Knitting Elephant

I made an Elijah, he's very slow at knitting but luckily he has a friend to fetch him cosy wool:

Epic Buns

Mmm, I just spent a lovely evening baking. Chocolate Brownie (Nigel Slater's recipe) for a pot luck lunch at work, plus *Epic Buns*.

Epic Bun recipe:

Make a tasty vanilla sponge-type bun mixture (I used the one in the Hummingbird Bakery cookbook but you could use any bun mix)

Put the mix into bun cases (I used my new silicone ones, much less fiddly than paper ones!)

Put a cherry into the centre of each case (I used tinned cherry filling stuff, I think it's meant to be for putting in pies)

Bake for the time required by the bun recipe

Allow to cool completely and add icing

Delicious, moist and juicy:)

Buns hot from the oven

Cherries hidden beneath icing and sprinkles, a tasty surprise:)

This being selfish and baking selfishly is definitely a good thing!

Multiple Baking

My New Year's Resolution to be more selfish seems to have led to increased baking. It's now a case of "I want cake, therefore I shall bake cake, and other people will just have to damn well eat it!" They don't seem to mind eating it thankfully. I'm currently imagining some sort of fairytale situation with a curse and vast quantities of cake over-running a kingdom...

Anyway, cake. I got a great recipe book for Christmas; The Hummingbird Bakery Cookbook. it is full of fabulous cupcake, cake, muffin and pie recipes. I've only made three things from it so far, Chocolate Cupcakes, Brooklyn Blackout Cake, and an apple nut loaf (unfortunately no pictures before it got eaten). A new recipe for scones was also discovered (from another recipe book), they barely had chance to get cool. Amusingly, on rolling out the scone dough, I realised I have a distinct lack of sensible cookie-cutters. I have various Christmas, Halloween, Canadian and Lego(!) cookie cutters but not round ones. I'm quite happy with my collection though. Fir-trees are evergreen after all, why should I be limited to tree shaped delectables during December only!?!

Brooklyn Blackout Cake with Chocolate Frosting:

(Rather hasty photo taken shortly before it was taken to work and promptly demolished)

Chocolate Cupcakes

Selfish baking; it's the way forward!

Resolutions

My resolutions this year are to be more selfish and do more fun things! This will hopefully include much more photography. Including of all the stuff I've been knitting instead of writing here. Oops.

Johnny Depp Cake

I went to a Johnny Depp and Jack Daniels Party the other night. It was fun. (The concept of matching initials parties started with Pumpkin Soup and Patrick Swayze).

The JD Party included Jammy Dodger Shooters (yum! Raspberry Liquer and Cream layered in a shot glass), "Johnny Dumplings" (actually chinese dumpling things but you've got to stick to the rules). My contribution was Johnny Depp cake:

It may look like chocolate cake, but it is actually rum and raisin chocolate cake! You may still be confused as to the relation with Johnny Depp, but see:

Rum - Johnny Depp, as Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean was a bit of a fan of the rum

Raisin - He played Gilbert Grape in What's Eating Gilbert Grape, and everyone knows raisins are made from grapes

Chocolate - How could I deny Willy Wonka chocolate? Plus he was in Chocolat (mmm Johnny Depp in chocolate)

If you want to make your very own Johnny Depp cake, the rough recipe I used is as follows (I used one off the internet but ended up changing a few things)

About 100g Raisins or dried fruit, roughly chopped

A good glug of Rum

175g unsalted butter

150g sugar

2 eggs lightly beaten

225g Self Raising Flour

40g cocoa powder

150ml milk

Soak the raisins in the rum for a while (preferably a few hours)

Pre-heat the oven to 180C, grease and line a cake tin

Beat the butter and sugar until light, then gradually beat in the eggs

Fold in the rum and raisins

Sift together the cocoa powder and flour

Fold the flour mix and the milk alternately into the batter

Pour into the tin, smooth the top and bake for about an hour (until a knife comes out clean)

Leave in the tin for 15minutes then turn onto a rack to cool

For chocolate rum icing, melt about 100g dark chocolate, mix in 100g butter until melted

Then add 75g sifted icing sugar and 3tbsp rum

Ice the cake and enjoy:)

I also put chocolate sprinkles on top just because I had some in the cupboard.

