I Has a Bubble Wrap

Poor little Alys has been to the vets this week to be spayed and has been ever so miserable about having to wear her plastic collar. Its a bit big and heavy on her and she keeps getting stuck in places. Especially when she is trying to eat her food. Its funny and tragic at the same time. It breaks your heart, bless her. If you haven't been I highly recommend visiting http://icanhascheezburger.com/ its highly amusing, at least to me!

Fugly Cookies

Slight disaster in my plan to keep H from the depths of boredom by baking cookies. The recipe was one of my favorite oatmeal cookie recipes, I had oats and I had chocolate but very little else and although this one looks quite nice I burned a batch and there were recipe alterations that i didn't plan due to not haveing some cookie baking essential ingrediants. Basically we blundered our way through and luckily they taste ok but they are oddly brittle cookies.

They were Chocolate Chip Sunflower Seed Oatmeal Cookies which was a bit diffrent from the plain oatmeal cookie recipe I just wish I had had the brown sugar, baking powder and so on at least it wasn't a full on disaster.

The Deepest Greys are Grey

Ok I have not been on my laptop for pretty much a week and to be honest I haven't really done very much craftwise, knitting wise or even painting wise, but I did go on a one day novel writing course with frizbe last saturday. It was the first time in a very long time that I have devoted a day to me and myself and I. A day to really look at the process of writing a novel and It was a very good day for me with much praise to Daniel Blythe for presenting such a great 1 day writing course. And I actually talked and participated in group discussion. I didn't just hide behind more gregarious and entertaining people. I would have thought that by age 30 I would be able to speak a bit more freely and not be so shy about things but its still such hard work to speak out and make eye contact. Maybe one day I will be a bright and outgowing person, but for now I'm happy to have gone along on the course and spoke a little bit.

Obviously I haven't had a chance to be on the computer, no mumsnet either thank you very much, but I have managed to make some brownies in a haphazard fashion. Meaning I had only two eggs and every recipe I had called for 4, so i used some melted chocolate and cream and they eventually came out great to eat but rather fugly.

We have had a few family days out to the zoo on tuesday, and to York thursday, had a lovely time both days except for the excruiating hour spent at the National Railway Museum in York, H loved it M took aome video of H running around like a maniac from train to train, It was quite horrifyingly, mind numbingly boring but it was cute to watch H looking at all the train engines, its definitly one of those places for granddads to take grandsons and leave mums at home with a nice cup of coffee and a few magazines.

I started a new scarf type thing last week but it only has a few rows to it but I like the wool and seem to have a grey thing going on recently. I guess grey is the new black. I'm off to go paint I think.. or make a cup of coffee, its a very fine line. meh.

Pumpkins, Pancakes, and Peach Cake Oh My!

Today nothing much has happened I had good intentions to finish off winterising the garden but that didn't happen, I planned to make a Lemon Drizzle Cake for MNWI ( mumsnet womens institute) and take a picture of it in a lovely outdoorsy setting of natural and historical significance, but we didn't really go anywhere except Asda and that is neither historical or natural, or even remotely pretty in anyway.

So what did I do aside from the usual round of dishes, laundry, and scrubbing? Well for breakfast I made chocolate chip pancakes, they were going to be fruit pancakes but as I had no fruit aside from some canned pineapple rings rusting quietly at the back of a shelf, they became chocolate chip ones. Because if you haven't got fruit you should at least have chocolate!





Later armed with some nearly over ripe, but not quite, nectarines I made an peach upside-down cake to go along with dinner. It turned out gorgeous and M says its much better than the apple version, Which I'm not quite sure about but it did turn out lovely. And for once I turned an upside-down cake over before the bottom/top stuck to the pan. The recipe I used was the same as the apple one but slightly modified, I'll write it all down tomorrow when I have more time. http://meridianariel.blogspot.com/2007/06/apple-upside-down-cake.html


Oh and the pumpkins are what H and I grew in the garden now residing on the mantle. Its nearly October after all..

Unfinished

I was busy last night painting the little paintings above. Sorry for the rough qualitly of the pictures as they were taken with my little camera phone. The first painting is my favourite so far but I also like the second one although it dosent show up very well in the image. I'm not happy with the tree one yet, they are all alittle rough and unfinished but thats sort of my style so I'll not worry too much about that, the tree painting might get completly re-painted though because once again my imagination outstrips my talent.

I can see how it should be in my mind, how I want it, but it just never turns out that way, I'll blame being left handed for now rather than admiting that i have such little talent.

off to bake cakes now.

Nutella Cupcakes

Very Vanilla Cupcakes with Nutella Iceing


Ingredients:
2 cups self raising flour
1 ¼ cups caster sugar
½ cup butter or margarine (softened)
¾ cup milk
1 tsp vanilla
2 eggs
1 jar of nutella spread

Preheat the oven to 375 F

Beat the butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Then add half of the flour to the butter beating well. Add half the milk and beat well then add the eggs one at a time. Add the rest of the flour then the remaining milk and the vanilla mixing till smooth, Fill paper cup liners, or greaded and floured muffin tins half full. bake for 15 minutes or until the top of the cupcakes are golden and spring back when pressed. Remove from onve and let cool on wire rack. Ice the cupcakes with the nutella spread. easy delicious. gone.

cooks notes:

The cup cake recipe is my basic yellow cake recipe, althoug in this instance i had only plain cake flour and had to add baking powder (1 teaspoon)and salt (about a 1/4 teaspoon) that I would normally omit from my recipes as I'm lasy and prefer self raising flour.

M loves nutella and has been looking for an excuse to buy some so I thought why not use it as icing and I think the result is great. So easy and yummy too. Move over Nigella.

Into the Sun

The above images are a bit crap due to it being only my little camera phone, I might plead with M at a later date to take some proper pictures of the paintings i just did tonight. The paint is in fact still wet but I was very happy to have sat down and felt like painting not one but three little pictures. They are loosely inspired by some glass art work in a glass working workshop in Caldwell's Mill that was all Burgundy and gold that frizbe loved, it just so happened that i had a bit of gold paint in the bottom of my paint box and earlier I just felt like painting. M says its like something just snapped in me or a switch was flicked because the canvases sat blank in the closet for the last two months and tonight I painted all three.

I'll see if I still like them when they have dried overnight. Of course I haven't a clue what to do with them as there really isn't any space on the wall that doesn't already have framed photographs from M or a few oil paintings that I did about ten years ago. anyway I'm happy and on a little creative buzz but that might just be all the coffee I had earlier.

Marie Claire Magazine

I just drew this on a freebie handbag given away with my marie claire magazine. I'm pretty happy with it and especially as it was just a free give away from a magazine I'm very happy.

right more later as I have to go wake the boy up from his nap so we can go have a nice ride out.