over at Confessions of a Bake-a-holic.

To participate, you just need to bake a cake from scratch with a Valentine’s Day theme, then follow the directions on Nina's site.

Finally, in keeping with the Valentine's Day theme, I wanted to show you this cute Valentine that I cross-stitched:

Have a great day!

Rocky Road

Are you still with me on the Christmas treats? I've got another easy one for you which is no bake - just chop, melt, spread and set. It's Rocky Road!!!


For the uninitiated, Rocky Road is chocolate mixed with nuts, jelly and marshmallows, and tastes as good as it sounds.


I used a non-traditional Rocky Road recipe from Loreto Cooks, a wonderful cookbook given to me by my dear friends Steve and Craig, who contributed their roast lamb recipe to the book. (I am yet to try it, but I will soon.) Steve works at Loreto Mandeville Hall, a private girls school in Toorak, so this book has special associations. It's not your average school cookbook - this is a properly bound, full colour, professionally compiled cookbook.


The Rocky Road recipe was contributed by Jacqueline Prestedge. I halved the recipe, and adapted it slightly as follows:


500g good quality dark chocolate
1 cup chopped marshmallows
2 chopped Turkish Delight bars
2 chopped Cherry Ripe bars
1 cup chopped almonds



Line a 18cm x 28cm slice tin with baking paper. Leave overhang on all sides so that you can use the paper to lift the Rocky Road out later.


Put all of the ingredients except the chocolate together into a bowl and mix together.


Melt the chocolate over a bain marie (or put it in a metal bowl over a saucepan of simmering water), then pour it over the other ingredients. Stir thoroughly to coat the other ingredients in the chocolate.


Pour the mixture into the prepared slice tin, press down evenly, and refrigerate for at least 4 hours or until set. Chop into squares of the desired size using a warm knife.


Dig in - it' s delicious!


On a different note, I cross-stitched this cute coaster for my friend Ruth:

I was going to make more, but ran out of time.


Have a great weekend everyone!

Butterscotch

Recently, I made butterscotch, a hard toffee sweet, as gifts for various people. It was amazingly simple to do. If you feel inclined to make your own butterscotch, the recipe (from p80 of the Australian Womens Weekly Sweet book) is as follows:


2 cups caster sugar
1/3 cup water
2/3 cup glucose syrup
125g chopped unsalted butter


Grease a 19cm x 29cm baking tray, and line with baking paper so that there is a 5cm overhang all the way around.


Put all of the ingredients other than the butter into a small saucepan, and stir over a low heat until the sugar has melted. Bring the mixture to the boil, and boil uncovered for 15 minutes or until the mixture is golden brown in colour (150 degrees Celsius on a candy thermometer).


Remove the pan from the heat and allow the bubbles to subside before stirring through the butter until smooth. Pour the mixture into the prepared tray, allow it to stand for 10 minutes, then mark it into squares using a sharp knife in slashes reaching right to the bottom of the pan. (If the mixture runs back in to fill up the slashes, allow the mixture to stand a little longer and try again).


Allow the butterscotch to set completely at room temperature, then break it into squares along the pre-marked slashes. Wrap sweets individually in small squares of greaseproof paper.


I placed my sweets into home-labelled sweet bags for gift-giving (labels from the HP website):





I also cross-stitched on tea towels to go with each bag of sweets:





I completed my gifts by boxing them individually and labelling the boxes with a cute gift label that I downloaded from 74 Lime Lane:


I thought that these looked pretty neat!!! And if you were one of my Pay It Forward winners, one of these will be winging its way to you.

Hope you are all having a great weekend.

Farewell Elisa - Red Bull Cake

It seems that my life is full of departures; this time, the lovely Elisa departs sunny Brizvegas for - wait for it - Melbourne (where I have just come from!). Elisa was always only on loan to us, but we will all miss her enormously.

Elisa somehow manages to survive on Red Bull and potato chips (crisps to non-Aussies), yet still stays tiny - maybe it's all of that time on the treadmill and grooving to Madonna.

