My Balcony Garden

Well before we knew we had secured the flat (it took a good long month from us saying we wanted the place and were ready to put down the deposit to secure it to the various owner type people getting everything in order and finally taking our money *breathe*) we were well aware it came with a delightful balcony. And as such, I was well aware I would fill our little outside space with as much greenery as I could as soon as I could.

When I left my seamstressing job down south with a lovely group of ladies, they knew of my plans for a balcony garden and for my leaving gift they bought me a fantastic selection of gardening bits anf bobs, this was my starting point for my gardening. I then spent the chilly months of January and February buying up seeds (I managed to get most of mine massively discounted because they were last year's. Packets of seeds for 39p ftw.), as well as pots and other gardening bits and pieces. Then on my week long visit down south to see family and friends I bought a huge amount of soil (£10 for 3 x 60 litre bags!) and what is proving to be possibly one of the best things I have ever bought, a mini, plastic greenhouse. Similar to this one here, but under a tenner!

It is currently my pride and joy. I have planted so many different things, I'm starting to wonder if I really do have enough space for everything once it gets closer to harvesting things.

 

Pretty much every thing's shooting up too. All apart from the strawberries, which have finally poked their tiny little lazy plant heads up above the soil, but are seemingly reluctant to grow into anything larger and that might potentially grow me some strawberries. And the coriander, that just doesn't seem interested. It's still got time though, I've not given up on the little seeds yet.

I've got radishes, which will go into their final pots this Sunday (Sunday is gardening day), purple sprouting broccoli and peas which are also close, tonnes of carrot plants, tomatoes, spring onions, pak choi, various herbs in a small grow bag on the bottom level along with two tubs of rocket and salad leaves, and butterhead lettuce.

Gardening for me is not just the joy of growing something from a seed and (hopefully) enjoying the fruits (veges?) of my labours, but about family ties and memories. One of the most important veggies I've planted, for me, are the runner beans. I've planted three beans which are a few generations down from the same that my Grandad grew rows and rows of on his plot of land at my grandparents' house, a place which holds strong and fond memories from my childhood. The generations in between were my parents' plants. I can't remember a year where we didn't have a glut of runner beans in the summer. And I love them, especially the first crop of the year, young and tender beans, absolutely delicious just on their own. Maybe a little gravy. Nom.

I've gone for a few flowers as well, poached eggs plants and nasturtiums. Both because they remind me of my parents' house. The drive out next to the front garden was, until recently, a thing of dread for anyone trying to navigate it (or just me and delivery men in vans). There was about a foot wide ditch between the edge of the drive and the lawn and it was inevitable I would end up in it in my car, more often than not (back wheels right in there, on a front wheel drive car D: ). During the winter this was a horrible boggy ditch of doom, which I got properly stuck in more than once (Pa having to come out of the house to angrily rescue me). But in the warmer months it became a beautiful patch of vibrant poached egg plants.

The gardeny part of the front garden was always covered in nasturtium plants, I used to play with the cabbage white caterpillars that would smother the patch for a month or so of the year, then once the caterpillars had all found somewhere cosy to chrysalis-up (or had been eaten by something), the plants would go mad and threaten to take over the path as well as the garden. And the smell, it was so strong, especially in caterpillar season.  Recently, however, my parents got the lawn (and the dreaded ditch) paved over, turning the area which was garden into lawn. Some of the nasturtium plants were put into pots and now live in the back garden, and I brought some seeds from the plants up to York with me, which are now growing into my very own nasturtium plants.

And sunflowers. There are no reasons whatsoever for me wanting to grow sunflowers other than they grow tall and awesome. And potentially delicious if I harvest their seeds (that sounds a bit sinister, but yeah.).

Other than my seedlings I've got my violas, which are just about surviving the greenflies that have appeared from nowhere.













 

I bought these not long after we moved in, in November I think it was. These have been flowering solidly since then! Dedicated little lovelies. They smell fantastic too.

 Honourable mentions go to my avocado plant, which has started to sprout again, to my relief, after I chopped all of it's leaves off!

 My lemon plant, which I grew from a seed I found sprouting inside of a lemon at my last pub job, over a year ago now. That's got sprouts now after I chopped the top off. (I think my harsh pruning habits must come from my Pa.)

