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friday inspirations

The River Cottage Family Cookbook is my favorite at the moment. I love their chatty, informal style & that it is as good a book to read as it is to cook from. Every time I go back to it just gets better and better. I baked the banana bread this week & it's a cracker of a recipe.

I have been sorting through some bookmarks and rediscovered the beautiful quilted blankets made by Rie Elise Larsen. That long, chunky hand (?) quilting looks so good. Very inspiring. 

Love the different patterns & textures of these beautiful tea cups from Samantha Robinson.

I think I might try to make this a regular Friday thing here as I'm having a hard time getting motivated to blog at the moment. I would love to hear your Friday inspirations if you feel like blogging about them - please leave a comment & let me know if you do!

Oh! And a warm welcome if you're here for the first time via Soulemama. If you are interested, more of the toys I make can be checked out here and here.

domesticated

I've been feeling far too domesticated lately. Which is sad, because I'm a domestic kinda woman. I love the baking, the home decorating, the sewing, the nurturing of the small folk. But lately I've allowed myself to let the not-so-great parts of this domestic based time in my life to get me down - the constant cleaning, the caring for sick kids, the juggling everybody's needs, the groundhog-day stuff. 

So, in aid of finding some perspective, I thought I might post about a couple of domestic-related things that are making me happy at the moment. 

1. I made marmalade from a whole lot of excess grapefruit we had. From this Nigella recipe (scroll down). Thanks to Charlotte for the idea - when I googled for grapefruit ideas, I came across her post about grapefruit marmalade and ricotta. Oh, how I love the internet.

2. I recently started a tumblelog of houses/home decoration that inspires me. I love that images on tumblr can be tagged (Did you know that? I didn't!) - so this is the perfect way to group all of that house related eye-candy. If only my magazine collection (about half of it above, currently being sorted through) was so compact and easily accessible.

one

 

Henry turned one today. We celebrated with chocolate and blueberry cupcakes. He voraciously - but precisely - picked off each blueberry and ate it. And then proceeded to crumble the cake all over the floor. A future fruitarian, perhaps? I was scared about what this first year might be like, but I needn't have been. Such a happy little camper. We love him to bits. Happy birthday handsome Harry!

two weeks and tomorrow

Almost two weeks without posting and this is the best photo I come up with? Sheesh. I've been a shocking blogger. Without boring you with the details, Matt turns 40 tomorrow (happy birthday my dear, if you read this!) and on the weekend we're having a breakfast shindig for about 30 adults and 10 kids. We must have been on some kind of serious newborn baby induced high when we decided that we could cater for that many people with a new baby in the house. (Thankfully he's an easy going little guy, but still!) So, in between worrying about whether we're going to have enough food and attempting to make the house presentable, I've been baking. I broke my rule of never cooking something for guests that I've never tried before and made this:  Bill's Fig, apple and sunflower seed bread. I doubled the quantities and it made two huge loaves. Hope they taste ok - they smelt incredible when they were baking. Let's hope that's a good sign.



Speaking of tomorrow, Henry turns 4 months old. It's going too fast!

on my desk. also, bananas.

On my desk today are a couple more big headed mice, with pinned on limbs and facial features. The first one is still unfinished. I find toy clothes fiddly (can't be alone there... all those teensy seams!) and often put off making them in favour of more toy, er, bodies.

This isn't on my desk, but only because it doesn't fit. Playing with the crosses quilt for Audrey continues. I took out a lot of the duller reds (which I love, but just weren't working) and replaced them with some white, orange and a paler pink. This will probably be it, not because I'm so overjoyed with it that it's demanding to be sewn up immediately. More like this is one of those things that could be fiddled with forever, but I want to finish it some time soon, and would like to get it off the floor. Like Allison said in the comments after I last posed about this: finished is better than perfect. Love that.

It's cold today and I used some of my frozen banana stash to make a big batch of muffins. I've never frozen bananas for baking before - they are always eaten too quickly in this house. But during the heatwave they were turning brown faster than we could devour them. And now our house is full of that delicious banana muffin smell, and the muffins are extra banan-ery (?) So I'm a convert. The hot weather was good for something after all.

