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Making Cinder Toffee

February 16, 2012 By 3 Comments

I don’t usually do spontaneous. There’s often no room for it for one, but in the interests of full disclosure : I don’t bloody like it.

So when I saw Nigella’s tweet about her recipe of the day, it was a surprise to find myself making it not half an hour later. Now, she calls it Hokey Pokey, but where I come from (oop north) we call it cinder toffee. You might also know it as the inside of a crunchie. I love the stuff. It reminds me of school trips, sitting crammed into a shambles of a coach, stuffing this stuff into my mouth until my tongue was raw.

I remember watching her make this on her telly programme, thinking I ought to do it. Who knows what happens to all those resolutions made in front of cooking shows, but here we are, better late than never. She was right, as well: it’s the work of moments and utterly delicious.

You know why she tells you to give it away too? Because if you don’t you’ll just carry on eating it until it’s all gone.

Filed Under: Making for Mothers - 3 Comments

Wolf Porridge

February 3, 2012 By 16 Comments

So I’m a good baker. I may not be the best baker, but I rarely have a cake that doesn’t rise. As a young girl I made a cake every Saturday before I went ice skating, usually chocolate, let’s be honest, and I’d have a massive slice of it when I got home, having first spent my 50p on a massive chip butty at the ice rink. Ah, the seventies – what a decade of fine childhood nutrition that was.

For Christmas I got the second best Christmas gift* ever – a raspberry red stand mixer. I finally went for the Kenwood Kmix, because a) British company and b) that Kitchenaid’s almost twice the price innit? Sheesh. Anyway, I’m sure they both make a fine cake, but I love my Kenwood, because it’s mine.

(Interestingly, before Christmas Mr J sent me a link to a different Kenwood, which had more attachments and more watts and stuff like that, thinking he ought to get that one, because technically it was better. It was only marginally more expensive than this one. But, as I said to him, this one is RED, a fact which is seemingly lost on him. Tsk.)

(*Best ever Christmas gift is still the kindle. I think it might only be toppled by a new and improved kindle.)

We’ve been baking a lot from Short and Sweet by Dan Lepard, which I love not only for its density and completeness, but also for the fact that it is the first cookbook I’ve felt compelled to scribble in, adding my own notes as I go along. I think perhaps it is something to do with the fact that, unlike a lot of modern recipe books, every recipe is not given a photograph or even a whole page to itself. There is more of a jumbled in feel to the collection. The paper is also very tactile, not shiny and smooth, and it takes pencil marks exceedingly well (I still can’t bear to make marginalia in anything but a pencil).

It was the turn of his cupcakes recipe today. Turning aside from my dear Nigella‘s tried and tested fairy cakes recipe made me nervous but kitchen gambles are never irreversible. Dan suggests throwing the butter, sugar, eggs and vanilla extract into the bowl of your delicious mixer all at once and beating for 3 minutes. Now the recipe does say to make sure the butter is soft, which it was, but I have added a note to say ‘do not try on extremely cold winter days’, or you will end up looking at tiny shards of butter being flung around in an eggy sugary mixture with not a hope in hell of coming together into anything like cake mix.

We started again, beating the sugar and butter together in a more traditional way, and everything was fine. And the cakes are fairly delicious, though I imagine if their liberation from the oven had not been held up by the liberal sprinkling of wolf porridge (a mixture of red lentils and pearl barley) all over the kitchen floor, they might be even nicer.

Baking seems to have become a staple thing in the house again, which was happening even before the arrival of the red beast, and this week was the first week in four that I actually bought a loaf of bread, as the dough hook makes chucking a loaf together a work of moments. Also it’s expedient with an impatient two year old, who likes measuring, flinging ingredients about, and licking his hands, but not so much spending ten minutes watching mum knead dough.

Our hours in the kitchen today were borne of desperation and necessity – stuck in the house with both snuffly colds and the bitter cold outside – but they were some of my favourite hours of this whole week. Finishing off by letting the boy pour lentils all over the place while I washed up from our cake adventure was delightful for him and me, seeing his growing confidence in pouring with small cups and bigger jugs, and inventing wolf porridge along the way. After all, it all sweeps up doesn’t it? It’s only a little bit of mess.

Nice to be back by the way.

Filed Under: Baking, book review - 16 Comments

A List of Nonsense born of Industry

November 3, 2011 By 4 Comments

(This post starts as one thing and ends up as something else. I’ve let it stand, as opposed to editing myself.)

I’ve been beavering away making some bibs for the Craft Fair in Dulwich on Saturday. I’m piggy-backing on my friend Jo’s jewellery stall as I did last year, so I imagine we’ll be being very badly behaved and tasting all the delicious cakes (I hope the cake lady is the same as last year – they were amazing, and she introduced me to the delights of edible glitter).

Thoughts that have occurred while I’ve been busy:
  • This room is no warmer than it was in the spring.
  • 4OD is great, because it has an archive of shows from forever, so I finally got the see the Devil’s Whore, and made myself a new hero in Edward Sexby.
  • I have a lot of fabric in my drawers that I’m probably not going to use and should have a de-stash.
  • I fiddled with the blog layout again, and wish I could find the colour green I used about four years ago, rather than the slightly odd green that looks fine on my mac, but not on my PC.
  • Signing up for nanowrimo is so so so optimistic, given that I’m three days behind already.
  • I don’t really know how to reconcile all the different parts of myself into a coherent whole at the moment.
Ever feel as if you’re floundering a bit? When I’m busy I always feel as if I ought to be attending to something else. There’s always the feeling that some parts of me are being done a disservice, by the effort of distilling them into one shape or another. Perhaps I’m trying too hard to be coherent, and the trick is to let things flow more, the way children will throw their entire being at a task and then seamlessly move onto something completely different.

