By Alice | Published:
January 30, 2012
1. Beep likes to snuggle.
2. One friend reading another friend’s Soviet joke book
, a lot of laughs ;)
3. Beep enjoying cat grass that I grew from a kit I was given at Christmas.
4. Ira.
5. The weather lately.
6. IPAD!! I have been loaned one and I love it. It’s my kind of gadget! I like to read lots of visual type sites about photography/design/cookery/art/gardening etc and this is perfect for that, much better than a computer. For the first time I am almost caught up with my RSS subscriptions. I am using the ‘Perfect RSS’ app which caches your feeds so you can read when not on a WIFI connection. My dilemma is about a case, there are so many ugly and expensive ones. The roll of fabric is there because I am trying to decide if I should make one.
7. Dinner at my mother’s house. Always nice! For dessert I brought over ice cream and made these brownie roll-out cookies dusted with a little bit of icing sugar. Tasty and I thought they were nicest the next day.
8. Pub. A crowd of us saying goodbye to a friend going back to Australia.
By Alice | Published:
January 9, 2012
I don’t plan to make granola in particular at this time of year but this seems to be when the urge strikes. I guess it is a time of year when you need all the cheer you can get while still trying to eat healthily. For this batch of granola I wanted to limit the ingredients to a few flavours rather than throwing in every nut and seed I have. I remembered that my dad gets a very nice maple pecan oat cereal from Sainsbury’s that I’d tried over Christmas so that was my inspiration. My measurements were roughly 500g oats (I used Flahavan’s organic porridge oats), 100g pecans, 100g sunflower seeds, 1/2 cup maple syrup, and 1/4 cup groundnut oil. Mixed, then spread on a baking tray, put in a medium hot oven, and stirred every 15 minutes until golden brown. I think the secret treat when you make your own granola is to make it pre-breakfast so you can have that first bowl with granola warm from the oven, preferably with a handful of blueberries on top.
I took this picture on Sunday morning before I took down the Christmas and birthday cards that we put across the dresser and radiator in the absence of a mantlepiece. I can see a cute gingerbread one from Marceline peeking out!
Also posted in Cake & Dessert |
By Alice | Published:
November 6, 2011
Further experiments in gluten free baking, this time it was a birthday cake for my aunt. I thought the idea of a quinoa cake was intriguing when I saw the recipe in Dan Lepard’s book Short and Sweet. The recipe is here too: quinoa and hazelnut cake. It was great, it’s nice to have a gluten free cake that feels nicely cake-y with a good crumb texture. The cream and jam topping was easy to make and delicious, I used cherry jam.
By Alice | Published:
October 16, 2011
This morning I popped round to a narrow boat for a morning cup of tea. Boats are kind of fascinating :) I brought a dark sugar chocolate cake like the one I made the other day, this time I iced it with a chocolate fudge icing from the same book. The others were off on a trip up the canal but I headed off to deliver another cake.
By Alice | Published:
October 10, 2011
Short and Sweet
is a lovely cookery book and you feel he really knows what he’s talking about. It covers all the classics, pastry and so on, but also there’s lots of unusual ideas, next excuse I have I’m going to try the Quinoa Hazelnut Cake. At the weekend I made the brown sugar chocolate cake, really nice with half fat crème fraiche :)