And last but not least, my carrot plant. Which you would be correct in thinking it is just a top of a carrot. Le Boof  hit the nail on the head by saying gardening taps into my nurturing nature. I saw one of the carrots starting to sprout in the fridge, which of course meant I had to chop the growing bit off and stick it in some soil! There will be millions of carrot in the flat when I'm finished, I swear.




So there we go. There were going to be several other things mentioned in this post, but I've probably waffled on enough for now. Back to cake and yarn next time!



Two songs by one of my favourite bands ever:
The song that first got me interested in them, Wild Beasts - Assembly
One of the songs from their latest album, Wild Beasts - Bed of Nails

Mother's Day 2012

 



Due to the big ol' move, this year was the first year I was away from my Ma for Mother's day, *sad face*. So at the beginning of the week I set out to make a wonderful gift package as a substitute for my presence. I started with the traditional list of things: chocolate, flowers, gift and card, then had a good think about how to achieve these goals with my powers of arts, crafts and baking. (And yes you would be correct in thinking I really should get round to making myself a cape some time soon.)

For the flower part of the gift (and also the card part) I found a jolly good gerbera knitting pattern (ma's favourite flowers being gerberas), which knit up very nicely. Although having chosen yellow for the petals I had to put up with lots of people asking why I was knitting a string of tiny bananas. A small sacrifice however. I made myself a card from two A4 pieces of nice lilac card stock and then made a paper hinge (folding a long thin piece of paper in half length ways and sticking the two outer faces on one edge of the bits of card). I then poked holes close to the sides of the stem and tied it to the card with the same colour wool and cut out a leaf shape from green card and stamped it with my letter stamps and acrylic block (such useful bits of card making gear).

So once Ma's done with looking at it as a card she can remove the flower on it's own and put it somewhere as a lasting memory of what a good daughter I am (really!) :D

The gift part of the, er, gift, was two little knitted piggies. I made three smaller ones for Ma for Christmas, she liked them so much I decided to add to the family that now lives on the printer in my parents' house. It's a fairly straightforward pattern, but as it's done on DPNs and with double knitting wool it can be a little fiddly. A good one for practising bobbles though.




And finally in the Mother's Day Gift Pack 2012 (now it's official title), the pièce de résistance, was a small batch of these chocolate truffle cookies. Unfortunately, not all of them could fit in the box I had in mind to send off, so some were left over. And.... tasted. Repeatedly. Omnomnom! They are gorgeous. I think maybe a recipe best saved for a special occasion, they're terribly more-ish and I can't imagine they rate highly on the health meter, even for cakes and cookies. They come out of the oven crisp on the outside and soft, ever so slightly chewy and melty in the middle.

So there we are. I packaged these bits up in a box and packaging le Boof and I had previously been sent things in from our parents (yay, recycling!) and pottered off to the post office.

My brother managed to hide it away until Sunday and dadah! it's like I was there in person. Well nearly, it's hard to send wittiness and charm through the post. *ahem*

The Story of the Citrus and Chilli Cosmic Cake and My Very First Cake Competition

Ok, first off, sorry for the humongous gap in time between now and my last post. Turns out making money to pay all the bills people keep sending us takes up a lot of one's life. Anyways.

So myself and le Boof are members of the university's gaming society, FragSoc. They host three LANs (if you don't know what a LAN is, please read this) a term, which is great fun. Sixty to ninety people sat in a massive room for an entire weekend playing games, eating junk food and consuming an unhealthy amount of caffeine. When I first joined I had heard rumours of baking competitions and the weekend just gone they finally held one. YUS. First ever baking competition, dead excited.

So planning began. A long, late-night discussion with BBF (best baking friend - find her here amongst other places) followed, on what could best fulfil the four criteria the cakes were to be judged on: taste, appearance, ingenuity and "appropriate use of caffeine". I wanted something interesting, something that no one else would think of. Chilli cake was a route I was intrigued by, and chocolate and chilli was the obvious recipe to go for, but it had already been done in previous competitions. Of course the next step is lemon and chilli (??) I have no idea where that came from but it stuck. As far as getting caffeine into the cake was concerned a lot of previous entries had, in my eyes, cheated, and just ground up pro plus tablets and popped them in the cake batter. I did not wish to cheat. So the idea of incorporating energy drink into the cake somehow was added to the list of insanity.