I confess I’ve often thought of stopping writing here lately. My landscapes have changed since I started blogging in 2007, and I don’t know if this space suits me anymore. I keep fiddling with the blog’s layout too, because it’s just not comfortable, and each time I’m happy for about 36 hours. Perhaps I did everything the wrong way round, when it comes to writing, blogging, making, having a child. My instinct is to stop and start again, but where would that get me? At the beginning again. Where I love to be, happily master of none of the things I take up. I really fancy learning Norwegian, for example, which is really just part of a wider interest in norse myth, old english and the experience of North, and being Northern. But where does it fit in?

Elizabeth wrote of creative people who have a keen urge to pursue more than one discipline. Perhaps the nature of blogging means that I’m stopping myself from experiencing more pure joy in following my interests because of the tramlines I made for myself with the title, or the notion that I must write about everything here, and then stopping myself doing things or writing about them because of some odd idea that they aren’t suitable. I’m not good at compartmentalising. Maybe that’s it.

Perhaps the whole thing is best summed up with the trouble I have choosing a twitter name. In the dark history of the internet, you chose an avatar and a pseudonym, keeping your real identity a secret, since the internet was full of Wierdy Geeks. If I was just one thing, or had just one website, then it would be easier to settle on a name. I’ve flipped back and forward from one thing to another, causing confusion and delay, not least to my own sense of identity. This week I realised it would be much easier to tweet under my real name, since this is the only way that I can safely encompass every part of myself, and everyone is on the internet now anyway. But my name is taken. Where to now?

Should I end this post by making excuses for myself? Blame it on the darkness? Blame it on a lack of chocolate? No, my friends, I think not. No more excuses.

Filed Under: Diet & Butter, Life, Sewing - 4 Comments

November, November

November 1, 2011 By 6 Comments

*I did this face in about five minutes flat, having realised it was not half an hour to the child’s bedtime and we hadn’t carved a face. Halloween is not one of those things you can do the day after. I may have modelled it on my own dismayed face brought on by slack parenting.

*I have done my back in. This seems a cruel and unnecessary reminder of my advancing years. It was almost better but then I jumped off a stile because I was being chased by a horse (I say chased. I mean the horse was ambling after me slowly. But my friend mentioned the deer in Nara who bit my bum in search of biscuits and I panicked.) I am currently in love with the wee adhesive heat patches you can stick on, which seem to be the best thing for it, but I’m still doing everything v.e.r.y. s.l.o.w.l.y.

*I joined the ranks of people who can speak to their phone to Get Things Done. (Siri, the voice assistant on the iPhone 4s.) I thought it would be rubbish but it isn’t, and I can add things to a groceries list as I pootle around the kitchen, which means that when I do my online shopping I actually get the stuff we need. Big breakthrough.

*I started making a baby blanket from the yarn i got at Ally Pally, and I also did some sewing at my desk again. It felt good to have busy hands again.

*I also made welsh cakes at home for the first time ever. They were amazing, and I only tried them because it was a rainy day and they don’t require much in the way of dairy produce (online shopping failure yet again). Most of the ingredients are dry and will just be hanging around in your cupboard. You don’t need a griddle pan – a frying pan is just as good.

*I keep expecting Winter to arrive, but so far it hasn’t and we’ve been making the most of the fair weather while we can. There’ll be enough dark and bitter days in the coming months, and the clock change only hastens them in. The sun set at 4.45 today. We were still in the park, still had energy to burn. It makes less and less sense to me to have more light at 6am than at 5pm, but this might have a lot to do with my child now waking at 6.30 instead of 7.30.

*As if I didn’t have enough going on I set up a tumblr, purely for pictures from my iPhone and Instagram. I’m finding time passes so quickly now, and the business of toddlers makes it harder and harder to record things (witness this poor neglected blog), and often the only thing I have time for is a quick snap with the camera in my phone. But at least I have that.

*And apparently it’s November now. What the hell happened to this year?

Filed Under: Life Tagged With: , - 6 Comments

Forgotten pleasures

October 13, 2011 By 7 Comments

I went to the Knitting & Stitching Show last week, with my lovely friend Jo. I haven’t been since before I had the boy, what with being firstly a new mother of only 4 weeks, and then a mother who rightly decided that a pushchair with a one year old in those crowds would be hell. This year was fine, because he goes to his lovely childminder, and so I was free to skip all the way across the river, with a sandwich from Paul in my bag (Florence is right – the food is dreadful), and a willingness to open my purse if I liked what I saw.
I took my camera but I took no pictures. None at all. I think I was just happy to be out, looking at some great textile art, as well as some fine examples of what Jo calls “misplaced effort”- you know, those things that you think, ‘technically accomplished, yes, but really quite hideous and pointless’. Thankfully there weren’t many of those this year. We truly loved the knitted herons in particular, and I was buoyed to discover that the artist had got herself a dream job as a weaver after graduating. Just a wee reminder that there are people out there following their passions to the limit.

After a lunch that included two glasses of wine my purse well and truly spilled open and I bought some lovely things from Ray Stitch and Eternal Maker. It’s the first new fabric I’ve bought in an age. I bought with projects in mind for once, and probably not coincidentally, it’s the first time I’ve felt properly excited by sewing in forever. This might also have something to do with being able to see the sewing surface again. The new fabric also made me realise I need a little bit of a de-stash, so that’s another job to stick on the bottom of my list.

But for today, I’m just going to do some actual sewing. Yes, I know. I can’t believe it either.

(Apologies for slightly blurry photos – I would have redone them, but I’ve already cut the fabric. No, I can’t believe that either.)

Filed Under: I've been shopping, Sewing Tagged With: , , - 7 Comments
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