Domesticali

Baking frenzy

What with it being birthday season, there's been a fair amount of baking going on.

The hubs got pumpkin whoopie pies (from The Hummingbird Bakery Cake Days)

With cream cheese frosting. Which was my subversive twist as he loathes cheese. Ha! Nobody was any the wiser - they just yummed them up. I am nothing if not a stealth cheese pusher.

And then my Mum - she has never had a terribly sweet tooth and would not class herself as a cake lover. But birthdays demand cake and I knew the boys would eat it. Spiced apple cake with brown sugar frosting sounded suitably Autumnal and a little bit grown up. In my enthusiasm, I neglected to register the part of the recipie which said 'serves 14 - 16....

It was truly a whopper, thankfully an incredibly tasty one, with icing made by making brown sugar Italian meringue and then whipping butter into it, which results in the most divine, fluffy, yet not too sweet frosting. Just don't try to work out the calorie content of a cake which used more than half a kilo of butter, 10 eggs and goodness knows how much sugar. But it did have two apples in too - so at least it counts towards your 'five a day'!

My brother's birthday comes next - he lives too far for me to bake - shame, as there is half an enormous cake left. In fact, if I had been thinking straight, I could have sent it off with my parents to deliver to him on the way home. Thereby saving me from eating any more slices. My thighs would have thanked me.

And that just leaves Mark's birthday at the weekend. He wants a Chelsea FC cake. I am so over baking novelty cakes. The supermarket lurid cake aisle is beckoning....

Follow your nose

Hacking away at the buddleia which will not die the other day, I sniffed something on the breeze. And following my nose, found my neighbour shearing her lavender bush. Straight into the compost bin. No no nooooo! She looked rather oddly at me as I begged for her garden waste, but handed it over all the same.

And so was born a little shoal of lavender fish. Thereby scratching my creative itch, justifying my Pinterest habit and breaking the sewing drought round these parts.

Plus my wardrobe could do with a little sprucing and pruning. And having a good smelling shoal to pop on the hangers might just inspire me to do something about it. The Changing Room helps too - a safe little corner of Flickr which encourages me to confront the reality of how I dress. In the anticipation that what we pay attention to, we tend to improve on.

Because left to my own devicies, I don't really pay much attention to the reality in the mirror. Or the mirror at all, really. One drunken student evening, my pals gave me some extra bushy eyebrows with a marker pen. They had to confess around 3pm the following day, because I still hadn't looked at my own reflection and noticed. I'd like to think that things would be different nowdays, but perhaps not.

So, what is your Autumn wardrobe crying out for? Do you think a spell in the changing room is in order?

Seasonal urges

The urge to cook is upon me - it strikes every year at about this time. When a warm meal seems the right way to welcome home the boys from school and hubby off the train. When whatever I've made says 'I was thinking of you today, whilst you went about your business in the big wide world'.

Because they are often on my mind when I stand, hand on trolley in the supermarket, waiting for inspiration to strike. How can I fill them. With food, love, nurturing. They are all sort of bound together in my mind. And I am not the only one for whom this is true, as my latest recipe book aquisition demonstrates.

I think I read about Mad Hungry: Feeding Men and Boys on Alicia's blog. But it could have been Erin. It sounded interesting, but it was an import and seemed a relatively large amount of cash for a book I'd not even flipped through. I had put it out of my mind when up it popped on the shelves of TK Maxx. Meant to be mine then! 

Mark was sufficiently intrigued by the title to pick it up, so I thrust some post it flags at him and told him to choose the things he fancied trying. By the number of pages he marked,it's clear that the book had some tasty sounding things. And this is how we came to be eating Empanadas the other evening (part of my childhood vernacular, but unfamiliar to them).

  

And they were very good. Not instant food, but filled with love. The time was inconsequential - the breathing space of an empty house allows me to plan what is going to appear on the table and cook something that either needs a long time to simmer or whose preparation is fiddly enough not to be practical with the inevitable interruptions that everyone at home brings. And who begrudges a little kitchen time, pottering on a cold day with the radio on and a cup of coffee to hand?

