Project: Checkmate Blanket

 It feels a bit weird sitting here writing for something that isn’t my portfolio, and I feel a bit guilty because if I’m typing this then maybe I should be writing about non-verbal communication or starting my HIV presentation, but I don’t feel like it today, I feel like listening to Taylor Swift and writing a post for my blog that I’ve not felt like for a few months. So that's what I’m doing. 

Drinking makes everything better

Spring is kicking off here, the forsythia has been in flower for a while, the daffs on their way out and the tulips are in flower. And the blackbirds have either started nesting in the hedge or are just marking out their territory, either way they’re noisy little bastards that wake me up now the clocks have changed. The corner of my house is clearly a great spot to sing from, it just also happens to be the corner of my bedroom. I’ve been feeding the birds, I want to get a flat table so that I can feed the blackbirds and robins, but as I went out to top up the feeders this morning and have a nose at the flower border to see if my anemones had come up yet, I saw that the apple tree has blossoms! Last year it didn’t flower and had a growth spurt instead and I was worried that it wouldn’t flower this year either. I pruned it in the autumn, which was a bit daunting but I don’t think it had ever had one before and would probably explain it’s really weird shape. Obviously the Wassailing we held for it helped as well, because who doesn't feel better for mulled cider? I also gave the cherry a trim when I did the apple and I don’t think that has worked as well because I’m still getting pom-pom style bunches of blossoms and no new growth, yet any way. Maybe it was jealous and I need to Wassail it as well next year (hmm, cherry brandy in warm cider? Could be a winner).

Checkmate Baby Blanket

I saw this blanket on LetesKnits instagram when she designed it for her own baby. My cousin is due to give birth in a few weeks and I’d been trying to decide what to make her when I saw this. It looked simple but with just the right amount of something to make it stand out. 

Try and spot the mistake.

Yarn:

Paintbox yarns, wool mix aran in Marine. I couldn’t find anything I liked at my YLS (online, because they’re still closed for lockdown), so I bought this from Lovecrafts.com. I wanted something that had a lot of wool in it for all its benefits, but for a baby blanket I wanted to make sure it could be machine washed because babies are grubby and hand washing a blanket every time it gets dirty will get very old very quickly. This was really nice to work with, soft but didn’t seem to be felting on my horrible dry hands, and coped well with quite a bit on tinking. 

Needles/Gauge:

The pattern gauge is 12.5cm wide by 12cm high for one pattern repeat on 5.5mm needles post blocking. Mine is 11x10cm on 5.5mm needles but pre-block. I know it’ll grow a bit with a bath, but even if it doesn’t I’m happy with the material and size I’ve ended up with. 

Modifications:

I only made one mod for this, I slipped the first stitch of every row knitwise. I just like the edge this gives the garter ridge border.

Difficulty:

Can you knit and purl? Then you can do this. The cable-like stitches are simple and well explained and the pattern was easy enough to remember after a while, especially if you find it easy to read your knitting (I can read my knitting as well as I can read my handwriting, which is why I have a couple of ‘unique features’ in some of my squares where I’ve got a stitch twisting the wrong way). I did find it helpful to have a whole load of stitch markers separating the squares though.

Worth repeating:

I would definitely make this again, because it was in aran it knits pretty quick. It fits in that nice ‘simple enough to knit while watching tv’ but not ‘so simple it’s boring’ sweet spot too.

Books

I had a week off in February to use up the last of this years annual leave and I read a lot of books. It was really nice. I treated myself to some more of the Invisible Library series by Genevieve Cogman, waiting to collect outside my local bookshop seemed a bit weird - there was a queue of us outside going just inside the door one at a time, like picking up books was illicit (which might be apt given the books I was buying). I read each of the first four books in the series over about five days, I haven’t done anything like that for ages. I read the next two in the series over Easter weekend. I really like these books, I think they’re well paced and funny. And I’m kind of annoyed that I’m nearly caught up and soon I’ll have to wait for the next one to be written. 

Food

Ten finally!

