A venture into the kitchen..

Apart from the sewing I've also been venturing into the kitchen to cook up some treats! I know this started out more as a sewing blog but I think I'm going to include my other interests too - I am a Gemini after all and like to have my fingers in all the pies, literally!

Greatly inspired by the program, The Great British Bake Off, which is on TV at the moment, I've experimented with focaccia, chelsea buns, cornmeal sticks (recipes courtesy of Dan Lepard, who is an incredible baker), along with chocolate chestnut cake (Hugh Fearnley-Whitingstall), a tarte au citron (Raymond Blanc), a chocolate roulade (Mary Berry), cheese souffles and apple muffins - which I adapted from several recipes I found online. Here's my version for the apple muffins:

Apple muffins (makes 8):

200g plain flour

90g caster sugar

50g soft brown sugar

2 1/2 tspn baking powder 

1/2 tspn salt

tbspn water

2 eggs beaten
75ml sunflower oil

5 drops vanilla essence

150g eating apples, grated

for the topping:

handful of pumpkin seeds

1 tspn cinnamon

1) Preheat the oven to 200C and place muffin cases in muffin tray.

2) Mix all dry ingredients in a large mixing bowl; flour, sugars, baking powder and salt.

3) Add wet ingredients and combine; water, eggs, oil, vanilla essence. Don't worry if there are a few lumps.

4) Gently fold in the apple and put the mixture in the cases.

5) Sprinkle some cinnamon over the muffins along with the pumpkin seeds.

6) Cook for 15-20mins until golden brown and a skewer comes out clean, then leave to cool on a rack.

I confess I did mean to put the cinnamon in the mixture but forgot! I found sprinkling it on top actually worked quite well though, as well as added to the nice brown colour. If I make them again I'll try adding the cinnamon to the mixture instead and let you know how it works!

Aside from the above photo I've only managed to grab some snaps of the crispy cornmeal sticks and focaccia as everything else needed to be eaten right away!

Back to the blog

I've been very neglectful with my sewing and blog, but I'm back with something new!

This year has really flown by since we moved into our house in February as we've been working hard to get it ready for the winter. The existing heating was really kaput, but now we're ready to take the winter on with a beautiful Morso woodburning stove, and less lovely gas central heating system.

But back to the sewing...  I felt I needed something to motivate me to get back into it, so I found a great course to make a log cabin cushion. This is really useful for using up all your scraps of fabric and pretty simple to make once you get the idea! I picked the colours to go with the other cushion I made, and another one I've half done.