Production line

Devil's Food cupcakes baked by the boyfriend (with some help from me) to take into work tomorrow.



Lily's scones (from Domestic Goddess) baked by me (with no help from the boyfriend) for this event in Reading tomorrow. I hope everyone's hungry!

De(vi)lish

It's all well and good making March the month of healthy eating but then the boyfriend announced that he had to make cupcakes for his colleague (and my friend) Kathrin's birthday and could I help. Fittingly he picked a recipe (Devil's food cake cupcakes) out of the book of cupcake recipes that Kathrin gave me for my birthday last month.



[making the batter]

The boyfriend was very excited by the 'owl' that appeared when he took the mixer out of the bowl of chocolate icing and insisted that I take a photo. Well, it's as much like an owl as all those images of Jesus and the Virgin Mary that Americans keep finding in their poptarts.



[chocolate icing]

The cakes rose a little bit more than we anticipated but there were enough 'good' ones for the boyfriend to take into work this morning.



[Devil's Foodcake cupcakes]



Nom!

Cookie monster

The boyfriend was keen for me to blog the oatmeal and raisin cookies he made for dessert this evening. Despite us substituting white granulated sugar for brown sugar and not quite knowing what was meant by "1/s tsp" baking soda they turned out splendidly - nice and squidgy in the middle and crispy around the outside. The recipe is from Lucy's Kitchen - our go-to blog for North American cookery - and I'll be making them again for a quilting or knitting get together in the not-too-distant future.

Talking of quilting I met up with some of the other members of the quilting group this evening for a mammoth cutting session. I cut the remaining fabric for the Carolina Lily block and also the fabric for a new block using Celtic applique. I'm very excited about doing some more applique - it's really great to stretch my hand-stitching muscles. I'll do a post soon to show off my beautiful hand sewn seams when I have a chance to take some photos in good light.

Fast and fruity

Last week in sunny Geneva it was all about the ice cream. This week back in the autumnal UK I'm suddenly craving hot puddings with custard. This is a twist on one of our favourites and literally takes about 10 minutes to prepare and bake.

Fastest ever fruity pudding

You'll need two small microwaveable pudding bowls and a microwave. I use two teacups but you can always re-use the plastic pudding moulds that come with shop bought puddings!

Ingredients (makes two puddings)
50 grams each of self-raising flour, butter, and sugar
1 egg
1 teaspoon vanilla essence
2 dessert spoons of mixed berries with juice

Soften the butter then combine with the flour, sugar, egg and vanilla essence.
Place a spoonful of mixed berries into the base of each pudding bowl and then divide the pudding mix between the two bowls covering the berries. Make sure that there is some room between the top of the pudding mix and the top of the bowl as the pudding will rise.
Cook in the microwave for 3 minutes on high, then leave to rest for one minute before loosening the puddings from the bowls using a knife and turning them out.
Serve with custard, cream, or ice cream.

Each peach pear plum..

Some kindly person brought plums from their garden into work this week and so I made a plum and apple pie, using up the remaining apples from the ones we picked a few weeks back (apples really do keep well).



Luckily I took a picture before serving the pie as it all fell apart rather on cutting!



Still, all the constituent bits were delicious.

Today has been a day of small successes.

I've reached (and now finished) the heel on the second Hopscotch sock and there's still a sizeable cake of yarn left which bodes well for the length of the leg.



I've also finished (at long last) plying the hand-spun MoBair fibre which I bought back in May. It's currently hanging up in the shower to drip dry after which it's off to Katie's for the ball winder treatment (I've frankly had quite enough of winding this stuff around chairs!). It's worth it though, it's come out at a nice laceweight and I think I should be able to knit something very pretty in lace from it.



Lastly I've skeined up some yarn which I had over-dyed in the leftovers from yesterday's red dye bath. This was Debbie Bliss cream merino dk which I had a go at hand-dyeing with Supercook food colouring back in May. The results were not so much variegated as blotchy.

Before:



After:



Cooking the yarn in the somewhat diluted red dye bath has softened out the over-concentrated aqua and filled in the undyed gaps with a dusky pink. The result is a variegated yarn in petrol blues and greys with some rose and purple. It's beautiful and I'm torn between being thrilled at having produced it and somewhat regretful that it was completely by accident.

Like I don't have enough work deadlines

I've been really good all this week, working on the POTW on the bus and at lunchbreaks and spinning when I get home with the result that I've completed 10 out of 21 repeats of the 2nd half of the POTW and am more than half-way through the fourth bit (or batt if that's the right word?) of prepared fibre out of 5 on the 2nd single for my 2-ply yarn. Still, there's a lot of spinning still to do before I can even ply the stuff, let alone knit it (thank goodness it's a quick knit).



My plan (and I'm a novice spinner so do tell me if this sounds hopelessly naive) is to spin about half of my fibre to make one ply, then on a fresh spindle, spin the other half-ish for the second ply with the aim of ending up with two plies of roughly the same length which can then be plied together. We'll see pretty soon how that works out in what I like to call reality. Once I've finished spinning there'll be a mammoth skeining session and then it's off to Katie's to wind the two plies into balls. Actually just typing that makes me want to chicken out - the plies are pretty thin in the places where I let the spindle drop without grabbing enough fibre and I have now idea how my spun fibre is going to behave in a centre pull ball. Maybe instead I need to hand wind my first ply back onto a bobbin and ply it together with its mate still on the spindle.

I think I'd risk the centre pull option if a) I wasn't on a schedule and b) the eventual product was for me (I can put up with lots of woven in ends from knots and breaks). Given that I need to have knitted and posted a pair of Sockapalooza socks from this by August 2nd I think this is going to have to be done quick and dirty so to speak!*

In the meantime..



I made these on Sunday when my wrist was too tired to spin any more and it was raining (thus precluding a trip to the Co-op for bought biscuits). I was going to try small chocolate flowers in the middle of plain flowers and vice versa but the dough was a little too soft, still they look pretty good I think and they certainly taste alright.

* I am still horribly worried that it won't be done on time. I really don't want to let down my sock pal - I think I'll have to buy in some emergency sock-yarn as a back-up. I'd use my Trekking but she doesn't like purple.