I was given ‘Sweet’ by Yotam Ottenlengi and Helen Goh ages ago hadn’t attempted anything from it (but it is a lovely book  just to flick through it), so for Hubs’s second lockdown birthday I made him a surprise birthday cake - Coconut, Almond and Blueberry Cake from it. I didn’t have any lemon zest, I missed it in the ingredients list when I went shopping, but it still tasted pretty good. Nothing complicated in this recipe, and it lasted quite well for a couple of days.

January blues

 January is a pretty depressing month in a normal year, the lights of Christmas have to be taken down, the weather is shit and its still mostly dark. And I think we can all agree this year is even worse being in lockdown number three, post a Christmas that had to be changed at very short notice. Going through last years diary to transfer dates over to my new one and seeing all the things that had been cancelled last year, I'm not exactly the most social person anyway, but it was still sad to see how my little world got smaller. And as things I was looking forward to in the summer are already being cancelled its getting harder to find hope and things to look forward to.

And I don't mean to make this all super depressing, but when my worklife is covidcovidcovid, then my social media is also covidcovidcovid, and there's nothing else going on because covidcovidcovid its hard to see the light.

So I'm trying to celebrate the little holidays. Kind of inspired by The Everyday LoreProject  that I sadly found at the end of last year when the project was into it's final month. For the last few years I've had an Almanac , I funded the first one on Unbounders and find it so interesting I buy one every year. It covers things like celestial events, planting times, seasonal recipes, and each year has had a theme like what goes on in bee hives or hedgerows. This years theme is travelling and has history and events related to the Traveller communities in the UK. This year I also have a Food Almanac which is a great collection of essays and recipes.

Hopefully between these two, and any other high day celebrations I can find, I can fill my diary a little bit. So here's what I managed in January.

Lemon Pig

He's got a very shiny coin

So technically this one isn't for January, but as a New Year tradition its a good way to start the year. Started on twitter a few years ago thanks to @70s_dinnerparty (an account that shares the very worst recipe ideas from 70s cookbooks), this was meant to be a good luck charm for the year. All you need is a lemon, some cocktail sticks, cloves, a bit of silver foil and a shiny coin. The cocktail sticks were a nightmare to find but I did manage it and a month later I still have my lemon pig, although slightly shrivelled and it no longer holds it's shiny 5p.

Quadrantids

This is a meteor shower that is visible at the beginning of January but it's peak is only a couple of hours, much shorter than some of the showers in the year. They were meant to be visible about 5pm so we went out for a night stroll (because 5pm is dark then) to try and see them. I really miss night time walking, it normally means we've been out to the cinema or pub, but at least you don't see many people out after dark. Unfortunately there was a lot of cloud cover so no meteors for us, but at least we tried.

Wassail

Drink weil!

This is celebrated on Old Twelfth night, which was either the 15^th or 17^th Jan, depending on which calendar you use. We opted for 17^th, the date from the Gregorian calendar. Wassailing happens a lot more in the parts of the country that have strong apple connections, like in Kent or the south west in the cider making regions. Not so much in the fens as they don't have a lot of apple orchards. The Wassail is to scare the bad spirits from the trees and give thanks, and hope for a good harvest. My poor lone apple tree has had a rough time in the past, when we moved in it was hidden by weeds and brambles and only produced a single apple. Last year, after managing to keep it bramble free for a few years it decided to have a massive growth spurt and didn't even produce blossom. I was assured this is perfectly normal, but it ended up a really weird shape, and so this winter I had to give it a trim. As a bit of extra encouragement to produce fruit it got it's own wassail. I made a mulled cider for which I had to get cider brandy which was a bit difficult, but really delicious and even my cider adverse husband enjoyed it. We took a shot full for the tree, and a piece of toast (one of the many origin stories of 'toasting') and cheered the tree. I didn't bang any pots, I think we were loud enough to discourage any bad spirits from the tree. I was planning to make these apple and pear muffins to have at the time but didn't check the recipe fully and so made them later in the week. They were still nice, even without the mulled cider to drink with them.

