Furoshiki!

Good Afternoon all,

I'd like to share with you my latest obsession:  The Japanese art of Furoshiki, or cloth folding.  This is usually used to wrap gifts or carry things such as books or even watermelons!

I've been using a (homemade) furoshiki wrap for my lunch this week, and I think it's super cute!  I made the furoshiki wrap by cutting up a square of fabric (that I made from the same fabric as my ironing board cover) and hemmed a simple edge onto it.  Then the fun started...

 Lay the cloth out in a diamond in front of you...

Pop your lunch in the centre of the cloth- I use a small clippy box for fruit and a medium clippy box for soup or leftovers or whatever.  There's usually a banana or a cereal bar balanced in there too...

 Take the left and right corners and bring them up over the lunch and tie in a double knot...

 Turn the whole thing round so the loose sides are on the left and right again and bring these up, a bit like wrapping a present.

 Both sides up...

 ...And tied in a double knot.  I tend to do this quite loosely, and not tie the knot too close to the lunch inside, so it acts like a carrying handle.

You can even slip your chopsticks through the 'under-knot'.  I really like the way this looks, and the way it holds your lunch together, especially if you're like me and end up with all sorts of random or loose items in your lunch!  The good thing about this is that it doesn't matter if your lunch is an awkward shape either, because you're not forcing your food into a square box! :)

Sugar Skull Facepaint!

Good Morning,

We went to a Halloween themed birthday party last night with the instructions to 'maybe, sort of, dress upp, y'know, if you feel like it'.  We went down the plain-clothes-sugar-skull-face route, and I think it worked quite well!  Enjoy!

Mini Apple and Blackberry Pie

Good Afternoon all,

As progress with the house has slowed a little, please indulge my frequent posts about baking. I've just bought two tiny, super cute pie dishes from Cargo Homestores, via Amazon. They arrived on Wednesday and I was amazingly keen to make a cute dessert for the Mr. Cue rummaging through the fruit bowl and freezer...In the end I used an apple and some blackberries that I picked and froze from our trip to Manor Farm Country Park. I also decided to try a lattice crust, which I've never really done before, and I think it worked rather well.

And here is a pic of the pie once baked and crispy...

To give some idea of size and scale of the cute mini pie dishes, here is how big they really are!

The pastry was ready roll shortcrust pastry (I know, I'm lazy) and the filling was made using one apple (I think it was a golden delicious or something, just what I had in the fruit bowl) peeled and cut into chunks. I popped this in a bowl with about a tablespoon of caster sugar and a teaspoon of cinnamon and microwaved on high for 2 and a half minutes. Then I added in a handful of frozen rasberries and drained off the syrupy liquid. I lined the dish with pastry and filled it with the fruit. I cut the rest of the pastry into strips and put a lattice on top, brushing the edge with milk to make sure it stuck. Then I trimmed the edges, brushed the top with more milk and sprinkled a little lot more sugar and cinnamon on top.

Bake at about 180C for 15 to 20 minutes (perhaps longer if you're making more than one) then EAT!

Baby Shower!

Good Evening All!

I've just finish clearing away after a very successful baby shower.  Unfortunately this is going to be another cake-related post.  I will get back to the house at some point, I promise...

So,  Remember the chocolate ombre cake I made a few weeks back?  Well that was a practice cake for the baby shower.  I made a pink one this time and made the 'roses' a little smaller, and I'm pretty proud of how it turned out.  (I also made cake pops, sausage rolls, quiche and biscuits...)

Sorry the pictures aren't that great but the lighting kinda sucked and people were arriving whilst I was trying to put it together!  It was great fun though, and I think my Sis had a really ace time!

Dining Room!

Good Afternoon!

After another weekend with the paintbrushes it seems that the dining room is finally in a sharable state.  I'm still not sure about the yellow, but the Mr loves it.  The grey does soften it a bit (yes, it's the same grey as the lounge and the bedroom).  Anyway, enough of the talking, let's get on to the pictures...

We have the light fixture hanging over the dining room table.  As we live in a rental place, we couldn't be moving the light fixtures, so we rewired the ceiling rose with a nice long bit of flex, and added a hook to the ceiling above the table.  Voila!

All in all, the room feels a little more livable now, but ut's an awkward shape and still doesn't feel quite 'right'.  Watch this space, I suppose!

Ginger cake with Fudge Frosting...

Good Afternoon...
Still no progress with the house!  We hope to things a bit more up together by Christmas though, by that I mean we should having a dining room we're happy with...
So.  This weekend was the Mr's birthday, so I baked a ginger cake with fudge icing.  I struggled to find a recipe so I tweaked one from the various recipes that I found.  I present it here (mostly for my own future recipe searchings...)

Simple Ginger Cake
Ingredients:
285 g self-raising flour
3 tsp ground Ginger
1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
1 tsp Bicarbonate of Soda
A pinch of Salt
200 ml golden syrup
125 g butter
125 g soft light brown sugar
2 large eggs
240 ml Semi Skimmed Milk

1. Grease a 20cm tin, and line the bottom with greaseproof paper if you need to.
2. Preheat the oven to 180C/gas 4. Sift the flour with the ground ginger, cinnamon, bicarbonate of soda and salt. 
3. Put the golden syrup, butter and sugar in a small pan and gently heat until all melted together.,
4. Break the eggs into a bowl, pour in the milk and beat gently to break up the egg and mix it into the milk. 
5. Remove the butter and sugar mixture from the heat and pour into the flour, stirring smoothly and firmly with a large metal spoon. Mix in the milk and eggs. The mixture should be VERY sloppy almost like a batter, with no trace of flour. 
6. Pour the mixture into the lined cake tin and bake for an hour, covering with tin foil half way through, until a skewer inserted in the centre of the cake comes out clean. Unless you are serving it warm, leave the cake in its tin to cool, then tip it out on to a sheet of greaseproof paper. Wrap it up in foil and, if you can, leave it to mature for a day or two before eating. 