Eventually I came to my final decision. I would make a citrus chilli cake with an orange energy drink and chilli drizzle and the same energy drink in an orange buttercream icing. And it would be magnificent.

After half a day of playing around with a lemon drizzle cake recipe and and quite a lot of crushed chilli flakes, I found a good balance, and to my intense relief, it actually tasted really nice! Next was the drizzle. I boiled down some of the energy drink (Relentless Inferno for those who know what it is &/or are interested), and again chucked in a load of crushed chilli. That... well, that was best not consumed on its own to be frank. But on the cake, it definitely added (more) kick!

Fairly innocuous lemon drizzle mix

Slightly less innocuous chilli flakes

Batches ready for varying amounts of chilli

Chilli batter and the control mix (sans chilli)

Then came the day before the LAN party, and the competition. Three batches (and not small batches either) of cake mix, two cans of energy drink, a lot of naked lemons and oranges, a hell of a lot of chilli flakes, and a fair bit of arts and crafts later I had my cake finished.

Two of the three cakes used

The Relentless and chilli drizzle being reduced

It was. Magnificent.

The Final Cake!

The space invader design was le Boof's idea. It's used in the gaming society's logo and of course is iconic within computer gaming, so was a no brainer once it'd been suggested. The night before I made the cake I made a bespoke cardboard base for it and drew out the logo in 1 1/2 inch squares, then covered it in a couple of layers of cling film. Once the cakes were made I cut them up into the same size squares and put them together in the space invader pattern, like giant edible pixels! To top if off I went crazy with the space dust edible glitter, although you can't really see it in the pictures. *sad face*

Just for funsies I also popped the left over Relentless and chilli drizzle in an empty (and clean) vanilla essence bottle and brought that along, then left it casually by the side of the cake. During the judging this got passed round the more laddish of the LAN attendees who were shotting it from the tiny lid and  then shaking their heads and gasping!

I came third in the competition in the end, it was incredibly nerve racking! It was judged by the chair of the society, a guy who had come along to represent the society's new sponsor and another member of the society (society society). I was beaten by an admitted really impressive Nyan cat cake which was beautifully decorated and was a seven layer rainbow cake inside. I doff my hat to them, it tasted good and looked incredible, but despite that they only came second. I can't say I would have awarded first prize to the cake it did go to, but I'm not grumbling. Here's what I won! Yay! Prizes for baking!

*Fanfare*

So there we go. It was great fun doing it, although I can't now even think about eating lemon drizzle cake, I'm sick of the sight of it. I enjoyed my first dabble into experimenting with baking. I think I'd do the basic cake again, not all the energy drink business, that was mainly to get in some caffeine. I'll pop the recipe at the end of the post, it's definitely worth trying out if you like a little bit of spice in your food (prob not for the faint hearted though).

This also means I am now no longer just one of the girls at the LAN (max 4-6 girls to min 50 odd boys usually), I am the girl that made the crazy but surprisingly tasty citrus and chilli cake. (oh, and the girl that's good at TF2 - my team totally won the tournament.)

---------------------------------

Citrus and Chilli Cake

320g Caster sugar
3 eggs
Zest of 2 lemons and 1 orange
350g plain flour
1tsp salt
250ml milk
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
250g butter
4 1/2 tsp crushed chilli

+Pre heat oven to 180°c
+Cream butter and sugar together
+Stir in eggs
+Add zest, vanilla extract and crushed chilli
+Sieve in flour, baking powder and salt
+Stir milk in, a bit at a time until you've got a nice batter mix
+Pour batter into cake tin
+Bake for roughly 30mins, dependent on what shaped tin you're baking in
(Original recipe this is based on was for a lemon drizzle loaf, that said to bake for 1hr 15min, although I put mine in a brownie tin, which took considerably less baking time)

Croissant Bread and Butter Pudding

Have far too many "left over" croissants? Need to find a way to make them a little more unhealthy/delicious?

I have the answer you are looking for: Croissant bread and butter pudding.

Ok, so there are definitely many perks to working in the food shop I work in now. Sad little left over pastries. "Oh noes! We'll never make it the weekend, take us home and eat us quickly!"

One particular Saturday evening I was lucky enough to come home with these babies

The ones that survived the initial onslaught of the bearded food hoover (and, being honest, me) ended up in this recipe. This also works fine with stale croissants, if they ever last that long.