Mittens

My fourth mitten is finally complete!

Mitten number one was meant for my granny but ended up the perfect size for me (and hence too small for the intended recipient - oops!)

Mitten one (pre-thumb)

Mitten number two (knit at a looser gauge) was perfect for my granny (yay!)

Mittens two and three - blocking.

Mitten number three was the same size as two but had the thumb the wrong way round the first time (argh) and had to be fixed.

Mitten number four was going to be too much for the wool I had left so some shifting round of colours make it a friend to number one, rather than an exact copy. Good enough for me, and so warm:)

Mittens one and four, complete!

I particularly like the contrasting pattern on the thumb, and the picot hem.

Pattern: Found at http://knitty.com/ISSUEwinter06/PATTtiffany.html Tiffany Mittens by Sari

Wool: Rooster Almerino DK

Libraries

I like libraries. I loved them as a child; being able to wander round amongst aisles and aisles of fascinating books and pick ones to take home for free!! I read avidly as a child and still adore the escapism books provide.

Unfortunately some librarians are evil minions of satan, incapable of allowing people to enjoy books. Do they think I'm going to corrupt the poor little books or something? I don't plan to involve them in book-burning or anything, I promise. Anyway, I had a bad experience with one library (well, two bad experiences actually, and I've only been in there twice), so it doesn't really surprise me how popular online book-retailers are.

Generic Online Book-Retailer:

• Allows you to see a vast selection of potential options
• Gives you other reader's reviews
• Suggests other books you may like
• Sends the books to your door and requires minimal human interaction

University Library:

• Baffles you with a variety of options
• Only gives information about the standard option
• Apparently has a variety of different shelving systems (Dewey Decimal not good enough eh???)
• Is inhabited by evil people who shout at you for being slightly confused

I've worked at the University for a few years now and never really considered getting books out (it's a lot further away than my local library and I mostly read fiction and knitting books). A little investigation showed that they had the score of some piano music I wanted to play (Metamorphosis, Philip Glass - the piece Starbuck plays in Battlestar Galactica) at the nice price of free (as opposed to about £30 online). Awesome. So, I registered with the library, looked up the information about how to get books out, great. Except of course sheet music is in some random corner of the library and not in the right place in the baffling subsection of freakish book-shelving (I like the Dewey Decimal system dammit). Eventually I found it and took it to the information desk to check out.

Unfortunately the person at the desk had no idea what she was supposed to do with sheet music. She finally found a piece of paper that I was maybe suppose to fill in, so I did. I got the sheet music home and realised she hadn't stamped the return date. No problem, I thought, it'll say on the online system! Of course, that would be too simple, no record that I have it out.... Generally it seems you get to keep books for a month so I tried to take it back after 3 weeks, just in case. Oh that it could be that simple.

I took it to the information desk and asked about the return date (you know, for future reference), the man at the desk proceeded to tell me off for not knowing the return date and said I should have remembered it from when I took it out. Given the person I dealt with was totally baffled by the concept of sheet music, she hadn't given me any indication of when to return it, she hadn't stamped the return date (there were a couple of recent return dates in it). I said this, and pointed out I had checked the online system. "Well of course it's not on the online system!" Err ok, I hadn't realised, it's the first book I've got out, I'm staff, not a student, so I didn't know. "It's not a book, it's a score!!!" Err, ok but what would the return date be for scores then? "The end of term, as always!!!!!" Err...but I don't know when the end of term is, I'm staff... He then seemed utterly baffled by the concept of wanting to return it early and found a scrap of paper and a pencil to write my name on. I think he's going to use it to hunt me down and kill me:/

Maybe I'll aim for illiteracy in future.