sorry that there’s not much happening here, I’ve really only been making granny squares for the never ending blanket, and designing my wedding invitations, which obviously I can’t put up because of the whole surprise element that is apparently necessary for weddings. but on my other (food) blog there’s lots (ok, some) going on. check it aoww..
it’s been a while since I blogged, and I can’t really be bothered posting one now, but I want to share this bunny I made for a swap last month (or the month before, I can’t remember). I wanted to make a bunny with stand up ears, not floppy ones and I thought some mohair I found in a charity shop in St Andrews ages ago would be super cute. I was rather pleased with it and quite sad to let it go
that I will most likely be unable to make it to the Made in the Shade Springtime Jamboree this weekend. I got many splendid things at the last one. Alas I will be partying hearty in Edinburgh at a friend’s hen night. You should definitely go though.
can’t get enough Jempins? good news! I have another blog: pie-in-soup.tumblr.com!
it’s pretty small now, but should grow into your basic food blog. just pictures of what I eat, links to what I’d like to eat, a little commentary and maybe even some recipes. enjoy.
As it was Mother’s Day this week I invited my mum and dad over for lunch on Saturday. I’m not a fantastic host, all concepts of timing go out the window and I’m horribly disaster prone when entertaining (washing up liquid soup anyone?). Add to that my mum being an amazing cook but both my parents being fairly fussy and this was a potentially a highly stressful situation, so I gave what I was going to cook quite a bit of thought over the week. When I say my parents are fussy what I really mean is my dad has been spoiled by 30 + years of my mum’s excellent cooking and my mum’s tastes (even though she’s pretty open minded about food in general) have become somewhat specific. She has pretty defined likes and dislikes. She’s not nuts about most vegetables for example. But she loves haribo. She also loves carpet picnics, and bowls of wee things to graze between. So I decided to make just a few simple things I’ve made a thousand times before and was pretty sure she’d like: tortilla, patatas bravas and black pudding and chorizo in tomato sauce. Add to that some lovely bread from the local deli, little doune balsamic dressing and really fruity olive oil, posh crisps and a baked camembert and I think she was happy.
And what better occasion to make a proper cake than having the folks over for lunch? I’ve had my eye on the lemon curd cake in baking porn book Gorgeous Cakes for quite some time. The recipe is a richer version of the lemon drizzle cake I made from the same book after Christmas, but filled with mascarpone and lemon curd. Unfortunately I didn’t love it as much as I loved the first lemon cake. The sponge is a lot denser (and mine annoyingly fell quite a lot in the middle), and the mascarpone filling makes it quite heavy. It was a big eat, especially after a big lunch, I wasn’t sure I liked it at all. I did really enjoy it today with a cup of tea though (obviously I had to give it a second chance, fair is fair), so I think I’d make it again, the next time a proper cake is required.
Blog fun time! I was tagged here by Marceline from the Asking for Trouble to write about a photo. I never do stuff like this but it’s quite jolly and frankly I need all the blogging encouragement (pressure) I can get. The rules are thus: 1: Open your first photo folder, 2: scroll to the 10th photo, 3: Post the photo and the story behind it, 4: Tag 5 or more peeps to continue the thread…
I share iPhoto with my boyfriend and the first folder had nothing to do with me, so I proceeded to the second, a folder called ‘out 06′. The people in the photo are Carol and Keith, who as well as being dear friends from yore have also been Boyfriend’s flatmates and briefly my flatmates. Carol appears to be at the height of her ‘emo princess’ phase so it must have been around the time I was living with her, and Keith has a shaved head, which makes me think it must have been either just before one of his summer trips to Cornwall to teach children to surf, or just after a grueling summer picking lettuce in the Kingdom of Fife. There are bars behind them (you can’t really see them in this tiny photo, but I can in the original), so that makes me think it was at the Glasgow Uni QMU, although I had long graduated by 2006 so it seems unlikely. Really I have no idea if I took this photo, I have no idea where the night out is, I don’t remember it at all, I’m not even sure I was there. But it does make me super nostalgic. I miss going out to the dancing!
So who am I going to tag?
I’m thinking
Phil at Elba Sessions
Stevie at Mumble Club
Alan at Alshie
Laura at Scrappy Chappy
Fran at The Graphic Foodie
Once upon a time I used to make peanut butter cookies. And they were pretty good and everyone liked them. And I made them loads but the more I made them the more I began to feel that they just weren’t that good after all. Something was missing. Something just wasn’t quite right. They weren’t peanut buttery enough. They weren’t quite chewy enough, but they weren’t exactly crispy either. Small chocolate chips melted into them too much but chocolate chunks stopped them spreading on the tray. Eventually I stopped making them.
Time went on though and I started to miss peanut butter cookies, but I couldn’t go back to that stupid old rubbish recipe that I used to make. Bleugh. Those cookies were disgusting. Luckily this time I knew exactly where to go for a truly satisfying cookie recipe, the same place I found my beloved raspberry buttermilk cake, smitten kitchen.
So there you have it, perfect nutty flavour, chewy texture and lovely squishy dark chocolate chips (the recipe calls for peanut butter chips, but I just used all chocolate since we don’t get peanut butter chips here. I’m not even really sure what they are – just solid bits of peanut butter?). The recipe yields loads, I think I made about 25 and still had about a quarter of the dough to freeze for a cookie emergency.