Croissant Bread and Butter Pudding

2 eggs
200ml milk
75g caster sugar
3 croissants, cut into cm slices
50g raisins
tsp vanilla essecnce



1. Beat the eggs, milk and caster sugar together.
2. Arrange the sliced croissants, slightly over lapping each other to cover the base of oven proof dish.
3. Sprinkle the raisins over your layer of croissant, then pour in the egg mixture.
4. Let this soak for 30 minutes.
5. Bake for 25-30minutes at 180°c, until golden and crunchy on the top, gooey on the bottom.

(Armadillo? No. *ahem*)


This is so quick and easy to make, and tastes SO GOOD. Yes, good enough to warrant random use of capital letters. I didn't think of it at the time, but this would definitely benefit with a sprinkle of ground spice of some description, maybe a little cinnamon or even mixed spice. I popped a couple of portions of it in the freezer too, which came out fine after a reheating.

Project Round Up II

Despite the obvious inconveniences that go with anywhere in England being covered in a thick layer of snow, I am, and probably always will be, very excited by it. I missed it coming down yesterday as I was stuck in work all afternoon, so after dinner le Boof and I went out for a walk around the city (big unflattering (but practical!) jacket on and big old camera in tow). It was wonderful walking round our new home city, seeing our first snowfall here and how it changes the landmarks we're slowly getting used to. York's a beautiful city without the snow, but there were some breathtaking views on our short walk.

It feels all the more appropriate to be sitting in most evenings and knitting myself a jumper when the weather's so uninviting outside. My current project is a pullover for myself, made with the selection of wool my Ma bought me for Christmas. The pattern is Caitlin Pullover by Pam Allen, which I found on Ravelry (srsly, if you knit/crochet and aren't on Ravelry already, why??) It's the first colour work project I've properly got into (I did start one with 4 ply wool on circular needles, but haven't so far got past the ribbing at the hem...). I've got the front and back done, and the picture above is of half a sleeve. Just the yoke, which repeats the colour work pattern from the sleeves, and the other sleeve to go. Crossing my fingers it's a good fit!


I got back from work one day last week and had an urge to get something crossed off my crafty to-do list. After much deliberation I chose to make a vase of crocheted flowers for our dining table. Off I went into the city (the novelty of being able to just wander into a city from where we live is going to take a very long time to wear off (I'm a bit of country bumpkin if that's not already been made apparent)). First I went around the charity shops looking for a vase, and found this beauty:

Only 99p too! Love charity shopping. The only problem was persuading le Boof that just because it may have had a previous life as a beer receptacle, doesn't mean he should automatically have a right to steal it from me. It is my lovely vase now. Nothing can be done about that. Also, it's now full of these, making it somewhat more difficult to store beer in:

I will make a few more eventually, but three was my limit for that one evening! The pattern for the flowers comes from this book, with I-cord made with a knitting dolly, stuffed with a pipe cleaner for the stems.

I've mentioned it before, I know, but it's one of my favourite knitting pattern books. The closer it gets to spring the more I can see myself using it, making the flat look lovely for the nice weather.


As far as edible things go, I am continuing my quest to find a good, relatively quick and easy loaf to make on a regular basis. I've made all of our bread pretty much since we moved up here to York, something I'd never done previously, and I'm slowly getting to grips with how different things affect a loaf.

On the cake front, this week's cake was lemon and almond muffins.














Trust me, they are far more interesting to eat than to look at!
I found the recipe here, after doing a search for more cake recipes to use up some buttermilk I've had in the fridge for too long now. (Don't worry, still within it's best before.) I tweaked it a little bit to suit what I had available:

Lemon Buttermilk Muffins
250g plain flour
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp bicarbinate of soda
1/4 tsp salt
250g caster sugar
55g unsalted butter
1/2 lemon's worth of zest and juice
1 egg
1/2 tsp almond extract
235ml buttermilk
Sliced almonds to garnish

0. Preheat your oven to 180°c

1. Mix the sugar and butter until light and fluffy.
2. Add in the egg, mix well.
3. Stir in the lemon zest and juice and the almond extract.
4. Sieve the flour, bicarb, baking soda and salt into the bowl, mix well.
5. Pop in your buttermilk, mix again (there's only so many ways you can say stir in).
6. Spoon your mixture into muffin cases, then bake for 20-25 minutes, or until springy when prodded.
7. Leave to cool on a cooling rack, then devour.

