Chocolate Peanut Butter Fondants

Rich, chocolaty & packed with peanut butter flavour

Eight years ago last Friday, I met my husband-to-be. The next day I baked him brownies.

Back then, the thought of writing a food blog hadn’t even entered my head. The online world was a very different place: basic WordPress was only just up and running, Facebook in its infancy and YouTube launched that year. Blogs like Delicious Days and Seven Spoons might have just got started, but the idea of writing about food on the internet was still just the seed of an idea in the minds of Joy the Baker, Deb Perelman and numerous other bloggers we know and love today.

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Best of 2012 | thelittleloaf

A pile of beautiful, buttery croissants

With just a few hours left until the new year, there’s little left to say other than thank you.

Thank you for your comments and support, for continuing to be interested in what I have to say, for reading and sharing my recipes and for sending me your amazing pictures when you make them.

Rather than posting anything new today, I’ve included a round up of your five favourite (by page views) little loaf recipes from the past year, followed by five of mine.

2012 has been incredible. Here’s to an even more amazing 2013.

Chocolate Peanut Butter ‘Magnums’

Individual peanut butter ice cream bars cloaked in milk chocolate

Everyone wants to be happy. Whether it’s that lifelong happiness that comes with from great friendships and falling in love or a fragment of joy found in the briefest of moments, if you’ve ever wondered what life is all about, this is it. Happiness is what you need, guaranteed.

Chocolate Fudge Cupcakes with Peanut Butter Frosting

Edible engagement rings made from modelling chocolate

This weekend just gone, we celebrated our engagement for the second time in as many months (with a big group of people, that is, I can’t even begin to count the number of times we’ve raised a glass in smaller circles), inviting just over sixty of our favourite friends to drink, dance and generally make merry whilst using our upcoming wedding as the perfect excuse to do so.

Chocolate Peanut Butter Feuilletine Cheesecake Bars

Creamy peanut butter, crunchy biscuit & crisp feuilletine

This post started life as something very different. Very different and infinitely more virtuous.

While the content of this blog will most likely have helped you arrive at the correct conclusion that I’ve got a very sweet tooth, eating healthy food is also important to me. At the weekends I’ll bake with abandon, often experimenting for meals with family and friends or rustling up the ultimate in comfort food to ease us back into the working week come Sunday. The other five days I’m a little more restrained, as likely to enjoy a bowl of Greek yoghurt and honey or something simple and fruity as anything more button-bustingly flamboyant. I’m therefore always on the look-out for interesting ideas for sweet treats to enjoy mid-week: recipes that are wholesome enough to eat every day but every bit as delicious as their more calorific counterparts.

Chocolate Peanut Butter Birthday Cake

Squidgy chocolate cake with creamy peanut butter frosting

David Lebovitz once said that the best thing about being a pastry chef is that your kitchen colleagues have to be nice to you 364 days a year. Why? Because on the 365th they want you to bake them a birthday cake. While I’m no pastry chef and have never worked in a commercial kitchen, when it comes to baking cakes for friends, I know exactly where he’s coming from.

One of the things I love most about baking is being able to share what I make with those around me. A cake can be a talking point, a celebration in itself and (for me anyway) often a better way of expressing love for the person in question than any other present might be. Birthday cakes are particularly personal, the one opportunity each year to take centre stage, to call the shots, to cut yourself the biggest slice, eat seconds and thirds and lick off extra icing if you should so choose (not, of course, that I’d ever do something like that . . .)

Peanut Butter & Jam(mie Dodgers)

Crisp peanut butter biscuits with a sticky strawberry jam centre

Peanut butter and jam. A classic combination of salty and sweet, crunchy and smooth, fruit and nut. A mixture which shouldn’t really work, but somehow really does.

Peanut Butter Brownie Ice Cream with a Salted Caramel Swirl

Creamy peanut butter base with squidgy brownies & a salty caramel swirl

Living with just one other person has a lot of positives. At a stage where we no longer want to live in a university style madhouse but a few years before the patter of tiny feet turn our household into another kind of chaos, we’ve found a very happy lifestyle in our little flat for two. Whether it’s wandering naked between bathroom and bedroom or filling the fridge with whatever we want without fear of someone else eating it, the space is ours to do as we please.

Chocolate Peanut Butter Mousse Cake

Chocolate peanut butter mousse layered with chewy peanut meringue

Chocolate mousse. Two words, a hundred variations, a thousand different expectations.

Ever since I made this favourite little dessert on holiday in Italy, I’ve wanted to write about it on the blog. My usual recipe for chocolate mousse is simplicity itself, rich and elegant, steeped in childhood memories and consisting of just two ingredients: chocolate and eggs. It’s the ultimate store cupboard recipe (don’t tell me you’ve not got chocolate on your shelves, I don’t believe you), and involves minimum effort for maximum impact, making it an easy go-to recipe to have in your repertoire.

Perhaps a little too easy.

Chocolate Coated Peanut Butter Flapjacks with Crystallized Peanuts

Silky milk chocolate coated peanut butter flapjacks

How many recipes have you made in your lifetime? How many more do you think you might still? And just how many are left languishing inside eagerly acquired cookbooks, on pages torn from magazines, on bookmark bars and Pinterest boards, never to see the light of day as you return to tried, tested and trusted recipes you’ve always enjoyed?

According to a poll commissioned by the Good Food Channel last year, the average British woman can cook just seven meals from scratch, with eighty percent admitting to churning out the same thing over and again, and only two percent turning to cookbooks or online for a source of inspiration. I don’t know about you, but as a member of that minority percentage, my problem is less how to get out of a cooking rut and more deciding what to make next from the ever-growing reams of recipe ideas accumulating in print, online and in my head.