I’m desperate to make them again, but there are so many amazing looking cookie recipes on Smitten Kitchen that I feel like it would be a waste to to not try something else, so I might be making two different types of cookie this weekend.
again, not really exclusively Christmas, but here’s a round up of what I’ve been making over the last two months.
first up are the Christmas decorations, for the splendid Christmas ornament swap. Obviously I made out like a bandit with all the goodies my swap partners sent me (only one flaker, pretty good show), so I really hope everyone that got a matryoska liked it. I sketched these in my notebook earlier in the year, so I was really looking forward to making them, and I enjoyed playing around with different ways of embellishing them. I think the turquoise one is my favourite, I was sad to see her go.
next up was a red scarf for Boyfriend. I never really make him anything (boys can be so hard to craft for, yes?) so this was a delight. Plus, I very much got into a knitting groove. It was slow starting but after a few rows I was frantically clacking away in front of the tv, on the train, at the cinema. He wanted it pretty long, so I know it was going to take a while, and I thought it was going to be boring but I really enjoyed it and was sad when it was finished. I liked having such a simple portable project.
I was enjoying the yarn so much that when it was done I made a wee cup cosy one night. We have a (weird) collection of 80s smarties mugs that came with Easter eggs, and I did have an idea of making one for each of them, but haven’t got round to it. I might still though, a cup cosy is quite a satisfying job of an evening.
and most recently I made my best ever teeny tiny stuffie. My swap partner loves little red riding hood, and I love little red riding hood, so after much deliberation (because it seemed a little tricky) I decided that’s what I was going to make. There are so so so many really cute red riding hood representations out there, I love Ottogicco and Shinzi Katoh’s Red Hood, so I knew I wanted to do a pointy hood. No smiley mouth or rosy cheeks for my gal though, just a pair of french knot eyes. I really wanted to keep her for myself, but alas, she had to go to my partner. I’m a bit concerned though because I’ve not been rated yet, I hope she’s not lost in the post.
I also got a few awesome handmade gifts from other makers, including a stationery set from Asking for Trouble, a t shirt from She Draws, and cute accessories from Fluffssuffs
I have not been blogging much in recent months, but you should not infer from this that I have been living some sort of slothful existence. I have, in fact, been in a whir of activity since the start of December, and after I finished my million ornaments for friends and swap partners I had other gifts to make.
The most significant was toffee for my Dad. We give him toffee every year (pretty much always Thorntons) and it’s a bit boring, so I thought it might be nice to make it myself this year. I studied several instructional articles on the Guardian site, including this very helpful lightbox and decided it was going to be a piece of piss. Which is half true. Definitely the theory is a piece of piss. The actual practice is a bit more tricky because the caramel really will turn from lovely browny-red to black in about 2 seconds and be ruined. And if it’s not dark enough it tastes of nothing but sweet, but if it’s burnt it tastes disgusting. The ingredients are cheap enough that you can try again and again until you get it right, but after a whole weekend of making caramel I had a horrifying sugar headache and had developed a strong gag reflex to toffee, fudge and tablet. Luckily I also had a couple of decent batches of toffee – toasted brazil nut and maple pecan. The brazil nut was slightly bitter and I did wonder if I’d burnt it a tiny bit, but it was quite nice so I decided to keep it. When I tasted it a few days later it seemed to have mellowed, although this could have just been my frazzled taste buds returning to normal. The best bit was I had enough to give to a few people as well as my dad. People appreciate a homemade gift so much.
My dad is also a big fan of nuts so I made a batch of sweet and spicy ones to go in another jar. These really are a piece of piss, just your choice of nuts stired through whizzed up egg whites mixed with sugar and flavourings toasted in the oven. I used a Hugh Fearnly Whittingstall recipe that I stumbled on (again through the Guardian I think), and they were nice, but a bit too wholesome. Next time I’ll be making these sugar and spice candied nuts from smitten kitchen, which have about twice as much of everything to about half as many nuts. In the photo they look all crusty and lovely with sugar, so I think they’re more what I’m looking for.
I did have a couple of food triumphs over the festive season. Almost a month on I’m still extremely proud of the giant 3kg of chilli brisket I made on Hogmanay (and of which I still have about half in my freezer because people had already eaten before they came over). It was just the most brisket I could fit in my biggest oven friendly pot cooked with vegetables and red wine for a few hours, and then roughly torn up and a vat of homemade chilli sauce poured over. It was pronounced by several people the best chilli they’d ever had. Since everyone has their own favourite ingredients for chilli I’ll tell you mine: a really good slug of little doone balsamic dressing. In fact, it’s my favourite thing with any tomatoes.
My other pet success was a ridiculously good lemon drizzle cake. Nothing fancy, it’s not even drizzled with lemon syrup, just juice and sugar. And it looks like nothing, so I didn’t bother with photos. But it’s the nicest sponge I’ve ever made and stayed light and moist for 3 days. I’m getting rather excited thinking about variations. Lime and coconut. Orange choc chip. Something involving lavendar. It’s one of Annie Bell’s Gorgeous Cakes, of which I’ve made many, and they always turn out very good if not excellent.
So I’ve not done a post since the 31st of December, and I am very ashamed. I hilariously actually thougth about doing a new blog with a crafty tutorial / recipe every week this year as a project 52 thing, which is gold considering we’re 3 weeks into January and I haven’t even written up what I made over December for this blog yet.
Anyway, somehow I’ve managed to write a guest post for my most favouritist ever blog Super Cute Kawaii. Visit it to see my Red Riding Hood themed guest picks.