Very good snacking muffins these, not too sweet, so good any time of the day. Especially with a nice cup of tea when it's dead chilly out.


P.S. Le Boof and I went to see one of my favourite bands last Friday. I love love love them. Check this out. The Black Keys - I Got Mine

Lurgie-Fighting Cupcakes!

Despite having had the lurgie for the last couple of days, and making it the excuse I gave to myself for not updating sooner, I seem to have gotten quiet a lot of things done/made. I wonder whether it might have been my unconscious mind walking me into the kitchen to bake without me realising it.

First off I bought some more seeds, and have planted my first crop *fanfare*

Ok, so it's only sprouting seeds, but still. Next up will be my strawberries.

I've been eyeing up mini greenhouses recently. As we don't really have a lot of space to be used up by seedlings in the flat (sadface) I think it might be a good idea for the balcony. It would mean I could start planting things earlier without worrying about the mean Yorkshire temperatures stopping them from germinating. Having gone through all my seed packets and making a chart to compare when things can be sown, there won't be any more proper planting until March. Next I need to make a space plan and work out what can fit in where on the balcony and what containers I will need (as many hanging baskets as possible!).


As we all know, Vitamin C is one of the best things to take when you're suffering with a cold. I decided it would probably a far more efficient way of getting vitamins into my body by putting all the vitamin C into...

....cupcakes of course!

These babies are carrot cake with orange zest and raisins in. Take that, cold! (I do feel better now so they must have worked).

Usually, the main problem that arises when I have a desire to make carrot cake is that le Boof does not like nuts. Especially in his cake. To him, each little tasty nugget of walnut (or pecan omnom) would be a tiny little nugget of betrayal. Which is a shame because I love nuts in my carrot cake, I like the contrast between super spongey cake and crunchy nuts. However, with the recipe I found for these cupcakes (masquerading as muffins, although only in size. Let's be honest, no one can be satisfied with a cupcake sized portion of cake.) walnuts are replaced with raisins! Fantastic! I love them, le Boof loves them, he said the raisins worked really well in them. No more colds for us. We'll be packed full of vitamin C any time I've baked a batch of these!

The recipe I used to make them is here, but I used a proper carrot cake icing: 180g cream cheese, 50g icing sugar and 90g butter instead of the dribble drizzle they suggest in the cake recipe.

I've been meaning to make a needle case for all my knitting needles for a while, my DPNs in particular. My first attempt ended awfully. I honestly couldn't tell you why I thought it might be a good idea to try and make something with nice neat straight lines with two different types of stretchy material, but that got put away in the oddbits material bag quick swiftly (after fiddling with the things for about an hour). Whilst in the oddbits bag I found a nice sturdy piece of material and I knocked one up in a matter of minutes.There's no particular reason for the snail, just that it's been hanging around in the bottom of my sewing box for years now, and I finally decided to give it a home.



I was planning to make some kind of rough tutorial for this, but I got so excited about making it, and it actually working, that I completely forgot to take pictures of each step. I'm planning on making another for my normal needles so hopefully I'll remember then and get a tute up.




And finally; slowly but surely the bunting is spreading round the house. The bathroom was the latest target.

New Curtains and Homemade Quiche

I think today has to have been one of the more productive days I've had recently. Inspired by the fact that we've been given the green light to put up picture hooks in the flat (a big deal for me, sad as it sounds, as it means I can now start making the flat feel more homely (empty walls are sad walls)), down came the butt-ugly bathroom curtain that has been terrorising me since we moved in. The picture below doesn't do it justice. It's an unpleasant fabric to start with, and it's all browned and hand badly and a-symmetrically. I don't know why I hadn't done it sooner, it took £2.20 and maybe an hour tops to do. Admittedly it doesn't go with the décor, but I can live with that.

Before = Blech

After = Phew!

Yep, that's a towel. Well, two towels. All it took was a bit of this stuff (curtain hanging tape maybe? I'm not sure what it's called)

It took two ticks to sew this to the top of the towel. Then I just used the hooks that were keeping the uber-ugly "curtain" (it really only roughly resembled a curtain) "up" (barely) to hang it. I did have to sew another towel to the bottom to get it to be the right height, and the second curtain wasn't actually the same width as the first towel, but it was definitely worth it! Not only is this far easier on the eye, but it should hopefully help insulate the bathroom a little, it is by far the coldest room in the flat.