Burns Night

The Food Almanac has an essay by the lovely Signe Johansen about whisky, and drinking whisky. I feel whisky is something I would like to drink, on an aesthetic level. So with this essay, and Burns night, I thought this would be a really good chance to try whisky and learn to appreciate/love it. We went to Edinburgh a few years ago and we didn't get around to doing a whisky tasting, but I found a tasting set which contained a dram from each whisky producing area. If I could learn to like beer and red wine I was sure I could do the same with whisky.

Turns out I couldn't. I didn't get past the first bottle, like not even finishing my half dram. It was very sad. I have the other bottles so maybe this was just a style I don't like and my perfect one is still sitting in the box on the kitchen table waiting for me.

I did cook the traditional haggis though, that was something I did have in Edinburgh and did enjoy. We'd had it stuffed inside chicken breasts at a tiny restaurant so I did something similar but with pork tenderloin. I followed it with some Cranachan, which we'd had in the same place. I misremembered us having some big brand whisky in the house, so ours was a virgin Cranachan, but given how the tasting session went that was probably for the best.

#WinterWatchList

Teeny Tiny Flowers

I love Springwatch, and all the others they host, and I'm so glad they've managed to make the show work, even if everyone is in separate locations. For this show they set a challenge for people to keep an eye out for specific winter migrants and plants. I did try, but as I'm still working I didn't get to see all the items. I did find a medium difficulty item though, the flowers of hazel. I'll be honest, they practically poked me in the eye as I walked into work one morning. I did find some snowdrops as well, but it's the worst photo.

BigGardenBirdwatch

This is the annual bird count run by the RSPB over the last weekend in January. I've not taken part before but now is always a good time to start. I started putting food out for the birds a few weeks ago, mostly to try and stop the bluetits from eating my forsythia buds, but also to encourage the birds in so I'd have something to see. I set myself up with tea, binoculars and reference books in the kitchen, unfortunately I had to stand as the windows are too high to see out of if sat on a chair. There weren't as many birds as the day before, I'm sure they knew I was trying to watch, but I had bluetits, shouty blackbirds, and what may have been some dunnocks but I thought were sparrows. One of the local cats appeared about 20 minutes in and looked like it was going to settle down to eat grass but luckily it didn't stay long and the birds carried on.

Pikelets

This isn't really holiday related but one of the January recipes in the Food Almanac was for Pikelets, a type of welsh cake, and came with the writers memories of them being made, and it bought up my own memories of going to see Aunty Meg (my uncles aunty, not actually related to me) in her little house up the Rhondda and her making these for us on her range which took up a good chunk of the tiny kitchen, and given the age of the house was probably responsible for the heating. Aunty Meg died last year so I can't go and sit in her kitchen any more, but I'll think of her every time I have the tiny round cakes. So I think that is the last thing I'll do for this month; eat cake, drink tea and toast Meg.

Knitting Along

 

Sunday morning and I'm sat at my kitchen table with a lovely cup of tea from Bird and Blend. I have a bit of a collection so today is Earls Paradise, a riff on Earl Grey but with exotic fruit. Usually I use this little bit of time to read an Almanac, do some drawing or Netflix and knit. Work is still super busy, no suprise as there's a pandemic on, but this morning there's breaking news that my organisation may go through a restructuring, seemingly out of the blue. I know I've not been super into news recently trying to stop feeling overwhelmed, but if there had been any inkling of this it would have been mentioned at work. And as a civil servant I should probably stop talking before I get myself in trouble.

Anyway.

Since I wrote last, which wasn't years ago but a mere 2 weeks, I've taken the final step to delete my Ravelry page. Anyone that knows me would probably tell you I'm pretty indecisive, I don't like doing things that can't be undone (or pick where I want to shop, or what to have for dinner, or what time to meet for drinks...) but given the continued ambivalence towards accessibility, I want to call it violence and aggression which I know some of the activists who have been very vocal about this have been experiencing, but it's the indifference that TPTB show that is just as bad. But then that is just another type of aggression, and something I'm sure disabled people are unfortunately used to dealing with. Anyway, it's big and scary and very disappointing, but that sums up this entire year.