In honour of Elisa's love of Red Bull, I made her a Red Bull cake, using the recipe from Pandas and Cupcakes. Yes, folks, this cake is an AHDD nightmare - Red Bull, with red food colouring inside and blue and black colouring in the icing. However, I am sure that Elisa will love it, despite its strange resemblance to Marge Simpson's hairdo.

I finished off the decorating with a fudge icing pen for the writing (I can never get these things to write straight, despite having no trouble with piping bags), and red skittles. (Elisa loves American candy, and has been known to travel back from US trips with 42kg worth of it - hope skittles are on the list.)

Here is the cake before frosting, which I made in the cupcake shaped pan given to me by my gorgeous friends at Optus:

I also cross-stitched a card for Elisa:

In honour of her love of Wagamamas (affectionately known as "Waggas" by Elisa), we bought her the Wagamamas cookbook - hope she likes it. It will certainly make a change from her South American/Italian heritage - and the chips!

Good luck in Melbourne chick - we will miss you!!!

Sugar High Friday - Spice Up Your Life - Spicy Banana Cake; Yum-Yum Award

Pastrygirl of Dessert First is hosting Sugar High Friday (created by The Domestic Goddess) for October, with a theme of Spice Up Your Life. It's simple - make a sweet dish containing one or as many spices as you like.

I had quite a few overripe bananas living in my fruit bowl, so I wanted to incorporate them into my recipe. A quick Google search brought me to this recipe for Spicy Banana Cake - perfect! It contains cinnamon and cloves, along with bananas, raisins and nuts. I used a combination of hazelnuts and walnuts instead of pecans, because I had some that needed using up.

Here is a photograph of my finished cake, which I baked in a 9 inch springform pan instead of a 10 inch tube pan:

This is a wonderful, moist and huge cake! (The strange looking bit on one side is where a clump of banana rose to the top.) I don't like a heavy banana flavour, but this was not overwhelmingly banana-flavoured. The bananas and the raisins made the cake moist, and the nuts added a fantastic texture.

To spice up my life a little more, I added cinnamon to the water icing that I iced the cake with. Here is a slice of the cake (displayed on a plate instead of a napkin for a change!):

Mmm, mmm - don't you love the chunkiness and texture? I would gladly make this again (if I weren't so buy making new recipes all the time).

Don't forget to watch out for the roundup of recipes to spice up your life on Pastrygirl's site after the end of October.

In the meantime, I have been cross-stitching again, and made another baby album banner, this time for my work colleague Matt and his wife:

This teddy bear pattern came from p38 of the October 2008 edition of Cross Stitch Crazy.

Finally, my blogging pal Ivy from Kopiaste has awarded me the Yum-Yum Award:

Thanks Ivy!

There don't appear to be any rules attached to this award, so I will pass it on to the following people, whose blogs I find "yum-yum":


Tammy of Wee Treats by Tammy

Susan of Food.Baby

Arfi of Homemades

The Caked Crusader

Swati of Swati's Sugarcraft

Rosie of Rosie Bakes a Peace of Cake

Do visit these blogs if you haven't already - they all have great photos and recipes to enjoy.

Claire's baby cake

Claire, our wonderful and efficient payroll officer, left us on maternity leave yesterday. She is going to have a little girl, so I decided I was going to make her a girly-pink baby-themed cake for her last day.

The pink base cake was made from the cupcake recipe used by Lorraine of Not Quite Nigella in her breath-takingly beautiful Ispahan cupcakes. The cake formed a macaron-style crust on top as it baked, which I loved.

My inspiration for the cake design came from Cuppycake Digital Designs, who makes the sweetest little baby cupcakes ever (blog now removed). However, not having the patience to make 24 of the little sods, I converted the design to a single large cake.

As no-one wants to eat a massive ball of rolled fondant, which I would have needed to make for a pure fondant head and body big enough for this cake, I instead used part of the cake batter to make two patty-cake sized small cakes that I iced together for the head, and a half-size mini loaf cake for the baby's body. I iced the cake and the body parts with water icing, and stuck the head and body in place while the icing on the cake was still wet.




