Lockdown week 13 - quilts and cake

A day of two halves. In the morning, my friend came over and I gave her the quilts I'd made from the shirts of her late husband. Our coffee date was actually in the garden; she just came in for the photos. When we were discussing what she'd like, she looked at photos of ones I'd made and choose the tumbler shapes, quilted hearts and half-square triangle borders.

It's quite tricky to get the quilt the right width so that the triangles meet neatly at the corners - I've only done this kind of border once before - but I was quite pleased at the result here.

I'd found a £20 note in this pocket, so I sewed the pocket on the back and put the note in a little envelope.

And then I made a second quilt, because there was so much shirt fabric. This one was much quicker, though. So few corners to get right.

Then in the afternoon we went down to Daughter 2's Edinburgh flat and Mr L worked very hard. He put up the curtains and new shade so that the living room looked smart, and then we moved all the furniture from the bedrooms into the living room (thus ruining the effect) and also the washing machine into the hall, and he lifted the vinyl in the kitchen - so that we can get new carpets and vinyl laid tomorrow.

So that was less fun. But never mind; it's progress.

Lynda asked for the cake recipe. Here it is.

Coconut cake:
3/4 cup coconut milk
1/2 cup fresh grated coconut (only I didn't have any so used desiccated)
1 teaspoon vanilla essence
2 and 1/4 cups self-raising flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
10 tablespoons (ie 6 ounces) butter
1 and 1/2 cups granulated sugar
3 large eggs

Heat the coconut milk (though I didn't bother and it was fine). Cream butter and sugar, gradually add eggs, coconut milk, coconut, vanilla, then mix in flour and baking powder by hand. Bake in two 9-inch tins for 20-25 minutes.

I then used chocolate butter icing but the recipe suggests making -

Fluffy Coconut Frosting.
1/2 cup water
1 cup granulated sugar
2 large egg whites
1 and 1/2 to 2 and 1/2 fresh grated coconut
Bring water to boil with sugar, cover and cook for 1 minute without stirring.
Uncover and boil, stirring frequently until mixture is hot enough to spin a thread when a little is dropped from a spoon, or about 230F. Remove from heat. Whisk egg whites to stiff peaks. Still beating, add sugar mixture in thin stream. Continue till mix is fluffy again and holds peaks. Assemble cake with frosting between layers and put frosting on sides as well, then sprinkle coconut over the top and sides.

(You can see why I didn't bother with this. I didn't have any more coconut anyway but, well, chocolate and coconut are nice together and I'm a busy woman.)

The days are getting longer...

Earlier in December, Daughter 2 came for the weekend and we iced the cakes. I make two big ones: one for us (because usually there are a lot of people eating it) and then I cut the other into two halves, one half for Son (because Daughter-in-Law doesn't like fruit cake) and the other half for Daughter 1 and Son-in-Law 1 (I may have to rethink this half-cake policy since there are now four of them). Daughter 2, living in London and having to carry presents home on the train and having a diabetic husband, doesn't get one at all, which I think I should also rethink. Anyway. My icing is a slapdash affair: above, cut-out stars...

... and above, for cat-fans Son and DIL, rather messy cats.

But Daughter 2, the architect, spent rather more time on Daughter 1's cake, designing an alpine village for Grandson's benefit. It had chalets, trees, road sign poles, roads with white lines made out of sugar strands, a roundabout...

 

Then, after our sepulchrally-quiet Christmas, the family (and Son-in-Law 1's parents) were all here by New Year, which was lovely. The grandchildren opened their presents from us and were extremely excited but also very good.

 

Here, Daughter 1 holds up hexagonal cookie cutters, with which she was delighted because it means that you can cut out the biscuits without leaving any extra bits that you have to mash together and roll out again. Cunning.

And yesterday Mr L, Son, Daughter 2, DIL and I went out for a walk. Then the younger ones all went home. Sniff.

Now I must go and de-Christmas the house, a horrible task. Sulk.

Happy New Year, all bloggy friends.

Nearly new

Today was Granddaughter's birthday. She's 2. Daughter 1 made her a panda cake. Granddaughter likes pandas, though not as much as she likes cake.

She appreciated the artistry...

... but made sure that she got some cake stuffed in her mouth as soon as possible, in case someone thought better of this unusual carbohydrate largesse.

Today, her actual birthday, we went to Prestonfield House for afternoon tea in a private room. The house, now a hotel, was built in 1687 and various important people have visited it over the centuries, such as David Hume, Benjamin Franklin, Samuel Johnson, Winston Churchill, Margaret Thatcher, Sean Connery (is he important?), Catherine Zeta Jones (is she?) and Oliver Reed (well, again...). The decor is still very much as it was originally and the house is full of antiques.

It was a generous tea, not entirely without calories.

