So baking is my thing. I like to bake to unwind, I bake when I’m stressed, sometimes baking makes me stressed (see this post ) but I love it. Like I said, it my thing. But this post is not about baking, well not really. There’s a tenuous link.
This post is about my husband’s thing (snigger). For a long time, my husband didn’t have a thing. I’m not sure he would appreciate that sentence but hey ho! At least I am amused. My husband needed a hobby. He’s a software developer (computer programmer) and in his spare time would read about computer programming. Hmmm. Thrilling, no? His only other interests are running and drinking Weston’s Vintage Cider and selected beers, mostly Belgian. It didn’t take a genius (me) to suggest home brewing as a new hobby. Mostly so that I could bake in peace.
I’m not going to lie, there are days when I regret bringing home brew into our house. I now know far more than I would ever want to about hops, malt, sparging, wort and other things I stopped listening to. But that’s marriage for you. My husband has had to pretend to listen to me for years about baking, feigning interest in pictures, articles and recipes, taking my creations into his office and getting tasting notes off colleagues. It’s only fair I return the favour. Although to be fair the tasting notes thing hasn’t been very successful. “That’s really nice” is about the extent of it. Helpful.
So since the inception of home brew in my marriage almost 6 months ago, there has been a lot of beer talk! And I’ve even been roped into helping with the bottling process. I’ve not done too badly with it all, even if I do say so myself. Except for on a recent trip to London when we went into a pub famous for its beer selection: I ordered a rum. BIG MISTAKE! Huge. Total faux pas. I won’t be making that mistake again, I tell you! At least I had the presence of mind not to tell them that I don’t actually LIKE beer. I think I might’ve been chucked out, had I uttered that blasphemous sentence… Really!
But onto the tenuous link between beer and baking for this blog post, the Tiny Rebel Brewery. Its a fantastic brewery local to us (well, in Newport and we are in Cardiff) and has a great pub, Urban Tap House. Incidentally, Urban Tap House does the best burger I’ve had outside of London. Plus the barman wasn’t snotty if you didn’t order beer! (But I did order a half to begin with, having learned by lesson – it was very tasty, actually). So, for fun, I decided to make my husband a Tiny Rebel biscuit. It was also a great excuse to get some more practice using my KopyKake projector. Best toy ever! I was very pleased with how it came out. It is my regular vanilla biscuit , flooded with white royal icing and then left to dry overnight. The bear himself is royal icing too but the red is coloured with a food pen. I shall be posting my vanilla biscuit recipe in a future post, so keep an eye out for it.
I was surprised by the response I got on Twitter when I posted the above picture. It proved much more popular than I had anticipated. So much so, I even ended up posting a few to Tiny Rebel themselves! They seemed to appreciate them, anyway. And it saved me from eating yet more biscuits. Result for all involved!
NB This post is not sponsored by Tiny Rebel or Urban Tap House. My husband just likes their beer. I like their burgers. We both liked my “beer-scuits”.
Icing Sugar Cloud 