Once I had defeated that task, I moved onto dinner. I decided yesterday I wanted to make a quiche. So I did. As seems to be the case more often than not recently, I tend to look through several recipes for the same thing, take a few pointers from each, and then ignore most of what I've just read and make it up as I go along.

This is the results of today's baking adventures.

A completely made-from-scratch quiche. And it's dead easy. And you don't need silly things like double cream that I never have in the fridge unless it is for a specific recipe.

Here's how I made it.

Bacon, Leek and Mushroom Quiche
for a 20cm flan tin (3 respectable sized portions)

For the pastry:
2oz butter
4oz plain flour

For the filling:
                                                          2 large eggs
                                                          1 rasher middle bacon (or 2 of streaky)
                                                          1/3 leek
                                                          3 medium mushrooms
                                                          150ml milk

1. Make the pastry by rubbing the butter and flour together (so much easier with a pastry blender). Then when it's roughly breadcrumby, start adding small amounts of cold water until you can squish it all together into a soft dough. It doesn't want to be sticky, just soft.

2. Roll out the dough fairly thin, then carefully lay it over your flan tin (with removable base preferably) and press it gently in. Cut off the excess pastry round the edge of the tin then prick the base with a fork.

3. Cover and pop in the fridge for 30 minutes.

4. Set your oven to 200°c and put in a baking tray to preheat.

5. Line the chilled pastry with greaseproof paper then fill with either ceramic pastry beans or just plain old rice (I was surprised how well using rice worked, I had always put off making blind baked pastry cases due to my lack of baking beans). Then pop it onto the baking tray in the oven and bake for 20 minutes.

6. Meanwhile, chop up your mushrooms, leek and bacon and fry them until cooked.

7. Whisk together the eggs and milk and season. I put in a teaspoon of mustard powder, some salt, pepper and mixed dried herbs.

8. Take out the pastry and remove the rice and paper. Cook for 5 minutes.

9. Brush the pastry with the eggy mix and bake for another 2 minutes. This will just form a bit of a layer to stop the pastry going really soggy when you put the eggy mix in next.

10. Take out the pastry again, leaving the baking tray in the oven. Turn the temperature down to 190°c.

11. Spread the bacon, leek and mushroom evenly across the pastry then pour over the eggy mix.

12. Bake for 30-35 minutes. Leave for about 5ish minutes then NOM.


Goes well with: Sweet potato chips. Chop up half a sweet potato per person into chip sized chunks. Put them on a baking tray and slather with olive oil. Cover in pepper, garlic salt and dried mixed herbs. Mix it all up so the potato chunks are evenly(ish) covered then put in the oven at about 200°c for 20-30 minutes. (Give them a prod at 20 mins, if they're soft through they're done)

What I have learnt: Don't think it's clever to put as much of the eggy mix in the pastry case as physically possible. It will go everywhere and make your flan tin stick to the baking tray and then make you drop your lovely quiche on your camera.

This came out far better than I could have hoped for. On taking the pastry out ready for the filling to go in I thought it was looking quite soggy, but it crisped up nicely. Le Boof thought I had bought it from a fancy quiche shop or something and then even after I corrected him it took some persuading to made him believe I had made the pastry case too. This pastry recipe is the one I use for all my savoury pastry needs and it never disappoints. I took out a book from the library a while ago about cooking during WWII rationing, a book full of wonderful, sensible and hearty meals, and this was the recipe they suggested for making pastry. I'm not a big fan of clichés, but if it ain't broke...



Ooh, and finally, I know I've waffled on a fair bit already, but I have for a while been on a mission to find a good chocolate cake recipe that goes well with a chocolate buttercream icing (a lot of recipes I've tried have been too sweet). I made some this week, and they're my favourite so far. It's a recipe for a chocolate cake, but I just put the mix into muffin cases. Also, I discovered that although it makes it far faaaarrr too stiff to pipe, freezing chocolate buttercream icing makes it taste even better. If that's possible.

Song what I have been reminded I really like: The Count & Sinden featuring Mystery Jets - After Dark