A baking nightmare!

I have a new blog! It's new and beautiful and 100 times better than this one but I'm not going to start using it until after Baby Dragon is born, you'll understand why when I do start using it. I'm also still in the process of transferring all my old posts on to it so it's not quite ready yet.

My reason for mentioning is that when Ethan started designing it for me (he's a very talented man) I told him when we moved to Spain I would write a post each week featuring the recipe of something I'd baked. However, this definitely hasn't happened. Baking is a nightmare here!

One problem with baking is the fact that we don't have any weighing scales here and because we are only here for a short amount of time I don't see any point in buying a set that we only have to leave behind anyway. This has led me to using CUPS when cooking! I feel this goes against everything I have ever believed :l But I know it's only temporary at least...

Another problem is that it's borderline impossible to find the same ingredients in Spain that you get in the UK. It took two attempts to buy yeast and even then I think it's a slightly strange version, yesterday we ended up buying some liquorice tasting liquid rather than golden syrup and had to buy hot chocolate powder instead of cocoa powder as that's all they had. It's all quite distressing really!

The main issue is our oven doesn't work properly! When you turn the main oven on the grill automatically comes on too so within no time at all you have a burnt top of whatever you're cooking, and an underbaked middle and bottom! This has led to a number of quite burnt dinners to start with, but we're slowly getting accustomed to it. However it does mean that it is impossible to actually cook anything like cakes and meat as the middle would just be completely raw still!

The first lasagne we cooked with a burnt top!

Due to these very unfortunate and distressing problems, baking and I have had to come to a compromise. But thankfully we have had some slight success despite these terrible afflictions... Yesterday we made tiffin which didn't need to use the oven at all (you can find the recipe here), and brownie works quite well as the middle is suppose to be gooey! (Although I do have to cook it for a couple of minutes in the microwave too).

Lets hope Italy is a little more baking friendly as I want to bake!