Sarah

Deep Contentment

I know the subject is happiness, but deep contentment is as close as I could find for the moment.

Before I marzipanned the first cake I trimmed it as the edges looked a little over done and gave them to Cyclo who pronounced them dry and over cooked. Since then I have been worried that the cake will be awful. Pretty on the outside, in a rough sort of way, but not so good on the inside….

I decided to have a back-up cake. Both Delia Smith and Mary Berry have a cake recipe made using mincemeat – I didn’t find my versions on-line, but in my old recipe books. I decided to go for Mary Berry and added luxury mixed dried fruit instead of the dried fruit she lists. I made it in my newly purchased round tin, on Friday.

The cake was easy and cooked well, and I had been storing it in a tin until yesterday, when I applied the marzipan. Now, you’re supposed to wait a few days for the marzipan to dry out, but when I considered this option I knew this was really my last chance, and less than an hour after adding the marzipan I had applied the icing. The risk of this is the leaching of oil from the marzipan, which may stain the pure white of the icing. I applied my icing thickly, however and that should stop that problem, at least in the time frame that the cake is likely to last! The icing is less crumbly this time, Christina….

Reindeer kiss

(Since I made the new cake, BTW, we have started the other one and it tastes pretty good…. though I say it myself, but is a touch drier than I’d like, in an ideal world, but still better than a bought one. I shall have to wait to see if this one was more successful)

The weather outside is frightful. Lets stay indoors?

Christmas Wishes

To all aboard the Chariot, Happy Christmas.

Christmas cake Santa Outside it’s raining, but inside, the cake is well snowy….Father Christmas is up to his knees in it

Event of the year, for photo competition

My Birthday was marked by a visit to Waddesdon Manor – our astonishing local Renaissance-style château… which is about half an hour from us, just out of Oxfordshire and into Buckinghamshire, UK (not in deepest France as you may guess just looking at it)….

Continue reading “Event of the year, for photo competition”

Supper’s in the freezer, Mrs Spider

I’ve been at work today, between two surgeries and various patient’s homes, and all day I have been in wonder of the winter whiteness of the world. A foggy frosty night had left the trees, hedges, grass – everything covered in crystals of ice. Twice (only twice… so I had to leave a lot of photo opportunities un-snapped. What restraint!) I stopped at a destination and took my camera out.

The first time was because of the hedges, swathed in cob-webs webby hedge2 Frosted gossamer
makes webs look like razor wire –
useless to spiders Continue reading “Supper’s in the freezer, Mrs Spider”

For you mathematicians

Here you can see a fine example of nature’s geometry: the spiral in a snail’s shell which illustrates the Fibonacci numbers and the Golden Number very well, so I’m told.

However if you want to know more, ask a mathematician, or google it

Autumn colour

For the next photo competition, Autumn.

Indoor ornaments

A simple wood carving from Malawi, for this competition

Autumn: sometimes damp

Yesterday I discovered that London’s sunrise was officially 7:15 am, and sunset was 6:19 pm, apparently making the day 11 hours, 4 minutes and 37 seconds long. By Monday 15th October the daylight hours will have shrunk to 10h 41m 28s. In a couple of weeks the clocks will have dropped back an hour to make the most of the available daylight, and by 21st December, the figures are like this: Sunrise 8:04 am, Sunset 3:54 pm and the day will be 7 hours, 49 minutes and 43 seconds long.

Then the night’s will start drawing out again.

Wild clematis, seed head, wet from the drizzle, on Monday Continue reading “Autumn: sometimes damp”