And so... The Mixing Bowl blog is born, to a silent fanfare and non-existent whooping.....

My 2012 resolutions were:

1. Lose weight

2. Start a baking blog

3. Volunteer at a charity

4. Get better at my job…..

Resolution 1 is not going well so I thought I’d move straight to Resolution 2. This will probably have a negative effect on Resolution 1 but I have all year, right?

I have had an obsession with baking for quite a while now, which I can admit has grown from having a sweet tooth. The idea of this blog is to document my culinary triumphs and mishaps, and hopefully I will become more adventurous as time goes by.

In that spirit, left with the flat - and more importantly kitchen - to myself for the weekend I turned to my Paul Hollywood book. I am definitely a novice to all things yeast based but Mr Hollywood has not failed me yet. So, on a miserable weekend in London I set about rekindling memories of weekends in Paris by making croissants.

It turns out this is a long process. A very long process. There is a lot of folding and leaving for an hour, before eventually leaving overnight.

However, about 20 hours after I began I had a batch of fresh croissants. And they were yummy (even if I do say so myself!). I made slightly fewer than the recipe detailed and the sizes certainly weren’t uniform (Mr Hollywood would be deducting points!) but I was chuffed that I had managed to make them and that they were actually recognisable as croissants!

During the rainy hours I spent waiting for my dough to rise, I became restless and once I had caught up on a whole series of desperate housewives, the oven was calling me. Rummaging through our cupboards and finding an assortment of nuts and seeds, I decided to continue along the breakfast theme and make some granola. Whilst greedily munching on this (resolution 1 going out of the window again) I decided that it would yummy in a muffin, a ‘breakfast muffin’ if you like...

So when my housemate returned on Sunday afternoon she was greeted by an empty fridge, a flour-covered kitchen and no dinner. But there was a range of breakfast options - I’m not gonna lie, she wasn’t complaining!

And what do you do with 30 odd croissants when you have a good half a stone to lose? Make a few friends in the office of course! (That reminds me...resolution 4!).

Till next time.