FFFS flat lay, how very insta.

In an effort to build a bit of knitterly community away from there, I've been really enjoying the Everyday Knitter group on Mighty Networks. Louise Tilbrook set up the group on Facebook a few years back and I joined but it was a bit much to keep up with. The new format is really nice, ad free and it shows all the things that have happened since you last visited, which is nicer than the Facebook algorithm. Currently we've got a knit-a-long (KAL) to celebrate the move, we're mostly knitting one of Louise's patterns which she kindly made free to the group, the Fuss Free Festival Shawl, or FFFS. I'm using some yarn I bought from a local knitters destash, it's from the Witch Fibre Co, who are a new to me dyer, and it's called Dream Country inspired by The BFG. Normally when I buy yarn it's in a skein and you can see all the colours and have a bit of an idea of how it's going to look knitted, but I've only seen this as a cake so it's a bit of a surprise. I'm loving it though, and although I did intend for it to be a Christmas present, it might be a bit hard to part with. What was fun though was having an official cast on party Monday night, Might Networks has a chat feature, although knitting and typing aren't things you can do together easily and there was talk of maybe using Zoom for the next online event. 

Gnicki the Gnome to be.

I'm also trying to keep up with the Imagined Landscapes Gnome-along. Where the EK KAL is a pattern is just a normal pattern we all make together, and you can see the finished object (FO) before starting, this one is a mystery or MKAL. I know it's a Gnome called Gnicki, I know the designers style, and that I needed 4 colours of fingering weight yarn but that's all I had to go on before buying the pattern. The colours I've picked for my Gnome was inspired by the summer moutain meadows seen in the Sound of Music, the designer said they'd chosen some of their colours to keep the idea of the Gnome being a mountain creature of ice and snow, but sometimes mountains are covered in wildflowers. I've used some miniskeins from Mothy and the Squid, specifically “Squeaking Silk Moth” (yellow), and “Springtime” (purple/blue), and some yarn from stash, the white is from Belinda Harris and the green is the last of my very precious SparkleDuck “And The Forest Began To Sing”.

Some people really don't like the idea of not knowing what you're making before starting, but I quite enjoy it. Maybe it's to do with the indecisiveness, when I feel like making a hat there are so many hats out there how to I pick one? Also it's fun seeing a project some together with lots of other people. So far I'm up to clue 4, I think clue 6 was released today so best get the needles out.

Food:

No bread from me recently, and I really should feed Doughsophine the starter, but I made some cake with greengages that were left at work for people to help themselves to. Greengages aren't usually commercially available, I don't think I've had any since Hubs and I found some growing in a Shropshire lane many summers ago, and before that in my Little Nan's garden. Some people at work hadn't heard of them before. This is probably why it was really difficult for me to find a recipe for greengages in my bookcase, but the River Cottage Fruit Handbook had a really nice ones for Plum and Hazelnut cake, which became Greengage and Walnuts because I didn't have any Hazelnuts either. I love using whole (or half fruit in this case) in cake because it just explodes in your mouth when you bite into it. 

While looking for recipes I had a flick through Ruby Tandoh's “Flavour”, and I'd forgotten how many good sounding things there were in there. So now I have Coconut and (homegrown) raspberry ripple ice cream in the freezer. I started it yesterday and it took a bit longer to freeze than I was expecting so I added the raspberry ripple earlier than was recommended but I had to go to bed and thought doing it this morning would be too late. Update: just checked and it's frozen solid so this was the right move.

Books:

I visited my local and lovely bookshop Toppings the other week and purchased a whole bunch of books. The first I read was “The Masked City” by Genevieve Cogman. I accidentally bought the sixth book in the Invisible Library series first, so I'm slowly getting them in order so I can read that one. Luckily I really enjoy them, this is the second book of the series and I just didn't want to put it down. They're fantasy books, the Invisible Library is set in a pocket universe/dimension that connects to lots of other world of varying degrees of chaos (under the influence of fae) or order (influence of dragons). The Library is there to collect unusual works of fiction from across all these worlds by sending out Librarians, and the novels follow one Librarian, Irene, and her apprentice Kai. Magic, fae and dragons, how could I not enjoy it.

