Muffin Report

I am now in the happy position to be able to report that these muffins are very good indeed. They are rather more savoury than muffins you buy in the shops, but that is no bad thing as far as I’m concerned, especially when I’m after breakfast foods. The first one I had, when they were only just cooled wasn’t as nice as the one I ate just now, and I had a suspicion that this would be the case. Some baking just needs a bit of time for the flavours to settle into themselves. Or something. Either way, I am very happy with these, and I will definitely be making them again. The whole process only took me an hour or so, and to take an hour out of my day every couple of weeks, when I get yummy muffins out of it, I can work with that!

As to which recipe I should try next…I’m wondering about Lemon, Sunflower Seed and Blueberry muffins. I suspect they would go down well in at least one quarter…although finding blueberries that aren’t an ethical nightmare at this time of year might be a challenge. I have my eyes on Parmesan and Paprika Scones, and “Forbidden” Chocolate Brownies (quote marks mine!), but think I would need a good excuse for brownies, whereas who can ever object to scones on a dim and gloomy October afternoon? Let’s be honest, though, eventually I will make most of the recipes in this book!

Peach and Poppy Seed Muffins

Today I undertook my second foray into the world of Harry Eastwood. Today’s recipe from Red Velvet & Chocolate Heartache, as you might have guessed, was peach and poppy seed muffins. These were towards the top of my to-do list from the outset, as I’m always after new and interesting wheat-free breakfast ideas. And I love muffins. So, it seemed like a good bet.

This recipe is pretty straightforward, and once your ingredients are assembled and prepared it probably only takes about ten minutes to get your muffins in the oven. But this is a recipe from the same book as the Chocolate Chocolate Chip Cupcakes (Post 1 and Post 2). Can you guess? GRATING! Yes! More grating. Sweet potato this time. And once more it was pretty tiresome. Having said that, I now have a shiny new rotary grater (a very different beast from the simple metal one my parents had when I was a kid!), and this made the process significantly less horrid. Still, you need a lot of energy in your arms for these recipes! Or a food processor with a grating attachment…

However, that really is the meat of the work, and once its done things get a lot less stressful. The mix, once finished, looks disturbingly salmon coloured, but they have lost their pinkness in the cooking. Which I’m quite relieved about, actually! Although it might have been amusing if they hadn’t… I didn’t find I had enough mix to fill each of the recommended nine muffin cases all the way to the top, and if I had done, perhaps they would look different, but I can’t imagine it will affect the taste. I’m pig headed. I was promised nine muffins, and I intended to have nine muffins!

They have now come out of the oven, having made my kitchen smell gratifyingly peachy and they look pleasantly muffiny:

I can only hope they taste as good as they look (and of course I will let you know…)!

Simplification

Lately I have been having a problem with head space. I am spending so much time working on the PhD, worrying about the PhD, worrying about friends and family, worrying about money and other domestic issues that I simply don’t have the mental capacity to worry about other things. Like knitting, or the blog. Not that I am abandoning either! I just need to go back to a place where knitting was relaxing and fun. This is not the time for demanding knitting.

So, I have spent the last half hour unravelling half knitted socks. I am putting Tangled Yoke away in a cupboard. I will finish it, but now is not the time. I don’t have the patience to fix things that go wrong right now, and so my knitting needs to not go wrong.

Therefore, my current projects are a pair of ribbed socks (which were previously going to be lacy) and a stripy jumper (gauge swatch drying as I type). Everything else is being packed away as far as possible, and where that isn’t possible it is being ignored.

The socks are for knitting group and when everything else makes me want to cry (actually, the spinning wheel is really for that). The jumper is my “exciting” knitting. It will be a raglan sleeved stocking stitch jumper knitted in the round from the bottom up. It will be stripy, and it will be lovely.

In Hobbycraft on Sunday I bought yarn. I bought copious quantities of Sirdar Balmoral in dark blue, light blue, and grey. This afternoon I took a bit of time from the PhD and measured my favourite fitting knitted jumper and myself to work out the sizing and fit of this jumper. I am now fairly sure what I want, and once the gauge swatch is dry and measured, I can begin to do the various maths things that need to be done.

I am very excited about this jumper! I’ve been wanting to do one for a while, and was determined not to start anything like that until after Tangled Yoke was done. But I know I can’t handle that for now, ripping back cables is NOT FUN. So I decided that rather than knitting five pairs of socks I wasn’t particularly enthusiastic about, I would take the money and knit one jumper I was enthusiastic about. I think this was wise… It isn’t like the rest of the yarn or projects are going anywhere, I can come back to them later or, if necessary, pass them on.

Wintery

The world is starting to feel wintery. Strangely as autumn seemed to disappear very quickly. However, this morning I found myself on a train platform, watching my breath on the air as I waited for my delayed train. Happily, it did come along, about ten minutes late, not forcing me to embark on a chilly walk back whence I’d come. For the fifteen minutes I waited, though, I was cold. Especially my hands.

