What a heartbreaker!
Sunday 27 December 2009
Desert Island Discs: a work in progress
"Desert Island Discs is a long-running BBC Radio 4 programme. It was first broadcast on 29 January 1942 and is said by the Guinness Book of Records to be the longest-running music programme in the history of radio. Guests are invited to imagine themselves cast away on a desert island, and to choose eight pieces of music, originally gramophone records, to take with them."
I am looking forward to discovering later additions to this list.
Sunday 25 October 2009
Monday 19 October 2009
Autumn
On Friday I arrived at my desk to find more than post-its. Each desk in the department had been adorned with a little conker....made out of chocolate and marzipan! It was someone else's birthday, but we got given presents?! Maybe it is worth working after all...
Twice a day, between tram stop and destination I wade through an autumn detritus and have to restrain myself from arriving at work with a pocketful of acorns and berries. I found this little gift particularly exciting and touching. And delicious.
Having survived a tram ride home it was a little squished by the time it made it in front of the camera and into my tummy.
Understandably I spent little time on its photoshoot...by 5pm I was greatly regretting my decision to hold off eating it until after I'd shown it to my godmother.
Thursday 15 October 2009
2 weeks
My life here is equal parts Fairy Tale and Satire.
I have rather lost my taste for blogging, but I'm sure it'll boomerang back some time soon.
What transformation do you foresee for Halloween?
My inspiration:
Sunday 27 September 2009
Daily Painting: Titian
This one hangs in The Fitzwilliam Museum, a museum in Cambridge I grew up running around in (my dad considered it a good open space for toddlers to explore) so it seemed like the right choice for Titian. I really enjoy his work, but hardly any of his contemporaries'.
Rape of Lucretia (Titian and Lucretia) (1568-71) Oil on canvas
Saturday 26 September 2009
Daily Painting: Gustave Caillebotte
An obvious choice, but I had to stop agonising over which one to choose.
Les raboteurs de parquet (1875) Oil on canvas
Friday 25 September 2009
Thursday 24 September 2009
Fall Fantasies
Pre-fall 2009.
1. Proenza Schouler 2. Alberta Ferretti 3. Yves Saint Laurent 4. Burberry Prorsum 5. Doo.Ri 6. Phi 7. Matthew Williamson 8. Marni
Daily Painting: Felicien Rops
This man created so many interesting and baffling images.
Pornocrates (1896) Etching and aquatint
Sunday 20 September 2009
Saturday 19 September 2009
Very vegan (and gluten-free) cupcakes with very un-vegan frosting
I found this recipe the other day and immediately started scheming over how to find the ingredients. Ingredients in gluten-free baking are often a little overwhelming, but I've decided to stop making excuses and just go find the stuff no matter how many bicycle rides back and forth between supermarkets it takes. Maybe I should learn to drive?
Anyway! Here is the recipe:
Vanilla Cupcakes by Erin Mckenna of Babycakes NYC
Copied from Epicurious
Ingredients
2 cups garbanzo-fava bean flour (gram flour)
1 cup potato starch (farina)
1/2 cup arrowroot
1 tbsp + 1 1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda (bicarbonate of soda)
1 tsp xantham gum
2 tsp salt
2/3 cup coconut oil (a little too hard to find so I used grapeseed oil)
1 1/3 cups agave nectar
3/4 cup homemade applesauce or store-bought unsweetened applesauce
3 tbsp pure vanilla extract
grated zest of 1 lemon
1 cup hot water
The dry ingredients:
And the wet ones:
Oops - the dark bottle on the left is the vanilla extract..I didn't take too much care with these photos!
And as you can see I used Sweet Freedom Natural Sweetener instead of agave nectar. That wasn't out of preference so much as laziness. It's all they had at Tesco's. Next time I will go to Sainsbury's and buy agave! Also, the apple sauce was more than fine but I'm tempted to make it from scratch next time because I would like something less sweet.
Preparation
Preheat the oven to 325F/gas mark 3/162C. Line 2 standard 12-cup muffin tins with paper liners.
In a large bowl, whisk together the first seven ingredients. Add the next five. At this point the batter looks pretty gross but the next step sorts it out: stir in the hot water and mix until the batter is smooth.
Pour 1/3 cup batter into each prepared cup, almost filling it. Bake the cupcakes on the centre rack for 22 minutes, rotating the tins 180 degrees after 15 minutes. The finished cupcakes will be golden brown and will bounce back when pressure is applied gently to the center.
Let the cupcakes stand in the tins for 20 minutes, then transfer them to a wire rack and cool completely.
Oh man these cakes are so good! I don't think I've ever baked a more delicious vanilla cupcake. And on top of that they're gluten-free!? This must be witchcraft...did I just unknowingly create a potion and offer up my soul to the cupcake gods? Yes! That's right - I just insinuated that these cupcakes are divine. And I won't take it back.
I think I quite like this vegan baking malarky...no endless beating of butter! No sticky egg shells dripping all over the kitchen!
That being said...I did not attempt vegan frosting. Woops, that was a bit of an anti-climax after the above proclamations of love for butterless baking.
Well, I have more proclamations of love - for the traitor frosting actually. So goddamn tasty! And I'm not even that into frosting..seriously!
Vanilla frosting
(icing? I don't know what to call it any more! Both feel wrong...I have been conditioned, like most Britons, to consider the sweet gooey-ness "icing" but the icing of my childhood was merely icing sugar and water..never anything decadent that could be swirled. Ah, what a dilemma. Rather than deciding I shall erratically switch back and forth between the two. That seems like a sensible solution, doesn't it?)
Ingredients
230ish g mascarpone
80ish g butter, at room temperature
Lots of icing sugar....over 2 cups! Just keep going until you like the consistency!
Seeds of one vanilla pod
Preparation
Beat the mascarpone and butter until smooth.
Sift in the icing sugar and continue beating until smooth.
Slice open the vanilla pod and scrape out the seeds. Mix the seeds into the icing.
This is genuinely the best icing I've ever had. It seems so obvious, but for some reason I never made the extra effort and used real vanilla before. Mascarpone has got such a creamy, subtle taste - it means the icing isn't overly sweet..which is the reason I usually leave most of mine on the side of the plate.
Anyway...enough raving about vanilla frosting. Next I'll be bowled over by the TV remote. Time to calm down. As you may have guessed - I've had a lot of sugar today...
This was my first time using a piping bag to decorate cakes. Heh, can you tell?
I'm really not at all psyched about how they look, but it was just an excuse to start practising piping. I need a lot more practise! Which means...much more cake!
Friday 18 September 2009
Friday
Holy Captain Nemo, Batman I am sinking deeper and deeper into hopeless exhaustion, but I can not detach myself from the TV yet. Kevin is about to start thwarting Harry and Marv!
So, to pass the time and keep the eyelids vigilant a lazy post should do the trick.
Items, places, people that have been involved in recent occurrences:
Why can't everything be the colour of peaches?
Making jam, pâte de fruit, staining a brand new wooden spoon!
And baking with these beauties from Boyfriend's garden. The result is a secret for now, though:
Playing with Cat! Inside..
..and outside.
Re-painting bits of broken furniture on the front lawn. And leaving them to dry in the bushes..
Ukulele lessons with Boyfriend
Clearly that is not my uke. It is in fact my grandma's guitar, missing the D string.
My little brother went to see Rocky Horror in London:
I may or may not get in serious trouble for posting that photo...
Gluten-free lemon drizzle cake:
Post-drizzle:
Post-sample:
It is good.
Remembering:
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