I created the blanket, dummy and bow from rolled fondant, with the blanket binding picked out with a fork and the blanket design embossed using a small butterfly cookie cutter, and stuck those on the cake while the water icing was almost but not quite dry. The baby's eyes and nose were painted on using black liquid food colouring on the tip of a skewer.

I was also a little crafty for Claire, and created this cross-stitch photo-album wrapper from a pattern in Issue 198 of CrossStitcher:

I bought the materials before I knew whether Claire was having a boy or a girl, hence I played it safe and made it green. I even hauled out the sewing machine from hibernation to sew on the ribbon!

I wish Claire and her family every happiness for the pending birth of Claire's second child.

Roast lamb with almonds; lamb giouvetsi

I recently had my friends Charet and Marco over for Sunday lunch. For dessert, I served my Daring Bakers Opera Cake. However, for the main meal, I served roast lamb - but not just any old roast lamb. I marinated my lamb using a recipe by Karen Martini from Where the Heart Is.

The marinade gave the lamb an interesting flavour which made it a little more special than if I had just roasted it in the oven seasoned with salt and pepper. Although I personally would have cooked the lamb for longer than recommended by Karen (as I found it too rare for my taste), I enjoyed this dish, and my guests said they did too.

To make this lamb dish, you will need:

2kg boned leg of lamb
fresh basil
fresh oregano
2 bay leaves
8 cloves peeled garlic
1/2 cup vegetable oil
zest and juice of 2 lemons
1/2 cup almond meal
salt and pepper

Put the basil, oregano, bay leaves and garlic in a food processor and blitz until chopped up finely. Add half the oil, the zest and salt and pepper to taste, and blitz until well combined. Finally, add the almond meal and blitz, then place the mixture into a bowl. Stir through the other half of the oil and the lemon juice.

Score the fat on the lamb with a knife, then rub the marinade all over the lamb. Place in a plastic bag and allow to marinate overnight in the refrigerator.

The next day, preheat your oven to 230 degrees Celsius, and bake the lamb in the oven for 25 minutes. Turn down the heat to 180 degrees Celsius, and continue to bake the lamb for at least another half an hour (or if you like your lamb cooked more than medium rare, bakeit for longer).

Once the lamb is cooked, remove it from the oven and allow it to rest for about 20 minutes before carving. I served it with baked potatoes, pumpkin, parsnips and carrots seasoned with salt, pepper and oil, and twice cooked beans in tomato sauce.

One of the problems that you have with a large piece of meat and only three people is that you have a lot of meat left over. For a couple of nights, I was content to continue to eat roast lamb. However, I soon became quite sick of the same thing every night. That is when Peter of Kalofagas came to the rescue with his recipe for lamb giouvetsi. Hooray!

If you would like to make your own lamb giouvetsi, you can find the recipe here on Peter's site.




I had all of the ingredients except for the pasta, which I picked up at the grocery store. Unfortunately, my grocery store does not sell Greek pasta (orzo), but I figured that risoni would be very similar, so this is what I used. It also does not sell Greek cheese, so I used grated cheddar. My final variation was to use vegetable stock instead of lamb stock, because I had a huge carton of it in the cupboard that I bought in a fit of false enthusiasm for a risotto that never was.

Finally, I wanted to show off my wedding gift for Charet and Marco that I completed when I wasn't cooking, blogging or off on some other project. It is the largest single piece of cross stitch that I have completed to date. As you can see from the date on this piece, Charet and Marco were married about a month ago, and I bought them a bottle of French bubbly to enjoy on the big day. However, I only finished sewing this last night after about 2 months of on and off work. It took much longer than I anticipated - when I finished the cross stitch, I hadn't counted on how much back stitch there was, and how long it would take me to complete it.

There are a few mistakes in this piece where I wandered from the pattern, but you can't tell from looking at it (relief!). However, it was not a good idea to go off on a tangent, simply because it made everything harder as I could no longer follow the pattern exactly. As a result, I had to take a fair bit of artistic licence by following the picture on the packaging to complete the piece. I have now mounted and framed this piece, and intend to give it to the happy couple when I next see them. I hope that they like it!