I followed this by reading the Witcher Book “Sword of Destiny”. I'm not a gamer so only came to the Witcher because of the Netflix show. I enjoy Sci fi and fantasy, but it's much easier to find sci fi TV and movies than it is to find fantasy ones (like, proper fantasty a la LotR, not GoT). I would have thought it easier to make fantasy than sci fi, but I guess more people like space. I really enjoyed the TV show and decided to read the books, and I'll be honest they are not exactly what I was expecting. The Witcher on tv doesn't say much, there's lots of fighting/killing monsters and sex, the sort of things you would expect from adult fantasy, and a game series I imagine largely aimed at men. But through the books (the two I have read anyway), where Geralt the Witcher is a bit more talkative anyway, there is a long running thread where he loves one woman, Yennefer, and is constantly longing for her, but knowing that because of their individual issues/occupations (witcher=mutant, Yennefer=sorceress) that they can't be together. I thought it was nice/weird to see in what I expected to be a more fighty/killy/sexy book.

Still reading the Philosophy Queens book too, and I might even read a proper philosophy book or two at some point to enjoy the full work of some of the women I've learnt about.

Garden:

Not gonna lie, it's still out there, and has slightly fewer brambles but that's about it. Apart from the odd courgette that I find, normally once they're huge. There's been a heat wave, it should be lucky I watered it. 

How did I miss this?

By the power of Thor!

Every month, thanks to my mother-in-law, I get a copy of +BBC Good Food though the door. It's great, generally comes as a surprise because I'm not paying attention to the date and I get to spend the evening planning new foods to try. But very occasionally, three times in fact, I've bought Delicious. I've not made anything from them, but they seem very well put together and have some interesting features, one of which is "save our heritage" recipes that are at risk of dying out because they are no longer fashionable. Interesting idea, and the recipe in the issue I bought was Singing Hinny's (very much like a drop scone, or welsh piklet). At the bottom of the page though was the advert for the following issue: Thor cake.

Now, I love the Norse gods as much as the next person (ok, probably a bit more than the next person) but I wasn't going to buy another issue of quite an expensive magazine just for one recipe, not when there is the whole of the internet to provide me with what I want. So here it is.

Thor Cake

225g porridge oats (or oatmeal)
225g self-raising flour
225g brown sugar (bit vague, I used dark brown sugar)
½ tsp baking powder
½ tsp ground ginger
½ tsp salt
½ tsp ground allspice
50g candied peel
225g butter
175g black treacle

I was a bit worried when I saw all spice, I had bought some a while ago (can't remember for what) but I'd never gotten around to using it. I did wonder if this had been a mix up and it was mixed spice that was actually required, but I stuck it in and it really does smell right (my house currently smells amazing).

Also, a note on measuring the treacle. I can't remember where I read about this but it's always good to share tips. My treacle came in a tin, cute, oldy-worldy but a pain in the arse to measure. So what I do is put the open tin on my scales (this will only work for digital scales), set it to zero and then started removing spoonfuls of treacle. As the tin gets lighter, it reads the weight you've removed in minus grams! Amazing.

In my usual "just chuck it in" kind of way of doing things, I didn't have candied peel. What I did have though was about 30g of mixed dried fruit and some raisins, which I decided would do instead.

So Step 1 Mix all the dried ingredients. Easy peasy. Also preheat oven to 190C.  And grease/line a loaf tin.

Step 2 Over a low heat melt butter and treacle in a saucepan.

Step 3 Mix butter/treacle into dry ingredients. Mix like crazy. The recipe I followed said "Now stir with all your might with a wooden spoon until you get a thick, loose dough-like mixture." Now, I thought that might mean 'loose' as in fluid, but having mixed, probably means 'loose' like 'not tightly packed'.

