Welcome to my Lively Kitchen! I’m Charlotte and this is where I share my love of experimenting with food, testing and perfecting new recipes and bakes.
Charlotte’s Lively Kitchen is my own personal cookbook – A place to share my recipes for everyone to try.
I originally set up the site just for me as a place to store my recipes, rather than keeping them all in my head or on scraps of paper (I have a terrible memory!). It was even called My Recipe Book.
Over the years the site has grown significantly and I’ve developed a passion for focussing on fun and tasty bakes. I still create the occasional savoury dish but perfecting those sweet treats is where my heart lies (and what my readers tell me they want).
Recipes You Can Rely On
There are millions of recipes available on the internet. Anyone can set up a website fairly easily but that doesn’t mean that all of those recipes are good. It is so frustrating to hear from people time and time again that the recipe they have spent time and money creating simply didn’t work. If I go look at the recipe, unfortunately I can often see why.
You can always rely on the recipes on Charlotte’s Lively Kitchen to have been tested multiple times until they are perfect. I’m not interested in a cake that just looks good, it must taste delicious with the right texture too. Let’s be honest, nobody wants a dry cake no matter how great it might look. If I don’t love it, then I don’t share it – it really is that simple.
My Chocolate Cake actually tastes of chocolate. My Easy No-Bake Lemon Cheesecake really tastes of lemons and my Oreo Buttercream is packed with Oreo flavour. This is important to me and the reason that so many people come back to my recipes again and again.
I try to write my recipes so that they are easy to follow and the answers to many common questions about my recipes can be found in my posts. Plus I’m always happy to answer any other questions you might have, just leave a comment and I’ll do my best to help.
Tools That Really Help
I not only love developing recipes that work, I also love indulging my inner geek and coding some handy baking tools for you to use such as my Grams to Cups conversions calculator, which I know many of my readers use on a regular basis.
I also love dabbling into food science to understand more about how baking works. And I’ve shared the results of many of my experiments such as finding the perfect ratio of baking powder to plain flour to make homemade self-raising flour and conducted all the research I could into whether Egg Size Matters. Spoiler alert – it does!
My research into the impact of egg sizes on baking cakes led to me being invited to appear on Food Unwrapped on Channel 4 to demonstrate the difference it makes using medium vs large eggs in baking vanilla cupcakes.
Last but not least are my handy cake ingredient calculators. If you’ve ever found a cake recipe but wanted to make it in a different size or shape tin or with more or less layers, I can help with that for my most popular cakes.
Simply add your tin size and number of layers into the calculators for any of these cakes and the ingredients will be auto calculated. What’s more, the calculators are designed so that you don’t need to do any silly splitting of an egg into fractions!
Fun with food
You’ll see my kids mentioned in many of my posts. I’ve baked with them since they were young and I love to try something a bit fun or daft. I’m always on the lookout for new ideas and challenges to have a go at and share with you.
It’s a great way to get the children involved in the kitchen and hopefully teach them the same love of cooking that I have. So whilst this site isn’t child baking focussed, you’ll find many recipes that are perfect for making with little ones.
More About Me
I don’t just bake, I work in finance too. It’s a career I love and after a few years working on this site while my boys were young, I’m now back at it full time. And I couldn’t be happier. You really can have your cake and eat it.
I also love the technical side of working on a website. I get great satisfaction from working out a tricky coding problem and helping my fellow site owners to solve their technical woes.
When I’m not at work or baking, my favourite thing to do is to spend time with my friends and family. I’m a big fan of walking in my local area, going to the theatre (especially musicals) and I love trying new things. I’ve recently started learning to ice skate, something I’ve wanted to be able to do since I was a child and I finally arranged myself lessons. I’m terrible and fall quite a bit, but I absolutely love it.
I keep mentioning them so I should introduce you to them properly. My two boys are Daniel & Josh and they’re my chief taste testers. They are also the reason that you’ll find a lot of birthday cake recipes on my site. Daniel loves a chocolate cake and Josh the vanilla.
Josh also loves cookies and Daniel is a big fan of brownies. And I love….actually I can’t choose…in fact I refuse to pick a favourite! I love variety – everything from Cheese Scones to Lemon Curd, No-Bake White Chocolate Cheesecake to Amaretti Biscuits and Baileys Cupcakes to Carrot Cake. I love them all equally.
But the recipe I’m most proud of creating is my Vegan Vanilla Sponge Cake as I designed it for a friend who wanted a really good vegan cake recipe for a birthday party. It really is delicious and I don’t think you’d ever know it was vegan if you weren’t told.
I hope you enjoy visiting Charlotte’s Lively Kitchen as much as I enjoy writing it. If you’d like to keep in touch then I’d love it if you’d join me on one (or all!) of these social networks. See you there!
