Village Show 2013.

You remember the elderflower cordial?
And the Plum Jam?
And there'll be a post about a bread plait some time.
Well, they all ended up in the village show. 
I've just blogged about this year's village show entries.  Read all about it here.

A spice-saving solution...

So, we've got kitchen cupboards.  But they're on the full side.  One of them was, until today, rather crowded with spice jars, as we could only fit a few (14ish?) on our spice rack.
So I made a new one.
Simple enough, some stripwood, some dowel, and some little lathe-type things.
A bit of measuring, sawing, drilling and hammering later...

Ta-da.  Space for 30 (ish) spice jars.  And yes, we do use most of them!
The sides and shelves are the same wood, nailed together.  There are thin strips nailed to the back (two to each row) to stop stuff falling off the back, and the dowels you can just about make out in the rubbish photo are just pushed into holes in the side bits that were drilled using a drill-bit the same size as the dowel.
Pretty easy task.

Rhubarb!

You may recall the elderflower cordial.
Well, here's a quick recipe that includes the use of slightly too sweet cordial...

Rhubarb crumble.
Basically, you get a whole bunch of rhubarb.  You slice it up into chunks.  Then you cook it up in some of the elderflower cordial.  This makes the rhubarb taste (even if I say so myself) absolutely amazing.  It was genuinely completely delicious.  I suppose you could use shop-bought elderflower cordial if you haven't made your own!  Perfectly acceptable :)
I made up a crumble topping, which was basically along the following sort of quantities:
155g flour
80g butter
110g sugar (I use a mix of white and demerara or light brown sugar)
A generous amount of ground ginger. 
Buzz the butter and flour in a mixer thingy (or do it by hand) then add the ginger and sugar. 
Rhubarb goes in a dish, crumble mix on top.
Pop it in the oven 'til the crumble's a gorgeous golden colour and the rhubarb is bubbling up around the side. 
Eat.
Let me know how it goes!
(Sorry, not got pictures at the mo'.  May add some later)

A cordial attempt.

It seemed that for our entire Cornwall holiday last week, we were never more than about 20 paces from a display of elderflower - in the fields, hedgerows, gardens...  You name it, elderflower was there.  I determined to do something about it - make some elderflower cordial.  Not while on holiday (picking elderflower from the roadside can appartently result in fume-tainted cordial, quite apart from anything else!)

So when we returned, I decided to find some elderflower, harvest it and make it into cordial.  A bottle of elderflower cordial costs £3.15 at Tesco...

Finding the elderflower was harder than I thought - yes, it grows along every road in the land, but I wanted non-exhausted elderflower (so to speak).  Little Boy and I went on a long and largely fruitless (flowerless?!) search,but had a fun outing whilst on our hunt.

 We eventually found some by our cricket pitches.  With my completely inexpert eye, it looked about right.

 We took it home, dissolved a kilo of sugar in a bowl of about 1.5 litres of boiling water, cooled it down in a sink of cold water and rinsed the flowers in the sink, adding them to the cooled, sugary water (I trimmed them to minimise stalks).  We also added the zest of two lemons and sliced the lemons into the water.  (I did a second batch which was one lemon and one orange...)

 This was then clingwrapped and put in the fridge overnight.  We then strained it, first through some muslin. 

 Then, because I wasn't convinced the muslin was fine enough, through a tea towel. 

 This can then be diluted (either with fizzy water or with normal) and made into a lovely drink. 

 Hey presto, elderflower cordial.
We'll probably add some preservative if we want to keep it, or bottle it into the freezer... 
It's actually probably a bit too sweet, so I might ease up on the sugar next time :)

How do you make a Swiss roll?

Push him down a mountain.
Ha ha ha ha ha...

Or, alternatively, you get Mary Berry's Baking Bible, turn to the swiss roll bit and go ahead and make one.
This is another part of the whole 'new year's baking resolution'...

Apart from the fact that it was fused to the paper when I took it out the oven (I used greaseproof, rather than baking parchment...), it seemed to go ok.  Oh, the flour wasn't mixed in properly either.
Not an unmitigated disaster, anyway.
And there's not much of it left now.  It was made for elevenses this morning, and three normal sized slices remain (or two generous ones!).
P'raps the Selfridges strawberry and champagne jam helped :)

Weekend art project.

Big Boy has now got his own room.  The hope was that this would mean everyone got more sleep.  On the plus side, Big Boy does seem to be sleeping better.  Little Boy, on the other hand, is still waking up at weird times of night.  But I digress - back to the room.
Some time ago, we painted Charlie and Lola on the wall of his 'old' room (now with Little Boy as its sole occupant).  Charlie and Lola was fairly straightforward - they're basically coloured-in line drawings.
This time, however, Big Boy wanted Winnie the Pooh.  Winnie the Pooh is more painting than drawing, so this worried me a little, but we did it nonetheless.
Here's what we used:
A Winnie the Pooh book.
A scanner
An acetate (remember them?) and a printer
An OHP
Some chalk
A whole bunch of paint tester pots
Some paint brushes

We scanned in the picture he wanted from Winnie the Pooh and printed it onto an acetate.

We projected this onto the wall and draw the outlines with chalk.

We painted the outlines black. 

We coloured in and added some shading.

And finally, a sort of background (vaguely similar to the one in the book)

Ta-dah.

Let them eat cake.

So ... one of my resolutions this year is to bake more.  I was given Mary Berry's Baking Bible for Christmas, so I thought I'd put it to use over the course of the year.  The aim is to bake something every week, though realistically, this might not happen.  I can but try :)
Anyway, week one was a French Apple Tart.  Known to linguists as a tartopom...

And then this weekend gone, I made a Hazelnut Meringue Raspberry cake thing.  I chose this particular one because we were having friends over for tea, one of whom is gluten-free (so to speak...) and this recipe, being a meringue, has no flour.

The Apple Tart looked the nicer of the too, but they both tasted lovely, so two successes can be chalked up.