 Tip this mix into the loaf tin and cook for 40-45 minutes, use your judgement, mine's been cooking for 50 minutes but at 180C (I thought I might need to reduce for a fan oven, I don't think I needed to) and it's a bit wobbly still so is staying put.

Right, so it's finally out of the oven, possibly slightly burnt on the top, but I think that's my own fault for messing up the oven temperature. I've left it to cool for a bit before cutting a slice, it smells really good and couldn't help myself.

It's such an odd cake, not really a cake, more a beefed up flapjack. The allspice is amazing, definitely have to use it for more things. The sugar/treacle combo give it a really nice toffee flavour as well. Can't wait to try this cold tomorrow, I imagine it's going to become really chewy.

Just as a side note, having become a bit calorie obsessed recently I thought I'd work out how much damage this cake does. The answer: a lot. If this serves 10, then each slice will contain around 470 calories, sending me from doing 'ok' to 'shit, I'm over my daily count by a third'. Nevermind, cake is cake, and although this is much more an autumnal cake than a spring cake, it still goes down very well.

Cake!

I love baking but I've been trying to cut down on making cakes, mainly because cakes = fatsy Emma. But every now and again I get to make one that won't be sat around for me to eat. Today was one of those times. For the retirement of one of my husband's co-workers he needed a cake, and this one I'd seen recently on the cover of GoodFood. I like using this sort of occasion to try new stuff, last time I made cake for his office it was chocolate raspberry brownies. So this time it was sticky ginger lemon drizzle cake.

Cake

• 140g butter , cut into cubes, plus extra for greasing
• 300g self-raising flour
• 1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
• 4 tsp ground ginger
• 2 tsp mixed spice
• 1 tsp ground cinnamon
• 140g dark muscovado sugar
• 140g black treacle
• 140g golden syrup
• 300ml whole milk
• 1 large egg 

 Rub flour, spices, and butter to bread crumbs. In a saucepan put the sugar, treacle, syrup and milk and slowly warm until everything is dissolved. When everything is dissolved heat it until nearly boiling. Beat into the flour mix (maybe do this slowly so it mixes properly) and then mix in the egg.

Pour into a greased and lined 20cm tin and cook for 50 minutes-1 hour at 160C/140C fan/gas 3.  Checked its done with a skewer and leave to cool completely in the tin. It's a good idea to leave it to mature for a few days in grease-proof paper wrapped in tin foil.

Lemony drizzle

• zest and juice 1 lemon
• 50g granulated sugar
• 50g preserving sugar or crushed sugar cubes

Lemon curd

• about ½ jar good lemon curd
• 2 balls stem ginger , diced

Ginger cream

• 4 tbsp syrup from the stem ginger jar
• 100g soft cheese
• 200ml double cream
• 3 tbsp icing sugar , sieved

When you're ready, cut the cake in half. For the drizzle, mix lemon juice, zest, and sugars and pour straight over the top half (I pierced it all over with the skewer first).

Mix the lemon curd and diced stem ginger and spread over the bottom half of the cake. To make the cream, whip the ginger syrup, cream, cheese and icing sugar until it holds its shape then put on top of the curd. Put the top layer on and then you have cake!

Mine was made in a 18cm tin because I don't seem to have a 20cm one, even though it seems to be the most common one used. I also only had one day to let it mature, I'd definitely do a couple of days next time, not that mine was bland, but I'd love to see how the flavour developed. As it was, it's like a really moist McVitie's Jamaican ginger cake. It seems quite dense (maybe because I used a smaller tin) but it didn't feel dense. And ginger and lemon, I'm sure it's a really common combination but I think this was the first time I'd tried it and it's *amazing*. I was stood eating some of the cream and curd I had spare in the kitchen (see, baking = fatsy Emma).  The sponge alone is freezable too, so this could be lurking ready made until you need it (although probably won't stay there for very long).

And, apart from my constant worry about heating sugar, it was really easy to put together, lemon and ginger well balanced (and I'm not a fan of too much ginger) and the drizzle makes it look really good without having to do too much work!