Velvet Antlers Iced Carrot Cake

Oh yeah, it's as good as it looks. This week's recipe is our Carrot Cake, made last night again by Dave, who couldn't wait any longer for Claire to get it made!

Ingredients:

250 grams of carrots, grated

3 medium eggs

130ml vegetable oil

150g caster sugar

230g self-raising flour

1/2 teaspoon of bicarbonate of soda

1/2 teaspoon of baking powder

Icing:

120 grams cream cheese

120 grams icing sugar

Preheat your oven to 180 celcius or gas 4. Mix your eggs, oil and caster sugar together in a bowl, then add the flour, baking powder and a bicarb and beat the mix well. Stir in the grated carrots and pour the mixture into a lined loaf tin. Bake for 50 minutes until browned and firm on top. Leave the cake in it's tin for 5 minutes on a rack, then turn it out to cool while you get the icing ready.

Mix your cream cheese and icing sugar tegether and beat well until its really smooth.

Ice with a pallet knife and put the cake in the fridge for a bit if you want to firm up the icing.

Tip: get your husband to do all of the above.

20% off all hampers pre-Christmas sale

Hell, if Marks and Sparks can do it, so can we. We're taking 20% off all our hampers for the final 9 days running up to the last Christmas posting day - December 19th. Get your order in for a hamper before 2pm on Friday 19th December and it will arrive with you or your lucky recipient in time for the big day.

Velvet Antlers at the Christmas Market

Today (Wednesday) Dave and I are taking Velvet Antlers to the Christmas Market, Lochaber College, Fort William. Drop in and say hello if you are about. A good time to get a look at our hampers and some other cools stuff we will have with us. We're there 10am-4pm.

See y'all.

Velvet Antlers Power Pancakes

After many requests we have finally given in - here is the recipe for our killer pancakes. These started off as my baby, a breakfast I made regularly for Dave which I gathered from an old book of Scottish recipes from Skye. The original recipe was for traditional Scottish Drop Scones (many small pancakes). I experimented with the vanilla (a favourite of mine) but stuck firmly to making the small drop scones - perfect for eating with one hand with a mouse in the other. But after Dave liked them so much for climbing fuel and took up the pancake mantle, he opted for more American style large pancakes.

This is a simple recipe, so where can you go wrong? Don't underestimate the effect of flour quality! Our wisdom garnered from the glitterati of Scottish cooking has led us to McDougalls flour in the UK. Try it back to back with the supermarket's own brand flour lurking in your cupboard and be amazed! Laterally, Dave experienced new levels of fluffiness using Spanish flour, which he attributed to higher levels of raising agent. Since then we've experimented with adding a smidgen (if you are not familiar with this standard Scottish unit of measurement click here) of baking soda to achieve new levels of fluff.

Ingredients

4oz the best self-raising flour you can get your hands on (wholemeal is nice too)

1oz caster sugar

1/4 pint milk

1 medium egg

1 dribble of vanilla extract

optional smidgen of baking soda

Seive the flour into a bowl and add the sugar and baking soda. beat the egg into the milk and vanilla and add to the dry mix. Stir until you ave a smooth batter, adding more wee drops of milk if it's too thick.

Spoon into a hot pan (with a little sunflower oil) if making drop scones of pour straight from the bowl for big panakes. Serve up with maple syrup, jam, butter, bacon, fruit or whatever takes your fancy...

Then have a good day.

Bridge Swinging in the snow

After a spot of filming for the Fort William Mountain Festival programme launch, I partook of a spot of light bridge swinging myself today. I thought I looked quite casual in the photo above but Dave reckons they are the eyes of psyche. The truth is somewhere in the middle.

Thanks for the photos, Bill.

The winter blizzards begin

Dave and Kev, happy men on snowy mountains

Fresh back from film school in Banff and with Dave just back himself from climbing travels in Spain, I was pretty keen on filming something again. Our friend Kevin Shields called and was psyched up to climb a hard route in the Cairngorms since winter had arrived in the highlands.

We were pretty keen to try some more filming in winter in Scotland. Filming harder winter climbs in Scotland has been very rarely pulled off because of the hardship of dangling around on a rope taking the full blast of a raging blizzard and the difficulty of actually shooting any useful footage. The damp cold of our climate has a habit of killing electrical equipment faster than you can say ‘condensation’.

We went, we stumbled in powder snow covered boulders, Dave rigged and abseiled into position. But it didn’t work out on the climb for Kevin this time. Dave thought it would be really good for both of us to go there anyway, even if we couldn’t film just to learn more about the logistics of filming winter mountaineering. We learnt, once again, that without a support team it’s really, really hard!

Baltic

The way down started off pretty scary for me, traversing steep ice slopes with my crampons getting clogged up with wet snow. But getting through all the snow covered boulder fields in the dark was the most tired I’ve ever been. I didn’t realise how fit you have to be to winter climb!