Don't misunderstand, dinner is nowhere close to domestic goddess territory here every evening. There's many a night when we run in the door from school starving hungry and throw some pasta in a pot. Though actually, a little jaunt to Ikea this week did produce not only much happy chatter with Val, but also a couple of bags of Moose shaped pasta. Which you have to say is pretty damn fancy. For a zero effort dinner night. 

Growing

Taking a firm hand with my garden was one of the motivating factors when I signed up for a day at Green and Gorgeous learning about growing your own cut flowers yesterday.

Well, that, and the fact that I am utterly seduced by their farm. It's a magical place - Johnny captured a little corner of it earlier this summer - health warning - the camera is extremely unsteady as he trots about - beware of motion sickness!

Yesterday, was less wandering and more focussed on the nitty gritty of planning and growing. And I got to spend the day with Tracy (though we were too busy scribbling notes to chat for much of it). Apart from during a very yummy lunch, (vegetable lasagna, home grown tomatoes with basil and salad and almond meringue with garden raspberry coulis and cream) which I was too busy snarfing to photograph.

And when I got home, I could look at my beautiful flowers and begin to plan all that I want to achieve outdoors next season. Starting off with making up a bulb shopping list. Mine includes Muscari, Triteleia, Scented Narcissus and of course Tulips. 

Clearly, I have ignored the part of the course which talked about setting a realistic budget for your master plans.....

 

Winds of change

Somewhere, unbeknown to me, a subtle metamorphosis has taken place. My once guaranteed-to-be-enthusiastic firstborn has morphed into a child who mutters and pouts and whines whenever he is asked to leave the house. Don't get me wrong, he is still a social butterfly when invited to do just about anything at all with his friends, but a family expedition? Nah.  This summer I have bent over backwards to try - geocaching, meals out, orienteering, all manner of fun excursions which might appeal to a boy on the cusp of 11. Somehow they have all been met with the same reluctance.

And the thing that really gets me? Quite often when I have hauled him, protesting, to do whatever it is, he says, on the way home "Actually, that was quite fun after all". Aaaaargh. Because after listening to his moaning and groaning I am in a thoroughly stinking mood and have not been in the right frame of mind to enjoy it at all. It's exhausting.

Perhaps it's my karma catching up with me. I was always so judgemental about the families you see out and about, with children all plugged into their individual electronic gadgets, and thereby insulated from having to interract with their families or their surroundings. It's just that I don't want to turn into one.

There is one gadget though that seems to ease matters - my camera. Viewing life through the lens allows him to engage with what's going on, yet still be in his own headspace.

Which is, what I am assuming, is what is with the proto-teen attitude. Though I could be wrong. Feel free to enlighten me.

Isle of Wight

One last final glimpse of hilidays before school begins on Wednesday. We made it back over to the Isle of Wight - glamping in a yurt. Which means waking up (in a proper bed) to this view in the morning:

It was in the grounds of a hotel, which meant, to my amazement, that your yurt got room service. I kid you not. And we are enormous breakfasts in the hotel each morning (my favourite part of holiday eating). We also got access to this private beach. See - empty (actually it was 8am, so not entirely surprising).

We discovered (thanks to Artemis) a new haunt called Steephill Cove, where you can eat the most amazing crab pasties.

But wandering in some of the beautiful gardens on the island, it became clear that summer is at an end. Time to move forward into the Autumn.

 

Playing catch up

Real life has a habit of running away from you, especially in these dog days of summer. And I cannot string together a coherent narrative of the last couple of weeks (well, not one that isn't tedious in the extreme), so you have a look at a few piccies and I'll be brief:

Monica is a good shopping partner in crime - I might have gone for safe and boring, but now I shall be lofty and elegant (and hopefully refrain from waddling like a duck, which is my usual 'heels' mode).

There is such joy in subversiveness - Kristina spotted this at Wisley. We didn't do it. Scouts honour.

When it comes to macarons, my willpower evaporates. That is why my photo shows fewer of them than Alice's....

An unanticipated 600 mile road trip can be vastly improved by listening to a good book whilst driving. I was shattered though.

Oh and then hubby came home and we went on holiday in a Yurt. But that's a whole other tale.