One more thing - incredibly talented Lauren has done a still life oil painting of one of my dolls (that she adopted). Wow!

buns in the oven

I am still here waiting. Baby's due date is only a few days away now. He still hasn't dropped very much, so I suspect I may still be around this time next week, too. But who knows? I have become a bit tentative about taking Audrey on big excursions far from the house by myself lest, you know, my waters break in the middle of a museum or something marvellously dignified like that. So we've been puttering about the house a fair bit. I discovered a new to me recipe for a humble cupcake base (from a little photocopied pamphlet given to me by my Nanna). I've been unable to sample it myself, but it looks so fluffy & light and I'm on good authority it tastes the same. I'll never use another cupcake recipe again. I had a birthday just before Christmas, so made these using my birthday/christmas/forever-and-ever-amen present of a long coveted stand mixer, so was able to beat the mixture within an inch of it's life - it seems to have worked! Also the fact that there's not much butter in there must help, too. Ok, enough crapping on from me - enjoy! 2 tablespoons butter 1.5 cups self raising flour 0.75 cups caster sugar 0.5 cups milk 2 eggs Cream butter and sugar, add eggs one at a time and beat well. Add sifted flour and milk alternatively. Beat into a nice fine batter consistency, adding a few drops of vanilla extract. Bake in cupcake cases 12-15 minutes in a moderate to hot oven (I think I baked them at around 175 deg. C) Ice or fill with whipped cream when cold.

it's beginning to look slightly like christmas

Touch wood, but after all the renovating/painting/baby preparations of the last few months, I think I'm finally starting to cross a few things off my christmas list. Today - christmas cakes, and a couple of handmade gifts (still in progress). As planned, I made Nigella's cakes and even though I'm not in a position to test them (the official tester will have to be set to work when he gets home from his proper job later), they smell wonderful. I'm loving these brown paper cupcake liners (with scalloped edges! found at The General Trader, local folk). I used the middle quantity listed here and it yielded about 25 cupcake sized cakes. They've been royally doused with sherry and I'm crossing my fingers the small size doesn't mean they'll dry out. Audrey employed her best pasting & glitter applying skills to make these gift tags. And I was reminded yet again that a small amount of glitter goes a long way (like, everywhere). For one of our advent activities the other day we used the instructions here to make a pom pom garland. This could be the lamest photo in existence, but they're festooned over our kitchen hutch which sits between two windows and is a right palaver to photograph. All that's left to do now (disregarding the rest of the wrapping, baking, making and posting) is to crank up the christmas music and inhale the sherry-infused air while it lasts. ;)

a very nigella christmas

Seeing Amy's post about christmas cookies yesterday, spurred me into action with my own festive baking. I usually bake a variety of biscuits or christmas cake for family & friends, but my current situation made me a little reluctant to dust off the cook books and read about all the sugary, carbo-filled goodness I need to stay away from this year. As soon as I opened up my copy of Nigella, though, my baking zeal returned. {A bit of an aside, but at the front of the cookie section there's a picture of a fantastic hand shaped cookie cutter that Audrey was really taken with. This afternoon, we ventured into a local baking/homewares store for some christmas cake suppiles, and lo and behold the very same hand shaped cutter was on the rack. And a foot one too. They had to come home with us.} Anyway, so I think my baking will be very Nigella-heavy this year. I've never tried her christmas cake (I usually do the Stephanie Alexander one), but will be giving it a whirl this year. We'll also be repeating her christmas decoration recipe (who else has done these? they are so good!), her rocky road, and trying the pistachio and white chocolate cookies. Last, but defintiely not least though, will be Bill Grainger's orange and cardamom biscuits. These are our christmas staple & I can't recommend them enough - they smell and taste incredible. If anyone else has a christmas baking staple, please leave a comment, I'd to love hear it. :)

wistful, grumpy. and cupcakes.

A slightly wistful and grumpy post from me today. These are some cupcakes I made for Audrey's recent 4th birthday. I seem to have developed a pregnancy induced glucose intolerance (can't bring myself to call it this, which seems a fairly alarmist tag, although perhaps I'm in denial). So I'm sorry to say I'm off the sugar for the duration of this pregnancy, until I get the all clear. This is such a different pregnancy - I scooted through my first one with not a care in the world! In any case, it's really not that bad, and certainly no big sacrifice to make to ensure the health of this little one - which is clearly the most important thing. It's not like I was mainlining sugar before or anything, but I will miss it. Especially at christmas - bah humbug!

feline

Two of our favourite people turn four this weekend, and I realised during preparations for back-to-back parties (yikes!) that there was a bit of a feline thing going on. The cupcakes are for our friend F's jungle party this afternoon. They are supposed to be tigers, so please pretend there are stripes and whiskers and try to ignore the fact that they just look like orange cats.

This kitten with a patchy eye is for Audrey's good buddy A. Her parents bought her a kitten for her birthday (every little girl's dream!), so I made this to go along with one of my favourite kid's books ever. Hope she likes it.

OK, dog people, it's safe to look back again now. Have a good weekend everyone!