So I have been thinking wintery thoughts. I came home and put on a load of washing comprising mainly wooly jumpers; I put the heating on for the first time in months; I am planning butternut squash risotto for my dinner; and am thinking about warm things I might knit.

Right now, due to circumstances beyond my control, I am utterly impoverished. So no new yarn for a while. Old yarn, that has been hanging around, like a millstone around my neck…well, that is fair game! So some Mirasol Hacho in Sapphire Jade I got in a swap has come into its own. It is now in the process of becoming some fingerless gloves. At some point I will need some fingerful gloves, or maybe mittens, but right now I need fingerless. My house is reasonably chilly, and if I can keep my hands warm and cosy while I type away on that there PhD jobby, so much the better!

September Has Come…

I could quote Keats again, but I think I did that another year…although I can’t find the post!

It is that time of year again. The new knitting magazines are coming out, and there are many new patterns for our perusal! Not least among these is the new Knitty. Which has the delightful benefit of being free. I like free.

I had been quite disappointed by the last issue, but then summer knitting patterns are never quite my thing. So, I am pleased to see this issue is full of lovely things! There are actually several things in it that I would like to knit, which possibly means that I will knit none of them… but I am particularly keen on Margot, Ruby Red, Renaissance, and Holla. Of those, I would probably go for Margot or Holla first, as I am more convinced of those actually suiting me. I tend to like the look of pretty, slightly fussy cardigans like Ruby Red, but they are the kind of thing I wear one day in a whole month, at best, and on a student budget I really need to play the odds a little!

I am very keen to try the Hat-Heel Socks. I don’t particularly like the look of them, actually, I don’t like the clear signals of construction where all the stitches are picked up. But I love a bit of novel construction, and may actually turn out to like them a little better in the flesh. It wouldn’t be the first time it happened! Plus, there are clear advantages to them, as the designer actually says, in terms of yarn-budgeting. As someone who hates toe-up socks (I just can’t do it. I hate all toe cast-ons, and if I manage to get that far, I start the heel too soon. It’s just irritating!), I often end up with lots of yarn left over because I’ve been afraid of running out. Which, with a construction like this, I could avoid. So it’s certainly worth a shot!

Riding on the success of my Ishbel, I am also quite keen to try another shawl. Something bigger and cosier and less elegant. As suggested above, I don’t get much of an excuse to do elegant these days. So, I could knit something to keep me warm in my rather chilly flat over the winter…

Ishbel

In June, on a complete whim, I cast on for an Ishbel. I don’t know why. It’s a pretty pattern, but I’m not really a shawl person, so it was an odd decision. However… I finished it while I was on holiday and it took me until today to get around to blocking it. Here are the results, with which I am very happy!

And, if you’re interested, I also have a version modelled by my lovely self…

Ahem…

I made it from Rowan pure wool 4 ply that I bought in the John Lewis sales at the beginning of the year.

Meeting Targets

You might remember a series of blog posts a while ago, they were lauding BubbleTimer to the skies. After three weeks where I was on holiday or in a situation where I didn’t really need to track my time, I came back to it, and streamlined it all dramatically. Although I still use it, I no longer use it for tracking everything. It turns out that there are some things I do that don’t need to be tracked. Some things do. Time spent on the PhD and on any freelance work (wonderful for when it comes to filling out time sheets!). Time spent on doing blatantly wasteful things like checking Facebook for the third time in fifteen minutes. Knitting and spinning time, which have a tendency to get out of control quickly. These are useful. But I no longer feel a need to know how much of my week is spent asleep, travelling, or watching television. I have concluded that as long as I am meeting my targets, none of this matters.

Which has led to my re-evaluating my short term goals. I realised that my goal for time spent on the PhD in a given day or week were hopelessly optimistic. They were big enough that they weren’t met with some frequency, and the weekly one didn’t account for the way I spend my weekends. Effectively, I was setting myself up to fail. So, I have dropped the target significantly. To something I cannot fail to meet. Which was a good idea. I am meeting the target every day, and am often passing it and waving it a cheery goodbye as I type away on my Introduction.

I have also combined this with a return to Remember the Milk. I always liked the idea, but I just found it wasn’t working for me. However, for my birthday I was gifted with an iPod Touch. It turns out that Remember the Milk with the iPod app is really working for me. So much so that, if I still feel the same when my free trial (of the app, which is free to RTM pro users) expires, I will get a pro account on RTM so I can continue to use it. Because I can keep on top of my tasks even when I’m away from the internet, I am feeling significantly more in control of my to do list. That is worth $25 a year to me!

These two together have really led to a major boost in my productivity since my return to reality from the land of holidayness and sloth. Of course, it may be a fluke, but I’m feeling reasonably confident that it isn’t. In the end, it is all about feeling in control, and not being overwhelmed by keeping my many balls in the air. For the time being, I seem to have that. Hooray!

Chocolate Chocolate Chip Cupcakes Part II

Happily I am now able to update you on the cupcakes I wrote about yesterday.