Granddaughter may be disappointed at the meals she's provided with tomorrow.

You can see our main city hill outside the window, basking in the balmy Edinburgh sunshine. Well, actually it was blowing a gale and intermittently raining but we'll ignore that.

In 1967...

From Daughter 2: some indoor sparklers. We'll keep them for Christmas.

 

And look! A deer which has turned to its left on the Advent calendar.

 

From us to her: some chocolate snowmen.

It's really difficult to get good photos of Grandson these days. He poses nicely, with dazzling smiles, but only for a second. And my camera phone has a delay so that I think I'm going to get a lovely photo but it turns out to be of the top of his head. Or he's blurred. He fairly whizzes about now.

In person, though, he's unbelievably delicious. Soft and squashy and smiley and enthusiastic.

Three days till Daughter 2 comes home for Christmas. Hooray!

(The cake, by the way, is a rich fruit one with sultanas, raisins, currants, mixed peel, cherries, almonds, eggs, sugar, flour, treacle and spices. Then I cover it with thick marzipan because we all like this except Daughter-in-Law and then ice it. Theoretically it should last for weeks. In practice - sometimes there's some left over by New Year's Day.)

Forty-five years ago today, Mr Life and I were on our first date. Goodness me. That does sound a long time ago.

What you do on a windy day instead of going outside

Today has been very windy. The cats have had a sofa day.

There's still just one dissident penguin.

No sofa day for me, though. I made the Christmas cakes. It's the sort of thing that we retired people can do mid-week.

Mix, mix, I went. British Christmas cakes are made with lots of fruit, like traditional British wedding cakes. I wonder if this is true in other countries too.

And there they are.

Now for the cards. Then I might have to think about presents. Ho ho ho.

(Veg artist - yes, we did throw away the wrappers and the bin men came at 8 this morning - sorry! I do wish you had a blog so that I could read about your cat/chores/weather etc. An idea for 2012??

Christine Thresh - I wonder why you think we keep our houses cold in Britain. Maybe we do, though I don't think so. Our (hall) thermostat is set at 24C but then we sometimes have extra heat in the room we're in at the time. The room my mother's in is usually about 40C, or so it feels. Global warming, here we come.)

A cake post

Has everyone seen this picture - from a website that Daughter 2's friend alerted her to? The website features cakes that could have been made with more care. This one was ordered over the phone from a cake shop. The customer instructed that the cake should say "Best wishes Suzanne" and that, underneath, it should say: "We will miss you."

The website is
http://cakewrecks.blogspot.com/search?updated-max=2008-05-31T08:45:00-07:00&max-results=15

should you desire more of the same.

Or you might prefer to see this picture of our cats in their little kingdom. Catdom.

Cats, cake and other profound thoughts

I’m sure there was no mystical significance to my dream about my dad, by the way. I’d been thinking about him and feeling a bit sad and this no doubt translated into my dream. He was a difficult man in many ways – very brilliant but not very empathetic and not, in our later relationship, very huggy. But when I was a little girl he was great fun. He made up stories and drew funny pictures and invented words and phrases that have stayed part of our family lexicon. A “fluggy”, for example, is a generalised word for a mythical animal of the monsterish variety, and “wurfles” is another useful term for any part of one’s anatomy (eg “I have a pain in my wurfles”). Even when he was dying in a geriatric ward, he still had that spark at times. At one point the nurses tried to get him walking with a Zimmer (walking frame) and he would say, “They had me Zimming around the ward today.”

When are we truly ourselves? Is the twenty-year-old person, full of health and vigour, the real us? Or the slightly creakier but possibly wiser forty-year-old? How about the sixty-year-old, the eighty-year-old? Ah, questions, questions…

Daughter 2 and her actor boyfriend are in Pickering, Yorkshire, for a non-stag weekend. (A stag party is a party for the groom and his friends in advance of the wedding. But this is a weekend for male and female friends, hence a non-stag party. The groom has an ambition not to spend the weekend naked, tied to a lamp-post.) Daughter 2 and actor boyfriend were out on Thursday evening and when they came back, she decided to make a cake for the event, which began the next day. She is known for her cakes.

It was chocolate, iced with chocolate butter icing, and then they made a road sign for the top – based on the one warning motorists of deer, but with a line through it. If this version existed, it would mean “No deer permitted”. (I have no idea whether any of this is self-evident to non-British people. Or even non-mad people. And I never know how carefully you're reading. No deer = non-stag. Yes?)

It was a work of art. (Daughter 2 is an architect. ) The kitchen became very sticky. So did they. Daughter 2 changed into the bottom half of her pyjamas for some reason connected with stickiness.

It was one in the morning before they finished it, put it in a cat-proof plastic box and went to bed.



By breakfast time, our son had left a little note on the box.

(He was joking.)