ORANGE, WHITE CHOCOLATE AND ALMOND CAKE

Well it's that time of year again... Granny's birthday! I made a wee cake (yes Anna, it really worked!!!! It didn't flop in the middle, splurge over the sides, be too greasy...).  It was a fairly complex recipe but I took plenty of time and it tasted great! Light and not sickly sweet.  I found the recipe from the BBC Good Food website.  However, due to the fact of only have one 20cm cake tin, this cake took up most of my day and created a lot of mess- but it was well worth it!


Ingredients 

175g butter softened plus extra for greasing
175g caster sugar
finely grated zest 4 oranges and juice of one
4 eggs
100g self-raising flour
1tsp baking powder
100g flaked almonds

Icing

200g white choc
200ml creme fraiche
100g white choc to decorate

Method can be found here http://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/5524/orange-and-white-chocolate-sponge

Emma!

BAKING MEDITERRANEAN BREAD

Recently had a go at making sundried tomato and olive bread (inspired by the great British Bake-Off), which turned out to be relatively simple and very delicious!

Recipe

650g Strong White Flour
2tsp salt
1tsp sugar
15ml vegetable oil (or I used the oil from the sundried tomato jar to give more flavour)
7g sachet easy bake yeast (I used Allinson's so I only had to prove the dough once)
400ml warm water: 1 part boiling, 2 parts cold.

Method

1. In a bowl mix flour, salt, sugar and yeast.  Stir in oil.

2. Add warm water and mix to form soft dough.  Take out and knead for 10minutes.

3. Prove in a warm place for 45mins

4. Add olives and sundried tomatoes after covering in flour to reduce oiliness.  Knead again briefly.

5. Separate into two loaf tins, and place in oven for about 25-30mins.

6. Remove and allow to cool.

Easy Peasy!

Emma

NEW SKEINS AND A DISASTER

Been finding ways to use my spare time... ... ... new skeins of candy floss finished!

Slight disaster with plying with my new coned wool (didn't work, not sure why) so gave it a miss this time and plyed the spun wool with itself!

Only two bobbins so I make do with a pen for storing the yarn during plying.

Result! Two lovely skeins of a light turquoise colour.

Au Revior!

Emma

LONG AWAITED MITTENS

Hello!
Unfortunately I couldn't think of any punny posts for this blog entry!  Unlike Anna, whose summer has been taken up with cough*dissertation*ahem, a plethora of craft based activities, my summer has been taken up with cycling, hiking, camping and job hunting (and not much knitting or spinning....more to come soon though!).
However, here is something small I am still finishing off, a pair of simple mittens with some handspun wool purchased from Kim at http://artequalshappy.typepad.com/, a while ago now!  Some spinning to come...

Emma!

WHAT'S THE MADDER?

Firstly, can I just start by saying that there are so many puns that you can make about madder. It’s madderness!

So summer is rolling along at an alarming pace. Can you believe it’s August already? I mean, where has the time gone? Well, a relatively large portion of my time over the last few weeks has been taken up with a combination of knitting, spinning and dyeing (because nothing says suitable activity during an English heatwave like the production of knitwear, am I right?). There are quite a few different things that I’ve been working on/experimenting with, some of which are complete, some I’m still working on and probably all are deserving of their own blog post so over the next little while I will try to make that happen but for now let’s talk about madder!

For my first jaunt into the realm of natural dyeing I decided to try my luck with madder powder. My first observation about the natural dye process was that it’s nothing if not long winded! I thought knitting was a big enough test of patience but I think with all the soaking, mordanting, cooling time etc. this might just take the cake. I’m learning that it’s just one of those things I’m going to have to embrace about the process. After all, in such a busy world in can be nice to relax into a slower pace for a change and it allows time to multi-task and catch up on reading while you're waiting.

The packet I had only contained 25g of powder and I used about 100g of white fleece so the result was definitely more orange than red but still pretty vibrant. I also experimented by dyeing some ‘Humbug’ Blue Faced Leister in the left over dye bath, which I stupidly didn’t take a picture of. It stayed predominantly brown but with an orangey tint. 

 

I didn’t leave it long before I started spinning it up. I decided it was time to get a bit more experimental with spinning different colours together. I used a mixture of both of the fleeces that I’d dyed with madder and added dashes of some natural dark brown fleece I had lying around, as well as the bright blue we’d dyed before (see previous post). The blue and the peachiness of the madder just looked really good together and made it a bit fun.

Finally, I plied it with a camel coloured machine yarn and voila! 

I’m pretty chuffed with this yarn to tell you the truth. I have a little over 200g of it and it’s going to become a cowl for myself. Happy days!

Emma, I hope you had a fantastic cycling trip!

Over and out!

Anna x

p.s – stay tuned to see what happened when I tried dyeing with avocado stones and blackberries!

A GOOD TIME TO DYE

We thought we'd kick off this old blog thing with a bang by sharing our first joint voyage into the world of dyeing!We decided to keep things simple by experimenting with acid dyes. If you are a Londoner and you haven't already, you should really get yourself along to the Handweavers Studio; it's pretty magical! We used turquoise and maroon colours and got a couple of different tones in each by reusing the dye baths.Making the most of a brief spurt of good weather we were able to dry our fleeces out in our sunny (if somewhat unkempt) garden.Neither of us are really sure what happened here. For some reason the colour took to some parts more than others and ended up with an almost tie dye effect. We rather like it!

This lot was from our second attempt. We used a much smaller amount of dye and a slightly grey fleece to create this subtle blue merley effect.

Here's some of our fleece after carding. Candy floss anyone?