What is this blog about?

Hello all,

My first post should really be to explain something about me and why this blog exists... 

I'm a 26 year old recently married women who currently spends her time teaching people to drive. Recently me and my husband have been watching more cooking programs on the television, like the Great British Bake Off and Masterchef and have been inspired. I recently purchased Jo Wheatley's "A Passion for Baking" book for my husband and have been looking at her blog and this has further inspired me. I would like to be able to make birthday cakes for our children (explains the mini Manley), or celebration cakes for family and friends. I want to learn how to decorate and style so that food will not only taste good but also look good. 

So the idea was born... I'm going to learn how to decorate using piping bags, glitter and cutters. I'm also going to bake, like never before, by following recipe books and working my way through them. I won't do every recipe in the books as we probably won't like them but I think I should do most of them and the plan is to do one a week but we'll see how this goes. I'll log all my efforts on this blog and try and post plenty of detail, please feel free to comment and ask questions which I'd be happy to answer. 

To start with I want to take baby steps as this is a bit of a new thing for me. I've had to order piping gear and will post my first experimentation with that. 

The recipe book that I will firstly be working my way through will of course be Jo Wheatley's "A Passion for Baking" since she's the one to inspire me I think it should be her book I start with. Now for where to start, do I start from the beginning of the book and work through? or should I pick out my favourite recipes? We've decided to do things completely at random so I don't spend ages trawling through the book trying to decide. My husband is going to write down all the recipes and put them in a hat, each week I'll pick out the recipe for that week and work on that. This week he picked page 82 at random... "Mini Banoffee Pies".. this is something I saw in the book and loved the look of so quite pleased to have this as my starting point. 

Bring on the baking... 

Here's a picture of me and my husband with our wedding cake which was home made by me, him, my mum and Lorraine, and His mum and sister. Decorated by his mum.