Bursledon Windmillery!

Good Afternoon all,

On Sunday we spent an extremely pleasant afternoon at the Bread and Honey even at Bursledon Windmill.

That's me, under the windmill, scratching my head.  That picture is totally candid, not posed.  There was a quiz about honey bees and I guess it was a bit much for me!

It was absolutely fascinating to see the journey from wheat to flour-windmills are a lot more complicated than we had initially thought!  We talked a lot with the guys and really got to appreciate the work that goes into grinding flour 'the old fashioned way.'  We got talking about baking and making, and knowing where your food comes from.  I'm looking forward to heading back to the windmill in the future, and perhaps taking down some cake that I've made with their flour.  Perhaps at some point I'd like to get involved with volunteering sessions, too, but we'll see how that plays out.

Just as we were about to head off for a nice long walk along their nature trail, the heavens opened and there was a big ol' downpour.  Not to be disheartened, we pulled on wellies and rain macs and went walking anyway.  We got soaked but we were happy.

Carrot Cake!

Good Morning!

I seem to be going through a 'baking' phase at the moment (never mind that it's lasted about 6 years...)  Until we get the dining room and hallway up to scratch, I present my carrot cake.  This recipe is taken from the Hummingbird Bakery book, and is the carrot cake with 1/3 quantity cream cheese frosting.

Enjoy!

Chocolate Ombre Cake!

Hello everyone!

I've had so much going on lately!  We've repainted our hall, stairs and landing, but this is still only half a job as we have two sets of stairs and have left the biggest wall white.  Here's an idea of the progress we've made...

It's really difficult to photograph as when the doors are closed, the only light comes from a skylight above the stairs.  Hopefully I'll have got the hang of it by the time the painting's done...

Onto the subject of the post then...Chocolate Ombre cake!  I've been feeding my cake addiction (No pun intende...OK. Pun intended) on Pinterest when I started coming across the pink swirly ombre cake, from glorioustreats.blogspot.com.  I am a chocoholic and started looking for a chocolate version.  Unable to find one, I made my very own...

On the inside I used two cake recipes-Lady Mary Berry's All-In-One sponge,  and the Brooklyn Blackout cake recipe from the Hummingbird Bakery cookbook.  I made one layer of chocolate cake, one layer of vanilla sponge, and two mixed layers so that the ombre effect continues inside the cake.

I baked the cakes and then used vanilla butter icing to sandwich and crumb coat the layers.

From there I mixed up the butter icing (some chocolate and vanilla, again from the hummingbird cookbook) and mixed some together to get graduating shades.  Then I filled up my piping bag and attached an open star nozzle and had at the cake with swirls!

Hooray for cake!  All ready for my dad's birthday party tomorrow...

Finally Finished Bedroom

Good Afternoon.

It's a Bank Holiday Weekend here in Blighty, and according to some ancient law, one MUST do some kind of DIY.  We chose to paint, and finish the much neglected bedroom.  We'd fallen into a trap with the bedroom-the 'no-one will see it but us' trap which meant that other, more public rooms got all the attention, whilst we woke up every morning in a white, bland, hand-me-down furniture and uni house bed kinda way.  Cue obligatory before shot.  Note the dark gray wall (Which I liked for ages, BTW), the country pine bedsides and the bubble glass lamps.  Nice.

So, you saw what we did with our bed, which was to build up the headboard and upholster the whole thing in lovely grey felted wool.  That was a good start.  Then we picked up some really nice bedside tables (Actually they were 'coffee tables' but I don't think anyone minds...).  We also found some old Anglepoise model 90 lamps.  We couldn't find matching ones, so I have a white one and the Mr has the black one.  One day we might buy another one so that they match, but these were free :-).

The Bank Holiday Weekend Paintjob saw us covering over that dark grey wall (and indeed all of the other walls) with Dulux Once in Chic Shadow.  Yes.  This is the same colour as the living room.  I think it's my favorite paint colour now.  The door frames now look nicer, the baseboards look nicer, hell even our furniture looks nicer.  We even managed to put up and old mirror that we got in a charity shop for £3.00.  It  always looked awful against the white, but somehow it just works against the grey.

OK, OK...Here's a pic of the AWFUL chevrons I painted in the wardrobe.  We're going to sand them down, paint over in grey and start again.  Any ideas how I can get them neater?

All in all, the bedroom is so much calmer now.  It was much nicer to wake up this morning :-).  Eventually I's like to swap out the Eames (It's actually one of the dining chairs and needs to go back...) for a Bertoilla Diamond Chair (or something similar...), with a yellow chevron cushion perched on top.  Sigh.

There is no rest for the wicked though, as tomorrow we're planning to paint the hall starts and landing (An onerous task as we have a wall nearly 5 meters tall) in a gorgeous shade of olive green-grey.