First of all, a confession. I messed up the icing. This is my own fault for using margerine instead of butter, and I have learned my lesson. For some reason I always mess up the icing. I can make a perfectly good cake and then foul it up with poor icing creation. Nevertheless…the icing is very yummy, glossy, and delicious looking, it’s just that I don’t think it will set any time before hell freezes over. C’est la vie!

As far as the yumminess of the cupcakes go: they are very yummy! They have a lovely dense chocolatey-ness, they are sweet, they are moist, and you’d never know that their primary ingredient was carrot. I think. In fairness, when I’m eating them I’m thinking “Hmm, can I taste the carrot? No, not really…” I think if you’re looking for it you can just about maybe tell it’s there, but give a cupcake to someone else and they’ll probably be none the wiser! Unless, perhaps, you haven’t always grated your carrot very finely,  but even then I don’t imagine that would affect the taste.

As cupcakes go, these were a lot of effort. It wasn’t like taking a box of cake mix and doing speed-cupcakes, or like all the flour mixing you normally expect. You have to grate carrots and you have to whisk eggs and sugar to several times their natural volume (thank goodness for my flatmate’s electric whisk!). The grating alone will give you a sore arm. Frankly, though, it is worth it. Just expect making the cupcakes to take a couple of hours, once you account for grating time, whisking time, and then cooling time before you can ice them!

The question is, what do I make next from this book? Certain things excite me greatly. There’s a recipe for jam, and although there’s a part of me thinking life is too short, there’s another part thinking how fascinating it would be to make my own jam. And then I could use it between cake layers and feel very smug indeed! However, there are some relatively savoury muffins and scones that I’m rather interested in making, for breakfast and lunch purposes. My breakfasts are very dull, and I’m sure they would be improved by Honey and Sunflower Ginger Scones or by Peach and Poppy Seed Muffins. Or, possibly, by both.

Chocolate Chocolate Chip Cupcakes

For my birthday I was given a copy of Harry Eastwood’s Red Velvet & Chocolate Heartache. The premise of this book is that you can cook cakes and delicious things using vegetables instead of lots of fat and other undesirable things. Like wheat, which suits me fine!

Visually, this book is stunning. Every picture makes you want to run out, buy more ground almonds than you can shake a stick at, a couple of tons of carrots, butternut squashes, potatoes, and other baking-compatible veggies and make them, one after the other. The instructions are clear and straightforward. Except that somewhere the instructions mention honey where there isn’t any in the ingredients list, but I’m sure that’s solvable…

So, having basically read this book, cover to cover (yes, I know recipe books aren’t really meant to be read this way), and having drooled over each and every recipe, I decided to make something. I chose Chocolate Chocolate Chip cupcakes as I had most of the ingredients to hand, and what I lacked could be provided by my reasonably limited local shop (for the most part. I’m using chopped up chocolate buttons instead of chocolate chips). Yes, I am lazy, why do you ask?

And then, I started grating. Grating, grating, grating. The thing is, grating doesn’t sound too much work, but it is, in fact, hard. And finely grating over 200g of carrots is a) boring, b) knackering, and c) painful. However, I muscled through, because, ultimately, I wanted cake. I will admit that some of it was slightly less than finely grated, and frankly, I am prepared to live with the consequence of some obviously carrotty bits in my cupcakes, preferring still being in posession of my finger tips and sanity!

Right now these cupcakes are sat on my kitchen bench, cooling. They look gorgeous. They smell amazing. And the bits of the mixture that cooked onto the pan (I’m not a tidy spooner!) tasted delicious! Once the second batch is done (I’m not going to waste the mixture, so there are three extras in the oven as we speak!) and they have all cooled I will make some icing and top them off with that and a giant chocolate button each. Then: we eat.

Despite my griping about the grating, I strongly suspect these cupcakes will be well and truly worth it, but I’ll get back to you one way or another.

All These Things That I Have Done

Lately there has been much spinning and a little knitting. Here are pictures of both. First, the yarns.

1. Camel Silk. I spun this straight from a blend bought from Wingham Woolcraft. It’s shiny and beautiful, and lovely and soft.

2. This is a black jacob top mixed with some light grey BFL.

3. This is some fawn coloured alpaca also mixed with light grey BFL.

4. This is black jacob, white swaledale, and some yellow dyed merino.

5. Chocolate brown alpaca plied with light grey BFL.

Is all good! I like some better than others, but I’m proud of them all! This is all about playing with things and seeing what happens, and sometimes good things happen, and other times less good things! I have my favourites, but I’d be interested to hear what other people like best!

I have absolutely no idea what I will do with these mini-skeins, but never mind. I’ll find something!

And then, the socks. These are Spring Forward from Knitty Summer 2008. I would really recommend this pattern. It’s absolutely beautiful, and much easier than it looks! The yarn is Natural Dye Studio’s Dazzle in Mimosa.  And they are lovely and soft.