Rainy Day Non-Baking + Kitchen Storage

Alternative title "how to make yourself your family very happy with 400g chocolate and a tin of condensed milk"...

I don't know about you, but when it's miserable outside I want to bake, and eat, and bake some more. Except it's half term, and I've discovered that long baking projects + little children is not a happy equation! Enter non-baking and a whole new world of possibilities!

I still haven't written about the parcels I ordered ages ago. Taken the photos, yes, written the post, no. One of the parcels was from American Sweets and included cake mix. I've never bought cake mix before and to be honest, at the price it sells for in shops, I've never really been tempted. But when I saw it reduced to 99p because it was out of date online, I thought it would be perfect to use for all the cake batter recipes I see on blogs. And since then it's sat in my cupboard getting bored...until yesterday.

When I saw Averie's post "Recipes Using Cake Mix" pop up in my Google Reader yesterday I started getting excited, and minutes later I was in the kitchen making No Bake Vanilla Cake Batter Truffles.

I wasn't 100% sold on these before I covered them in chocolate (although I still managed to eat 3 of them!), but then I've never, to my knowledge, eaten boxed cake mix before so eating it for the first time practically straight-up was probably a bit of a shock to my taste buds! Once covered in chocolate though, these are delicious...

I packed them away into the fridge (out of sight, out of mind!) as soon as I could, but I still managed to eat 10 of the truffles yesterday! I always find small bites like these way too easy to have "just one more" of!

As you can see in the above photo, I still had lots of condensed milk to use up. I was seriously tempted to just eat it with a spoon make Averie's amazing looking Mixed Berry White Chocolate Crumble Bars but as my self-control is clearly not up to much at the moment, I decided I better make something that I knew Liam would help me eat!

As you may have gathered from previous blog posts, Liam isn't the most adventurous when it comes to sweet foods (he's happy to eat pretty much any savoury food though, strange) - he was even wary of the cake batter truffles until I showed him the recipe to prove there aren't any "weird" ingredients with him! The safest bet to make sure that Liam will eat something is chocolate, so I decided to keep it simple and just make some quick chocolate fudge. This recipe was so easy - just stir everything in a bowl and melt in the microwave. I put the tub in the freezer for about half an hour to set and then had no problem cutting it into chunks...

Another box full of chocolatey goodness to store in the fridge!

I've made fridge fudge before that has refused to set no matter how long I chilled it for, so I was pleasantly surprised how well this one worked. Really tasty too, but then 300g of chocolate probably had something to do with that...can't go wrong with chocolate + condensed milk! ;)

While I was waiting for the fudge to set, I took a couple of photos of our new larder. I was worried we weren't going to fit everything in (especially when I discovered my major hoarding issue - 15 tins of pumpkin anyone??!!) but there is actually more space than I'd thought...

As well as kind of having the top shelf (which is so short due to the sloping ceiling that it doesn't really count as a shelf), I also managed to free one of the kitchen cupboards for "my" food...

Buying little tubs from Tesco (as well as the big tubs at the bottom of the larder too) has made things a bit more organised. Chocolate and bars on the bottom...

Random box, plus dried fruit (and a few bags of chocolate chips) up top...

We've also got the same tea/coffee corner we had in the old house...

and a half-cupboard for baking supplies...

This does mean that our counters are more than a little bit cluttered at the moment. Every time Mum's been into the house this week she's commented along the lines of "oh, I didn't used to have my toaster sticking out like that" "does that really need to be out on the counter?" "the kitchen looks so much nicer when it's free of clutter don't you think?" etc etc. Whilst I do agree with her, we have way more stuff than she did so it does look a bit of a mess at the moment. One of the jobs for this weekend is getting some shelves up in the kitchen. I haven't quite decided what I'm going to put on the shelves though...I'm thinking maybe all our mugs, which will then free up a cupboard to fill with all the random junk things that are currently on the counter. That will give me a good excuse to keep buying pretty mugs as well, if they are actually being displayed for all to see! ;)

Ok, enough rambling. Time to wake the children up from their naps, else they wont go to bed tonight, and go do a food shop. This half term has disappeared so quickly, I'm not ready to start making packed lunches again on Monday!

What are your favourite non-baking recipes? And any clever storage ideas for me? As well as the overflow in the kitchen, I also have no idea what to do with all our spare towels and bedding. In our old house we had a double airing cupboard upstairs, but there is nothing to replace that in this house. This house is really lovely, and on paper probably a little bit bigger, but we were definitely spoilt on the storage front in the old house. A combination of more storage and less hoarding is needed I think!